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!
The rain fell from the sky in jagged bursts, but the woman walking barefoot through Grimer's Court didn't seem to notice. The other denizens didn't seem to notice her either. She might as well have been the rain. Most of them knew her, and knew even on her bad days (and this was a bad day indeed) it was better to leave her alone.
Zeyn stepped into an alley and stared at the water falling from the sky, trying to remember what it was called.
she keeps her head down, careful not to meet the glassy eyes of the living ghosts around her. maybe it's because she didn't want to feel like she is looking into a mirror (she cheats and looks anyway - purely out of concern for her own safety of course).
phillip might have caused a panic. physis has no desire for panic, not when it already feels as if the world is trying to drown her into a gutter. physis has little choice but to stow him into a half-rusted pokeball.
for now, she only needs a place to rest. physis fights to breathe through the rain, and it is a fight after what she's been through in ceres forest - that dammed olivia and her volcarona. she tries not to brush against the open wound on her side, beaten with poison. physis could probably draw constant fairy signs to heal, but only enduring the poison will make it go away as of generation iv in the games. she will last. she has to, up to the very last breath. physis doesn't trust herself to teleport properly, not like this.
the agent takes furtive glances at her surroundings - this is not her place, has never been her place. this is what daniel had worked so tirelessly to protect her from. at the same time, it might as well be any place. an agent has no home outside of the land of nightmares.
dizziness starts to take root, but she presses on.
F2IuyIpb <50 she falls into a puddle in front of zeyn 2tsunz
The woman falls into a puddle at Zeyn's feet and a voice snaps in her ear like the winter winds. Zeyn swings the sword, battered and blunted, cutting the air where no one stands and no one speaks.
"????!" she said without hope. The voices had never listened before, but this one fell silent, as if in thought. She fixed her eyes upon the body before her. The voice whispers a name.
Zeyn prodded her with the tip of the blade.
"Sophia," she said, tripping over the unfamiliar sounds.
the impact doesn't do many favors for her lucidity, but the andrenaline that physis feels upon hearing her birth name is far sharper than the woman's sword.
that doesn't mean that the sword against her skin is an easy thing to ignore.
almost instinctively, the capture disk releases itself from her styler. physis wills the bug sign - string shot into being. it is the first sign that comes to mind after the battle with olivia and not fissure, thankfully. 2tsunz
Instinct was a truth that the dead had not yet taken from her. Zeyn stepped aside. It was not a fluid motion, like the water she could no longer name. It was practiced, mechanic.
"Dhaheekun," she spat. The voice chided her. She lashed out again with the sword, and again she found only emptiness.
But she relented.
"He says to take pity on you, and care. He speaks with a soft voice, this dead man, and I will listen for now. If he keeps his promise."
a year ago, sophia may have dismissed her words as the ramblings of a madwoman. today, physis is a woman who listens to the whispers of the land in her sleep.
arceus, and she's still half-drowning in a puddle. her wound throbs, a fierce reminder of the reason why she's even here at all. physis does not yet comprehend the gravity of the woman's words - how could she? the dead have no meaning to her, none at all.
(for sophia is the keeper of the dead)
physis does not take her hand, but she manages to right herself up into a standing position nevertheless. her eyes do not leave the woman for long, not in grimer's court. she puts a few steps' distance between them.
"who sent you?" the capture disc continues whirring in place on the ground, an endless supply of ripples. "what do you know?" 2tsunz
Zeyn tilted her head to the side. Her eyes were glazed, and they watched somewhere far beyond Sophia as she listened.
"No one sends me," she said finally, stirring. Her free hand clenched into a fist, nails drawing blood from her palm. "No one. I outran. I outran all of the dead."
She'd thought if she left home, outpaced the battlefield, they would be left behind. She had been wrong. And now what? What had she left? The memories she knew should be there were blurs.
But the voice pleaded with her, promised.
"He says his name is Daniel, and you are his lost little sister."
Zeyn smiled. Blood ran in a rivulet down her wrist.
sophia wants to yell at her, scream at her no one escapes the dead, but physis only feels a small bit of kinship from those words. still, she does not lower her guard.
when the woman finishes speaking, physis feels numb to the cold rain, numb to her claims. she averts her eyes from the medium, averts her eyes like there are a set of eyes to avoid.
"...not lost." she lowers her gaze until she is practically boring holes into the concrete. "thirty-first street. grimer's court. proserpina city, kohaku. physical plane." unless she passed out on the street somewhere awhile back, but physis deems that rather unlikely.
still, she cannot look at zeyn. not while she fights an unbearable guilt that makes her want to retch. physis does not trust the things that this woman says, so why is she so afraid?
"216 East 57th Street, Bellona Hills. Nerio. That's where you should be." The words were ripped out of her, and even before the last syllable had faded in the air, Zeyn was howling, turning away from Sophia.
"Never again," she growled, wet bangs falling in her eyes. "Never, you ?????. I will kill myself and damn you to the everlasting flames myself, if you do. I will speak, if you tell me, but no more."
She seemed unconcerned she was talking animatedly to the brick wall of the alley.
she had been to bellona hills, seen what that plot of land has become.
"that's no home." she spits out, unaware and uncaring of whom she's even talking to. that's how the truth usually worked. "that's not even fit to be called a grave."
nausea sets in, and physis struggles to stay conscious. maybe that's why she's humoring this line of thought at all.
"are you...a medium?" she had heard of them in di manes, certainly. sophia had never requested their services herself. even before the scourge invaded, she had always been determined to look forward (or was she only afraid of looking into the past?). "...why would he speak to you?"
why would he speak to her? after what's she's become, what she's done, what she's thrown away?
Zeyn sheathed her sword without thinking about the action.
"I don't know what a medium is," she said. "But they all talk in my ears, all day long, the gibbering voices of the dead. It has always been that way. I don't know who he is, I don't care, but now he talks as well in my ear with words about you, and promises to keep the others away. That's all I want."
she's probably starting to look a little blue. nevertheless, she spits out the words that need to be said.
"he is not obligated to his promises and you are not obligated to him service." even in her sickly state, sophia knows only one thing. he should not have died. "those who do not have the power to save themselves have no right to be saved by others."
it's a little difficult to see who she is addressing when her targed audience is a dead man, but it is a universal truth. these days, physis feels as if she is damning herself with every step, but to be crushed from behind would be a worse fate. she will not be crushed underfoot.
suddenly, her fever breaks. her body feels heavy, but physis manages to draw the fairy sign - moonlight.
she will not be saved by another, not again. she will pull herself out of the mud, or not at all.
Zeyn burst into laughter, knife-sharp and cold as winter.
"Moralizing from the gutter? The people of Kohaku are truly incredible. I have never visited a region that was full of quite so many important people. There seems to be no one here without a profound platitude about to fall from their lips."
She folded her arms across her chest, watched Sophia with the same dispassionate glazed gaze she affixed to everything.
"And yet despite your importance, I don't follow your orders." This woman was far too weak to earn one moment of Zeyn's hesitation. "And your brother strikes a better bargain than you; he knows how to humble his tongue as well."
"i speak to my brother, if he is here." she's well aware that this medium's 'gifts' are what allow her this dubious opportunity. "i know little of him and even less about you. i am far more lucid now, if that helps."much better now that she wasn't suffering from a severe case of poisoning.
sophia supposes that there are worse men that the medium could be bargining with. she stands with a practiced dignity that she would often perform for her brother. the last patriarch of their family. she does not do it for this woman, but for a ghost that she cannot even see. (that's right, sophia. pretend that you are a woman of any real worth)
her heart would tremble if she did not speak the truth.
"brother, you should not have paid for my salvation back then." she closes her eyes, since there is no place to be looking at. not while speaking to him. "now, there is no salvation to be had. help this woman if you wish, but not out of any obligation to me."
her smile is bitter, and her laugh even more so. "i have no wish to make a liar out of you."
i know it hurts to burn
