Chapter 1: The Uninvited Light

The afternoon sun had found a precise, lazy angle through Nobita’s window. It was the kind of warm, heavy light specifically engineered by the universe to make homework impossible. His math workbook lay open on the desk, the numbers on the page slowly dissolving into a greyish blur. Nobita’s head rested on his folded arms, his mouth slightly open. A thin line of drool had escaped, creeping steadily towards a particularly troubling long-division problem, though he was far past caring about the solution.

From his spot on the tatami mat, Doraemon watched the boy with a familiar, weary sort of affection. He’d given up on lecturing about deadlines hours ago. Now he just munched quietly on a dorayaki, the sweet red bean paste a small consolation against the backdrop of chronic academic failure. Outside, the ordinary sounds of a Tokyo afternoon drifted in: a distant lawnmower, a kid shouting, the hum of a passing car. Everything was perfectly, boringly normal.

Then the light in the room changed.

It wasn’t a sudden darkening or a bright flash. The sunlight slanting across the floor simply began to waver, like heat haze over asphalt in summer. Doraemon stopped chewing, his round blue head tilting. The air above Nobita’s desk started to shimmer, distorting the view of the wall behind it as if seen through old glass.

Nobita snorted in his sleep, mumbling something about a zero on a test. He didn’t see his pencil roll off the desk, not falling downward but sliding sideways across the wooden surface. It clattered to the floor, then skittered toward the center of the room.

Doraemon stood up, his stubby legs tense. “Nobita,” he said, his voice unusually flat.

The shimmering intensified, coalescing into a visible warp in the middle of the room. It was silent, utterly silent, which made the visual wrongness of it worse. The air itself seemed to be folding, pulling inward toward a point that hung in space about a meter above the floor. Nobita’s empty juice glass trembled on the nightstand, then slid off with a soft scrape, flying in a neat arc to join a growing constellation of floating debris—eraser shavings, a comic book, a stray sock. They all orbited that silent, hungry center.

“Nobita!” Doraemon yelled, this time with real alarm.

Nobita woke up with a jolt, lifting his head. A string of drool connected his chin to his homework. He blinked, disoriented. “Wha…? Doraemon, I was just resting my eyes…” His sentence trailed off as he saw his floating sock. His brain, still gummed up with sleep, processed this slowly. “Hey. My sock’s flying.”

Then his chair lurched.

It wasn’t a shake or a tremor. It was a firm, insistent yank. The legs screeched against the floorboards as the entire chair, with Nobita still in it, began sliding toward the vortex. The pull was gentle at first, then undeniable. Nobita’s eyes went wide with a pure, uncomplicated terror. He grabbed the edges of his desk, his knuckles white.

“Doraemon! Help!”

Doraemon was already scrambling in his fourth-dimensional pocket. “Hold on! I’ll get the—” But his words were cut off as his own round body lifted off the tatami mat. He flailed his arms and legs uselessly, like a cartoon cat thrown from a window. The half-eaten dorayaki tumbled from his grasp and was sucked into the distortion.

The pull became violent. Nobita’s grip on the desk failed. He was ripped from his chair, which then spun away and vanished into the shimmering point. He was airborne for a single, weightless second, tumbling head over heels in the silent grip of the anomaly. He saw his room upside down—the ceiling, Doraemon spinning beside him, the door to the hallway—and then everything stretched into impossibly long lines of color and light.

---

Across town, in her tidy living room, Shizuka was practicing her violin. A gentle sonata filled the space. She frowned at a tricky passage, lowering the instrument. Maybe she needed a short break. She walked to the kitchen for some tea, entirely unaware that the air in her living room had begun to vibrate with a strange, internal heat.

Gian was in his backyard, bellowing one of his original songs at a captive audience of his long-suffering mother and a bewildered garden gnome. He hit what he thought was a particularly powerful high note, puffing out his chest. The air around him wavered sympathetically, or perhaps in protest.

Suneo was in his lavish bedroom, video-calling someone to boast about his family’s latest acquisition—a limited-edition model spaceship from some anime. He was mid-sentence about its market value when his monitor flickered and died. He smacked it irritably. “Hey! This cost more than your house!” The air behind him contorted silently.

The pull came for each of them at once.

Shizuka dropped her teacup. It never hit the floor. She was plucked from her kitchen like a flower, a gasp stolen from her lips before she could scream.

Gian’s mighty singing voice cut off with a comical gurgle as an invisible force lifted all two hundred pounds of him off the grass. His mother stared, not in shock but in momentary relief at the sudden quiet.

Suneo was yanked backwards from his fancy gaming chair, his smug expression morphing into one of utter indignation. “Do you know who my father is?!” he managed to shriek, which were his last words before his world dissolved.

---

The sensation of movement stopped with a nauseating finality.

Nobita’s stomach caught up with him a second later. He gagged, squeezing his eyes shut against a sudden, overwhelming brightness. The familiar smells of his room—dust, old paper, Doraemon’s dorayaki—were gone. Replaced by something sterile and metallic, like the inside of a new refrigerator.

He forced his eyes open.

He was standing upright inside a clear tube. It was just wider than his shoulders, made of some seamless, glass-like material that felt cool against his back. The light was coming from everywhere and nowhere—a diffuse, shadowless white that illuminated everything with clinical efficiency.

He was in a large room. A laboratory, though Nobita’s mind didn’t supply that word immediately. It just looked like a very clean, very empty space where nothing good ever happened. The walls were smooth and metallic, curving to meet a high ceiling where soft luminescent panels glowed. There were no windows, no doors he could see.

Panic bubbled up in his throat. He slammed his hands against the clear wall of his tube. It didn’t budge or even vibrate; it felt solid as a mountain.

“Hello?!” His voice echoed weirdly inside his cylindrical prison.

A movement to his left caught his eye. Another tube, identical to his own. Inside it was Doraemon, who was pressing his entire blue face against the clear surface, his whiskers bent flat. His round eyes were huge with alarm.

To Nobita’s right was another pod. Shizuka was there, her hands pressed to the wall as she looked around with wide, frightened eyes. When she saw Nobita, her expression shifted to confused recognition. She mouthed his name soundlessly.

Further down the line he saw two more pods materializing from what seemed like thin air with a soft hiss of pressurized air. One contained Gian, who was already pounding on his walls and shouting muffled threats. The other held Suneo, who appeared to be crying while simultaneously trying to smooth down his hair.

They were all here. All trapped in these silent, transparent cells arranged in a neat row in this cold, white room.

Nobita pressed his forehead against the cool barrier, looking past Doraemon’s pod at the rest of the strange laboratory. There were more rows of these cylindrical tubes stretching into the distance. Most were empty.

But not all of them.

In adjacent rows stood other pods containing people he had never seen before in his life.

In the nearest pod, a boy about his age with messy black hair and a red and white cap stared back at him. The boy had a look of fierce, determined confusion, not just fear. A small, yellow creature with pointed ears and a lightning-bolt tail perched on his shoulder, its cheeks sparking with tiny, frantic crackles of electricity. Nobita blinked. What kind of weird mouse wore a cap? Or sparked?

Next to that boy was a girl with orange hair tied in a side ponytail. She was gripping the walls of her tube, saying something sharp to the boy with the cap, her expression a mix of anger and terror. Beside her was an older teen with dark hair and a resigned, weary slump to his shoulders, as if this was just a particularly bizarre form of bad luck.

In another row, the scene was somehow even stranger. A tiny boy with a round face and mischievous eyes was already bouncing inside his pod, laughing like this was the greatest playground he’d ever seen. A woman with him—his mother, probably—was trying to grab him, her face pale with shock. In a pod beside them, a man in a rumpled suit was shouting silently, pounding the walls. And in a smaller pod, a toddler with big eyes just sat placidly, sucking her thumb and watching the lights.

None of them were from the neighborhood. None of them were from anywhere Nobita knew. They were all just… here. Trapped.

A low hum filled the room, vibrating through the floor and up into the pods. On the curved interior wall of Nobita’s tube, right at chest level, a square of light flickered into existence. It solidified into a flat, glowing panel hovering an inch from the surface. It showed four colored circles in a row—blue, red, green, yellow—and below them, four empty slots.

A simple instruction appeared beneath in neat, blocky text: MATCH SEQUENCE.

Nobita stared at it. A puzzle? He hated puzzles almost as much as he hated math. He looked over at Doraemon’s pod. An identical holographic panel had appeared on his friend’s wall. Doraemon was studying it intently, his brow furrowed in concentration. He glanced at Nobita and made a series of quick, deliberate gestures with his paws—look, think, don’t touch anything yet.

From Shizuka’s pod came a soft tap. She had matched the first color already, placing a blue orb from a selection at the side of her panel into the first slot. She gave Nobita a small, encouraging nod.

Gian’s response was less thoughtful. He glared at the panel as if it had personally insulted him. “What’s this stupid game?!” he roared, his voice muffled but still audible through the barrier. He slapped a big hand at the red circle. The hologram shimmered where he touched it, but nothing happened. He needed to drag the color, not hit it. This only made him angrier.

Suneo was whimpering, poking tentatively at his panel. “This is obviously a test of intellect. My superior mind will solve it easily.” He dragged the green circle to the first slot, which immediately flashed an angry red ‘X’. Suneo yelped and jerked his hand back.

Across the lab, similar scenes were unfolding. The boy with the cap—Ash—was watching Pikachu. The electric mouse was pointing a tiny paw at the colored circles on their shared panel, chattering urgently. Ash nodded, reaching out to follow Pikachu’s suggested sequence. The older boy, Brock, was working methodically, his movements calm despite the situation. The orange-haired girl, Misty, had her arms crossed, arguing with Ash about which color should go first.

In the pod with the chaotic little boy, things were not proceeding methodically at all.

Shinchan Nohara saw the bright, shiny buttons appear on his wall and his giggles escalated into full-blown delight. “Wow! A TV! Boing-boingly buttons!” Misae, his mother, lunged for him.

“Shin-chan! Don’t touch that! We don’t know what it does!”

She was too late. Shinchan slapped both hands onto the holographic panel with all the force a kindergartener could muster.

He didn’t try to match colors. He just mashed. His small palms smeared across the interface, pressing every circle at once, dragging yellow into the first slot while simultaneously jabbing at the empty third slot with his other hand. The panel responded with frantic, conflicting inputs. Lights flared under his touch.

“Red! Blue! Yellow! Pee-pee man attack!” he cheered, now drumming his fingers across the display in a chaotic rhythm.

“Shin-chan, stop it!” Misae begged, trying to pull him away.

In the next pod, Hiroshi—Harry—saw what his son was doing and his face went from panic to pure horror. “You idiot! You’ll break it!”

But breaking it seemed to be Shinchan’s unstated goal. He discovered that if he pressed two colors and slid them together really fast, they made a funny buzzing sound. He did it again. And again.

Inside Nobita’s pod, a soft chime sounded. A green checkmark appeared next to his sequence. He’d managed, through sheer guesswork and watching Shizuka’s careful moves from the corner of his eye, to match the pattern: blue, red, green, yellow. The holographic panel winked out.

For a second, nothing happened. Nobita looked around hopefully. Was that it? Would his pod open now?

Then Shinchan’s pod emitted a sound that wasn’t a chime. It was a sharp, dissonant electronic screech.

The clear wall of his tube flashed once, brilliantly white, then flooded with pulsing crimson light. Bold black text scrolled across it: SECURITY BREACH. INPUT CORRUPTION.

The moment the words appeared, the entire laboratory erupted.

A deafening, blaring alarm sliced through the quiet hum—a harsh, two-tone siren that felt like needles in the ears. The shadowless white light vanished, replaced by strobing red warning lights that rotated from fixtures in the ceiling, throwing everything into a chaotic dance of scarlet and deep shadow.

WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP!

Nobita cried out, clapping his hands over his ears. The sound was inside his pod with him, vibrating in his teeth. Through the flashing red gloom, he could see everyone else reacting in their own prisons. Ash was shouting to Pikachu; Misty had covered her ears; Brock was shielding his eyes from the strobing lights. Doraemon was frantically tapping at the spot where his puzzle panel had been, as if trying to bring back a safer set of instructions.

In Shinchan’s pod, now a beacon of flashing red and scrolling error text, the little boy finally stopped mashing buttons. He looked up at the spinning red lights on the ceiling, his initial glee turning into startled fascination. “Ooooh… party lights!”

Misae grabbed him and held him tightly, her face buried in his hair, her shoulders shaking.

A new voice filled the room, cutting through even the brutal alarm. It was synthesized, genderless, and utterly calm—a chilling contrast to the visual and auditory chaos.

“Containment failure,” it announced. “Anomalous cognitive interference detected in Sector Seven-B.”

The voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“Initiating emergency environmental purge protocol.”

“Purge? What purge?!” Nobita shouted, though the blaring alarm swallowed his words. The word ‘purge’ sounded a lot more serious than a puzzle or an alarm.

From inside his flashing pod, Shinchan heard it too. “Purger! Like hamburger!” he giggled, wiggling in his mother’s grasp, completely missing the terrifying nuance.

The synthesized voice continued, its monotone a stark thread in the tapestry of noise. “Decontamination cycle commencing. Transferring specimens to primary observation biomes.”

Biomes? Specimens? Nobita’s heart hammered against his ribs. This wasn’t an accident. It was a procedure. They weren’t passengers; they were cargo. Test subjects.

Before the horrible reality of those words could fully settle, a new sound cut through the alarm from directly beneath his feet. A sharp hiss-clunk, like a heavy lock disengaging. He glanced down.

The solid, seamless floor of his transparent pod was splitting apart. A circular seam appeared, widening as four triangular sections retracted smoothly into the walls, opening a perfect, dark hole right under his shoes.

“Wait!” he yelled.

There was no time to brace, to grab anything. The floor simply ceased to exist.

The sudden vacuum pulled him down as much as gravity did. Nobita dropped with a yelp, plunging into darkness. The last things he saw were the red-strobed images of the other pods, each with their own irising floors, and the horrified faces of his friends—and strangers—as they too vanished down identical holes. Gian’s shouting face disappeared. Suneo’s flailing limbs, Shizuka’s outstretched hand, all swallowed by the geometry of their prisons.

The fall was short, steep, and utterly dark. He slid, more than fell, down a smooth, metallic chute. The material was cool and frictionless, and he picked up speed instantly, tumbling over and over in the confined space with no way to stop or even see what was coming. He heard distant, echoing shrieks and shouts from other chutes—the muffled roar of Gian, the high-pitched wail of Suneo, a chorus of unfamiliar voices yelling in panic. The alarm from the lab grew fainter, replaced by the rushing sound of air and his own pulse drumming in his ears.

It might have lasted five seconds or thirty. Time lost all meaning in the dark, spinning rush.

With shocking abruptness, the chute angled outward and spat him into open space.

He flailed, tumbling through damp, thick air before slamming into something soft and slightly springy. It was a mound of large, waxy leaves. He crashed through them, rolling to a stop on his back, breath knocked out of him. He lay there, gasping, staring up at a high, domed ceiling shimmering with a pale, artificial sky-blue light.

The air was hot and humid, sticking to his skin immediately. It smelled of damp soil, ozone, and something else—a sharp, coppery tang like overheated machinery. Instead of birdsong, the dominant sound was a constant, low-grade whirring, interspersed with mechanical clicks and the occasional soft hydraulic puff.

Groaning, Nobita pushed himself up onto his elbows. He wasn’t in the white laboratory anymore.

He was in a jungle.

At least, it looked like a jungle from a science fiction film his dad might have watched. Towering trees with dark, ridged bark rose all around him, their dense canopies filtering the fake sky-light into a murky green gloom. Vines as thick as his arm hung in lazy loops. But something was deeply wrong with the foliage. Some of the leaves had a dull metallic sheen, gleaming dully under odd angles of light. The flowers dotting the bushes weren’t organic shapes but precise, geometric clusters of petals that looked laser-cut. Some of the vines weren’t vines at all, but cables bundled in textured, synthetic casings that disappeared into the mulch.

He heard crashing to his left and right, followed by grunts and curses.

Doraemon landed in a patch of fern-like plants with a solid thump, bouncing once before coming to rest on his back. “Oof! My back!” Shizuka descended more gracefully, somehow managing to land in a crouch. Gian plummeted like a falling boulder, crushing a small bush adorned with glowing, electric-blue flowers.

Suneo was the last of their group to arrive, sliding out of a chute opening disguised as a hollow log and landing in a heap. “My suit!” he wailed, plucking a slimy-looking synthetic leaf from his collar.

From other chute exits nearby—some concealed as holes in mossy rocks, others as openings in massive, fossilized-looking tree stumps—the other groups were deposited with similar violence. Ash and Pikachu hit the ground ready, Ash rolling to his feet instantly. Misty landed with an angry “Ow!”, and Brock emerged from a different chute right after, catching himself on a thick root.

A few meters away, Shinchan popped out of a chute and landed face-first in the soft soil. He lifted his head, sputtering, a ring of mud around his mouth. “Whoa! That was a good slide!” He scrambled up, completely unharmed and already exploring. Misae arrived seconds later, stumbling and disoriented. Hiroshi landed on his rear nearby with a pained yelp. And, oddly gentle, a soft ramp extended from the base of a silvery tree, and baby Himawari slid down it on her bottom, coming to a stop as if delivered by a careful, unseen hand. She blinked, looked at a shimmering bug that flew past, and reached for it.

For a moment, all fourteen of them—humans, a robot cat, and an electric mouse—just stood or sat or lay in the humid artificial glade, staring at each other, breathing the strange air, taking in their new, impossible surroundings. The blaring alarm was gone. There was only the jungle’s low, mechanical hum and the heavy dripping of condensation.

Nobita looked at Ash. Ash stared back, one hand reassuringly on Pikachu’s head, his gaze scanning the tree line with cautious intensity. The orange-haired girl, Misty, brushed herself off and gave Shizuka a wary, confused once-over. The two boys from her own world seemed to ground her. She stepped closer to Brock and Ash.

Doraemon finally wobbled to his feet, rubbing the back of his head. “Nobita? Everyone, is anyone hurt?”

Shizuka stood and smoothed her dress, looking around. “Where… what is this place? It looks like someone built a garden inside a factory.”

Gian lumbered up, squinting. “Who cares what it is! Who put us here?! I’ll teach ’em a lesson they won’t forg—” He was cut off.

A patch of the foliage about twenty feet away shivered, not from a breeze, but with a sharp, jerking motion. Something uncoiled itself from the shadow of a boulder.

It was sleek, about the size of a large dog, but its form was made of liquid-looking chrome. It had four wiry limbs, a tapered snout, and no discernible mouth. Where its eyes should have been were two flat, dark lenses. In the jungle’s gloom, each lens ignited with a faint red pinpoint of light that grew rapidly in intensity, casting an eerie glow on the metallic leaves nearby.

It made no sound as it crouched, limbs poised like springs.

No one needed translation. It was targeting them. The light gathering in its lenses was clearly a weapon’s charging sequence.

“Watch out!” Brock yelled, his voice sharp.

Ash instinctively stepped forward, shoving his cap back. “Pikachu, get ready!” On his shoulder, the little mouse hopped down, facing the creature, its own cheeks sparking wildly, ready to fight electricity with electricity—maybe.

It all happened at once.

The chrome-plated creature gave a strange, shivering motion and leapt. Its form was a blurred arc of polished metal in the dull green light.

And Pikachu, without waiting for a command, released the built-up charge. “Pika… CHUUUU!”

A brilliant, jagged lance of yellow lightning cracked across the glade. For an instant, the entire false jungle was illuminated in stark, violent relief—every synthetic leaf, every cable-vine, every horrified and stunned face. The thunderbolt connected solidly with the chrome creature in mid-air, wrapping it in a spiderweb of sizzling energy.

The creature crashed to the ground in a twitching heap, steam rising from its chassis with a sickening ozone-pop smell. Its red eye-lights dimmed and faded to black.

Pikachu lowered its paw, panting slightly.

But the smell of burned metal and ozone wasn’t the jungle’s only sound now. On every side, more patches of foliage began to rustle. More low, predatory hums vibrated the air. Shapes slid between trunks that looked less like wood and more like conduit pillars. Red pinpricks were lighting up like malevolent fireflies in multiple directions, deep within the mechanical jungle. The single encounter was over. It had been the announcement.

They were surrounded, and the noise had just told every hostile thing in this “observation biome” exactly where the new attractions had landed.

“Everyone!” Doraemon screamed, his normally cheerful voice shrill with a panic they rarely heard. He whirled, grabbing Nobita by the arm. “Don’t stand in the open! Group together, quick, quick!”

Shizuka immediately backed toward Doraemon, Gian and Suneo stumbling after her instinctively. Across the clearing, in a small huddle of her own, Misty reacted first. “He’s right! Don’t be a hero, Ash!”

Ash, startled out of his combat stance by Doraemon’s terrified command, scooped Pikachu back onto his shoulder and took a few running steps backward, joining Brock. They formed their own tight, wary knot.

But two paces away from everyone, standing perfectly still in the middle of the clearing, was Shinchan. Having just completed a new mud moustache, he was staring at a collection of fluorescent mushrooms that pulsed in rhythm with the new hum filling the jungle, completely ignoring the urgent terror around him.

As Nobita stared, clutching onto Doraemon’s plush arm, sixteen bewildered eyes scanned the shifting shadows of metallic leaves, and dozens of robotic stares watched back.