This world is inhabited by creatures that we call pokemon. People and pokemon live together by supporting each other, but now the scourge threatens the safety of the entire region. Kohaku has become a dangerous place, where children stay at home and only brave souls go adventuring.
Welcome to KOHAKU. Come for the nightmares. Stay for the tea and crumpets.
The season is SUMMER. It is easy for survivors to forage for food from the land, as there are entire abandoned farms ready for harvest. On the downside, you can smell the corpses.
swarms
GRAND OPENING !
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Left, right, right. Uppercut with the left. Get the face with the right. Pose and look smugly at the sack of—wait, no. That’s not right. Felizia frowned at the baby Pokemon. “What… was that?”
Training a Pokemon that used its fists was surprisingly easy for Felizia. She knew how to use her fists – she knew how to use them more than what her parents liked. Had liked. And something else she knew was that if you stopped to pose and look smugly at whatever you had just punched in the face, then you deserved to get your own face hit off-guard. The smugness was better saved for later.
“Okay, no one likes a poser,” she told the Elekid. “Do that all again but without that stupid look on your face at the end.”
The Elekid tried that a couple of times, but the smug look came back. On the bright side, at least he dropped the posing. And on the brighter side, for once Felizia was absolutely certain that she knew what she was doing.
If only it were this easy to train the rest of her Pokemon.
When life gives you lemons you should make lemonade.
So when life gives you a ridiculously windy day, you should make… well, you just go along with it. Unless you were a certain Rotom who was doing the opposite. He was running hovering against the wind, and it was surprisingly a little harder than he thought.
It was also damn annoying, but this had been a dare and he had to keep it up for, oh who knows – another five minutes? He hoped it was a small number of minutes like that.
<A branch just flew through me!>
No response. Which was no surprise, really; the wind wasn't exactly quiet and Mo had travelled further than he realised. It took him a little longer to notice that Tiffany was out of eyeshot, and when he did, a grin escaped accross Mo's face as he stopped. He could stop the silly activity and rest and no one would be the wiser. It was the perfect crime.
“I see you!” a voice boomed, out of nowhere, through what must have been a megaphone. “You chickening out?”
“It’s simple, really,” Felizia was telling the Beedrill. “So simple even a baby Weedle could do it.” Um, no it couldn’t. Weedles didn’t have wings. And they were slow. So, so slow.
Now Beedrill, on the other hand, were decently fast. Not amazingly fast. Not top 100 fast (they sat at #188 actually), but they were still faster than a Weedle and her Beedrill was still fast enough for the task it had been set.
They were on the edge of some dense, odd dream world forest. The task was simple; the Beedrill simply had to fly through the forest as fast as it could without crashing into any trees. Simple, but not quite easy. The forest was pretty dense, so it had started off slowly, only gaining speed as it felt comfortable. Eventually, it did start moving fast, weaving in, out and around branches, zooming past smaller Pokemon and sharply turning when it saw bigger ones so that it didn’t have to deal with them.
All in all, the Beedrill crashed more times than he liked to admit, and when he’d finally had enough of the exercise, he faced the challenge of trying to figure out which direction he had initially come from.
Tiffany picked up the stones and reminded herself that Mo was a ghost type. If any of the stones hit him, they would go right through him. Well, maybe. She wasn’t sure. But she told herself to stop caring about surety and throw a stone already. He was waiting. He was ready.
The first stone missed by a lot. Mo laughed. <Have you gone blind? I’m not over there.>
The next few weren’t any closer, and Mo only laughed harder. It was the first time his laughter had genuinely irritated her. “Hey, why don’t you just hit them, anyway?!” she snapped. “You should be able to since you’re sooo great.”
<…>
An awkward silence fell between them, but they still worked. Tiffany still threw stones, getting a little closer, but never close enough to Mo. And the Rotom aimed ThunderShocks at the stones, sending them flying in other directions. It was tough trying to hit them from where he was, but he didn’t say anything.
“Stop right there,” Felizia ordered her Pokemon. “Just stop.”
The Electabuzz did stop and turn to face her, wondering what it had done wrong this time. But really, it should know by now. It always did the same thing wrong, over and over again. But no matter how many times it was told, it just couldn’t be convinced that:
“Did you just pose? No one likes a poser.”
The Electabuzz mouthed the last sentence, the one it was always being told. Over and over again. But the Pokemon couldn’t help it – the posing just felt too normal, too natural! As if it were a part of the Electabuzz’s identity. But no excuse it tried to give would work, and every time it was sent back to practicing punches with a disapproving look.
“We’re not leaving until you can do that combo… fifty times without posing.”
The Electabuzz sighed, but got back to work. It didn’t understand how Felizia didn’t think that poses were cool.
Deryn had been intending to drag her Pokemon along for a morning jog, but she guessed that a visit to the training centre while she was asleep was just as good.
However, that didn’t mean that the morning jog was called off. But her little Nidoran didn’t need to know that yet.
And her Nidoran was tiny. The thing hardly came up to her knee. The sooner she evolved it, Deryn decided, the better. It had stubby little legs that didn’t look that great for running; and that was a fact, for the Nidoran couldn’t keep up with Deryn’s pace at all. It kept falling behind, and Deryn had to slow down to a painfully slow pace in order to let it catch up.
“Isn’t it embarrassing to be slower than a human?” Deryn had asked it one time. That had made the Nidoran try harder to catch up. And when it was told “If you don’t hurry it up, I’ll go ahead without you,” the Nidoran tried even harder – her very best – to keep pace.
Deryn eventually lost patience and jogged ahead to a landmark and waited there for her Pokemon to catch up. When it finally did, all she said was, “I hope you’re faster with the morning jog.” The small Pokemon’s face dropped at the mention of a morning jog – wasn’t exercising here enough?
Finally – finally – the dream world was kind enough to gift them with a dummy target for Mo to hit. No more playing around with cans or having stones thrown at him. This time it actually felt like training.
And even though the dream world had been so gracious this time, Mo didn’t respond as creatively as he could of. In other words, he was still using ThunderShock. A lot. Jeez, it was as if he didn’t know any other attack. ThunderShock this, ThunderShock that – he was screwed if he ever had to fight ground or rock types.
Every time he made an easy hit, Tiffany made sure he moved back. By the end of it, he was so far away from the dummy that she wouldn’t have been able to see him clearly if it wasn’t for the fact that he was the brightest thing in the training centre.
“Well you’re not going to get any better if you don’t practice.”
The Nidoran looked up at Deryn with a pained expression. She had been running so much that not only her little legs and feet hurt, but also her sides. Not to mention her throat was feeling horribly dry; the poor thing was feeling dehydrated, but was promised water after “another couple of minutes.”
Deryn had been making that promise for at least fifteen minutes now. It was no wonder that the Nidoran let itself collapse onto the ground, completely exhausted. It hated running. It never wanted to run.
Unfortunately for it, Deryn liked running and she was convinced that running for a ridiculously insane amount of time was a good way to train a Pokemon.
And fortunately, Deryn recognised when her Pokemon had been pushed as far as it could go. “Here,” she said as she crouched down beside her Pokemon and held her water bottle out to it. “You’ve earned it.”
When the Drifloon had survived the running without much effort, Deryn realised that she had to try something else. It didn’t take very long for her to figure out what this something could be, and before the poor balloon knew it, she was looking around for things she could use.
“Practice attacking or something until I get back,” she told the Pokemon before walking away. For a moment, the Drifloon wasn’t quite sure what to do, but then it did a strange Drifloon-shrug and started to whip up little gusts of wind, trying to make each one bigger and more thrashier than the last. And when it grew bored of doing that, it went to a tree and constricted it.
Deryn found it weird returning to find her Pokemon, as she saw it, hugging a tree, but she said nothing. Only an eyebrow was raised, and then she called the Drifloon over to her. “Hold still,” she said, as she started to tie something to its legs. (Or were they arms or tails?).
No matter the anatomy, the Drifloon sunk down thanks to the rocks Deryn had tied to it. “There,” she said, a little proud of herself. “That should make things harder for you.”