Another short one. And while I'm here, I'd like another RBG for Kurtzwick from the Jungle Recovery Agency. *hands over 7 stamps*

Test No. 1
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Kurtzwick opened his eyes. The sight of a desolate, abandoned warehouse greeted him.

This startled him slightly less than it might have startled a different Pokémon. Kurtzwick didn’t have any real hang-ups about empty warehouses; some of his best work had been done in places where nobody was watching him.

The first thing Kurtzwick did, as was the first thing he always did when in an unfamiliar spot, was that he checked himself. No bruises. Nothing hurts. And my Collar’s still here. So there’s that.

He looked around. A light, hanging far above him from the ceiling, flickered and buzzed quietly. The room he was in was obviously unused – dust had settled on the sundry boxes and crates littered across the floor. The walls, tin, had rusted. A catwalk spanned the width of the room some feet above him – much too high to reach, Kurtzwick realized. There was a door at one end of the catwalk, though. Kurtzwick frowned. How the heck are you supposed to get up there, then…?

Putting the thought to the side for the moment, Kurtzwick made his way to the crates. A cursory glance through them revealed that they were in fact completely empty, provided you discounted the dust that had accumulated inside.

Kurtzwick grunted. Now that the room had been appropriately scoped out, he could devote his thought process to figuring out where he was and how he got there.

No answers presented themselves. Even though Kurtzwick, as he was no stranger to admitting, had cleaned out several warehouses in his fruitful career, this one wasn’t one he had ever seen before. That said, from the empty boxes, it did appear to him that someone had been there prior. Even if it was ages ago, he thought. From the dust, nobody’s visited in forever.

That just left why he was there. Let’s see. I don’t know this place, and I don’t remember getting here, so someone brought me here. Why would someone bring me to an abandoned warehouse…? Kurtzwick thought that one over for a moment, keeping his eyes open and his head slowly swiveling, just in case someone took the opportunity to sneak up on him. I’ve been covering my tracks pretty well, and nobody’s been coming after me recently, so this can’t be about me. So what does that mean?

In accordance with the laws of narrativity, the light hanging from the ceiling started burning at full brightness as soon as Kurtzwick arrived at his answer.

They’re using me to get at someone else. And as far as people I know who would have people after them, that leaves only Jeff and Raini. Kurtzwick frowned. And between the two, Raini wouldn’t care that I’d gone missing. This must be about Jeff.

His thought process was interrupted, though, when the room flooded with light – far more than what the one meager light bulb could provide. Kurtzwick squinted and looked up. A spotlight that he hadn’t noticed before – recessed into the ceiling – had turned on.

Ooookay. That’s rarely a good sign.

“You’re awake.” A voice spoke out of some hidden loudspeaker. It was male, leaning very slightly towards high-pitched, and it wasn’t emitting any emotion. It was neither good nor bad that Kurtzwick was awake. That was just a thing that had happened.

Kurtzwick knit his brow, glancing from side to side. “Er…” Come on, Kurtzwick, don’t show weakness! He cleared his throat. “Who the heck are you?”

“Please proceed through the door.” The voice never faltered.

Kurtzwick looked around. Though the spotlight was focused on him, it seemed to be slightly angled so that it illuminated the door on the catwalk. “That door? The one hopelessly out of reach, is that right?”

A faint rustling was just barely audible, and a rope ladder unfurled from catwalk. It descended and stopped right at his height.

“Oh. A ladder. For the discerning armless Pokémon. Real nice,” Kurtzwick hissed underneath his breath. Regardless, though, he lifted himself onto the first rung, then looped back and climbed to the second, then to the third. After a length of time just long enough that it couldn’t reasonably be called “soon,” Kurtzwick coiled himself up on the catwalk. Using more dexterity than one might expect from a Dratini, he managed to pull open the door and slither inside before it slammed shut behind him.

The door led, much to Kurtzwick’s chagrin, another room, and it opened onto a catwalk that served only as a dead end. This room was stacked higher with boxes, and an ancient stairway stood in a corner. It ostensibly led to another catwalk at some point in the past, but it had since rusted through – some unlucky sap, Kurtzwick reasoned, had managed to break right through the stairway just before reaching the catwalk. He dropped to the ground and absentmindedly lashed at one tower of boxes with his tail; they fell over without any rattling, only confirming for him that they were still empty.

“Proceed with the test,” the disembodied voice said.

“Test?” Kurtzwick asked, raising an eyebrow. Before he could ask further, though, a clanking from an air vent set high in one corner drew his attention. The grate popped out, and a Pokéball fell from the vent. It bounced a few times, then came to a rest on the ground before opening. A brilliant light filled the room, and once Kurtzwick cleared the flashing lights from his eyes, he noticed that a Pokémon that looked very much like a zebra was standing in front of him.

Test! Kurtzwick versus Blitzle!
Kurtzwick: “Hack, slay, and haul it all away!”
Blitzle: “Hello?”

“Um.” Kurtzwick wasn’t quite sure what to say. The zebra wasn’t making any antagonistic movements. It was just standing there. Thankfully, Kurtzwick realized, it didn’t seem to have seen him yet; his cover behind the fallen pile of boxes seemed to be working in his favor. But. he thought, I can’t get anywhere by just staying here. He tentatively poked his tail out from behind the boxes.

The zebra’s face lit up. “There you are!” it said. Before Kurtzwick could realize what had happened, the zebra had charged up a bolt of electricity and blasted it at him. He barely managed to pull his tail back in before it got singed.

Okay, so, it attacks on sight, Kurtzwick thought. So if I’m going to get past it, I need to sneak past it. Standard operating procedure.

Silently, Kurtzwick exhaled a white smoke that hung in the air between two stacks of boxes. He slipped through the Haze and took cover behind the second pile. Thankfully, the zebra hadn’t seen him. He glanced to the catwalk. As in the last room, there was another door at the end of it. So I just need to make it up there, then I’m home free.

Three more Hazes were all it took for Kurtzwick to make it to the staircase, behind the Blitzle. It was either mind-numbingly dumb or simply not very observant, Kurtzwick decided, since, even though the Hazes were still in the act of dispersing, the zebra didn’t seem to notice that anything was out of the ordinary. It hadn’t even turned from its original spot.

Kurtzwick slithered onto the stairs. This proved to be an incredibly bad move. The rusty metal creaked under him, despite his considerable lack of heft, and the zebra immediately swiveled its head. “I see you!” it called, and it lashed out with another Charge Beam. This one struck Kurtzwick, with nowhere to go, square in the neck, and he fell down the stairs.

This didn’t seem to bother the zebra at all, who continued its volley, zapping Kurtzwick repeatedly until he scrambled his way behind another box. Okay, so that wasn’t a good idea, he thought, panting. A faint glow enveloped him as the singed spots all over his skin began to disappear. I guess I have to take this guy out.

The zebra barely noticed as a cold wind began to pick up in the room. It circled around the perimeter of the room first, clearing away the Haze, then spiraled in on the center. The zebra shivered, then flinched; aside from being cold, the Icy Wind carried with it bits of ice and sleet, and they scraped across its skin. It glanced around for the source of the attack, but didn’t see one; as a result, it held its ground.

The next thing that confused it was the cloud of white smoke that poured forward from between the boxes. Those boxes, the zebra seemed to realize, were the same ones the intruder had disappeared behind earlier. It fired a bolt of electricity into the smoke, but its confusion got worse when the bolt disappeared with a quiet “tink.”

Kurtzwick huddled behind the Protect until the Shock Wave fizzled out. The Haze was still there when he opened his eyes, and he breathed a sigh of relief: it was integral to him plan. He dropped his shield and slithered through the cloud. After taking a second to psyche himself up, Kurtzwick burst forward from the cloud, wreathed in orange flames. The zebra began charging up an attack after flinching, but Kurtzwick barreled into it too quickly. The flames exploded outwards as he rammed the zebra.

Charred and weak, the zebra fell backwards, its eyes shut. Kurtzwick composed himself, sniffed, then slithered up the stairs, easily bridging the narrow gap.

Test complete! Kurtzwick grows to level 9!

He slid to the door, but was interrupted by the voice again. “Very good,” the voice said, though you wouldn’t know it from the tone of the voice itself – it was as passive as always. “You have completed the first test.”

Kurtzwick’s eyes widened. “The first--?”

“Please proceed to the next room.”

Kurtzwick threw open the door. The room that greeted him was incredibly similar to the last - it was stacked high with boxes, with a catwalk leading to a door on the other side of the room.

Had anyone been present, they would have been privy to the precise sound of a Dratini screaming in frustration through grit teeth.