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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The Hitmonchan got it a lot faster than the Electabuzz had – and without the silly posing too. He punched and punched and soon enough ruined the crudely made dummy. And when Felizia sent him to run laps while she scoured around the area for a replacement, he hadn’t complained one bit. Although, when her back was turned and he was out of her sight, the Hitmonchan would stop running and would punch thin air, hitting an invisible target.
A Hitmonchan that really liked punching. What were you expecting?
He punched to the left, he punched to the right. He criss-crossed and criss-crossed, then cha cha’d real smooth punched some more.
He had forgotten that he was supposed to be running, but Felizia seemed to have forgotten that too when she called him back over with a new – but just as shabby looking – dummy. Shabby or not, it was better than hitting the thin air of an imaginary opponent!
In the end, making the Poliwag run seemed cruel. The Pokemon had far too small feet and rather non-existent looking legs, so Deryn gave in after a few laps when it became obvious that running was not going to work as a training exercise.
She made a mental note to herself to get Pokemon who were built better for running.
So, instead, the Poliwag had been given targets to shoot at with bubbles and water guns and whatever else it could manage to fire at the targets. And every time the Pokemon got good at hitting a target, it had to move back a bit.
Then, Deryn told it, “Hit two of them at once.”
The Poliwag looked at her for a moment in disbelief. It could only fire one attack at a time, and therefore could only hit one target at a time. Did Deryn think it was some kind of super Pokemon? But when it dawned upon the Poliwag that its trainerwas serious, it had no choice really but to try to hit two targets at once.
Which, of course, proved quite hard (and certainly impossible for a Pokemon of the Poliwag’s level) and although the Poliwag tried very hard, it couldn’t manage to do it.
Sort of. There were no dummies this time, but while she was awake Tiffany had a bright moment where she remembered that wood didn’t conduct electricity, so now that they were here, she made Mo use the trees as substitutes.
It wasn’t like trees had feelings. Maybe. Neither of them were trees, so neither of them could know – but it wasn’t like they were destroying or obliterating them. They probably felt a tingle at most. Y’know, if trees could feel.
Then Mo started shouting something.
Tiffany looked up from her book, wondering what it was this time, and almost dropped it when she saw the flames. “What did you do?!”
<The leaves!>
“Can you use Flamethrower?”
<Do I look like I can use Flamethrower?!>
“… You can’t use Water Gun, can you?”
<No!>
So much for a quiet and simple training(/reading) session.
Running, running and more running. It was never going to end, was it? Run this way, run that way, go around in a lap, weave in and out in zigzags – It was always running. At least, by now, the Nidorina had accepted her fate and knew what to expect from her trainer and from herself. She learned how to pace herself so she wouldn’t burn out in the first five minutes, and she learned that Deryn didn’t care how fast she was running so long as she was actually running.
Imagine the Nidorina’s surprise when today Deryn announced that there would be no running. “You see that dummy over there?” The Nidorina looked at the sack of… something, and nodded. “Good. You’re gonna attack it.”
…
“Well? Get moving.”
The Nidorina was wary at first since surely there was some running hidden in this activity somewhere. She attacked the dummy very carefully – and unimpressively – at first, but when five minutes had gone by without anyone saying the r-word, she relaxed and started to put some effort into attacking the dummy.
It got rather boring rather quickly. Felizia made herself comfortable on the grass while absent-mindedly watching her Hitmonchan beat up the dummy. She had seen it all before and nothing was new – but as soon as the Hitmonchan reached a certain level, it would be able to learn the moves she was after. Cool, awesome moves.
“Don’t overwork it,” Felizia called out to her Pokemon. “If you get too tired, you stop, okay?”
As someone who enjoyed being lazy (not that there was much time for that now), Felizia felt weird whenever she had to remind the Hitmonchan to take a break. And even then, half the time the Hitmonchan pretended not to hear her. Like this time.
She decided that he must really enjoy the exercise. But after at least another fifteen minutes of sitting around and doing nothing, Felizia grew too bored and returned the Hitmonchan to its Pokeball, forcing it to have a break. “See you in… half an hour?” A half-hour break sounded right, didn’t it?
It was that time of day again, and this time it was the living, breathing balloon who was here in the training centre with Deryn. Again, she told the Pokemon to practice its moves (it refrained from any ‘tree-hugging’ this time) while searched for something heavy.
Lucky Drifloon, she found no rocks this time, and instead made the Pokemon break off some branches from the trees. “They’re better than nothing.”
On the bright side, the ‘weights’ weren’t so heavy this time, which meant they didn’t hurt or restrict the Drifloon’s movement so much. But the Drifloon was smart and knew not to let Deryn know that it was hardly feeling any weight at all.
Such a shame he was a bad actor. It didn’t take Deryn long to catch on, but there was almost nothing she could do. Almost. “Knock down some more branches. You look like you could use them.”
Electric-type moves were now, of course, “banned”. Tiffany didn’t want a repeat of last time, and even though Mo was a lot more confident than she was, he played along with the “ban”. Besides, the little convincing he had tried on her had been shot down with a very good point: he needed to practice something other than electrical attacks.
That was why he played along with the ban. He knew he was guilty.
The Rotom had started, as it was suggested to him, by using Double Team although he wasn’t sure what the point of using the move was. Actually, he did suspect that Tiffany would instruct them to instigate some kind of battle royale amongst him and the copies, but when he mentioned this, Tiffany only looked confused at the term and said that all she wanted to do was make sure Mo could actually perform the move.
Wow. So much faith.
Mo made a point of showing that he could do moves that weren’t electrical, and almost went a little overboard when whipping up a nasty, repulsive gust. Again, the trees were the ones to bear the brunt of this, and Tiffany would later tell him he shouldn’t take things out on the trees. Poor things had nothing to do with anything.
It was the Poliwag’s turn again, and like before it had been told to hit two targets at once. But this time, the Poliwag had been more vocal about its doubt and would mutter something every now and then when it took a breath before aiming a new attack at the targets. It didn’t take much of an imagination to figure out what it was muttering about.
But Deryn didn’t care. Every time the Poliwag stopped for longer than its muttering required, Deryn had to remind it to get back to work. Remind had been a generous word at first – she had been far too snappy for her reminders to be reminding – she was starting to relax into using a somewhat nicer tone that better suited reminding. Once she realised that the Poliwag would still listen to her even if she was nicer, that was.
She still waited until she had pushed the little Pokemon to exhaustion before she let it have a break, of course. That was how training worked, wasn’t it? Push them until they can’t do it anymore. “You get dehydrated fast, don’t you?” She said to the Pokemon as she poured a water bottle over it. And it was no wonder – how much water had the poor Pokemon spat out in this training session alone?
It was that time again. And sadly the Nidorina sighed as she resigned herself to the inevitable fate of having to run around and arund endlessly until she dropped dead. Or near dead, anyway. She had a dream once, that there was a training session which didn’t involve running. No aching legs or horribly dry mouth or panting – there had been none of that. In that dream, the Nidorina had been attacking a dummy instead/ O, how wonderful it would be if that was the only training she ever had to do!
But… no such luck. In the ‘wise’ words of her trainer, “What do you think this is? A hotel resort?” The Nidorina had no idea what a hotel resort was, but she gathered from the tone of her trainer’s voice that it was a much nicer place than this hell.
There was nothing to do but endure the training lesson, run and run until she dropped. Do her best not to trip over her feet when something like a branch snuck in the way. She more or less accepted the running now. There was nothing she could do to get out of it.