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!
He was quiet. This wasn't his turf. This was, in fact, the furthest thing imaginable from his turf.
Griff was a city creature. He played people. This didn't make him entirely unique among rangers, but unlike most members of the Union, his ability to keep himself alive in the wilderness... well, he could light a fire.
He didn't light a fire. That'd draw unnecessary attention. He didn't want any attention, not in scourge territory. In fact, he did his best to not exist.
It was dead of night, and Griff was awake. He'd only slept in short, scheduled sections of the day, whenever he deemed it safe. Now wasn't one of those safe times. He couldn't tell you why. He just trusted his gut.
So he walked through Lympha Bog in darkness, heading in the direction of Decima Town. He could've tried to stay put--quiet and hidden--but that only made Griff feel like a sitting duck, like prey.
He wasn't much for the great outdoors, but he'd been silent for the past hour at least. No snapping twigs, no splashing water, no scattering of underbrush.
Then naturally, Griff put just a teeny bit of weight on a tree, just to keep his balance. It was a dead tree. It had the good decency to fall down, creaking as it fell, trunk snapping loudly in half, and the whole thing splashing into the bog.
Griff didn't say anything, but he looked like he wanted to kill something.
as seasoned as karimi's pokemon were, a few weeks in the depths of pax territory could put anyone on edge. especially after they ran into a hades agent and a few pokemon with him.
the sound of splashing did not help the mood at all, not after half an hour of silence. karimi's arcanine had not been born a wary creature by birth, but living in nerio city before meeting karimi had beat that out of him. he was the first to react, the first to go barrelling into the direction of the sound on the off-chance that he would be able to land the first strike (being an arcanine, this was more than simply an off-chance).
his trainer is a little more wary that he would get the jump on some poor eos sap. that...wouldn't be good. she signals with her hand for her eelectross to follow.
the squelch squelch squelch of their footsteps hide nothing. an unfortunate side effect for anyone travelling in a bog, really.
the fog itself is difficult on them. the researcher sends out a braviary when the arcanine finally stops a good distance away from a blurred figure. friend or foe? karimi had to find out.
"i hope that you're not a hades agent, for your sake and mine." mostly his, but karimi didn't exactly relish in curbstomping some depressing dudes from the land of nightmares.
He could've heard her coming from a mile away. This one was not a person that bothered with silence.
Turning, Griff saw Karimi, squinted at her in the darkness. He drew half a sign but stopped when he saw the shine on the arcanine's fur--eos.
He laughed, softly, and he spoke only loud enough to be heard. There wasn't much point in stealth now that Karimi had been as loud as an exploud, but he still had his own standards.
"Because a hades agent would volunteer to be out here for shits and giggles." He paused, because the only hades agents he'd met so far were batshit crazy. "Well, they're a strange lot. Maybe they would, but I wouldn't. Luckily, for your sake and mine, I don't hate myself that much."
His pokemon, truly in the rarest of rare moments, were stored in pokeballs. This was because Diana was too lazy to want to walk through the bog at night (or during the day, for that matter), and Shyvana was just too damned noisy.
He released the mawile into a pond of marshwater. Diana didn't look like she appreciated, but even in the dark, her skin and steel glittered the trademark gleam of vaccinated pokemon. <Is there a reason for this?>
"Met someone. Wanted to show that I'm not one of the bad guys."
<Oh. ...Fine then. Put me back.>
Obliging, Griff recalled the mawile. To Karimi, he said, "Eos ranger, Sun Griffith, but call me Griff. I'm trying to make my way out of here without bringing a swarm of scourge zubats down on my head."
to be fair, karimi had learned early on how much good silence did anyone around here. scourge didn't just follow their eyes and ears. they followed the scent of fresh meat. blood. one torn leg was just as bad as an unmuted c-gear. there's not a single place to hide. there are only those who are willing to fight and those who are unwilling.
"you'd be surprised. i've spent enough time here to know." karimi signals for the arcanine to back off. "they're willing to put up with quite a bit for the end of the world." she smiles grimly.
she's met enough regular pokemon to know a vaccinated mawile when she saw one. her eyes were white enough, even if she didn't pull up a dex image.
"y'know, there's not actually that much point in hiding around here. that mawile is better off at your side. take it from a girl who's been here for several weeks at a time over the past year." maybe it had been masochism. maybe it had been atonement. "trust me when i say that you really don't wanna be ambushed around these parts, and they happen to everyone, experienced or not."
"i'm karimi." she'd quit giving out her first name since the run-in with ignatius. "eos researcher. the battling branches, mind you. none of that legendary mumbo-jumbo for me." ...none of that doctor of medicine stuff either. she's paying the price for that now. all that karimi can do at this point is to plow forward. "which is why i'm here to collect scourge entries. not a place in the world better."
sans the land of nightmares maybe, but she wasn't exactly eager to go diving in there after her disastrous first run.
"hey, so are you headed towards decima?" most travelers seemed to be headed in that direction. "i know my way around. i used to play around here as a kid." well. maybe it was less 'playing' and more akin to 'taking really stupid dares from idiots who didn't believe that she'd really go stomping off into a toxic wasteland'. come to think of it, she's pretty 'lucky' to have survived till the scourge invasion. "i don't mind coming with."
she grins. "especially if we happen to run across a scourge seviper or drapion" hook ¿
"She doesn't like the bog. Says it smells funny," Griff said, not bothering to explain that it is bad meta to start a scourge encounter thread with your pokemon out in the open.
Griff didn't mention it, but he could also draw a legendary sign if he was ambushed. He didn't like reminding people that he carried a V-Create in his pocket.
"Worse comes to worst, I can teleport out of here. Ranger, remember? We're good at staying alive in places we shouldn't." You could only teleport back to places you'd been though--places you remembered, in the way that only a psychic could. While Griff had stopped in the backwater that was Decima for a few minutes in the train station before, he couldn't teleport his ass there.
She was probably right, but there was something about sneaking around for him. It wasn't just that he felt safer that way (although he did). It was also that he felt stronger for it. He didn't have his alleys or cons to back him up here, but there was always the darkness.
...He trusted someone from Eos enough for a travel companion, Griff supposed.
"Sure. Power in numbers, and I can't say no to a pretty face."
A moment passed, and as a mood dampener, he added, "You're from around here? ...I'm sorry."
"doesn't like the bog? ehehe, sounds like someone is scared of the big bad scourge." at least the mawile isn't present to hear that.
does griff really carry a v-create in his pocket, or is he just happy to see karimi? /shotded "haha, lucky you! my pokemon used to know teleport. not anymore, though. otherwise, i probably coulda teleported us out." oops. thinking back, there were a lot of scenarios where she could have really used an instant escape button. it's too late to really regret that now, though. "but you wanna move forward, don't you? teleport isn't really gonna help you any with that, unfortunately."
karimi giggles a little. it helped that griff was kinda cute. "leave it to me to beat the scourge away! you just focus on not tripping over your feet in this bog!" because karimi's uh. kind of done that before. a lot. hey, it's a little hard to see the ground ahead of her okay.
of course, cheer never lasts in this place for long. "...from decima town, actually." wow, that's almost as bad as being from pax lake. "the lake was close enough for us, though." maybe a little too close now that the scourge had invaded. "i can lead you outta pax, but ... i've got way too much work to be detouring through decima. you should be okay, though!" the best that she could find there would probably be half-dying scourge. not nearly as concerning as the scourge that were threatening to overcome the muta boathouse any day now. "i can draw you a map once we get there. mefitis underground is probably your best bet for getting around the town."
hook ¿ wait are we really making this into a scourge encounter
...Griff was pretty sure Diana just didn't want the weird bog slime on her toes. She was high-strung like that. And a bit of a hypochondriac, which seemed strange on a steel pokemon.
...He wasn't planning on tripping over his feet.
"I was hoping to cut through to Hespera as quickly as I could. I'm not sure how far the poison goes, but the plan was to fly over rather than walk through town. No offense, but I hear walks through Decima aren't exactly as nice as a sunset stroll along the beach."
karimi is quiet for a second. even now, it's weird to hear people talk about decima town like it's a place to simply fly over. "it was nice once." is all that she really has to say to that. "just thought i'd give it a mention since mefitis underground is poison and scourge free. plus, you can restock on supplies there." it also had the added advantage of being an easier place to thread griff out of decima than the sky.
her arcanine walks ahead, his nose sniffing constantly for any irregularities. for now, he seems satisfied. the rangers at the muta boathouse must have done a really decent job around here.
the eelectross' spots light up enough to give them some illumination. up ahead, karimi can see the bodies of a few scourge corpses. she stops for a moment to inspect them.
"ugh, already got entries for these." she sighs and drops the paw of a dead sylveon. "...a sylveon. someone must have loved it a lot, once."
she might have been stronger since she first started fighting the scourge, but it didn't mean that she was any less sentimental.
"sorry. let's just...move on." pax lake is really not a place of good cheer.
hook ¿ well u started talking ab the metas of encounter threads
"There's still people living in Decima?" Normally, that was a good thing for Griff, in the sense that the existence of people with money at all gave him a job. But then, half the reason he wanted to avoid Decima was to avoid an itching urge to go looting.
1) People shouldn't take from the dead. 2) People shouldn't take things from people struggling to survive either.
The problem was that Griff didn't make a habit of sticking to what people should do. He had a conscience to speak of. It just... wasn't very talkative.
"Yeah. Sorry for bringing it up."It was Decima Town. It was also a topic that was nearly unavoidable, but he was sorry all the same. He knew a thing or two about bad memories.
toska --but i just need 10 posts to get out of pax
"yeah! i stop by, sometimes. just...not nearly as much as i ought to." #eosresearcherproblems. "and no, it's fine. better to talk about decima than to pretend that it's dead, or that it never existed." the war hasn't taken karimi's bitterness away from her. her town's not dead, not for as long as melchior stays. not as long as the people of mefitis stay. whenever she visits, she tends to see the older, more traditional folk who wouldn't move if they had the means to. the children were the ones who were sent off to war, or cleaner pastures.
they haven't really heard anything in a long time.
i_cdFsA0 <50 good sign, they're near the exit. >50 bad sign, someone (or something) is coming hook ¿ then this is the 10th post lol
He was quiet. This wasn't his turf. This was, in fact, the furthest thing imaginable from his turf.
as seasoned as karimi's pokemon were, a few weeks in the depths of pax territory could put anyone on edge. especially after they ran into a hades agent and a few pokemon with him. 
