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!
out from the dusty workplace of bacchus town, into the abandoned workplace of pax institutes. it was the only place that J knew of that was properly equipped to handle the dissection of a dead scourge pokémon -- especially a pokémon as large as a camerupt.
even as he and neo stood outside of the building, there was something dark hanging in the air that he couldn't shake off. something that gnawed into his shoulder and wouldn't let go. before him, the water bubbled ominously.
his delibird lobbed a (present) into the water and watched it explode in a miniature geyser.
"If that alerts an army of scourge to our presence, I vote we leave the bird to hang." She pointed her 'dex at the delibird, but she was more interested in the mysterious workings of present, but unfortunately the pokedex didn't have much to say on the matter.
She climbed into the building through a wide-paned broken window, careful not to cut herself on the way in. She stood in what might've been a simple examination room. There was a large table, in any case, and broken plumbing for a once-functional sink and a small coolant tank.
J recalled the delibird, wordlessly agreeing with neo's opinion of hanging the bird out to dry. he entered the laboratory after her, and glanced around. the facilities were barer than he had imagined them to be. for a place where the scourge started, he figured that it had to contain some sort of more ... advanced equipment.
or perhaps the scourge destroyed them all in their rage. he shrugged away the thought and placed the virus ball pi sofia had given him on the desk. "a dead camerupt. it's been dissected before, so you'll have to excuse the missing liver or something." J had no idea what rome had extracted, but the other researcher was decent enough to leave it in relatively good shape for another one to inspect the carcass.
the skull had been drilled beforet though, and upon release, the camerupt's brain would have turned into black goo. (with this being his third time seeing a scourge and watching it being cut open live, J was already used to the sight.)
"The last researcher did a clean job," she commented. It was a compliment. Regina was a mess, and Neo was also a mess, but she also didn't care about more of the cleanliness and safety regulations that came along with the job. She broke scourge pokemon down like old cars.
This wasn't Neo's first rodeo. She took out a pair of gloves and wrapped a scarf over her nose and mouth. Time to play.
She went about her usual routine, first taking samples of various slices of skin, a bit of toe, a cut of tongue. Then she set about vivisecting the camerupt without all normal considerations of, well, not making a huge mess. Like the other scourge pokemon, everything seemed... mostly in order. Organs and bones were all in the right place. No glands were particularly enlarged or shrunken, although with the camerupt so long dead, it was hard to say for sure. If she had to draw conclusions, she'd admit that the eruptors on the camerupt's back seemed a bit more densely built than normal, maybe.
She sighed, discarding the gloves and lowering the scarf from her mouth. "It's basically normal. Almost. Besides for the black goop."
J nodded, glancing over the carcass before putting on gloves of his own. "whatever the black goop is, it's probably like blood to it," he hazarded a guess, before retrieving his treecko's pokéball. every time he had scourge samples around, he had to bring along the gecko. (might as well name the thing, right? but J hadn't bothered to.)
"should i burn it?"
the treecko was already ready to exhale flames, but J held a hand up to stop it from loosing the (dragonbreath) on the camerupt.
Neo had a deino that knew fire blast. All the same, she nodded. She cast a dismissive hand over the camerupt; it had served its purpose. "I'm done here. Let the treecko have its fun."
She sighed. "I've seen so many scourge cadavers, but it doesn't feel like we're putting a dent in their numbers."
once J's hand was removed from its line of sight, the treecko released its (dragonbreath). up until now, he was certain that it was the only thing the treecko knew how to do; it hadn't even really started using its pound attack. all the time it was just dragonbreathing all around.
"well," J said, returning the gecko, "if we knew where their hq was, it'd be easier." he figured it'd be somewhere in lake pax, where it all started. wild pokémon rarely gave up their territory without a fight; he saw no reason for the scourge to be any different.
"no," J corrected neo, "but knowing where they are centered in would help." he didn't know how to explain it, but it was more of a case where knowing where your enemy was helped. it'd be easier to avoid dropping into their hq and having a bad case of death by scourge.
"the main point is to know where they live, and eventually push them all back to one point." J didn't know how to explain it. "like a zoo. all animals in there. you know where they are, an animal escapes, you know where to return it to."
"I may go looking for it," Neo said, pondering the thought. Lake Pax hardly felt like her backyard, but she was familiar enough with the terrain to have a pretty decent chance of spotting things out of the ordinary. "If I'm lucky I'll stumble upon it."
She frowned at the zoo simile. "But animals aren't contagious. The state of being an animal doesn't carry. If we quarantined the scourge pokemon, can we really say it'd quarantine the scourge?"
"the idea is that you visit a zoo to see animals. you put the scourge somewhere and kill them off," J explained. he didn't really understand how the virus worked, but he attempted anyway. "humans don't become animals. animals can become wild and that's the hades virus."
J didn't know where he was going with it. he never was cut out for academic thinking.
"You mean we mass produce hyper beam TMs and unleash them all on the lake somewhere. Hm. If we're lucky, the impact of an army's worth of hyper beams may do the trick. But shepherding the scourge into one location sounds like a challenge."
By 'a challenge,' she meant that sounds impossible. Who knew though. A pack of particularly aggressive herdiers might be up for the task.
She didn't forget much of anything, but she could pretend he never said anything. But for once, Neo felt that she needed to say a few words. "I never asked. Are you from Kohaku?"
She kicked the scorched remains of the camerupt, and ashes blew up into the air. Neo turned to him. "We can't destroy Lake Pax, J. It's our lake. Our lake. We should be protecting it until we can't anymore."
Then she shrugged. "But we're not a very good job. Should go back to Bacchus--Bellona even," Neo muttered.
J wanted to say that the scourge was doing a better job at taking care of it than the people of kohaku, but held his tongue. what was the story he told to everyone again? right, the one with the debt.
"i ... don't know," he muttered, "eos picked me up one day in the hospital and paid for my bills. i'm in debt. literally."
he stared out of the lab's broken window and at the calm, peaceful lake. "i'd protect it, but i'd first go to the cities that are only starting to get scourged."
