The Summoning: A Laden Swagman

 

As if I needed another reason to think of Osama bin Laden yesterday.

         

As you scurry around pushing levers and balls, testing teleporters, fighting enemies, filling and drinking healing potions, and filling in the map, The Summoning gives you lots of time to think. And what I thought about during my most recent sessions was a typology for how games structure their worlds. This is what I came up with:

1. The open world. We tend to think of open-world games as recent, but they really go all the way back to the first Ultima (1981). In this model, the player has a fairly large space in which to operate, and that space is seeded with both safe and dangerous places--cities and dungeons, usually. The player may pick a particular city as a "home base" (and modern games encourage this by literally letting him buy a house), but he doesn't have to use a particular place. Excepting some episodes, he has full control over how long he stays in each area, and he can transition between them at will, using any number of locations to regroup, by and sell equipment, level up, and rest and heal. Phantasie, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Baldur's Gate, Ultimas IV-VII, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion all follow this model.

2. The hub-and-spoke, also known as the "expedition-and-return." In this model, there's one safe place, often at the center of the kingdom, and the player does all of his adventuring from it. Each mission takes him to a new place, and he often has no control over how long he spends there, but when it's over, he returns (often automatically) to the safety and resources of the hub. Examples would be Starflight, Quest for Glory, Planet's Edge, and the two Buck Rogers games.

           

Here's a shot of an NPC named Khamillia warning me about gazers. You'll see why in a bit.

          

3. The airline dive. In this approach, you have a safe surface location, from which you repeatedly depart to explore the depths of a dungeon, keeping a constant tether back to your base. A key aspect of the game is how far and long you're willing to risk exploration before following your lifeline home; judge it poorly and you run out of oxygen. Almost all of the PLATO games fit this model, as does Wizardry and the Dunjonquest series. The goal is ultimately to get strong and skilled enough so that you can reach the farthest location, where you usually find the endgame.

     

4. The highway. The game is linear and one-way, with set "rest stops" (cities, leveling, healing, shops) at set intervals along the way. You don't always know how long it's going to be before the next stop, but you know it will come eventually. The Final Fantasy Legend and The Lord of the Rings fall here, although both allowed some limited backtracking. Icewind Dale II is another.

    

5. The "Waltzing Matilda." There are no "safe spaces," except perhaps the occasional dark corner after you've cleared an area of enemies. You have no "hub." All of your resources are in your tucker bag. You level up on the road and heal when you find a potion. It doesn't really matter if the game world is open or linear because you still have to travel the whole thing, and there are no rest stops. This is most roguelikes, Dungeon Master and its derivatives, and The Summoning. 

             

A partly-completed level.

          

Some of the most tense moments I have playing games is when I don't yet know which model a game is going to adopt. Games often begin with a constrained sequence, and until it's over, you don't know if the game is going to automatically move you to the next area or "open up." Then, if it does open up, you don't know until you start exploring if you're going to be returning to the starting point frequently or if there will be numerous potential hubs as you explore the world. It takes a few hours into Fallout 3 before you realize it's fundamentally a hub-and-spoke game (a player could approach it differently, but most use Megaton as a base of operations); when Fallout 4 began, I thought it would be the same, but it's much more of an open world. Often, a game surprises you by switching to another model for a particular sequence or expansion. Baldur's Gate II is a hub-and-spoke that becomes a highway in Throne of Bhaal. The Lonesome Road expansion to Fallout: New Vegas is a Waltzing Matilda tacked on to an open world.

Games also occasionally create tension and release by subverting their own designs. A common practice in airline dive games is to make you lose the line via teleporters or one-way doors. Hub-and-spoke games often defy predictability by sending you on a mission that turns into a Waltzing Matilda, straining your inventory space, exhausting resources that are normally renewable in town, and making you long for a place to rest or train. When you're finally able to break out and return, the sense of relief is magnified. 

    

I would have to say that the "Waltzing Matilda" is my least-favorite approach, partly because it's the hardest to pick up again when you haven't been able to play for a while. When you finally restore after an absent week, you're in the middle of a dungeon somewhere, with equipment you can't remember the reason for carrying, unsure if you were working on any puzzles and, if so, what they were. Meanwhile, the lack of a central depository means you have to anticipate what you'll need down the road. This is particularly difficult in a game like The Summoning, where numerous readers have warned me not to throw away any pearls or any spell scrolls (despite not needing them mechanically), and having been given the relatively useless advice to try to keep hold of at least one of everything because you never know what is going to be needed to solve a puzzle.

        

The reason for the game's name becomes clear.

       

I originally wrote, "The Summoning is taking long enough that I frankly wouldn't mind a 'walking-dead' excuse to wrap it up with a rating." The problem with that sentence is that it isn't taking that long--at least, not yet. I'm only into it for about 14 hours. It just feels very long because the nature of its construction is to never give you a break. I think this has less to do with its "Waltzing Matilda" approach (what seemed like a cute name is losing its charm as I keep typing it) and more because of its Dungeon Master paternity. Other games feature long corridors and large rooms just to fill in their grids, but games of the Dungeon Master line use all of their available space for puzzles. The Summoning is no exception. Any relief that you feel at finally getting a locked door opened almost immediately withers in the face of another locked door. It doesn't really make a difference that most of the puzzles are easy--which they are, far more so than DarkSpyre--but that they're endless.

     

My most recent sessions with the game involved the completion of a section of levels each named "Broken Seal." There were six of them, but a few of them had large basements, so it seemed like more. The ultimate goal was to find six wedges of a broken seal and assemble them to open the way to the next section of levels, which all seem to begin with the name "Elemental Barrier." A linear description of the levels would be boring and hard to relate given my fractured approach to playing and me recursive approach to exploration (more below), so I'll just cover the highlights:

         

• Broken Seal Three had a puzzle that required me to rescue a man named Duncan from a prison. His friend Tristan rewarded me with a bunch of runes for the task, but more important, Duncan told me that Shadow Weaver intends to use the Staff of Summoning to bring the God of Magic back to the world, defeat him in combat, become the new God of Magic, and remake the world.

• On Broken Seal Two, I found a woman dying of poisoning. The game strewed apple cores around her room, suggesting that she'd been keeping herself alive with Apples of Vigor, which was a cute touch. To cure her, I had to find a special antidote in Broken Seal One. As a reward, she gave me a magic mirror that protected me from the attacks of "gazers" (nothing like the Ultima enemies, but rather zombies holding decapitated heads that turn you to stone), which I encountered later in Broken Seal One.

    

The game brought up a little cinematic window as I administered the potion. It does that occasionally, which is a nice addition.

          

• Later, I learned the hard way that you have to actually equip the mirror when you meet the gazers.

       

Another cinematic shows Jera turning to stone.

            

• New spells found were "Poison," "Cure Poison," "Restore," "Fire Shield," and "Fireball." I also found additional scrolls for spells I already knew; it's nice that the game offers backups in case you miss the originals. The "Restore" spell is supposed to restore endurance; I've also found a couple of potions that do that, but so far nothing in the game has affected my endurance. Come to think of it, the manual suggests an entire "fatigue" system that if it actually exists hasn't been perceptible in gameplay.

              

This, alas, just shoots a small ball of fire.

     

• The game is very fond of closed doors that you need the "Kano" spell to open. Some of them are very hard to see as doors. I assume they're walls until I later see them on the automap.

• A common puzzle has been to need to push a rolling ball onto a pressure plate by using the temporary "Create Wall" spell to stop the ball when it gets to the pressure plate.

     

Like so.

           

• An exit from Broken Seal Two went back to the Antechamber at the beginning of the game. This is where I would have appeared if I hadn't gone through the "beginner" levels. A woman near this exit talked about the importance of speaking to magic mouths, which would have been odd advice this late in the game but timely advice for some cocky player who decided to skip the beginners' area.

• Gebo, Raido, and Thurisaz runes teleport the character to the associated "rune floor space on the level in which the rune was invoked." I've found a ton of them. I've been trying to remember to test them on each level in the even that I don't otherwise find those runes on the floors. I'm not sure I've gotten all of them, though.

          

Arriving in a secret Raido area.

       

• Towards the end of the Broken Seal levels were a couple of puzzles that required me to use knowledge of the game's lore. Each had one skull that asked a question (e.g., "Chesschantra's offspring") and three skulls that provided different answers, each with a portal behind it. The problem was that the "answer" skulls were arranged so close to each other that it was often unclear which one was speaking. Since the wrong portals dumped me into an exitless room, I had to reload a couple of times when I knew the answer but chose the wrong skull's portal. My favorite of these puzzles is when the "riddle" skull said "what you want" and the answers were "world peace," "glory," and, practically, "to complete this part of the maze."

          

One skill gives the answer as I face and am closest to a different one.

        

The automap does a good job, but it's annoying to consult. You have to remove whatever you have equipped in one hand, equip the "palimpsest" instead, use it, and then re-equip the previous item. So I've mostly been approaching each level by following the right wall, bypassing doors I can't open or puzzles I can't yet solve. If I've made three loops through the level and still haven't opened some doors (or found the exit), that's when it's time to sit up straight and start taking notice of things.

 

The problem with most of the game's puzzles (or perhaps I should say "challenge," as it's probably intentional) is that the game deliberately obscures their complexity. To illustrate what I mean, assume you walk into a room with four pressure plates, one lever, and a door in every cardinal direction. The "puzzle" could be as simple as the lever activates the pressure plates, and then the pressure plates open the doors in front of them as soon as you step on them. Or it could be as complex as the lever opens a portal to another section of the maze, where you have to solve four sub-puzzles to find four boulders to bring back to the main room to weigh down the pressure plates, which open the doors on the opposite sides of the room, and only one door can be opened at a time.

       

This one is pretty straightforward.

         

I've found that the best way to approach the game is to assume simplicity and to not start going crazy with the mechanics until it's clear that simple isn't working. You have to be goal-oriented in the game. If a room has three levers and one door, and somehow you get the door open without touching any of the levers, it's best not to worry about what they're for. There are plenty of times in which I've left an area suspecting perhaps there was more to find, but happy enough that I found my way to the next level.

New enemies on these levels included centaurs and the aforementioned gazers. Combats have been so easy that they're mostly incidental. I usually welcome them because the game generally uses combats in lieu of puzzles, so a room with mercenaries or skeletons is probably not going to have a lot of lever-and-pit nonsense. Most enemies die in a few hits, and if they manage to wound me direly, I just need to cast "Freeze," run a safe distance, and use "Liquify" to fill and chug Jera potions until I'm healed. Since I found the spell sequence for "Cure Poison," I don't even have to worry about that. The only enemies that have been problems were some ghouls, which none of my weapons and spells would damage. I'm just realizing now as I type this that I never fully "solved" that area, so I must have missed something. Whatever it was, it wasn't necessary to get through the Broken Seal levels.

          

Fighting a couple of centaurs.

           

By far, the biggest issue with the game has been over-encumbrance. You don't want to exceed your weight limit because it significantly slows down movement, including combat. But between runes, gems, potions, wands, coins, extra weapons, extra shields, and quest items, there's a lot in this game that seems pretty essential. At one point shortly after the end of the last session, I took a hard look at what I was carrying, made some tough choices, dropped a bunch of stuff, and was five pounds under-weight. It felt great for about five minutes, until I entered another room and found it loaded with stuff that seems essential. In most games with equipment breakage systems, you spend the game hoping that your items won't break. In The Summoning, you spend the game praying that they will, so that you can shed 8 pounds and swap in the next item.

 

I finally gave up. My character's maximum weight is about 85 pounds, but I'm lugging around close to 115. As we enter a new area, I drop enough chests to get below the threshold, explore for a while, then return and pick them up. (This is similar to Tygr's solution of using the first room of each level as a "warehouse.") Although the system basically works, I keep hoping that I'll eventually use or break enough stuff to get back under the threshold, but that goal gets more distant with every item that I find.

    

A decent part of my encumbrance (in space, if not weight) is made up of gold coins. So far, the only place that I've found to spend them is at NPCs who offer to heal you for a donation. Normally, I'd welcome these NPCs, but self-healing is so easy that I can't imagine ever having to use them. I wonder if there's any other purpose to the game's "economy."

One of Shadow Weaver's warriors, encountered I think on Broken Seal Three, gave me a preview of the rest of the dungeon. He said that Shadow Weaver opens all the seals every six months to allow the horde to come and go from its campaigning, but between those times you have to really work at it to pass through the various areas of the fortress. Beyond Broken Seal are three Elemental Barrier levels, then a series of levels "controlled by the five ruling knights." Each has a medallion, and all five are needed to actually enter the citadel, which I assume also has multiple levels. 

          

Well, this is depressing.

         

As I entered the Elemental Barrier levels, I ran into an NPC named Duncan--a different Duncan than the one I rescued from prison. He said that to open the "elemental barriers," I would need to bring him three spheres, which he would then somehow "activate." (Shadow Weaver drops the barriers whenever the horde marches to and from war, but that only happens every six months or so.) I don't know why spheres are such a big part of every game I play lately. Anyway, he said that in the years since "Balthazar" had placed Duncan in his position, no one had ever brought him a sphere, so he wonders if his job wasn't meant as a joke.

    

Anyway, that suggests that I still have a lot of game to go, which makes sense given the slowdown in leveling. Jera has reached "Adept" in edged weapons (7/10), "Skilled" in clubs and hacking weapons (5/10), "Average" in pole-arms (4/10), and remains a "Beginner" in missile weapons (1/10) because I haven't had any reason to use them. She is "Adept" in healing magic (7/10) and "Skilled" (5/10) in the rest. Her overall level is "Cavalier" (8/12). These all represent gains of only a level since the last session. 

    

I've given the impression of a game that I don't like, but it would be more accurate to say that it doesn't fit well with the available time I have this month. My enjoyment improves in long sessions when I can build a certain rhythm. I'd shelve it for a month except that strategy never really works. Even if it's a game I like (e.g., The Magic Candle III), I still somehow find myself loathe to pick it up again. So I'm going to power through with The Summoning even if it means I can't post about it that often. Next up, we'll probably have a BRIEF on Projekt Ikarus because I can't make heads or tails of it.

    

Time so far: 14 hours

Night In The Tower

When I was a young boy, my parents told me there were no such thing as ghosts. Growing up I really believed that. That's pretty crazy, right? Now we know ghosts are quite real and many famous trainers specialize in training the ghost-type Pokémon. It was Professor Oak and Elite Agatha who first speculated the existence of the ghost-type and it was because of their theories and the strange happenings going on at Pokémon Tower that they sent me, and Blue before me, to investigate and uncover the truth. I don't know what Blue endured within the tower before I got to Lavender Town, but I know he realized the prototype Silph Scope was absolutely necessary to see just what was really going on inside. I didn't know what I'd find inside, but I was confident that it wasn't going to be ghosts. They weren't real.
Professor Oak had sent me some urgent messages that I picked up at the Pokémon Center in Lavender. They sounded quite desperate. Apparently some of the other field research teams that he had dispatched to the tower had met with disaster. They had all abandoned the project. The rumors around town that whatever was going on inside the tower had involved Team Rocket somehow which I'm sure prompted Blue to take action in Celadon. It also explained why the Silph Scope was found among their stolen experimental devices in their headquarters.
"The tower is closed to the public until further notice," the attendant at the front counter told me as I entered the site. "Mr. Fuji is quite adamant that no one else be allowed to enter until a thorough investigation has been conducted."
"I was sent by Professor Oak," I stammered, hoping it would give me enough credibility to proceed.
"So were most of the others," she replied. "They didn't last very long inside. Neither did those Team Rocket members who forced their way in soon after. The tower is too dangerous right now."
"How so?" I asked. I knew the tower was used as a memorial for Pokémon that had passed on, but all the chatter around town of ghosts lurking in the darkness just seemed ridiculous to me. Ghosts weren't real.
"There was a team from Saffron City that went in about a week ago. Not a single one of them has come back. I personally won't even set foot on the first step up those stairs," she said motioning to the large winding stairway that worked its way up the floors of the tower. "Just forget about it and go home. I'm sorry if you lost a Pokémon dear to you, but it's just not safe up there."
She wasn't going to budge on the issue, but as far as I knew the tower was an open building day and night. There was no front gate, no locked doors, nothing to bar entry once this attendant had gone home for the night. Professor Oak's researchers had failed. Team Rocket had fled. Blue certainly wasn't inclined to come back after whatever happened to him. Not to mention a team of investigators from Saffron City had disappeared inside not too long ago. I needed to know what was going on inside and I was the only one with a Silph Scope that Blue assured me was necessary. So I waited patiently discreetly down the street from the path winding up to the Pokémon Tower and waited for night to fall.

As I had surmised, the tower was completely unguarded at night. The troubling rumors and the fact that it was a Pokémon graveyard probably kept most of the townsfolk far from the tower at night. I was the only one dumb enough to set foot inside after dark, and as soon as I stepped off the stairs my heart was racing. Even though it was early May and summer was just around the corner, the air was chilled. Even so, I was sweating up a storm as I crossed the first floor towards the next set of stairs leading up to the third floor.
The tower was dimly lit. Small candles burned on the memorials that were left for lost Pokémon, but there was no other light source. There were windows along the edges of the tower, but for some reason the moonlight was not making its way inside. As I passed by the memorials, I wondered, who had lit these candles if no one was allowed up here? I convinced myself that it must have been the team from Saffron City that were still lingering in the tower for whatever reason. I tried not to ask myself how they had survived for a week without access to food or water. Certainly they must have brought enough supplies. Right?
As my nerves began to falter, I popped the Silph Scope down over my eyes and glanced around. I was hoping they'd allow me to see better in the darkness, but sadly they did not. Everything looked normal through the lenses of the Silph Scope. Still, I wouldn't take them off now that they were on. They brought me some small amount of comfort and that was enough to get me to take those steps up to the next floor. It made me feel safe at first, but that began to dwindle with every passing moment spent in the tower.
Every passing step up across the floors of the tower and I felt a huge weight on my stomach pressing down and making me feel ill. I began to grow more and more terrified, jumping at every shadow flickering in the candle light. Eventually I felt like I was moving at a snail's pace as I made my way up the flights of stairs and across each new floor. It was deathly silent in here. Aside from the lit candles, that I hoped were being maintained by the Saffron crew, there was no sign or sound of anyone else inside. I felt tremendously alone.
It wasn't until the third floor that I realized I wasn't alone. I tossed out Dustin's Poké Ball and he was instantly on alert. I don't know what spooked him, but it didn't reassure me much. Still, I was glad to have the company as Dustin pressed forward one step ahead of me. Thanks to knowing the useless Pokémon move "Flash" Dustin's eyes managed to illuminate the darkness just a bit better than the candles, but a gloom still clung to the place.
I was certain we were being watched and Dustin seemed to agree. His eyes darted from corner to corner, lighting them up like a flashlight. As we progressed he would often stop and jerk his head around to peer into the corners behind us, as certain as I felt that there was something there. Neither his psychic prowess or my Silph Scope revealed anything, though. Whatever was lurking out there was quick to elude us and by the fifth floor, I think Dustin was making me more nervous than comforted with his erratic scanning of every dank nook and cranny of the tower.
Stepping off the stairs to the sixth floor, I could hear faint laughter or perhaps weeping coming from the final floor above us. It froze Dustin and I in our tracks. I saw him tilt his head as he reached out to probe with his mind. I envied him a little, but he didn't seem reassured much by whatever his psychic scan revealed. The noises from above confirmed that we were not alone and that disturbed both of us. The hairs on my neck were standing on end and my entire skin was covered in goosebumps by this point. I could see my breath in front of my face in the dim candle light, even though it really shouldn't have been that cold. Every instinct in my body told me to run back down the tower and out into the safety of the moonlit night, but I'd come too far. I'd faced down Team Rocket just two days ago and I wasn't about to let some laughing or weeping creature scare me away from this tower.
I almost wish it had, though. What awaited above in the darkness haunts me still. I've never seen anything like it before or since. As Dustin and I crossed the threshold of the seventh and final floor of the tower, we found ourselves surrounded by bodies - human bodies. They were strewn about the room like rag dolls that had been tossed aside, draped up against the walls and memorials, unmoving in the flickering candle light. The laughter, and I was confident it was laughter now, seemed to be coming from all around us. I couldn't tell if it was coming from one of the bodies on strewn across the floor or not. It wasn't until I looked at Dustin, who was staring intently up at the ceiling, that my stomach dropped and I slowly followed his gaze upward.
"Have you come to play?" A young woman was clutching the ceiling like some kind of spider or lizard, crouched on all fours, but staring down at us from across the room. Her face and neck were contorted in ways that didn't look natural or comfortable and her mouth was in a wide, sneering grin. "My other dolls are broken now, and this one will soon be useless, too." The voice was seething, but held a hint of laughter.
The girl dropped from the ceiling like a rock, but managed to contort herself in midair like a cat to land soundly on her bare feet and the palms of her hands. I could see she was wearing what remained of a very tattered dress, or perhaps tattered red hakama of a shrine maiden. Her wiry black hair fell around her face like a frame, but her grin did not change from the mocking crescent moon she held when we first saw her on the ceiling. "Answer me!" She insisted.
"I'm not here to play," I shouted back. I don't know where the words came from because I was trembling with intense fear.
"You never had a choice!" she screamed and rushed forward at insane speed. Fortunately Dustin raised his right hand, a pendulum forever swinging in his left and the girl was thrown backwards across the room, slamming harshly into the wall. It was then that I saw it through the Silph Scope. It wasn't the girl that Dustin had attacked, but something inside her. A dark purple mass was attached to the girl and I could see the grin fade from her mouth as it began to coalesce behind her.
"Help me," she gasped in a strained, but normal sounding human voice.
"Dustin! Hit it again!" Dustin took a step forward with his palm extended and I could feel a shock wave of his Confusion psychic attack blast whatever creature had hold of this young woman. This time she was freed entirely and her body fell to the floor in a heap. What remained was a round, dark purple Pokémon with large eyes with red sclera surrounding little black pupils. It held that same sickly wide grin that was splashed horrifically across the girls face. I was looking at a ghost - a ghost Pokémon which until recently had only been theorized.
It looked at me and Dustin with some disbelief behind its twisted grin. It apparently didn't expect to be pushed out like that. Dustin protectively stood between me and the creature. Before my eyes, two more creatures materialized out of apparently thin air. One of them a gaseous purple and black ball with eyes and a mouth, the other a floating purple apparition with two detached purple hands floating in front of it. I was all but locked up in terror at this point, but Dustin and I both knew that I was in danger.
Dustin sized up the opponents squarely. His gaze passed from one to the other. Finally I urged him to action. He hypnotized the gaseous orb which the Pokédex would come to identify as Gastly and it slowly drifted down to the floor in sleep. I quickly tossed out a Poké Ball to capture it if I could and get it off the battlefield. I didn't have time to see if it was successful as the apparition with disembodied hands lunged forward with a gigantic tongue rolling out of its gaping maw. It looked as though it were going to lick Dustin, but he was having none of it. Confusion absolutely decimated the apparition later identified as Haunter. It left only the original creature, the leader of this mischievous trio, staring coldly at us across the room.
Dustin and the Gengar appeared to be having some kind of intense staring contest and for a moment I wondered if they were engaged in some kind of psychic battle. It was unfortunately too late that I realized this ghost Pokémon was using one of my beloved techniques against us! Dustin was sound asleep and this creature was somehow feasting on his dreams and gaining strength. How could I have been so stupid? I fumbled for Dustin's ball to withdraw him and protect him, but before I could, a faint sound came trickling in from somewhere. It was the soft sound of a flute.
I didn't have time to be puzzled by this because Dustin was instantly awake and taking action. He leaned forward to send a final blast of Confusion at the Gengar which squealed in pain and then suddenly vanished into the night. The candles flared up dramatically, enveloping the whole room in bright light before returning to a normal, healthy glow. The gloom that had been hanging around this place had been lifted. I saw the faint blinking light of my Poké Ball and knew I had captured that one gaseous orb. I took a deep breath and felt like a huge weight had been lifted. I'd forgotten completely about the faint flute music.
"Are you all right?" I asked rushing over to the young woman who had been tossed backwards by Dustin's psychic attack.
"I am now," she said in an exhausted tone. "Thank you."
I didn't really know what to say. Dustin had done most of the work. I had been practically frozen in fear. I helped the woman to her feet. She looked around at the other bodies. She frowned.
"They are alive," she said. I wasn't sure how she knew what I was asking in my head. "I can sense them breathing, dreaming. They are just weak. That Pokémon was playing with us like toys and draining our energy. We might not have made it much longer if you hadn't shown up." Her voice was raspy and quiet.
"Stay here with your friends," I said. "I'll go get help."
"No need!" came a loud voice from the stairway. Dustin, the girl and I all snapped our heads in his direction, surprised by the announcement. Standing at the stairs, we saw an old, bald man in a kimono beside an old woman in a purple and white dress leaning heavily on a cane. The man looked genuinely ecstatic while the woman had a dark grin spread across her face. "We saw you come in armed with that scope there and knew we had to follow. I'd been waiting for Agatha here for days to help me investigate the tower and it appears her predictions were correct. There were ghost-type Pokémon in here!"
"May I?" she asked, pointing at the Poké Ball that now held Spectre the Gastly. I handed it to her. I'd like to reiterate, I had no idea who I was talking to at the time. As a newcomer to Kanto, I didn't realize I was in the presence of two well known authorities on Pokémon in the region, one of them a member of the Elite Four. All I knew was I was exhausted from this ordeal and they were here to help. It had been a long night. In my exhaustion, I never even noticed the flute clutched in the old man's hands.

Current Team:
Attacks in Blue are recently learned.




Current Team:
Bill's Storage: Kiwi (Pidgeotto), Vesper (Zubat), Spectre (Gastly)

Old Man Daycare: Charlie (Pidgey)

Help Dallas Pride this North Texas Giving Day

Help Dallas Pride this North Texas Giving Day

View this email in your browser Help Dallas Pride this North Texas Giving Day Dear Friends, North Texas Giving Day is coming up September 17th and, this year, Dallas Pride is participating in this event from the Communities Foundation of Texas. And you can help! Please consider supporting Dallas Pride's mission to strengthen, support and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. Your donations help us to create events and initiatives that foster connections between members of the community, its allies and its supporters. Early giving has already started! Donations are tax-deductible, and every dollar you contribute helps make Dallas Pride eligible for more funds and awareness connected with North Texas Giving Day. Your dollars go farther during the #NTxGivingDay campaign because a portion is matched by the Communities Foundation of Texas. Click here to make a donation for Dallas Pride via the special North Texas Giving Day site, or to find out more about doing your own "FUNdraiser." Also, head to our social channels to share the news about #NTxGivingDay with your friends and fans. Thank you for your support of our LGBTQ+ community. Sincerely, Jaron Turnbow Executive Director, Dallas Pride P.S. Find out more and learn how you can create your own "FUNdraiser" here!   dallaspride.org Share Tweet Forward Copyright © 2020 Dallas Pride, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. And by the way, Thanks! Our mailing address is: Dallas Pride P. O. Box 192668 Dallas, Tx 75219 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.