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!
Following the light had seemed like a good idea at the time, even if warning bells were being set off in her head about the increasingly hot and stuffy air, and the fact that they were definitely travelling downwards. But Felizia had been too tired to think and the same could be said for Carina.
If they were lucky, they had been walking for only half a day, but they were convinced by the aches in their legs that it must have been longer.
It wasn’t until they were able to see the fabled fiery pits that the two realised that they were absolutely, definitely, without a doubt lost. They looked at each other with the same expressinos on their faces, asking each other “Why did we even come down here? Are we crazy or something? But once they had gotten over the initial shock of their obvious mistake, they decided that, since it was light and warm down here, they might as well rest.
Just as they settled in as comfortably as they could against the uncomfortable wall, there was a sound. Footsteps. Again. Felizia rolled her eyes – the sound of footsteps seemed to follow them everywhere they went – and her Pokemon made a similar movement. “Sssh…” She patted her Marowak on the head and spoke to it in the smallest whisper she could summon. “Maybe if we’re quiet, they won’t notice us.”
(The fact that she was wearing a brightly coloured jacket that practically screamed “Notice me!” must have slipped her mind.)
An accident, he told himself. It was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, an accident that it was an accident he happened to enjoy. A distraction, he told himself, to deter him away from the fact that things looked - not to mention felt - vastly different from when he'd first set foot in this cave, and that he was probably in the wrong place and headed in the opposite direction from where he came from. In the back of his mind, he remembered that they had told him professor cypress gave out a map to those that went to him for pokemon, but since he'd skipped that, it was a blind trek through di manes. The fact that it was fun made him smile, but he didn't laugh, because it was too risky, because she was just a few feet away, he could see her.
An accident, he repeated, curling a finger down the rocky wall and letting the noise echo around the place while zebstrika clipped its hooves together briefly and silenced them with a small cushion of flames, abrubtly, only because Jayden had insisted on that for the added effect. Did it sound like footsteps, he wondered? And it must've sounded convincing enough, he decided, based on what she said and the way that she was acting. He looked, pointedly, at Zebstrika, and the horse stared back, eyes slightly narrowed (but it'd been like that since it'd evolved, so Jayden paid no mind). Then, it ignited a flame on its hooves again, but this time, slammed down so it made a sort of popping sound, like an explosion, bigger and much, much louder than he'd expected, and he cursed.
Felizia’s hands went straight to her ears and she grunted a swear word. Carina jumped up from her comfortable-but-not place against the wall and her eyes darted around. She took the loud, intrusive sound as a sign of hostility and gripped her bone club tighter.
“The hell was that?” Felizia’s voice came out as a strange sounding strained whisper that was trying to shout. She didn’t stand up; she stayed sitting down and her hands hadn’t moved from her ears. Her Pokemon didn’t respond as it was busy keeping an eye on the shadows and the dark – well, as much as it could.
Neither of them could make a good guess at what had caused the sound – but then again, neither of them really tried. It was probably some wild Pokemon showing off to its wild Pokemon friends or something just as ridiculous; something that wasn’t really a big deal.
“Sit down,” Felizia told her Pokemon, but the Marowak kept standing. She had seen something over there flicker like fire. She wasn’t going to approach it, and instead only watched it, making sure that it stayed where it was and didn’t get any bigger.
“Seriously, Carina. If it was gonna pick a fight, we’d know by now.” That was how it worked, right? If a wild Pokemon wanted something, it usually wasted no time getting it. Unless… “Unless it’s wimping out,” she added with a shrug.
Zebstrika jumped a bit at the noise, startled out of its movements and blinking frantically at Jayden, who stayed relatively silent with an index finger curled around his chin. His first thought'd been the question of whether or not they'd been found, cover blown, but even that seemed insignificant after a few seconds passed by. Because, he reasoned, what did they have to lose?
He'd thought, at first, that she wasn't very smart, because with all the noise, racket and glow that came from the moves zebstrika was using it would've been easy to find someone standing in such proximity, yet she didn't even bother to try. But it became clear to him after awhile that she wasn't all that she thought her to be, and that she must've had some experience in pushing other peoples' buttons because her words wasted no time grinding on his. And he, like always, took the bait, couldn't not take the bait because that just wasn't him.
"Wimping out? Wouldn't put it that way." Stepped into view, smirking, zebstrika choosing to hang back. "More like some harmless fun, wouldn't you agree?"
Carina eyed the human carefully for a moment, then looked beyond him into the darkness. She wasn’t convinced that the sound had come from him – directly, anyway – and was sure that he had a Pokemon hiding back behind him in the darkness. From what she gathered, humans didn’t come here without a Pokemon.
Felizia, on the other hand, eyed up the boy for a moment as her brain quickly pieced it all together and when the puzzle was complete, she put her head in her hands and groaned. Really? She thought Really?
She looked up again, saying, “Please tell me that you did not just waste your time tailing – no, stalking a stranger for ‘some harmless fun’. Do you really not have that much of a life?” And if that was the case, the boy seemed pretty proud of himself, but the weird thing was that he didn’t seem like a stereotypical creeper. He looked… normal. Ordinary. A normal, ordinary person who just happened to enjoy creeping people out.
(Well, it wasn’t like there were many other ways to pass the time here in the caverns.)
He held up both his hands, smiling a little less now, scowling a little more. "Hey, don't flatter yourself. Believe me, I would've been out of this cave by now if I had the ability to." Part of him wanted to reiterate and say that he was lost and wanted out at the expense of any means possible, but pride stood in the way, so he refrained.
"I got bored." There came a shuffle around the corner, and Zebstrika poked its head out, then emerged, warily eyeing the Marowak, but not paying much attention to the girl. "And...you happened to be there." Saying so, he shrugged his shoulders, like it was the most logical explanation in the world, then rocked back and forth on his heels to wonder why it was so hot in this portion of the caves.
Silence. Then, "No hard feelings, right?", in the gloom.
Felizia stared at the trainer, still suspicious, and Carina adopted the same look on her face when the Zebriska poked its head into view. Luck had shone down on the Marowak again – not only was this Pokemon an electric type, it also wasn’t wild. And with any luck, there would be no reason for a fight.
“You know…” Felizia looked up, pretending that she was making a considerable effort to remember something. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what stalkers say. ‘She just happened to be there, Officer. I wouldn’t have followed her if she wasn’t, I swear.’” She almost laughed – not at her own joke, but at how silly she knew she sounded. Felizia needed to sleep, eat a decent meal and oh, probably get out into the sunlight before she forgot what that was.
She mimicked the boy’s shrug, a bit late in doing so. “Don’t do anything suspicious and there won’t be.” Her eyes closed for a second, then opened again. She looked at the boy, and figured there was no harm in asking. “You know where the nearest exit is?”
