brave way [r]

[2tsunz]

"it's both," he said. "people die because they are weak. and the weak are allowed to die because people don't care. in kohaku today, the weak are eliminated at a frankly blinding rate. my parents were both civilians, people with simple lives. the scourge snuffed them out easily. only the strong are guaranteed to survive--and those the strong can spare the energy to care for. the rest of us who still live are simply lucky. in the future, there will be room for the weak and the strong alike to live in harmony. but that's not a world we had the luxury of being born into."

this world had to be burned away with fire for that world to emerge. the strong who would abuse their strength, the scourge, had to be marked and destroyed. he continued on.

"i'm not sure what you mean by not knowing how agents come into existence," he said. "it seems apparent to me that they are nothing more than humans infected by the virus.."

toska

[toska]

"oh, zahir-" even after a year of fighting the scourge, a year of listening to the same stories, they never quite get stale. no, they only get harder to listen to as time goes on. karimi holds her companion in a strong embrace. "i'm so sorry. what...what city was it? was it nerio? this summer?" that's where he said he was from, right? gods, if only she had heard of the siege sooner last year, gotten over to the city faster - nothing can be done about it now.

at the same time, his words hurt on a personal level. hurts because they are true. even with all the anti-scourge technology, only so much can be diverted to those who fight. those who cannot fight are not even in the equation. any researcher focused on eradicating the scourge knows this.

(her medicham would never have been saved. neither would larsa's luxray or arza's milotic)

she cannot imagine zara being a great battler, and she knows nothing about arza's abilities. she suspects that those are nonexistent. that didn't mean that they were weak, their abilities were just... diverted elsewhere.

"...the scourge have changed what it means to be strong." it's the world that decides, but it's not the world that she wants to live in. "but that doesn't mean i have to accept it!"

"that's what i used to think, but... i know someone who turned scourge without turning into an agent." a lot of someones, actually. oh fuck that sounds incriminating as hell, doesn't it? "okay, they're better now but...it was really shocking to me, y'know? we're so trained to think that scourge pokemon are utterly impossible to reclaim and now..." now there's a cure, and what they've been taught is all wrong. "...now i have to wonder about what else we don't know about the scourge, what else we don't know about agents. imagine if i could talk to a cured scourge pokemon! i could learn so much about how they live, how they function-"

fuck, she's losing the topic on the agents.

"but um. a lot of our research on agents is just guesswork and sporadic sightings. if we could just ... understand the process, then maybe...maybe we could prevent people from making the wrong choices."

she tries to imagine what things would be like now if neo didn't make the cure fast enough. her blood runs cold. her friends...she's not sure if she could turn her pokemon on her friends (this is why j thinks that you are weak, this is why neo considers you unreliable. this is why thalia considers you easy prey. this is why they will leave you behind).

"yes, they are infected by the scourge, but that doesn't mean that it is meaningless to study them. all of my research...it all works under the assumptions that the scourge pokemon are just...pokemon with an extra kick." a lot of extra kicks, if the number of attacks that they can pull is of any indication. "after i got serious about studying scourge pokemon, i started calling up my breeder friends to study a normal version of whatever scourge i've captured." studying them seperately yielded decidedly less productive results.

"it might be easier to mark them out as nothing but monsters, but ... i've found that facing the truth is far more productive. if we let ourselves get scared - if we forget that we're fighting beefed-up pokemon and people, then we've...we've lost our ace in the hole." she shakes her head. "i wouldn't sacrifice our chances of winning for anything. i ... promised to my brother that we would win. that the time that the rest of eos has bought us researchers...it's going to mean something." karimi turns away to wipe something out of her eye.

2tsunz