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'd never been to Lake Pax before, and after this trip, Thalia isn't sure that she ever wants to visit again. The entire experience has been cold and miserable, sleeping without a fire to avoid drawing scourge pokemon down on her, sleeping without a tent for the same reason, taking abominable watch shifts with her Pokemon at all hours so they still don't get jumped and killed and eaten (not necessarily in that order, unfortunately) and every other trainer she's met so far has been obviously and indefinably warped by their prolonged exposure on the front lines.
This is what you signed up for, idiot, she thinks, poking the ground with a stick as she crouches at what passes for tonight's camping place. Her eevee is curled into a tight ball a few feet away, his ears flickering as he dozes shallowly, but she has no doubt the slightest out of the ordinary nose could have him on his feet in milliseconds. This is what your future is.
J isn't the average trainer. he isn't the same as the rest of the people who signed up for the eos program, he tells himself. he's here for a purpose, and his purpose is to fight the scourge. once that's over and done with, he has no job. every time he stops to rest, he thinks -- does he really want to continue fighting? does he want to see every single one of those hades pokémon eradicated?
as the days pass, he has trekked from juno to lake pax. staying the night by the lake is a bad thing to do, but he has no choice. his pokémon don't, either. wing is almost always in the air, circling it. thorpe practices its kicks on a fallen tree, repeatedly bashing it until its legs are sore and its eyes watery with tears. the rest of J's team is similarly solemn.
their last encounter with scourge sobered them. the fight had been tough and they won because of strength in numbers. by the time they chipped away at their opponents until only one was left standing, the numbers were lopsided to the point that the hades-jynx chose suicide over a fight.
J saw movement in the distance, and gestured for wing. the skarmory flew down, taking care to land without its usual flourish and clatter of blade-feathers. "what is that?" he asked, and sent cross along with the bird to take a look.
the beldum soon returned with a reply via mental-link: a pink-haired trainer and her pokémon. cross saw well in darkness, its mechanical eye providing more vision than heat-vision goggles could ever hope to. do i make contact?
it didn't take long for J to put two and two together.
let her know i'm here.
and cross did as it was told, attempting to notify thalia that someone she knew was around, and helpfully added that they might as well camp together to spare both of them a night with an atrocious amount of sleep.
The telepathic contact is shocking at first, and Thalia jabs her stick into the ground violently on instinct, jerking the eevee awake, but once she realizes what's going on, she's grateful.
Making her way through the distance between them without making enough noise (read: any noise at all) to bring the scourge down on her head is annoying, but doable, and Thalia picks her way into J's camp with a grateful wave and a somewhat sheepish smile. At her side, the eevee eyes the other pokemon carefully, as if he's worried they might be enemies in disguise.
J raised a hand in greeting as cross returned to his side together with wing. the skarmory was tired from all the patrolling it had to do, but with a steely glint in its eye, the trainer could see that the bird still had a lot of fight left in him.
"stay," he told the bird. thalia was here, they'd defeated scourge before, everything was going to be fine. (he hoped.) he turned to thalia, and nodded towards a flattened piece of grass that was safe to sit on.
unlike the other trainer, J's camp had a small fire going, courtesy of his charmeleon's flaming tail. it wasn't much, but it was better than being in complete darkness and jumping at any sort of movement.
"no. it's been surprisingly peaceful." come to think of it, bacchus had been rumored to be rife with scourge, but he had seen none. it was the same for lake pax. "you?"
Thalia shrugs. "I helped out with the refugees at Bacchus, but that was the closest I've gotten since then. It's been weirdly quiet, I don't really like it."
refugees? he'd seen none at bacchus either. then again, he had been underground most of the time with neo in her makeshift laboratory, skinning the donphan corpse and making sure it was disposed of properly.
"it's weird that there's been no movement from them," J said, and glanced around out of wariness. "do you think they know we've killed two?"
Thalia's stomach dropped at the thought. "Do they think like that?" she asked. "The jynx didn't even seem phased when the donphan dropped dead beside her. And if they like to fight--if anything, that might make them more eager. I dunno. I'm not a researcher though. I couldn't even handle watching the jynx get cut open."
"no one said they don't have hive minds," J pointed out. nothing had popped up saying as much, and neo had made no mention of it. (funny how neo became his source for information.)
"you cut open the jynx? my donphan was burned by dragonfire."
"Well, not me. There's a researcher I know from when we were kids, and another I kind of put in an awkward situation, so I let them have at it. Didn't seem to find out much besides the fact that they've got weak stomachs. You get anything good off the donphan?"
"if anything i'm sure it was better off ashes than dead." the donphan had taken quite a while to burn, even with draconic flames.
"i'm not a researcher either. i didn't understand the significance of ripping off its exoskeleton or sticking hands in, elbow deep to touch its organs."
"Pfft, how could you not see the appeal in taking a power drill to that jynx's skull? Turned out to be nothing in there but black goo, for all that's worth. At least they used gloves."
She rolled her neck to the side, resisting the urge to get up and stretch. "Are you planning to stay here and fight, or move on?"
"black goo," J chatot'd after thalia. a similar sort of liquid had oozed from the donphan in place of blood. it was all over the place and burned so slowly, neo's wobbuffet had splashed about in self-defense. "that was horrible to dispose of," he commented.
"staying here just the night before i move on to decima. and beyond. one night here's enough."
"I guess I'm doing the same thing," Thalia said weakly. "I don't really know what I'm looking for. It seems like I should stay here and fight the scourge--fuck, that's my job. Doesn't feel right though. So I'm moving on."
