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!
Her eyes are covered with a strip of cloth when she opens them. All she can see is a dim light filtered through red. She's on the ground, propped against a wall, with her wrists tied to her ankles. Her back hurts. The back of her hair is matted with blood.
Her mask is gone and she's not dead, so they're underground. She managed to hand her pokemon off and get them away, and she's sure she was stripped of weapons without even bothering to check, so with her mask gone there's no need to tie her up other than intimidation. Or they think she might try to run into the smog and get herself killed rather than stay a prisoner.
Thalia swallows. Her mouth is dry as bone. Her arms are cramping. She can hear the soft click of claws pacing back and forth on the concrete. One of the scourge, surely. She wonders if she's alone in here, if they got one of the others. Blindfolded, there's no way she could tell if one of them is being held captive with her.
She works her fingers back and forth as far as she can against her ankles and waits.toska
physis never liked to talk to the dead, and that's exactly what this pink girl in the basement was. a corpse that was given a few more hours of grace in exchange for what her voice can offer them. there's no pleasure in flipping back to the beginning of the book, not when she already knows what's on the final page.
she is able to do this because hades has the real prophecy. that's all it ever amounted to. these heretics follow a path that will only end in their defeat, but that doesn't mean that physis has to follow them. that didn't mean that the world had to follow them. there is nothing to save. there is only time to watch the inevitable.
she takes out a stick of alomomola balm and starts applying it against her cuts and scrapes. the smaller gashes start to close within seconds. while she wasn't exactly intolerant of pain, open wounds wouldn't do her any favors once they were above ground again. after capping the stick, she tosses it in batin's direction. the battle hadn't exactly been a cakewalk for the both of them.
physis wastes no time with their prisoner. she had never met the woman of hearsay herself, but her doubts had been cleared by the last battle. the rumors piece together a patchwork. all that's left is to confirm the puzzle's worth. "what is your name?"
"Thalia," she says. "My friends call me Thali." No one has called her by that name in a long, long time.
In front of her, the quick scratching of claws pauses and then resumes, closer to her. She can hear her heart thumping like a rabbit in her chest, trying to tear its way out of her and run somwhere safe. She smiles at the thought. There's nowhere safe, she's always known that. This place is like any other.
Perhaps a little more cramped.
The first voice had been a woman's, but the second was a man's. And his voice was closer than the woman's had been--level with the sound of the claws, perhaps?
physis was about to answer "i can assure you that you are not among friends here", but something about batin's voice causes her to pause. something that reminds her of a wolf, locked into the archetype of toying with his prey. batin likes archetypes. zahir did too, but physis tries not to think too much about that. archetypes loaned meaning to an otherwise asinine tale, a backbone to all the absurdities that filled this man's head.
perhaps it was kinder to the prisoner, if she would imagine him as a wolf like physis does. after all, physis is not here to be kind. "why were you here today? what interest does eos take in decima -- what is there left to preserve?"
not melchior and the individuals that he was protecting, surely. his life could not possibly be worth the amount of manpower that had arrived at decima. sophia rosenburg went to school to quantify the worth of human bodies. physis came out of the crysallis to affirm the worth of human lives. nothing in those bags of bones and organs, dermis and blood made for a balanced equation.
balance it, she thinks. thalia shall balance it so that she may pick apart the proofs at every step. perhaps there was something of vial importance to the war effort here.
There was a hand on the side of her face. It tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. Thalia closed her eyes to keep from trying to wildly, futilely, straining to see through the blindfold at the person before her. His (?) fingertips were callused.
"I came to Decima because the scourge wanted it," she said. "If the scourge want something, why let them have it? I came to help the people who were here. I came to kill scourge."toska
"...keep talking until i believe you." they don't break that quickly. at least, not the ones that are worth killing. "you came here to help melchior? and a few of his stooges? you would risk yourself and your pokemon- " instead of trailing off, she makes a sharp pause. when she resumes, her words do not lose any momentum, as if a video had been unpaused. "are you native to decima?"
neither sophia nor physis had ever felt much loyalty towards the leader of nerio gym, but apparently things were a little different in the other cities. was the counterattack a move by the people of decima with access to vaccines? or by the arms and legs of eos itself?
they went through a lot of trouble to keep this one alive. physis intends to squeeze every little statement, every possibility out of her, for a person's falsehoods tell as much as their truths.
physis contemplates her words for a moment. "i suppose it's difficult to tell believable lies when all the blood is rushing out of your head."let me help you.
she crouches down next to the girl. without warning, she grabs a fistful of pink hair and yanks her head forward before slamming it into the wall. "try again. what does eos want from a toxic wasteland with a population of a handful, then?"
Thalia's head rang. "Careful you don't rip any out," she mumbled. "I'm already thinning from stress and I'm kind of vain."
There was the taste of copper in the back of her mouth. A hand on the back of her neck, rubbing gently, trying to draw her attention away from the pain? It only made her skull throb. A voice: "Just tell her what she wants, love, and she'll leave you alone."
Thalia's eyelashes fluttered against the blindfold. She was suddenly intensely grateful for it, for the scant barrier it offered her.
this was quite literally getting nowhere fast. so far, physis has only met two kinds of people. those who break fast, and those who never yield. not in the time frame that physis will allocate, anyway. she sincerely hopes that thalia will remain in the former category.
"a lot of people to help, i am sure." she glances at the lucario. "heron."
The lucario looked at Batin and he nodded. His hand stayed on the back of Thalia's neck as she slammed her head back into the wall while the lucario very carefully traced one claw down her thigh, cutting through cloth and skin alike. After a moment, blood welled up where his claw had passed like a river. Batin's thumb brushed the shell of her ear.
He tucked her head against his chest as she shivered uncontrollably. He stroked her hair.
"Shhh, shhh. It's fine to cry."
Her eyes were dry beneath the blindfold though, and she held herself tense against him. Not able to push away, but dreaming of it.toska
people are such delicate things, and it's a disgusting sight to behold. under the uniform of every clever soldier, their flesh gives away like cold butter.
(so would he. so would this nightmare of a man. so would she. this nightmare of a woman.)
maybe eos will leave decima alone with melchior gone. maybe they won't. either way, physis no longer sees any value in their silent prisoner. she takes out a knife that she had managed to pick up from one of the decima houses. "if you don't have any questions of your own, then we're finished here, batin." physis presses the cold blade near thalia's jugular vein.
Batin frowned. "You're wasteful." He gripped Thalia's jaw with one hand and turned her face toward him. He stroked his thumb over the blindfold. Dry. She hadn't cried.
"I'll take her. I want someone to talk with." The lucario knelt and sliced the ropes that bound Thalia with a quick motion. Not that it really mattered, considering that her right leg had just been sliced open: she wasn't standing with or without the ropes. toska
"don't you think that killing her would be the more merciful option--" her lips show the hint of a smile before she realizes that he isn't actually making a joke this time. physis does not remove the blade from thalia's person.
this is all wrong, and she'll be dammed if she let batin throw a wench in their works now.
"why don't you talk to me, then" her voice is deceptively pleasant. "talk to your love about how you promised her decima, but won't let her have the life of a girl who may very well kill us next week or a month from now"
"I gave you Decima," he said. "I gave you this poisonous wasteland of a town, although it is worth nothing and posed no threat, because you insisted that we have it instead of, say, an actual tactically worthwhile holding. And now I am taking the only thing of worth we found here."toska
