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!
There was no knocking or patient waiting. The doors were open, and Deryn walked straight through them. She was impatient and the sooner this was all over, the closer she would get to proving a pregnant woman wrong, and the happier the world would become. Deryn was still pissed off by her step-mother’s comments, which was just as well since they had fuelled her trip over here and were still fuelling her now.
Although… those feelings were leaking through.
“Hey, you,” she snapped at… well, the first person she saw. Deryn didn’t know who this person was, but she didn’t care either. The laboratory types all looked the same to her, anyway. “Where’s the Professor guy? I need a Pokemon, and I need it now.”
Deryn stared down the unfortunate soul with dark eyes, daring the person to tell her no or, worse, to keep her waiting.
The professor is busy. Ms. Sybil quipped, the telepathic thoughts clipped at the edges, razor sharp. Arms crossed over each other because cypress was always off doing some experiment with those rattata, and Mr. Krauss was preoccupied, so it left her to welcome these pesky 'guests' (and she would've closed the door on this woman, too, but she hadn't gotten the chance). He'll be here in a minute. There were padded, wooden chairs right at the entrance, and Ms. Sybil gestured at them, pointedly.
In the back, where all the lab equipment and 'experiments' were held, came various sounds of glass tinkling, cages slamming, and rattata squeaks, in various bursts. The professor poked his head around the corner and gave a brief "I-I'll be with you in just a-a moment!" before disappearing, his lab coat trailing powdery chemicals in its wake.
Well, so much for a person. Still, it wasn’t the first time Deryn had stared down a Pokemon. As close as she had been to her Poppa, she had hardly got on with his Pokemon. And Deryn didn’t feel like she’d get along with this Pokemon either. Deryn said nothing to the Pokemon, and didn’t sit down in one of the chairs either.
Deryn started to tap her foot impatiently as she waited. She briefly glanced at the Gothitelle again, and firmly decided to never own one. Deryn had always something unsettling about Pokemon that looked like humans with a very strange sense of fashion.
She didn’t see the professor poke his head around a corner, but she did hear his voice. “Well, could you hurry it up? I don’t want to hit menopause before I leave.”
Ms. Sybil sighed to herself and rolled her eyes, but said nothing to the girl as she stood there, gaze trailing back to the door. A few, uncomfortably silent seconds ticked by, then the professor emerged from the back of the lab with a cough, powder scattering around him in a thick cloud. "T-Thank you, Ms. Sybil." He murmured to the psychic type, then turned his attention to the woman who he still didn't know the name of. "Sorry about the w-wait." Paused, fingering at a loose button on his labcoat.
"I-If you'll follow me, please..." He waved a hand and craned his neck forward, trying to see if there was any spills or escaped rattata that he had forgotten to tend to before Deryn was to choose which pokemon to take on her journey.
“Finally,” Deryn muttered under her breath when the professor (well, she guessed it was him) finally appeared. He looked weedy, stuttered and fiddled with a button on his coat; not exactly what you’d expect from the guy who sorted out newbie trainers and researchers. And if this was what the guy in charge was like, Deryn suddenly wondered what the Pokemon would be like.
“You took your time,” Deryn said to the professor as she walked beside him (walking behind people have never felt right). “What were you doing? Practicing elocution?” It was just as well her Poppa was dead; he would have given her all sorts of trouble for being so rude – and to a professor of all people!
She looked around the laboratory as she walked. Another disappointment; she couldn’t see anything exciting. No strange vials of unknown liquids or horrific experiments. Oh well, she had to remind herself that the professor was weedy, not mad, and she shouldn’t have expected much. “What Pokemon have you got for me?” she asked.
Cypress laughed at the woman's words, continuing to stare straight ahead in case he needed to react to any unpredictable obstacles. "Not exactly." He explained, waving his hand around. "Just a f-few experiments at the moment, nothing h-huge." Sometimes, the cages would rattle, showing just how eager the rattata were to escape their confines. Today, it was silent, which somehow made it ominous, rather than the former, and he made a note to check - and possibly replace - any locks as needed.
The professor walked over to the lab table and plucked the scrap of paper that was there, lying on top of the black briefcase. "Ms. Altar, correct? T-These are some of the pokemon that have been prepared for you t-today..." In one motion, like it'd been done so many times now, he snapped open the fasteners and flipped the lid over, revealing two rows of spheres. The professor wrung his hands together, and smiled.
For a moment, Deryn’s eyebrows raised. A ‘few experiments’, huh? Maybe the professor was a little bit mad, behind closed doors. A weedy mad professor. She almost asked about them, but they had already reached a table with a piece of paper and a… a briefcase? Deryn didn’t know what she had been expecting, but she was fairly sure that a briefcase was somewhere near the bottom of the list.
And then it opened and Deryn had ten Pokeballs to choose from. She studied them for a moment, then asked, unimpressed, “Is this it? Do you really hand out Pidgeys and Hoppips to new trainers?” Sure, their final forms were probably decent, but Deryn wouldn’t say the same for their pre-evolved forms. Besides, none of the other Pokemon stood out much more than them.
The choice was a hard one. The only Pokemon Deryn had seen were strong, high-levelled ones; she had no idea how to judge which little baby to pick. She thought about what Pokemon her poppa had had, but she didn’t recognise their species in any of the Pokemon on offer. That was Plan A and Plan B out of the window.
Plan C was stupid, so she tried Plan A again. She closed her eyes as she tried to think – really think – about the Pokemon on offer, and when she opened them Deryn said, “I’ll take the Nidoran.”
"A-Ah yes..those. Funny you should mention them." The professor let out a small laugh at this, but it was nervous and tittering, and he ran a hand almost sheepishly through his hair. "They don't get too much a-attention." Most of the trainers that came to the lab skimmed over those, and they were relatively forgotten over their more powerful peers. To be frank, Deryn was the first one to comment on such a fact for awhile, and he almost wondered if she was considering them, or just asking (and since these were the pokemon they gave him, the professor had to work with what he got).
Unfortunately, his thoughts extinguished at the sound of her voice, and the professor was alert again, grabbing the sphere with his fingers and shutting the briefcase, his glasses slightly crooked. "Good choice! She's a very a-agreeable one, I'm sure you'll get along f-fine." Beside the briefcase now lay a small pouch (he wasn't ever sure how it got there, but Mrs. Sybil had her ways), and Cypress picked it up, dropping the sphere in it and handing the entire thing to Deryn. "There are some things in here to help you on your journey. G-Good luck out there!"
level 1o growl, scratch, tail whip, double kick, poison tail + stat boost of your choice
“Of course they don’t. Just look at them.” And, truth be told, she had briefly considered the Pidgey. A flying type could always come in handy. But even if her heart had completely set on that Pokemon – which it hadn’t, thankfully – she would have been too proud to ask for it. As for the Hoppip, well… she didn’t even have to look closely at the glorified bulb to know it was a Pokemon that she would never pick for herself.
Apparently the Pokemon she had chosen was a ‘good choice’. Deryn rolled her eyes at the clichéd words but didn’t say anything until she had taken the pouch from the professor. For all she knew, he could have changed his mind at the last minute and not handed her anything at all.
“Thanks…” It was clear from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t as thankful as she should have been. If her Poppa was watching her now, he was probably shouting at what he saw, like a person shouted at a TV when a character was doing something unfathomably stupid.
Deryn looked over the professor once more and said, “Get some new glasses. That pair makes you look more like a dweeb than a professor,” before she turned and left.
