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!
nerio is loud, it's bustling, it's bursting with life. it's a far cry from cura village, tiny, traditional cura village. here, color is everywhere, music is filtering in from speakers on just about every corner, and the people are talking and laughing. the only proof that tensions are rising, both from the syndicates burrowed in nerio and of the scourge so close, practically right on nerio's doorstep, is the tenseness of those sitting in the corners, conversing to someone over their c-gears, and the sheer distance others have, haggard and haunted.
the fact that almost everyone has pokeballs in plain sight, clipped to belts, or tucked away into bags, or something, is another dead-ringer. through all this xavier makes his way among the crowd, slowly ending up at the nerio department store. it's huge, towering with more than a dozen floors, and xavier ducks in and sighs in content at the rush of warm air that greets him, a sharp contrast from the frigid cold outside.
soon enough he's browsing through the collections of goods put on display, items shimmering under glass cases and clothes hung on racks scattered throughout the floor. xavier stops at a jacket aisle, rummaging for one his size. a year on the road hasn't been kind on his clothes, and he needs one to replace the torn blue one he has in his suitcase.
he doesn't see the person right behind him, though, and he bumps into them as he steps back. "oops, sorry," he says, turning around to face them fully. "didn't see you there."
karimi had certainly grown to be less careless than she was a year ago, but she still wasn't really too fussy over her personal business. that is, until she had nearly twisted her ankle on a log when her left shoe sole had started coming apart.
again? karimi could have sworn that she just bought this pair like... a few weeks ago? she never saw reason to limit herself too much on clothes that she would be fighting the scourge in, so maybe it isn't that she's buying shitty brands.
maybe these top sports brands could expand into clothes that would actually survive the adventures of eos recuits. yeah! then she wouldn't be replacing jackets and shit all the time.
nevertheless, karimi grudgingly goes to the usual clothing store, completely unaware that she had stumbled upon the men's aisle. that tended to happen sometimes, and she didn't really care. no matter what she's wearing, the scourge would have equal reason to tear her limb from limb.
karimi was checking to see if her pokedex would fit the front coat pocket of a blue jacket when she feels quite a bit of weight bumping against her back.
"eek!" her pokedex goes flying out of her hands and onto the floor with an ugly clatter. nette
it seems as if he's run into a woman, who is holding something.
scratch that, was holding something. a red object goes flying somewhere, and xavier's head snaps up at the clattering sound, as does others' in the aisle. when they're satisfied that something dangerous hasn't went off - damn the scourge, for making everyone so paranoid - they go back to their own shopping.
leaving xavier to apologize to the woman. "oh, i'm so sorry about that," he says, and bends down to pick up the object. it's a machine, of sorts, he can see that when he picks it up, but he doesn't linger to observe it - he holds it out for the woman to take instead. "it's my bad; i hope it isn't damaged." because he has no clue what this thing is, and he can't replace it if it is something important if he doesn't know what it is.
"nah, it's survived worse." karimi gathers her bearings for a moment before walking up to xavier to collect her pokedex. "no really, it has." she laughs, thinking of all the times that she's dropped it in a pool of mud or from the top of a tree. "i'm pretty sure that they build these to be indestructible!"
not that karimi was completely careless. she backed up the data several times at kohaku university every time that she returned. she checks her pokedex screen. yep, still functional and raring to go.
xavier raises an eyebrow at that. well, nothing was completely indestructible... although if it had survived a flight and a crash landing with the tiled floor the department store has, he shouldn't be surprised. on the contrary, he's glad that it wasn't broken or anything.
which leads him to the fact that he does not know what the hell that thing is. it's always a good idea to know what foreign objects were, anyway, and to see if owning one would help. "what is it, anyway?" he asks, folding up the jacket to sling over his arm. "i've never seen anything like it before."
karimi is a little surprised. pokedexes were a staple of every region, so it probably wasn't that the boy is foreign.
"it's a pokedex, a portable encyclopedia." she holds it up to show him. though many would argue that it's so much more than that. karimi would agree. the progress of a pokedex is the most reliable method of proving that one had an adventure worth recounting. "see, i got one of these 'cos i'm an eos researcher."
a pokedex? still, xavier's never heard of one before, although researchers, he knows. "a researcher, you said? thank you for your service." it's a standard reply by now, but it's one that xavier never gets tired of saying - eos is here to protect the people, after all. although with the way that disasters keep happening, it seems as if even they're having struggles against the scourge.
"do only researchers get pokedexes, or do other professions get them too?" hey, it wasn't every day that a civilian met an eos researcher. xavier'd might as well get some interesting information out of the impromptu meeting.
service, huh. karimi didn't really...think of it that way before. not much, at least. her travels didn't really happen for the sake of other people, and nothing about it was really selfless. if she saved the people that she wanted to save, then that fell under the same umbrella.
"yeah, these are a little difficult to produce, so they used to hand them out in other regions to promising young trainers." karimi wasn't much of a reader, but even she could keep awake during her history classes for stories like these. "most of whom end up saving their region in one way or another. i guess it's only fitting that they're handing them out to all eos researchers now."
xavier raised an eyebrow. "their region? really?" xavier had never really been interested in history, not all that much, so the fact that all of a region's heroes had something in common had slipped past him - if he'd even noticed it in the first place. the connection to researchers, though, makes sense, and he grins at the woman. "it makes sense, you have to admit that. though, how is eos doing? i haven't been paying attention to the news or any of the info they send out lately."
"hells to the yeah!" karimi grins broadly at him, for the first time in what feels like awhile. fighting the scourge on the frontlines can do that to you. "i'll admit the whole scourge takeover thing has put a bit of a damper on the 'save the world' kind of gig, but like...it's still kinda cool, yanno?" things didn't just stop being fascinating just because the world's gone to hell.
'how is eos doing'. karimi squints at a hat rack behind xavier as she thinks about how to answer that question. more and more lately, there's the need to choose between telling people something safe, or telling him something that will scare the pants off them. "um. i've mostly been off to pax by myself, so i'm not that sure about the others." it isn't a lie. "i've mostly been chasing scourge and cutting up bodies, if that means anything. i don't pay that much attention either, except in the dream world. i mean. i'm out there fighting the scourge, which is a helluva lot more information than what a not-suicidal reporter would be able to get. if i wanna know about other places, i just call up an eos friend. which i ... haven't been doing lately." she looks a little guilty.
he wasn't prepared for that information dump, but xavier kept up with what the researcher said easily enough. eos was doing pretty well nowadays, then - that was good to know. he did raise an eyebrow in skeptically at the last bit, though. "yeah, you should probably get around to that sometime soon. never know when's the next chance, right?"
it's okay, xavier. nobody is ever really prepared for an infodump, karimi edition. once she gets the ball rolling, she's not so inclined to shut up. "uh...yeah, probably." her face is sheepish. "i'm...friends with some pretty tough people, though. i'm ... sure they're alright." unless they go diving into the land of nightmares again. that's...always a possibility.
this shopping trip just got a lot more depressing.
(this is how you lost most of your family to the scourge)
fuck, not those thoughts again. karimi thought that she beat them out of her brain. evidently not. "i...should." nette
xavier watched as the woman drifted off into her own thoughts, taking the time to pick up gloves to go along with the jacket. he did peer curiously at the rack that she'd been sifting through, wondering what she'd been looking for.
he was glancing toward the eos researcher when someone started shouting. they were yelling some... creative insults, and xavier looked to see who it was. or rather, what it was. because there was a pokemon loose in the front of the store, and rampaging.
...well, at least it wasn't an onix or anything, and it wasn't headed towards them. though, by the way that the tauros was knocking down racks and shelves and leaving chaos in its wake, it wasn't surprising that no one had drawn a pokemon on it yet. they were close enough to help, if they wanted to, or they could run away like the rest of the people were doing.
...had been doing. they were the only ones left in the area now, the other civilians safe behind walls and other large structures. xavier sighed at the tauros, before turning to his researcher companion. "...we should probably stop that thing. though i'm not sure if a xatu or any of my other pokemon can stop it." xavier hoped to arceus that she had pokemon that could, because otherwise they were toast.
seriously???? it's her first break in a month. first break, and there's already regular pokemon fucking shit up. maybe that's a sign that she should be going back to work. maybe. or maybe this is a good break from having to decimate scourge all the time.
"no worries, i got this." he's right. this isn't a pokemon that they could simply fire blast and be done with. not with all these people around. karimi sends out her gardevoir.
"let it sleep, mary."
gardevoir closes her eyes and seems to sink the tauros into the ground with a dark void. he crashes into the ground. hopefully this tauros didn't know snore or sleep talk.
well, a gardevoir worked. xavier tucked his hands in his pockets as the tauros drifted off to sleep without any fuss. thankfully it didn't seem to know any moves that it could use while asleep, although it was still up to the jury about that.
"that's good," he said to the researcher, before glancing at the gardevoir. "hello to you too." it was always good to be polite to psychic types, he'd found, because they had no qualms in holding you up in the air by an ankle if they were pissed enough. he'd had enough of that, thank you very much.
lWi4STWc <50 it wakes up
at least their luck was holding. xavier slipped his hands into his pockets, rolling back to his heels as he looked at the damage. "d'you suppose that its trainer will come back for it?" it was very likely that they wouldn't; no one would want to take responsibility for something like this. better to leave a pokemon to its doom than to pay for damage; although that was typical nerio thinking for you.