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!
It was almost nighttime, caught between sunset and that soft, hazy twilight hue. Soon, it'd be dark. Apparently fearless--she knew she wasn't--Neo walked through Bellona Hills out in plain sight, her pokemon still in their pokeballs, but a flashlight in her hand.
She wasn't exactly making her presence a secret.
Thalia had reported running into a hades agent here. Neo was seeing if she could turn one incident into a trend.
She walked through the ruined town's roads, staying on the sidewalk if a sidewalk remained. With her flashlight, she felt like a copper walking a neighborhood beat. Eight o'clock and all is well, she could say.
Except, of course, all was not well. Not until the scourge was gone.
Cameron was surprised -- Bellona wasn't exactly the tourist attraction of the world, and yet here is another person -- another Eos participant, if the brazen stride and fearless demeanor meant anything.
No one would walk around without pokemon unless they were idiots with a death wish, and she was perfectly willing to be their genie.
She kept a hand on her pokeball, but she walked forward to approach the girl.
"You look like a man," Neo said, stating the blatantly obvious and also the single thing she knew about the only hades agent she'd ever heard of. Thanks for the physical description, Thalia. "Don't suppose you're Cameron."
She took a hand out of her hoodie's pockets, a pokeball held squarely in it before she paused. "Hey. We should battle, but--"
Neo licked her lips, because this was not how she saw her participation in the fight for Bellona Hills going down. "So. I punched someone named Delta. I don't think he felt it. He said you gave him a good beating though."
This was humiliating, but Neo pushed on. "How do you hit someone without breaking your own hand?"
Her hand, as one might glance to see, was still in bandages.
What the hell was wrong with people nowadays? The woman only nodded stoically to acknowledge her name. The description didn't faze her -- after twenty-five years of hearing the same thing over and over and over and over, she'd gotten used to it -- but the fact that this random girl knew her name was unsettling.
... No, wait. There was always Iskander.
She listened impassively to the girl, her hand moving to her own pokeball, before hesitating. Delta -- Iskander. That confirmed suspicion number one.
The woman didn't deny beating him up, but wondered why he would tell such a story. (Who the hell knew with him, though?)
Cameron raised an eyebrow at the girl's question, along with a surprised blink at the girl's hand. It was the agent's equivalent of gasping and clapping both her hands to her face.
"..." Everyone needed to know how to at least punch properly. The woman crooked her finger, gesturing Neo forward.
"Show me your fist." And why was she doing this, again?
"Uh." Again, this was not the encounter she'd anticipated having when dealing with hades agents. She'd actually anticipated attacking them with no mercy.
Neo swapped her pokeball to her other hand and lifted up the bandaged one into a fist. It wasn't too horrible of a fist. It was a little limp-wristed maybe, but the thumb was on the outside, and the grip wasn't too tight. All the same, the punch she'd thrown at Iskander was pretty obviously the first punch she'd ever thrown in her life.
Neo watched Cameron, expressionless although she felt a certain level of admiration. As she other woman demonstrated, Neo mimicked, but slowly and carefully. Physical violence was foreign to her; this was like learning a new language.
...This was going to take a lot of practice, huh.
"Okay," she said, and she meant it. She'd start punching trees or something.
"Thanks."
Neo shifted her weight from side to side. This was going to be hard to segue into.
"Not to be an ingrate or anything, but how about a battle to the death?" She paused. She wasn't sure she hated Cameron that much; even if she did, she owed her a bit for the pointers. "Maybe not to the death."
The woman shrugged off the thanks. She didn't do things to be thanked -- words were words, and they weren't worth all that much in the end.
Cameron's expression shifted slightly when the girl spoke again, the corners of her mouth turning up slightly. She doubted this girl could kill her, anyway. "Of course." That was why she was there.
She left Neo's side, standing relatively far from the girl. "Shall we start?" (As if it would be any normal battle between two people.)
She didn't bother asking how the girl knew. As always, if it wasn't important she didn't care. All Cameron did was nod, releasing her giant volcano pokemon. Rapture nuzzled her shoulder, the agent placing her hand on the darkened pokemon's nose.
Time to begin.
"Go, Rapture." Her pokemon snorted, slamming his hoof against the ground, before releasing a large, expanding blast of flame. There was a rumble and the screech of rocks clashing against each other as the boulders rolled down (from where??) toward the gyarados. The camerupt shone brighter in the twilight as it used rock polish (still don't know how you literally polish rock in the middle of a battle), then yawned hugely at the gyarados.
Cameron drew Victini's sign with her styler, sending a massive flame streaking toward the haunter.
(camerupt: rock slide and yawn on gyarados; heat wave on both; rock polish on itself. cameron: v-create on haunter.)
Neo paled. Her eyes widened, but otherwise her expression didn't change, but her skin turned from her normal shade of admittedly quite pale into something downright ashen.
Icarus narrow dodged the rock slide, and quite frankly Neo seemed more worried about it than the gyrados did. The heat wave hit both of them, which wasn't a good start, really. Both pokemon had seen worse, but Neo could only foresee things going downhill--fast.
Throwing another pokeball to the ground, she released the duosion. "Phoebe, charm! Follow with psyshock."
The other two pokemon on the field were already on the move.
duosion used charm duosion used psyshock haunter dodged v-create haunter used mean look gyrados dodged rock slide gyrados used surf
The wave of water was unpleasant, but expected -- so Rapture stomped out of the way, only to run into the sudden psychic blast. He huffed in irritation, feeling the effects of the charm and mean look as well.
As the pokemon brought another rain of rocks on the gyarados and haunter, Cameron drew the rock sign at the duosion.
camerupt: dodged surf, hit by charm/mean look/psyshock used rock slide on gyarados used rock slide on haunter cameron: used rock climb on duosion
gyrados and haunter fell asleep gyrados and haunter got pwnt duosion hit by rock climb
"...This isn't a winnable fight for me, is it?" she asked nobody in particular. Neo considered just turning tail and running. She decided that'd be the smart thing to do. She decided she didn't want to do the smart thing.
She sighed. "Hyperion, Tiresias."
deino used earth power deino used work up zebstrika used thunderwave zebstrika used shockwave duosion used confuse ray
