Escape to a Dungeon
Jade quietly shut her room's door behind her, taking excessive care to not slam it. She had only just escaped from a half-hour of verbal berating about "laziness" from her mother, and she was far from eager to have her progenitor invade her space to berate her more. With very quiet motion, Jade grabbed her Switch and plugged her earbuds in, taking the console with her as she went to lie in her bed. One of her favourite games as a kid had been her well-used copy of Red Rescue Team, and the newly released remake looked like it was going to be just as important to Jade as an adult, if nothing else than out of sheer escapism.
Jade had managed to scrape together enough to buy the new remake out of the meager allowance her mother gave for her chores ("You don't get as much as your younger siblings because this work is your rent, you should be glad I'm giving you anything at all") and, given all the good things she had heard, Jade was quite enthusiastic to see her childhood nostalgia reborn. And, quite frankly, due to her current living situation, she was looking forward to the fantasy of leaving human life behind again. Granted, as a kid, she was more wanting to leave behind the bullying for being "a sissy" rather than leaving behind her own mom's bullying, but the parallel was still quite relevant.
As Jade started up the new game on her Switch, she took a moment to revel in the nostalgia the magnificent musical melodies were evoking. The composers had clearly put in a lot of work to capture the feel of the originals while creating the more modern remixes, and their effort really showed. Jade just sat on the title screen for a couple minutes reminiscing about how coming home to play the original had been her only life drive for about three years of school, before finally actually starting a new game. She was ready for the standard personality quiz, and the remake did not disappoint, the rainbow tones of the quiz screen combined with the dulcet tones of the remix mesmerizing her slightly as she read through the standard framing device.
The game told her that she was about to enter the world of Pokémon, and it would ask her questions to see what she would become, warning her to answer honestly. She knew this was coming, as it had been in every Mystery Dungeon game before (save the one she doesn't talk about), but just going through it on where it all started again was having a profound impact on her mind, and she had almost forgotten about her mom's nigh-abuse already.
The game started off with a simple question of "You're offered a new job far away, but it means your family is going to be far away! What do you do?"
"They definitely changed the quiz in the remake, but I definitely wouldn't mind leaving my mom behind." Jade thought as she answered the question with "Embrace the new opportunity!"
The game had multiple other questions for her, many of which relating to leaving things behind, all of which she answered with an enthusiastic "of course," until she got to what she knew to be the final question: "Do you want to play as a boy or a girl?"
"Huh, I like their inclusiveness of enbies in that changed phrasing." she thought, reminiscing to how her choosing "girl" as a child was one of her first valves of that. That having not changed since, she quickly selected that she wanted to be a girl and moved on to the little blurb the game always gave before telling you who you got.
"You appear to be... the enthusiastic type! You seem excited to leave everything behind if it would make your life better, like the wind blowing free. But you have to know it's important to have some attachments sometimes."
"Wow,the game's calling me out hard, isn't it." Jade thought.
"An enthusiastic type like yourself should be..."
Jade waited in anxious anticipation, hoping internally that she'd get Eevee like she did as a kid.
"Actually, could you answer another question?" The game asked, breaking from Jade's anticipated script.
"That's weird, there was never an extra question after the blurb in any previous game."
"If you could come into this game yourself, would you take the opportunity?"
Jade was startled by the question. She never remembered any of the games getting this meta, and she was sure that the journalists would have mentioned something like this in the remake if it had shown up for any of them. Still, she felt in her gut that she wanted to answer honestly here, and, as such, she immediately picked "Yes."
"I had suspected as much, so allow me show you something."
Still immensely weirded out by this situation, Jade barely noticed as her vision around her started to distort, and, soon enough, she found herself floating in the rainbow void that had previously been on her screen. She was quite taken aback by this, and attempted to step back, to feel no ground under her.
"Apologies for the disorientation of that, are you alright?" Jade heard a voice directly inside her head, and looked around to see nothing around indicating a source.
"W-wha-what's going on?" Jade said out loud, frantically looking around, in a bit of a panic.
"Calm down, you're safe, I can send you back if you want once I explain what's happening, just be calm for now." she heard the telepathic voice again.
"O-okay..." Jade anxiously said, trying and failing to calm her nerves from suddenly being teleported into a void of pure rainbow light.
"You seemed from the quiz like you really did not enjoy your life outside, right? I have the ability to make this into more than just a game for you, if you like. I can make you live in this world, as a Pokémon, free from humanity."
"W-really? You can do that, Gardevoir?"
"Wait, how do you know- oh right, you played the original game, didn't you..." the voice said to Jade, cutting itself off.
"Yeah, I did..."
"That makes things significantly more complicated. It would rather, ah, break the world if you went in knowing all you already know. I would have to wipe your memory to make the world not collapse immediately."
"Oh..."
"Don't worry, though! That would only be temporary! It would be trivial to return your memories to you once you finish your quest, it is just at the beginning you would only possess knowledge of your name and that you were a human. I presume you know how the basic story goes, so it is directly similar to that."
"Ah. And I can choose not to do this too?"
"Yep! If you tell me no, I can transport you back outside like nothing happened, and you can just play the game as, well, a game." Gardevoir telepathized.
"If I did choose to, you know, enter your world, would I be able to change my mind and return to my own at all?"
"Once you finish your quest, you most certainly could. However, given the memory removal, you would have to complete your quest to really know there is a world to come back to, so you would be unlikely to be particularly stressed by it."
"I-wow... I could live in the world of Pokémon just... actually, for real..."
"I know it's a tough choice, and I'm sure you have some people in reality-"
"YES PLEASE TAKE ME IN I WANT THE ESCAPE" Jade interjected enthusiastically.
"Wow, you're quite excited about this, aren't you? I'll take you in, we just have to decide a couple other things first..."
"Um... excuse me... wake up! Come on, please wake up!" Jade heard from a very avian-sounding voice in front of her, as she roused herself awake. She immediately noticed the very different body plan she was in as she positioned herself on all fours almost automatically. She shook herself off and talked to the Torchic in front of her, with some confusion, answering her questions as best she could. And yet, despite the obviously missing memory and her general disorientation, there was a deep feeling within her that, for one of the first times in her life, in this new world, the newly-made eevee was truly, tail-waggingly happy. And that, at least to her, made everything okay.