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!
leave my corpse to rotI PLAY grayson lumina
alex faysal
addi monet
luke hopeTRAINER fossil, dust, ebon, venomBREEDER 307 eggsRANGER 4 signsAGENT 12 battles
karimi had been laid down on a bed, alex had conjured one with satin sheets and a comfortable pillow. he had positioned her almost like a corpse, hands crossed over her chest.
alex sat beside the bed, which was seperated from him with metal bars reaching up to the ceiling, caging karimi in. he thumbed through a book, a scourge gothitelle hovering over with a tray of cups and a tea pot. a night stand was conjured beside him, to which the gothitelle lay the tray down and floated away.
sonata outside the cage patiently, leaning against the bar and just looking off into the walls. he toddled over to the tea and sniffed it, before returning to his original location.
"she must be getting her beauty rest." alex says, flipping the page in his book.
leave my corpse to rotI PLAY grayson lumina
alex faysal
addi monet
luke hopeTRAINER fossil, dust, ebon, venomBREEDER 307 eggsRANGER 4 signsAGENT 12 battles
"oh, so you're awake." alex stands to pour karimi a glass of tea. "i hope you like green tea. antioxidents. do you take sugar or milk?" he looks over as he makes his own glass. "you're in the castle forlorn. you seemed so curious. take a look around. its origins lie with the human race." he recalls the legends he's read. "once upon a time, it was a thriving place. the Shining Land." alex smiles. "now it is the place of nightmares."
except it's been awhile and she really is quite thirsty but she'd also be taking tea from the fucking castle forlorn and karimi isn't that stupid. she'd probably start spouting tentacles from her nose or something.
"ain't nothing shiny about this place" she stops trying to shake the bars, but she doesn't let go. "and i've never heard of such a thing! why is this place starting to show up now, of all times? i thought...we all thought that the scourge were a human invention..."
fuck, had they been wrong? were they doomed to suffer from the start? it can't be. it ... simply can't.
leave my corpse to rotI PLAY grayson lumina
alex faysal
addi monet
luke hopeTRAINER fossil, dust, ebon, venomBREEDER 307 eggsRANGER 4 signsAGENT 12 battles
"suit yourself." he forms a bottle of aquafina for karimi in the cage, sipping at his own tea and settling back into his chair. "no, nothing is shiny." he leans back, crossing his legs. he smiles. "ready for a bit of a story time?"
"how'd...how'd you do that?" the conjuration was a little too precise, even for this creepy-ass castle. she slaps herself. fuck, ow. okay, not dreaming. legit kidnapped. this agent is also conjuring things so easily when karimi couldn't even manage a door the last time.
wait... maybe if she tried reaaaaaly hard...
ntmL07T0 <20 bars open up
NOPE.
"fuck you too" she yells at the cage. the cage doesn't yell back.
fuuuuck how long is she gonna be trapped in here?
"i feel like you're gonna tell it to me anyway, mister kidnapper. god, is every one of you agents a kidnapper? got a fetish for girls in lab coats or somethin'?" first neo, now her? <5 infection check
leave my corpse to rotI PLAY grayson lumina
alex faysal
addi monet
luke hopeTRAINER fossil, dust, ebon, venomBREEDER 307 eggsRANGER 4 signsAGENT 12 battles
"well aren't you just a ball of positivity." alex said, raising an eyebrow. "you were so curious so i brought you here. and i know if you were left to wander by yourself, well. i'm not the most dangerous thing here."
the door to the room was ajar, and a powerful salamence flew past, roaring through the halls. alex could understand, it was just looking for something to drink.
"this used to be a thriving land one day. but humans are greedy. they sucked everything from this place, and this is the empty husk of a place left." he set his tea cup on the desk. "we can conjure things, but nothing complex. i could not ask for precious metal ore. perhaps ages ago, i could have."
leave my corpse to rotI PLAY grayson lumina
alex faysal
addi monet
luke hopeTRAINER fossil, dust, ebon, venomBREEDER 307 eggsRANGER 4 signsAGENT 12 battles
"no." he sips again at his tea. "the land is like a parent to scourge. humans may have engineered the virus, but the land supports us. we ask for things, envision them with our mind. the virus within us hears, resonates to the land, and the land produces what it can."
alex stands and walks around, over to the window looking out into the land. "it's hell, in a way, but scourge are not the condemned here. it is here we find home with our others." he turns back to look at karimi. "are you sure you don't want some tea? perhaps something to eat?" a smirk then appears on his face. "regular human food, of course."
"okay, so if this land is so great to y'all, then why don't you guys just stay here? why go out to pillage and murder?"
karimi tells herself that she can't understand this line of reasoning at all, but that's a lie. decima town had given her everything that a girl could possibly want, yet she yearned for the world. she didn't want the humdrums of a small town, and the quiet could never contain her.
she can't imagine spending an eternity in a place like this. that's not what a home is for.
karimi compromises. "okay, can't y'all go out without all the pillaging and murdering? is that wired into you like all the other scourge? cos either y'all are really good at faking sanity or you could just. choose to sit tight like the rest of us, yanno?"
something about alex's question throws her a bit. "what, don't you eat normal human food?"
...agents aren't cannibals too, are they?
suddenly, the steak that batin offered her at sol city becomes a little more omnious. YUEK9EGx <5 infection check
leave my corpse to rotI PLAY grayson lumina
alex faysal
addi monet
luke hopeTRAINER fossil, dust, ebon, venomBREEDER 307 eggsRANGER 4 signsAGENT 12 battles
"the land is a difficult place." says alex, setting down the tea. "it wears down the mind. makes you mentally exhausted. if you spend too long here, it's difficult to sleep, even when you return to the normal world. hence why i couldn't sleep in bacchus gym." he pours a bit more tea for himself, as well one for karimi, offering the dainty tea cup to her through the bars.
for a researcher, alex finds karimi incredibly dim. "i was in bacchus gym to isolate myself. i infect pokemon simply by being near them. in the gym, it was safe." he sips at his tea. "i know what it's like to lose a loved one to scourge."
ismael wasn't dead, but alex was dead to him.
"i prefer alfredo really. i'm considering becoming a pescatarian. but no, pokemon are not to my tastes. sonata however, is different." sonata perks up. "i take him out to feed. it is like a pyroar who hunts and kills to eat. sonata is not a vicious killing machine to gorge himself on pokemon. he eats enough to survive, to fill his stomach, and stops." alex forms a bowl of porridge for karimi.
"this will be easy on the stomach. i do not know how your stomach will react here in the land. something simple should do." sonata waddles out of the room into the hall to find something to eat as well. alex forms a plate of cajun alfredo for himself.
the smell of food doesn't intoxicate any scourge pokemon to come in. the two are left to themselves. "the scourge infected me. i chose to live."
oh yes, alex's explanation makes karimi totally grateful to be spending her time here. lovely place to be hosting a tea party - a world in which madness and sleeplessness could overtake her at any moment.
"yeah, totally safe except for the fact that there's still baccheans who are trying to get it back! there have been eos who've been wandering the gym for weeks" she doesn't think that alex has much of an excuse, but karimi wonders if playing the devil's advocate will get her anywhere.
"look, maybe you'd be a whole lot more believable if you'd just....quit hanging around the places where you're liable to be attacked? teleport away instead of returning fire against those who have every reason to be shit scared of scourge pokemon after what they've done? or just come back to civilization without the gengar maybe. he'd probably scare the piss out of kids and old people." or anyone, really.
oops, that wasn't really a thing to say in front of the gengar, is it. too late to take it back now.
she wonders if she should bring up the fact that a cure for humans has been developed. except she's not really in contact with that particular researcher anymore. oops.
(that's because you opted to get a doctorate in pokemon training, and not a degree devoted to ending this nightmare)
"well duh, basic population ecology is like... secondary school science." karimi isn't actually stupid or blind to the fact that the majority of people weren't vegetarians. "it's not about the ethics of how nature works! it's about the fact that people and entire towns are dying, and it's our job to reclaim them!" well, the towns at least. the dead can never be brought back. "we can't expect all the scourge to be like your gengar over there. people are dying, and i'm not about to sit on my ass here to debate this shit in this punk-ass castle."
fuck, she's really hungry. really, really hungry. karimi looks at the food with the expression of a sad puppy.
wy4EyTfA <30 gives in to the demands of her stomach
c'mon she's not about to trust him or this castle like that. strangely enough, castle forlorn is a lot less terrifying this time around when there's someone sitting in front of her who actually knows their way around.
karimi still hasn't given up on leaving this creepy ass place. at least the gengar is gone now. "look, maybe i'll put in a good word for you on the account of good behavior if you ditch this castle and get me out of here. i mean...you seem sane enough.how'd you get infected anyhow? i mean you don't see entire refugee populations scourgifying in front of our eyes, not the way that pokemon do."
leave my corpse to rotI PLAY grayson lumina
alex faysal
addi monet
luke hopeTRAINER fossil, dust, ebon, venomBREEDER 307 eggsRANGER 4 signsAGENT 12 battles
"it was abandoned when i arrived." alex ate some of his pasta before stopping. "sonata has been with me since i was a child. he was a gift from my mother." sonata wanders back in from numerous calls of his name, sitting down beside alex to feast on a corpse.
each word out of karimi's mouth makes alex think less and less of her. his eyes are hard when she asks about how he became scourge. "i was part of the virus development to make pokemon stronger. i was infected." there's a pause. "as well as my brother."
he remembers his mother holding a gas bomb with a manic look in her eye, ismael tucked under her arm. "the virus is what saved his life when my mother attempted to kill them both." alex looks over to the plate of food and adds a bit more to the smell, wafting and filling the room with a potent deliciousness. "eat. you will need energy to protect yourself should the time come to leave. i will not be the one to guide you back."
alex sighs and looks up to the ceiling at karimi's stupidity. he presses on the bridge of his nose, taking three deep breaths. "it is not the insane who are infected. it is anyone. proximity infects." he points out the distance between karimi and alex. "if i were to lay a single finger on you, your chances of infection greatly increase. the scourge seems to function similarly to a strain of ebola that has developed consciousness. it spreads to survive, but it kills the host. the only difference is, well, i don't need to be telling an eos this."
it's a narrative that karimi personally knew, except for a different ending. her medicham had not survived her. those wounds still feel as raw as they've ever been, and all that she could do was layer the cut with new victories (what will you do when the victories no longer come?).
karimi becomes quiet at his next words. a pax researcher. a real pax researcher. she had dreamed of this moment for so long, but she hadn't - she hadn't wanted the meeting to be under these circumstances. "why'd you do it? you did it because you wanted to help pokemon, right? you did it because you loved them right?" she's desperate. she's desperate and she knows it. what difference would it make if he does? would it make her wounds ache less? would it change anything in what has happened?
no. never, but somehow the answer still seemed all-important to karimi. if it's something that will lessen a belief in monsters, then she will take it.
"what?" her sisterly instincts flare at the mention of a younger faysal brother. "what happened to him? is he still alive?" she had never imagined that hades agents would have siblings. of course they didn't come from a yeast cell, but it was still a strange concept to apply to such misanthropic people. she recedes a bit when alex answers her question. "oh. that's um...good, i guess - wait, you're just gonna leave me here?" she eyes the door cautiously. "what am i gonna be using that energy for? beating back the scourge with my fists?" she might have stood a chance against something like a leavanny. a duskull or a metagross, not so much.
fuck, it's still food though. karimi finally decides to give in to weakness.
H0y4I2oE <50 food affects her infection roll
karimi probably should have been a little more frightened at the prospect of getting alex-cooties, but her curiosity manages to override that. "that can't be true! if that was true, then there wouldn't be so many dead people in the scourge territories! they'd all be immune to scourge predation! no, there's gotta be something else..."
a conscious virus? it seems absurd to karimi. a virus is defined by its ambiguous status as a nonliving unit. except there's been a lot of absurd things happening over the past year. this will have to be one of them. "why would the virus want you alive, then? the pokemon are plenty capable of killing people themselves! what's it need you guys for?" <5 infection check king
karimi had been laid down on a bed, alex had conjured one with satin sheets and a comfortable pillow. he had positioned her almost like a corpse, hands crossed over her chest. 
karimi does not sleep well in the land of nightmares. she wakes up with a start, sweat already gathering along the hairs on her neck.
