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!
imagine an early march scene. good. now put a young woman in it, complete with a cafe front and a quaint street. her name? she will give you sophia, but her dreams whisper something else entirely. whose perception do you desire? does it matter?
a young man brings her a chai latte. he's a good looking fellow with soft spoken words and freckles that almost blend into the blush that the cold winds paint onto his face. sophia says nothing to him. she only pays him what is due, and a little more. her brother had instilled in her that much.
still, this does not feel like the normalcy that she must have once felt. sophia did not expect it to. he leaves her with his thanks, not minding that the woman did not even seem to hear him. maybe in some ways, she doesn't. she's far away and close all at once.
if she desired the voices of other people, then maybe things could have been a lot different. of course, she could also have ended up dead. that was always an ever-present possibility.
sophia has no love lost for the city, but it's better than anything that the land has to offer. it's real to her. real like the pavement is real. real like the shops and stands on the street are real. best of all, proserpina is not nerio. there are similarities, to be certain, but her heart does not jump in the same way whenever she encounters a familiar destination.
when it burns like all cities must, she thinks that will be real too. it's spring, but nothing blossoms.
Children never think they can die. Happiny darts down the street, heedless of cars or passing strangers. Even though it's chilly, the sun is out for the first time in days, and she has spotted a pretty stone across the way. She wants to carry it, but she doesn't want to keep it; she wants to give it to someone faux-shyly, eager for the moment their face breaks into a smile as they accept their gift, tuck the smooth rock into their pocket or hold it in their palm, considering.
Thalia chases after her, half-jogging and half-laughing. Thalia is not a child, feels she has never been a child. She knows she can die, and she knows it could be any moment. But the happiny's joy is contagious as she twirls about with the stone over her head, and when she bursts forward into motion again, Thalia doesn't stop her, although she could.
Happiny offers her gift to a lady with dark hair sitting outside a cafe. She'd old to Happiny, old beyond reckoning--but so is Thalia. Her days are years, they're leaves on the ground, they're endless and they'll always be there. Why hoard? Why keep? She wants to share and share.
Thalia arrives a heartbeat after her, already apologizing for her pokemon.
"I let her out for a run, and she went wild," she says. The happiny is still posed like a statue, gift outstretched.
a girl with pink hair comes to her with a small pink happiny. the world is full of such contradictions, and physis hates them.
sophia can only tighten her grip around her hot drink. it burns. she's alright (she's not alright) - she has a face this time. she has a face and a name. that's all that she needs in a city. that's all that anyone needs to be safe.
sophia separates her warm palm from her cup. she accepts the happiny's gift, like all the other things that she has not earned and will never deserve.
maybe she should have refused it, but the idea only occurs to her after the stone is already in her hand. sophia has always been rather lousy at turning things down. she did not make an exception for the happiny, not like she would make an exception for anyone.
"... i don't mind." her voice is nearly unrecognizable to her, a delicate sound that sounds out of place in prosperina. maybe it's a good thing. they have spoken to each other before, haven't they? "she's cute. is she yours?" likely. the happiny is vaccinated. the color is a slight difference, but not to an ex-pax researcher.
she looks up from the happiny and looks a sheathed weapon directly in the eye. that's never happened before, has it? it's always been a visor between them. or in thalia's case, a blindfold.
she thinks back to decima. she thinks back to all the losses that thalia has dealt her.
Her work done, the happiny peers up at the woman for a moment, before giggling and darting behind Thalia's legs. Thalia reaches back and pats the happiny on the head briefly before she keeps talking.
"She's mine," Thalia says.
The happiny flushes red with pride at being called cute, and begins strutting around the cafe front, waving to people on the street as they pass by. Some wave back, but most don't. It doesn't seem to bother her.
Thalia seems to realize she's still just standing at the woman's table, and she smiles sheepishly, holds out a hand.
"My name is Thalia," she says, and casts a furtive glance at the happiny, who seems oblivious to the two of them now. Her world is only what lies before her. "Thanks for taking her stone. I owe you."
their second introduction is better than their first. then again, prisoner thalia is kind of a lowballing point of comparison.
sophia takes a sip of her drink and does her best to keep physis away from this conversation. she is not needed here, not until sophia sees a monster that she does not have the power to reason with. for now, sophia is safe.
(except all monsters are hidden in plain sight)
she watches the happiny for a little bit. the child of the happiness pokemon. she had eaten a blissey's egg before, back when she was still involved with an urban food critic. it was an euphoria that came suddenly, and left just as quickly. a biological function that is more real than anything that she has felt in months. sophia had wanted little to do with blissey eggs after that. she had wanted to believe that there were ways of earning her own happiness. she looks at the happiny, but her mind is elsewhere.
thalia's voice reminds her that the girl is still there.
she takes thalia's hand automatically. it's warm. she doesn't know why she had expected anything different. her hand is as warm as the blood that pumps through her veins.
"i am sophia." she says the words, but they feel ... not untrue, but out of place. like a word inserted in a random place in the book where it doesn't belong. in the middle of a sentence, maybe. "i am sure that someone will have taken her stone eventually." she says, if only to fill the silence - an emptiness that even sophia can fill. "that sort of cheer is a rarity these days." a commodity that kohaku can't seem to provide very easily. no thanks to her, really.
The happiny's cheer was precious, these days, and almost infinitesimal. Her pokemon were happy, Thalia knew, but the happiny was different. She wasn't strong, and she didn't yet bear the burden of strength. The responsibility of knowing what you had to do. There was no other path you could walk, once you saw it.
"It almost makes me feel guilty, her happiness," Thalia said, watching the happiny continue her one-sided quest to greet every person or pokemon passing by. A woman in a straw hat and sun dress (she was trying to will spring in, apparently) smiled at the happiny, and so did the swampert that stomped after her.
"I'm Thalia. A trainer with EOS," she clarified. "I didn't have the same reservations about raising pokemon when I was just a league trainer, but my pokemon never killed when I was a league trainer either." She felt tired, and older, years older, than a moment before. Regardless: she shouldn't talk so to a civilian. She smiled at Sophia. "But it's the duty of the strong to protect those who aren't. I've never regretted my ability to do that, and I don't think any of my pokemon have either. Hopefully by the time my happiny is strong, she'll know her duty as well--and more than that, she'll embrace it."
sophia stares into her cup, ignoring the wind that nip at her cheeks. the happiny feels farther and farther away, even when she stays within sights, the pokemon lives in her own little world. except she tries so hard to expand its borders. the scourge are the same. except fighting is the only way for the scourge to move forward. to where? she doesn't really know what lies at the end of the road, but sophia only knows that she cannot allow herself to stay at a standstill.
she's not sure what to say at thalia's conundrum, so she keeps her silence. thalia's guilt will pass soon, sophia is sure. when she is faced with opposition, her first instinct isn't to run. guilt is not what keeps thalia moving forward. they are two different people.
thalia may have dilluted the conversation for a civilian, but it was still some pretty heavy small talk.
"a duty?" she blinks in genuine confusion. "to whom? for whom are you protecting the weak?" perhaps the memory of a loved one. or maybe all eos were contracted under such terms. she never applied to become a trainer. she wouldn't know.
"hopefully she will." she says absentmindedly. one day, it may be that happiny that hurls an egg bomb at her head. one day, their worlds will intersect again. between herself and thalia, it already has. 2tsunz
she rather likes thalia's confusion. it meant that she does not belong in the world that physis knows.
"hm." sophia smiles for the first time in this entire encounter. she smiles as if she's listening to a joke that only she understands. a musical score that only she can hear. "sorry, it's just. you remind me of someone that i knew."
he would have been equally as confused, once. these people - these beautiful people with their eyes fixed permanently on the sun. sophia wishes that they would look away.
(should they really?)
"how far would you go for them?"
it's a composition that she wants to listen for to the very end.
What a loaded statement, especially at the end of the world. Someone that I knew. Perhaps they were dead; perhaps they were simply gone. Often it was the same, but at times not.
"I'll do my duty until the very end," Thalia said. She crossed her arms, nails digging into her skin. She knew the price of being strong. She'd paid her pound of flesh for the strength to do what was right. The crystal Deoxys had given her was still hung around her neck as a pendant, tucked beneath her shirt against her skin. She shrugged. "It's my responsibility. It's my right. If I have to kill, I'll kill. If I have to die, I'll die."
And then she smiled.
"But it won't come down to that. We're going to win. I don't know if word's gotten back here yet, but Pal Park is free. I think they're starting to move people out of Nenia's tunnels already. And I've been at the Bacchus gym quite a bit lately. Trying to clear it up as well. We're gaining ground."
and there lies the difference between stefans and thalias. no stefan would have taken that as a loaded statement. not in times like these, when people simply died from carelessness or bad luck.
or in some cases, neither of those. sometimes, they chose to burn.
maybe she should have been more frightened. if thalia was going to kill anyone, it was probably going to be her - hell, they have tried to kill each other. even a house fire burns warm. and then there is the other pressing matter about ceres - no. this is not a place to be thinking about it.
"i suppose you are fortunate for being able to choose." not everyone was strong enough to get that far. after speaking to zahir, sophia becomes steadily convinced that it wasn't simply luck that helped thalia escape decima. she was strong, and the world rewards those sorts of people amply. batin had seen to that end. "i am sure that there are those who envy your strength." a lot of whom had been eaten by the scourge. again, no thanks to her.
sophia isn't sure if she could pull a surprised face if she tried, so she doesn't."i heard." witnessed it, even. "any news about the scourge travels fast" the dream world tended to facilitate that, even if she wasn't an eyewitness to the carnage.
"i'm surprised that eos cares so much about a gym when the leader is gone" she finishes the rest of her drink. "but i wish you luck." they'll need it. sophia is not sure if she will. it becomes harder to choose the battlefield with each passing day. something has to give.
"Everyone has a choice," Thalia said softly. She thought of Alex, howling his tragedies to her in the dead air of Bacchus. As if he hadn't had his own choice as well. As if he wasn't responsible for his own actions. You had a responsibility to be better than the world you had always known.
"And if there are those who envy my strength--one day soon, I hope this will be a region where my strength is no longer needed. As for the gym; Irene may be gone, but she's no longer the leader." And if she tried to come crawling back to Bacchus when all was said and done, Thalia would drag her out herself. "Bacchus existed long before Irene. It will exist long after her. The gym is the heart of a town. When Bacchus is freed, we'll need it as a new center of safety and defense for the townspeople again, a rallying point. I imagine Nenia will take over."
"yes." sophia had made her choice a long time ago, and there is no alternative. if there was, then she has little right to it. she should be able to plow through to the end, regardless of whether she believed in it or not. she will either get there, or she will die on the field of battle. "yes, they do."
"i would not be so quick to surrender your strength so quickly." sophia notes that thalia speaks of bacchus with familiarity. perhaps it was a natural difference between a girl from nerio and a girl from bacchus. i mean the thalia who grew up in nerio ended up being a fucked up dark messiah. maybe there's something in the water.
a gym as a rallying center. the notion is intuitively foreign to her as well. even in angelo's time, the gym had always seemed like another business. before angelo - well. not even sophia can remember who the leader was.
"If the world is safe, what need of those with strength?" Thalia said. "I would only be a temptation. But I know we're not there yet. I'm not ready to rest."
"if the world is safe...it would be nice if anyone could put a date on when such a time would arrive."
then maybe she might have something to strive for. sophia had used to mark those days. small days of little significance. the day that daniel would be on vacation leave. the day that she would graduate high school. the day that she was slated to return to nerio from pax lake. the day that she would receive certification.
those had been false dates. sophia understands this in hindsight. and there will be no hindsight truths, not if she is not there to observe them.
"do you believe that the world will be safe, after the war is over?"
imagine an early march scene. good. now put a young woman in it, complete with a cafe front and a quaint street. her name? she will give you sophia, but her dreams whisper something else entirely. whose perception do you desire? does it matter? 
Children never think they can die. Happiny darts down the street, heedless of cars or passing strangers. Even though it's chilly, the sun is out for the first time in days, and she has spotted a pretty stone across the way. She wants to carry it, but she doesn't want to keep it; she wants to give it to someone faux-shyly, eager for the moment their face breaks into a smile as they accept their gift, tuck the smooth rock into their pocket or hold it in their palm, considering.
