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 !
Welcome to KOHAKU REGION's grand opening! If you're interested in joining, come check out our grand opening giveaway!
Neo sat at the edge of Avernus lake. Icarus sat in it, which is to say Icarus lounged like a king upon a throne.
Between them was a small, crackling fire. Over it sat a tin tea kettle that was bubbling a little nauseously. For herself, Neo had a little tin teacup. For Icarus, she had a shaddow bowl.
Delicately, she poured bubbling water into her cup and his bowl and let the tea (1 tsp of dragon pearl) steep.
Post by cold volume on Mar 31, 2013 22:29:09 GMT -5
"W-whoa," uttered Regina as she stumbled into camp. She'd look like she'd been through something rough. There were burrs in her dark hair and pine needles sticking out, and her face was covering in a queer black soot. She coughed a little as she dropped the twigs in a messy pile and collapsed beside Neo.
"Augh, fucking mudslide got me. So lucky I landed in a bush.... Can I have some?" she perked, noticing the fancy tea. "I'm so sick of this wilderness. AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" she pressed her dirty face into her hands.
She observed the newcomer with interest at first before she returned her attention to her tea. Hm. Not quite ready yet.
She had plenty of water, there was a lake right there after all, and while she didn't have unlimited amounts of tea, she had enough to go around. There was something vital missing though. "Do you have a cup?" she asked.
Post by cold volume on Apr 2, 2013 10:50:28 GMT -5
"U-uh," Regina stuttered. She found her canteen - a nasty waterbottle that was beginning make all the water that got inside it taste like plastic. Very unfortunate. Regina wanted something she could enjoy. She wanted a luxury.
"I have this, but it's kind of shitty." She threw out her pokeball and a lotad appeared. She pointed to its back, which her pokedex said catches rain water. "Will this work?"
"It--" has a hole in it, she wanted to say, "--will do, provided he doesn't mind scalding water poured onto him."
Delicately, she dropped a cup's worth (or more, it was hard to gauge a cup with a lotad's head) of tea leaves onto the lotad's head. Gingerly, and perhaps at more of a distance than necessary to give the water extra time to cool as it traveled through the air, she nearly poured the not-quite-boiling water.
"Takes a few minutes to brew. Maybe you'll want to do something about all that mud."
Regina knelt down beside Billy while the hot water was poured over its leaf. "Now don't moooove, and try not to dance. You'll make it all spill." Billy grumbled, digging his face into the mud of the soil while the hot water began to cool. Little bubbles plopped up through the thick puddle because he wasn't one to ever keep quiet.
"This mud... yeah..." Regina muttered to herself, stepping away for a second and looking at her hands and arms. Meanwhile there was a hole lake of water. She looked at it wistfully. "Is... there anything dangerous in the lake?"
She gestured to her gyrados, who was, for now, busy inhaling the tea. (Neo wasn't entirely sure he even drank the tea, but empirical evidence indicated that he relaxed in the presence of tea, which was a pleasant alternative to rage.) "Icarus is in the lake. He can be dangerous sometimes."
Neo took a sip of her tea.
"If you find anything else dangerous in the lake, you can let him know. Then we'll see which one's more dangerous."
"Ohhh, I see him now," Regina said, leaning to the side and squinting into the darkness. She wasn't wearing her glasses - they were so filthy. Indeed their was a Gyradoes in the lake looking at a steaming bowl of tea with his mouth hanging open.
"...Icarus is a he, right? He won't peak or nothin'?" she whispered, not wanting to give the pokemon any ideas.
Neo nearly did the same. The idea of Icarus debasing himself with interest in a lesser species was kind of laughable. Neo'd be surprised if the gyrados found anything anywhere near so attractive as a magikarp's ruby scales. "He's only interested in magikarp. Trust me on this."
She turned her attention away from Regina and instead focused on her lotad. She eyed it for a few seconds, mentally noting down her own observations, before pointing her pokedex at it.
"well, if you say so," she said, looking again at the gyradoes. It had eyes the size of dish-plates. They freaked her out okay? She walked over to it - not directly - but with a testy reluctance. She pulled out her pokedex and made a few note.
"You seem familiar too..." she said to herself.
After bathing in underground lake with awkward glances every now and then at the tea-sipping sea monster, Regina returned to the campfire squeaky clean with her glasses on properly. Her tea had nicely cooled, and the lotad had fallen asleep. Snore bubbled percolated of the mud. She scooped it out and then sipped from the leaf.
"It's very good," she gasped, then drank more. "Wow. Do you cook often?"
Maybe this girl in her hoodie really was a good cook. Maybe Regina had been wandering these wilds for too long.
Neo had a good memory, but Icarus didn't. Well, the gyrados had a great memory of the pokemon that had defeated him, just not their trainers. In many instances, you could say that Neo had no understanding of caution. In this instance, she preferred not to remind the gyrados of his magikarp days.
She looked Regina square in the eye and said, "I must have one of those faces."
When Regina finally returned to the camp, Neo began to wonder if she intended on staying for the night, because Neo wasn't going to share her tent with anyone ever again.
"No. I don't cook. I boil water." Although after looking over J's shoulder, she suspected she could throw together an edible stew if she had to. All the same, she felt safer with instant ramen. "Do you cook?"
It was a cozy little camp. Regina, assumed people like to share everything as Neo shared her tea, and it was fun. She definitely predicted hanging out for the night in Neo's tent and just talking and playing shadow puppets against the wall. She had a sleeping bag - it was curled over her backpack, but she was so sick of the stars and the spooky sounds the forest made, and the feeling of bugs crawling just beneath her that the tent was a must if it was nearby.
However, it was not time for bed yet so that misunderstanding will have to happen later.
"Boil water? Still impressive!" she asserted, "It's an art - with tea." There was a man sitting nearby, but it was too dark for Regina to recognize him and make a fuss again about who he really was. Lucky for him, he didn't say much and Regina was fully entrance by Neo's conversation.
"Here and there. I prefer cafes, restaurants, takeout when I'm working. I've never had the need to really know? I mean, there's some stuff I do in the laboratory that's similar, you know? But I can't make anything more than sandwiches and, like, popcorn! WHICH I HAVE." And she withdrew a magical bag of buttery goodness from some premium grocery store in Nerio before it was looted. "I was saving it for a special night, but each one has been lonely or with someone who doesn't appreciate me!" She scowled, thinking of Stefan. AUGH.
Neo was occasionally chatty and talkative. Previously, she was often conversational (if still a little on the quieter side), but it was fair to say that these days she was mostly terse and uninterested in idle chatter.
Nevertheless, she tried. Not because the liked Regina (trending the opposite at the moment--why on earth did she need to talk so much?), but because she assumed this would make the time pass less painfully for both parties.
"No movie for popcorn," she said. She had tried to say it lightly, but the statement still came out devastatingly serious.
Okay, that was an abject failure. She tried again. "Who doesn't appreciate you?"
...Maybe she'd just give up on forcing sociability. The effort input really was not justifying the distinctly lackluster output.
"O-oh! Well we can always tell scary stories or something!" she said, throwing the bag onto a frying pan with a hungry glint in her eye. "You'll really like this stuff. Who needs a movie-"
Her uplifted mood from bathing fell a little as she thought of Stefan, though. "W-well I'm not exactly sure if he appreciates me or not, but he was one of the people I was travelling with. Goes by Stefan. He has glasses like me," she giggled, "I think he's some trainer with Eos? But he always seemed like he had a stick up his ass. Like, I think there's something good in him deep down, but he's shy. Doesn't use many words. I talk to fill up the space... but, its irritating."
Slowly, the bag began to pop and the butter to melt and a heavenly salty sent spread from the fire pit. "He has a girlfriend, so maybe that's why. But still, he left me to travel all alone. And I don't even know where I'm going half the time.... Glad I found you! -- I guess your with Eos also" -- Regina said, pulling out her own pokedex, "Yeah, I have one too."
"Is he looking for a guy named Erik?" Neo asked, because there weren't that many Eos recruits out as far as these caverns. "Because he's not shy. He's just a dick."
That was, Neo allowed, probably a bit of an exaggeration. He simply had different priorities, from what Neo could tell. A little apologetically, she added, "He keeps his promises though."
Neo... didn't think Stefan had a girlfriend. He didn't seem like the sort of boyfriend that any girl (or boy) would ever want--unless they were Erik Alejandro maybe, in which case, she understood why Erik was on the run. But she couldn't say for sure. Maybe Stefan had found an equally humorless soulmate out there somewhere. It just didn't seem likely.
