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!
she does not know if methuselah has been avoiding her, or if the land of nightmares simply does not want her to meet her ex-mentor. either way it does not matter. physis has given up on such a fruitless pursuit. it's been months, and she will not be handed the answers that she desires. not from the living, who do not care for her inquiries.
physis has long since learned how not to fear ghosts. that is why she is here in the library of lost things, browsing the shelves carefully, but with haste. she asks the questions that sophia would be too frightened to ask. she compares rationales. she attains answers. lots of them, and certainly more than she knows what to do with.
after a few hours, physis finds herself in a silent argument with a green book about andromeda's theory of friendship evolution, the book's voice screeching in her mind. she slams it shut before moving on to the next volume.
physis receives so many answers that she no longer remembers her question. the land plays an irritating game.
this place floods her, pricks her fingers, kisses her neck. there is nothing specific about this feeling, she can only call it everything and something. she can do it. she will face methuselah once more. she will find a way to live on, that's the only thing to do. i'm not weak, she decides, and she thinks that's the end of it. but it's just wishful thinking.
a puff of smoke comes from her lips and swirls in the library around her and she can see shapes- it's a heart. an staryu. her father. and he slithers away to the ceiling. just another thing gone. and she can't resist but call out to him, out of desperation for someone. something. but there's nothing.
there never is, so she just continues around the bookshelves and raises the cigarette to her lips again, before mustering out a weak call. "methuselah...?"
physis has no fondness for the library of lost things, but it's the only place that will give her more answers than questions. actually, that might be inaccurate. the place dredges up old questions that she has long since forgotten how to ask. maybe that's why so many of the researcher types tended to favor this place.
"not here." comes the prompt reply. her eyes are still glued to the pages of the latest book. a treatise on the dream world and pokemon training. physis isn't used to being in a place where no one is trying to kill her, so she does look up after finishing the last paragraph. "...you're yves."
yves feels naked standing in front of this woman, this stranger. cold. alone. her shoulders shrink and her neck curls in, sheltering herself from the humiliation that the situation could bring. "you're yves." physis says, and yves lifts her eyes from the floor. "i am." is her quiet response, before her eyes go back to studying the tiles on the ground.
"you're physis." and a limp finger points at the woman before yves.
she feels ashamed here; like she's been caught red-handed. like she's done something wrong. has she? no, nothing. she's just done everything so clumsily, so badly, so carelessly. and she's been trying to fix things, she really has, but nothing works. because she's all alone-- and she can't do it by herself. that's something she learned a long time ago.
"i met an old friend of yours." yves says meekly, hugging herself. "he's very kind."
"i have not seen you in a long time." a simple observation. actually, alex is probably the only one that she runs into on more than one occasion. then physis realizes why that is. she's been spending too much time in the land of the living. that must be it.
their conversation is more civil this time around. probably because sophia is less afraid. she pauses. there aren't many that she would consider a friend these days. "the boy with the gengar or the man with the porygon-z?"
come to think of it, she has not seen aaron in a long time either. she's not a very good friend, is she. CAEDMON
"it has been a while." she manages to stammer out, feelings raw. physis has always been interesting to yves-- strong. brave. ridgid. all intriguing qualities but not exactly easy to get used to. yves sighs and rubs her eyes.
gengar? porygon-z? she had met a boy with a gengar, but alex had only seemed interested in getting into her pants. yves shook her head. "he was supposed to have a cloned lucario, but i don't know how that turned out." yves doesn't consider many people friends either- but batin is the closest she's had in a long time. "although i did meet alex and his gengar."
"minerva? she's...rather kind." not completely uncharacteristic of a scourge partner, really. what she doesn't really understand is why yves assumed that batin and physis would be friends of all things. "alex is as well."
her voice sounds tired. yves is looking at a broken pillar, just as batin had predicted.
"i think you have a very different understanding of what a friend is." physis smiles mirthlessly. "what if i told you that batin is the reason that we were trampled by thalia at pax institute? what if i told you that he is the reason that thalia still lives to deny us the amberwell?"
at this point, she's only being petty. physis knows this. she knows, but she finds it difficult to care.
yves tilted her head. "minerva? i haven't met her." although if she knew batin, their paths were bound to cross eventually. someday, somewhere-- it was written in the stars, it must be. there aren't many people like yves or physis out there. you've just got to learn where to look, if you want to find someone.
alex? kind? they must have a different understanding of that word as well. he wasn't unkind, only rude. to yves, at least. her gaze finally solidified on physis.
"i wouldn't care." she said simply and quietly, brushing hair out of her face. "he's a friend." a rare one, she wants to add, but it's too much to say. and she doesn't want to waste her words.
alex was probably rude to yves because she actually looked young enough to bang. physis is past her mid-twenties okay.
a shadow looms over her face. of course yves wouldn't care - that was the reason why she had clashed with the girl, isn't it? she reminds her too much of him, never fixed on the important things. survival. not their whims.
physis isn't really sure how to counter yves' assumptions without flat out saying 'he's trying to carry out my dead fiancee's plan of getting rid of all the scourge and agents', so she doesn't say anything about that. she doesn't care enough about yves to give her the truth. at the same time, she's not even sure if yves would care about the truth.
that's what irritates her the most about people like batin and yves. the truth means little to them.
(her truths mean little to them)
she doesn't even bother smiling anymore.
"i don't understand? i have known him for as long as the scourge have existed." longer than that, even. "i sincerely doubt that you can override my experience."
she's been in love with the man who had held batin in for almost ten years now. yves would have had to been a small child. either way, her point stands.
she didn't mean to offend physis- not at all. they didn't seem to get along very well, perhaps she should stop talking about batin. but she wants to hear so much more-- physis knows something she doesn't-- and yves wants to know (desperately) what that is. but physis's smile runs away from her, so yves follows suit and tosses her's out too, just another thing in the garbage bin.
and she lets physis go, lets her speak. and yves only quietly straightens her jacket and scuffs her heel against the floor. she's almost forgotten where she is; it only now becomes apparent that she will not see methuselah today. because eventually, she has to wake up. "eventually, everything must come to an end." and there he is in her memory, wolf smile. and she has it too, fox's.
there's a mystery to him. she saw it, a flash, when they met, but physis knows more. "he spoke like this about you too, you know." yves said quietly. "not unkindly. but he did seem to have an opinion." she shrugs, inspecting the hundreds of book spines on the shelves.
another thing dawns on her now-- minerva is probably his pokemon acquaintance. cloned lucario or not, if physis thinks she's kind, where does the agent think batin's partner got it from? she could say it out-loud, but she resists again, instead choosing the safer route.
"no, i can't override your experience," she nods, "but i've met him. he was nice." she'll leave it at that.
she chuckles unpleasantly. "i would bet money that he said that i was cold and unwavering. brittle, maybe." considering the wreck that she was lemures? probably. cold and brittle as ice.
"batin has opinions about a lot of things. whether or not they are true is a different matter." if she had believed his words to be true - well. they wouldn't be in this stalemate, would they? physis stands up and starts shelving the books away. it's clear that she's not going to be able to read and converse at the same time. not for this conversation.
"he was nice?" she pauses. she pauses and takes a good look at yves. she pauses and realizes that she is speaking to a child. a child with claws and teeth maybe, but still a child who believes in stories.
"i bet he told you an interesting story, and then you believed him." undoubtedly, yves believed him and became his friend. sophia isn't much better. sophia believed him and became his lover. "he has a good form for storytelling." she'll give him that. physis moves on to the next stack of books. "but if you think that he cares about people as much as he cares about stories, then you're in for a surprise."
yves thinks. ponders physis's words. clearly something went wrong between them. she frowns slightly, glancing to physis. "he did say that." she admits. "and i believed him, because i had known it to be true when we had met."
now or never, she thinks. might as well put it out there. "we don't get along, physis." yves begins, eyes looking anywhere but to physis. "you aren't..." she pauses. "flexible."
"batin's different though. he doesn't even have to try and be flexible." she sighs, worried for what was to come of this. "he's creative. you probably know that-- you call it 'a good form for storytelling.'" finally she looks back to physis, ashamed.
"i think that may be something we're both missing."
"believe what you want." in actuality, physis didn't much care. it wouldn't change what she is, and she can be content with that.
she also doesn't care about whether she gets along with yves or not. it's obvious that they don't, and trying to fix anything between them is really a case of digging themselves into a deeper hole. completely unproductive if anyone asked physis. thankfully, nobody does.
but of course, yves just keeps digging into all the places that she shouldn't be.
she sneers. "sounds like you have quite the celebrity crush." batin had tried to feed her a carefully crafted image too, at lemures. it was one that she had rejected quickly. "i don't suppose that he had told you about the time that his flexibility had nearly gotten him killed?" her fists clench. "or the fact that he remains alive today because i refused to be flexible about his life?" maybe she should have. it would have saved her a lot of headaches, but sophia would never have let it happen.
"i have no need for stories." she looks up at the endless library shelves. "if there is a truth...then i will find it."
she thinks to the ruins of her home. she thinks about the faces of the dead.
"...the living are the only ones who are capable of producing truth."
and nobody could do that once they were dead. she had wanted to believe in zahir, but he had rejected life.
she curls away, running her fingers down the spine of a book. the ugly ducklett, an old nursery rhyme. yves can picture the pages in her head--she used to read it all the time. it would make her feel something, and unfortunately that was one of many rare things, even when she was a child. was it because she shut out those feelings, was it because she didn't want to be sad, she wanted to feel sad for someone else.
that's what stories are all about, correct? it's a question she asks herself when she's going to sleep at night. why are we here? and what are we doing? and who am i?
perhaps she liked batin because he was an escape from her own mind. perhaps she liked batin because he, himself was a story. or a book full of them. and if she read enough stories, if she read enough books, she could get lost in the characters and not have to think about herself. not have to think about how her own story is going to end.
she looked at physis. "you could have killed him is what you're saying." it's quiet; the first time she's spoken in a few minutes. "you could have killed him and you didn't." she plays with the hem of her jacket and her eyes flit away. "was that not the 'truth' you were looking for?"
she sighed. "is killing people the 'truth' that you think we're all looking for?"it's not. she thinks. and now yves knows- physis is just different, too brittle, too robotic to like stories. because she can perfectly conceal her feelings inside her own self, inside her own mind. she doesn't require any assistance.
"why do you need to find the truth anyway?" she glares at physis. "what is it exactly that you're looking for?!" her voice booms in the empty library.
she does not know if methuselah has been avoiding her, or if the land of nightmares simply does not want her to meet her ex-mentor. either way it does not matter. physis has given up on such a fruitless pursuit. it's been months, and she will not be handed the answers that she desires. not from the living, who do not care for her inquiries. 
