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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Post by cold volume on May 3, 2013 18:52:39 GMT -5
SCOURGE ORIGINS
Hey guys --
The story of how the scourge all came to be is actually a mysterious plot-hole. None of the character's know because it's that grand, dark, bloody mystery they are all fighting against, but neither do any of us writers! It's one big, blank puzzle piece of Kohaku's setting. We haven't nailed out this particular dramatic irony, so let's talk about it.
Have you guys thought of any theories concerning how the Scourge came to be?
sophia was a survivor of the pax incident (i assumed that was allowed since zulf accepted the app and no staff ever said 'no' to me afterwards). basically, she found unusual readings on the pokemon that they were working with (chemical imbalances/weird behavior/whatever you guys decide), but the higher ups dismissed her concerns.
feel free to change stuff and i'll just retcon some shit
the scourge are a project that went horribly wrong imo. didn't they destroy the lab in the beginning anyway? maybe said lab was trying to create something; like making gijinkas or using pokemon dna to cure humaa diseases, but something went wrong?
First thing that came to mind was this article. I can't quite exactly remember what was in it, but to my non-sciencey brain it sounded pretty legit at the time I read it. It could have some good ideas - and #2 includes scientists and experimentation and that.
wait i s2g i read on here somewhere that the scourge were the result of kohakus battle-focused atmosphere and scientists trying to create "stronger" pokemon and it went terribly wrong.
we are delving deeper, yo. anything could have happened at pax, and what happens at pax stays at pax.
dude dizzy, that story about the man that was first put into a coma - thought dead and buried - but actually dug up and fed hallucinogens to wake up and work like a zombie on a plantation?
i vote that one.
But anyway - I'll talk about the one that first came to my mind. Has anyone heard of mad cow disease or creutzfeldt-jacob disease? It's basically not even a virus but a protein that's in nervous system tissue that causes other proteins to misshape and aggregate into large lumps. Basically, its like having rocks growing in your brain slowly pressing on all the healthy parts. If this protein were somehow engineered to attack a specific part of a pokemon's brain, it might work. It could have been engineered to destroy a spot in a pokemon's brain that scientists had pin-pointed as 'tying them down' but the affects went awry. Also, this shit is super contagious.
ON THE SIDE: MAYBE the black goo they turn into can be like an organic soup that all pokemon were created from? I think the term ichor is perfect for this substance: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichor
My own head canon is that the Pax scientists were experimenting with battle items--like trying to make a super soldier serum or messing with gamma rays to make hulk-pokemon--and it basically all went horribly wrong. Shera's mentioned that they could've been trying genetic splicing (either to make legendary spliced pokemon or even gijinka humans) too, which would I think would be cool.
What I haven't considered much (because hades agents are new to this iteration of kohaku) is how they got this new world order idea into their heads. Where the hell did they get idea? I don't really have any concrete ideas on this. I think a couple of you asked if the scourge was a hive mind? And... I don't think so, but maybe they are? Maybe there's some prototypal origin scourge pokemon that's seeded this new order idea to the others. Or maybe the virus itself just gives them all visions of the new world order. Would that mean the virus is conscious? Is it even a virus?
yeahhhh tbh that was my main struggle with making an agent.
i think cameron always thought that the world was shit, iska is here for the lulz, zahir is doing it bc "he added two plus two and got fish" (in tsun's own words), aaron thinks that he Has A Better Idea of How the World Is Supposed To Be, and sophia just thinks that the scourge have a right to not be systematically exterminated by the government (she's not necessarily pro-expansion tho).
so tbh i think the agents' idea of revolution is mostly self-driven, and not bc they're following scourge orders.
aren't the furies the originals??? and tbh i've played a couple of scourge that weren't hive mind, so uhhhh sorry. the scourge partner pokemon tend to have a bit of personality as well
in my head, the scourge just want to be able to eat and stuff. maybe it's just the leaders that want revolution (see: the furies). maybe the progenitors have authority that the rest of the scourge instinctively feel the need to obey??? idk just my two cents
Shinra gone wrong with a slightly more bloodthirsty spin on deepground
I like the idea of Agents being self-driven, not so much infected by a strand of the virus that can infect humans. Otherwise, we may as well start vaccinating humans with Pokémon.
I don't know if Scourge are hive-minded, just that most of them go "shit I'm really hungry that Pokémon over there looks tasty let me go take a bite out of it."
as a design note, hades agents were originally considered "infected" as well, in my book. I'd planned for them to display signs of the hades virus (as it would effect humans) as they progressed, but I scrapped that as gimmicky--and I think it limited individuality for hades agents.
I didn't want them hive mind for a pretty practical reason: there's gonna be a bajillion different people playing different scourge, so in practice, they wouldn't be hive mind at all just for a whole lot of different people writing them. So if we do go with a hive mind concept, it wouldn't really be that. rather more like they have a queen bee giving directions, but they can all think for themselves anyway.
I actually think there's a few grades of scourge pokemon, in the same way that there's usually different ranks of undead in... uh, stuff like Warcraft. Like there's the mindless shambling zombies, the ones that're just like fooooooood (ie, the spirit animals of me and tsun), and then there's smarter ones that call the shots and have ambitions a la new world order. Like the shambling zombies are treated as disposable soldiers by the smarter ones, and amongst the smarter ones, they have a pseudo hierarchy based on who's the most powerful?
Okay, full disclosure? I have no idea what the Furies are. I just thought it'd be nice to give make a few named scourge pokemon to scare the shit of characters every now and then. I think they are influential too though, so yeah, they're probably the visionary sorts.
