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!
contrary to popular belief, stefan is a staunch believer in contracts. he's just a bitch when he thinks that they've been broken by the other party. eos hasn't let him down yet. thus, he treks back to the nearest eos-affiliated lab in nerio. one of the better ones, he had heard. stefan doesn't really expect anything less. not when the specimen in question still stews in his residual rage.
the aggron gives a roar and slams his armored palms against the cage floor. stefan is seated across from the creature with the virus ball sitting within reach, utterly perplexed in his reading. as he had thought, the reading materials in a lab were considerably more difficult than any trainer's publication. the scourge pounds again, and a beaker falls off one of the shelves. stefan doesn't even look up.
nothing is so exciting after the first thirty minutes of the same thing, after all.
Her haunter entered the room ahead of her, the ghost pokemon not needing to bother with the door. Neo followed shortly, and without a word, she paced around the aggron's cage. Picking up a meterstick from the side of the room, she used it to prod at the aggron's wounds. "So they do feel pain. Yet it doesn't give them a fight or flight reaction--only fight. Reminds me of some people I know, really."
Leto laughed at the caged aggron--not too polite of her, really--and used hypnosis. Then continued to repeat hypnosis until it bloody well worked.
"If she still thinks you have a girlfriend, I'm sorry. I may have encouraged that line of thought," she said. It'd have been inadvertently. Neo had tried to tell Regina that Stefan was likely a very single dude, because no woman in their right mind would have him.
Post by cold volume on Apr 20, 2013 15:05:13 GMT -5
The observations of the two specimens had been quiet and sterile, pale grey gloves holding her pen with the sheet listing the distorted measurements of the armored tyrant's physique. Her thick hair was pinned back with a professional austerity, the eccentric curls of her lab coat swayed like a stiff hairdo. The black pen scratched aggressively, taking notes behind Neo's shoulder's. Regina seemed to be distracted from the Aggron, having taken her data, and meticulously eyed up stefan when he wouldn't notice.
"...What?" said Regina. Stefan had lied? About a girlfriend? What man would lie about having a girlfriend? Usually it was the other way around. She looked at Stefan and Neo, Stefan and Neo, head switching, she waited for a contradiction? A denial. An evasive move to at least change the subject.
"You're... not in a relationship? Why did you come back with this to me then?" she asked Stefan as if she had never asked before. (Which she hadn't.)
stefan remembers the scourge scrafty ducking for cover, but he dismisses the idea of giving neo the information. he will answer questions when asked, but volunteering them is a bit beyond his contract. if not for the eos trainer card in his pocket, even prying information from him was probably an experience that was akin to drawing water from a well in mors desert.
he smiles ironically. "you're not sorry"
not that he really cared about what regina thought, to be honest.
"surely professionals such as yourselves wouldn't have advised me to bring it to a pokemon center" stefan flips another page. "i hardly see why the question of bachelorhood matters. you have writeups to make, and i have places to go. finshing this quickly is mutually beneficial"
She shrugged. She was sorry a minute ago, but she'd also forgotten how abrasive Stefan was. She wasn't sorry anymore.
"You could just leave unless you've got something worthwhile to add," Neo suggested to Stefan. She didn't quite mean it as an insult, and if she implied he was useless here... well, most trainers would be pretty useless here. "We'll call you when we're done."
Post by cold volume on Apr 25, 2013 21:52:21 GMT -5
Stefan smiled at Regina like he had broken his poker face to reveal some sort of cheater's royal flush. Her soured eyes narrowed. She didn't like this joke he was slowly turning her into, and for a second, she wondered if was lying now instead of back then. Regardless, this game frustrated her.
Neo told him to just leave. There was work to be done, and she was fully invested in an analysis of the Aggron. But Regina snooped closer to Stefan with a harder look that might have resembled her father, her silence she considered a punishment. She very lightly prodded Stefan in the chest with the blunt end of her pen like she might flip over a sacrificed Ratata's limp body.
"Why would you bother lying about something like that?" she hissed, looking at him with a steady, hurt mistrust. She hadn't exactly forgotten the bite of gravel on her hands. toska
he had come to observe - stefan is admittedly inexperienced in actual combat with the scourge. he had thought that expending a few minutes of his time would buy him a few more years of life. now that the aggron is asleep, it seems that there is no more need for that.
"why did i bother." he doesn't phrase it like a question. he phrases it like an affirmation. back at di manes, he did not have anything to anchor his position within eos. now that he has attained results, albeit a small one, he is confident that he will not have to answer to regina again. "you're absolutely right. i won't bother next time"
he will just turn and leave.
hopefully there won't be a next time, but stefan can't promise himself that.
with that, he sets the book on the table. the original virus ball, he leaves behind. "have fun"
Neo wasn't actually sure which of Stefan and Regina she found harder to deal with. One was a sourpuss. The other never shut up.
"With friends like that, who needs enemies." That also wasn't phrased like a question, although it should've been. Neo was pretty well aware that Stefan still counted as an ally, and one that she was generally thankful for in the end. The difference was simple: he wasn't running around with a scourge pokemon trying to destroy everything that mankind ever accomplished.
Regina glanced from Neo, to Stefan's back, and back to Neo while the door slammed. Her dry mouth swallowed as she resumed work, nodding and letting her mouth fall silent for a bit.
"I might have gone after him," she said, bothered by it all. Her pen lackadaisically made notes on her clipboard, and she couldn't settle into her work. A biting dislike had grown into her voice. "People shouldn't just storm out like this. It's depressing. I know... the scourge trainers are the pits..."
Neo didn't make contact when Stefan at any point of his departure, and she didn't make eye contact with Regina now either. The only thing she needed to see was the Aggron. The humans, they weren't for her to observe.
"You could run after him, but I wouldn't bother. He has his own problems. He's looking for someone, and neither of us can help him--not in the his search nor anything else in his life." Neo pursed her lips in thought. "Theoretically, a friend could help his... let's call it his attitude. But I don't believe he needs friends so much as he needs results, and he needs to get results himself. If you ask me, he'll stay in his pit until his work is done."
That psychoanalysis, rudimentary and speculative as it was, came easily to Neo. She wondered if it was just self-projecting.
Post by cold volume on Jun 25, 2013 19:03:05 GMT -5
She was a civilian more than any scientist, nearly a hobbyist compared to Neo's rigor. She worked like an old man raising pigeons beside the top-of-the-line artificial insemination kit a girl like Neo would utilize. Regina was a dirty lab, a hodgepodge student with eccentric mentors under the scientific radar. She hadn't an ounce of professionalism.
"That's no way to live," Regina muttered, holding her pen loosly and watching the flopping laboratory door return to its place. "I get results, I mean, I get it - we need them these days - but what has ever been accomplished alone?"
