Mook Bouncer - Television Tropes & Idioms

A monster that has the ability to teleport people against their will.

More often than not, this specific location is the beginning of a level or area, requiring you to go through the whole area you just went through again. Sometimes, however, it's a cell or other confined area, which you must then escape.

Examples:

The Zelda series has the Floormasters and Wallmasters, who boot you back to the beginning of the dungeon if they catch you.
- The fan-made Zelda Classic adds similarly-behaving Wind Wizzrobes. They teleport around the room firing small, irritatingly fast-moving wind cyclones; getting hit by one also sends you back to the dungeon entrance.
- Also, in the stealthy segments in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the guards kick you back to a cell if you're spotted. In The Legend Of Zelda Majoras Mask, the Gerudo Expy pirates will kick you out of the fortress if you're caught, though the Stone Mask will cause all but a few guards to ignore you.
  - The Hyrule Castle guards in Ocarina of Time kick you out on sight, too. Thankfully enough, the Courtyard guards only get you out by the moat instead of out the gate, so you don't need to do a double sneaking session.
  - The Gerudo Fortress guards, and the Forsaken Fortress guards in The Wind Waker, throw you in a Cardboard Prison if they spot you.
- Big Octos in Wind Waker, too. If you can't kill 'em before the whirlpool drags you up to 'em, they spit you to a random place in the Great Sea. Good thing there's only 6 of the bastards...
  - Wind Waker also has Cyclos, who will drop you and your ship off in a random place if you can't beat him quickly enough. (And if you run into him before you've gotten the one weapon that can hurt him, well, that's just too bad for you.)
- The 3rd pendant dungeon in The Legend Of Zelda A Link To The Past has a BOSS (Moldorm) who can knock you into a pit, forcing you to walk back up several floors before you reach him again, where he will be fully healed and try to pull the same trick. Very annoying.
- And he was recycled for the first dungeon of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. The seventh's dungeon's boss is a bird that tries to knock you off the platform you battle it on but only to the previous screen, which is still enough time for it to fully regenerate its health.
  - The eighth dungeon's mid-boss Blaino, however, is an arrow-straight example who will straight-up Wall Master your ass back to the dungeon entrance if his uppercut connects.
- The invincible Phantoms in The Legend Of Zelda Phantom Hourglass's Temple of the Ocean King will send you back to the beginning of the current floor, sans 30 seconds of your precious time, if they manage to hit you.
- The Phantoms in The Legend Of Zelda Spirit Tracks also evict you to the last entry point for the floor you're on, but there's no time penalty since there's no time limit. They also infinitely respawn and cannot be destroyed by direct means; the only way to remove one from a floor is to insert Zelda into it.
  - And in the Lost at Sea Station, you can't even do that because your sword is confiscated.
The crazed Toriningen of Yume Nikki transport you to a tiny, inescapable area if they catch you, which you can only get out of by pinching yourself awake.
- Uboa does the same, but let's admit it: you really have to go out of your way to get teleported by him. Doesn't make it any less famous.
The ghosts in the haunted mansion in Magician's Quest teleport you back to the Door of Beginning and End, in your dorm, if they catch you. Which is aaaall the way on the other side of the town.
The underground traps in the cave in Seiklus warp you back to the start of the cave. Luckily, one of the treasures lets you see where they hide.
The enemies in the infamous Atari adaptation of E.T. would throw you into this pit when they caught you, and it was infuriatingly hard for you to get out — and infuriatingly easy for the bad guys to simply grab you and throw you back into the hole.
In Paper Mario, there are weird UFO-esque creatures in parts of Tubba Blubba's mansion. If they catch you, out the door you go!
- In Thousand-Year Door, in Creepy Steeple, after you free the ghosts and talk to the one that shows himself, if you fail to keep them from picking you up, they'll throw you out. But it's not that far; just open the door again.
- The Back Cursya of Super Paper Mario sends you back to Flipside Tower, which is a step before the beginning of the level, as if you had used a Return Pipe.
Not quite mooks, but the concept is similar: In the DS Pokémon games, you and anyone you link with can employ traps in the underground that have the power to move you. If someone has the time and energy they can set up a whole series of these traps to send anyone who hits a trap anywhere they want.
Eternal Darkness, a game already overloaded with Nightmare Fuel thanks to basically being "Resident Evil meets Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game", has an enemy type called Trappers. If the scorpion-ish enemies manage to zap you with a burst of electricity from their tails, you're instantly teleported to the Trapper Dimension, a dark area with a few ancient walkways and columns floating in nothingness, mysterious magic portals that lead to unknown locations, and monstrous enemies who want to tear you limb from limb and will cause your in-game sanity to drop just by looking at them. Unlike most enemies of this class, they do provide a few benefits though: a single Trapper dies upon teleporting you so it won't be there when you return, and the Trapper Dimension has one-use Mana recharge points for one of your three meters.
The Legend Of Dragoon: The robot sentries in the City of law teleport you to jail when they catch you. However if you talk to a robot in the jail you can make a law that stops these robots, making them harmless.
Nethack's quantum mechanic monster's physical attack will make you teleport to a random spot on the level.
The above enemy also exists in Kingdom of Loathing, with a similar effect. The area it occurs in is a spoof of Nethack.
ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal has Psy fairies whose offensive spells deal rather moderate damage but come with all sorts of nasty side effects. One of their favorites is the one that teleports the enemy to a random location of the arena upon a critical hit. "Random location" includes "directly into the Void that kills you instantly".
In Devil May Cry, the Fault enemy does the holding cell version, teleporting the player into a prison he must break out of. A warp boss appears in the first Devil May Cry, in which Nightmare does exactly the same thing. Which is something of a double-edged sword, as it forces you to fight another boss inside the cell, but also does a large deal of damage to Nightmare when you escape.
In Half-Life, one of the Nihilanth's attacks is to fire a ball of energy that teleports Gordon to three different rooms. The first is a jumping puzzle room, the second is full of Goddamned Bats, and the third has a killer fish.
In Final Fantasy VI the guards in Vector start a battle when approached and afterwards your characters are forced to return to the entrance. Thankfully they're easy to avoid and it's not necessary to enter that area.
- Also in Gogo's Cave and the Bonus Dungeon of the GBA Remake, there're these greenclad characters that, for no coherent reason, are hanging out on a series of jumping bridge and if you touch them they push you off. In Gogo's Cave you can quickly get back to the jumping bridges from where you fell off, but in the Bonus Dungeon you have to complete a whole goddamn subdungeon filled with mini-bosses to just restart the puzzle. Since they're green and they wear hats, one walkthrough writer decided to name them the Green Asshats.
  - Aren't those Kappas?
Sweet Home has wandering ghosts that, if touched, take you to random other parts of the mansion, sometimes dividing your party in the process.
- Also, some enemies have an ability that can teleport members of the active party out of the battle and into a different room. What makes this harder to deal with than the wandering ghosts is that you can't avoid encounters with these enemies, and the place they drop you off to is not always the same.
Angband variants have Blink Dogs. They summon you to themselves but travel in packs meaning you seldom get more than one hit on a single dog before another pulls you away.
Ok, so I just need to herd some buffalo to win this event, that should be eas- wait, what's Cattlepult? ...why am I back in Bastok?
- There's also a non-annual enemy that appears in Moblin Maze Mongers that can send players to a prison during the Stealth-Based Mission they can undertake.
Non-mook example in Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion. If you attack Sheogorath in his palace, he won't mess around with spells or swords that you might be resistant to; instead he'll just teleport you to a hill just outside the city. About 150 feet in the air above that hill, to be exact. There is no kill like over-hill.
In chapter 2 of Mother 3, there are enchanted brooms that will sweep up Duster and his party, sending them all the way back several floors.
Kumbhanda from Digital Devil Saga 2. You have to run through traps, through three floors to escape. If you're caught, your character's HP get shot down and you get thrown back to the cell on the first floor.
- Dante does the exact same thing in his cameo appearance in Nocturne. If he catches you, he fights you just long enough to kill some of your demons and teleport you away.
A dungeon in Valkyrie Profile Silmeria had Elves. Normally enemies are on the map, and when you run into them, you get into a battle. If you run into or slash the elves...you get teleported to the start of the dungeon. You have to freeze them or outmaneuver them. Its an annoying dungeon.
Dungeons & Dragons had Crypt Things, a specific kind of undead used for guarding tombs. They could teleport intruders 100 feet in any direction. The 2.5 edition monster manual actually advised that a Killer Game Master could have the Crypt Thing teleport players directly inside solid objects, killing them instantly.
Hunt The Wumpus has bats which carry you to a random room within the maze if you stumbled upon them .
Legend of Mana - the Shadoles will send you back to the bottom of the Underworld if you touch them (but only in That One Sidequest); the Boinks are a milder version, in that they will only transport you to where their tails are located if you talk to them (and you can use their teleportation abilities to your advantage).
In Wario Land II and 3, Wario can't die or take any damage- the only effect of getting hurt is that Wario is knocked back a bit (and in II, losing some coins). This can lead to a Mook Bouncer type of effect in itself (especially if an enemy knocks you off some type of high cliff). But the real offenders here are the bosses, which usually have some sort of attack that will send you flying off the screen to another area if you get hit by it, forcing you to make your way back to the boss room to start the fight again from the beginning. This basically makes Wario a One-Hit-Point Wonder against most bosses.
A rare TV example would be the Weeping Angels from the Doctor Who episode "Blink". They don't send you to a specific place though, no, they just send you back in time to before you were born and feed off the energy of the potential life you would've lived.
"The Weeping Angels, the only psychopaths in the universe to kill you kindly."
Metroid Other M has an indirect example - there's an enemy that you can't kill when you first meet it. It resides on ceilings and has a large tentacle which, if you get grabbed by it, electrocutes you for heavy damage, THEN plops you back to the beginning of the room. It's a huge relief once you get the Plasma Beam, and can kill it easily.
In one floor of Darm Tower in Ys, you run into a group of statues that teleport you into the dungeon and take away your silver sword and armor. To pass, you must find the Blue Necklace.