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!
After parting from Ignatius, Sabina had gotten hopelessly lost. She'd debated calling him on her C-Gear, but the thought of confessing to him her incompetence made her stomach churn.
(She wasn't entirely sure she even had a signal, anyway.)
So she'd kept on trekking forward, not entirely sure as to where forward was leading her, until she'd ended up back exactly where she'd encountered him in the first place; Messor Rock. Ignatius was long gone, however, when she scanned the area telepathically, which was something of a relief.
But she wasn't alone. Her mind snagged on another, and it drew her attention sharply. She'd never felt something quite like that before--Sabina trailed after the aura in curiosity.
Raza’s skin was practically prickling in anticipation. He didn’t need the reports to tell him this place was under attack from the Scourge. The signs were everywhere. The scent. The very feeling of it. It was repulsive overall, but it made his blood boil. The desire to destroy those corrupted, twisted creatures was strong enough to corrupt and twist him as well. His mind flitted without pause. Snippets of his past, flashbacks of the most horrible moments. Blood. The smell of it, the look of it. Screaming. Every kind of screaming. His parents. His grandmother. His pokemon. The scourge. Himself. His siblings. Sobbing and pain. Such pain. The loss of everyone. Of everything. His family, his home, his pokemon, his city. Loss of himself. Pieces of his flesh gone. The most incredible desire to destroy and kill, with such focused intent, it might have been from a Scourge pokemon were it not for the young man now approaching down a small and rough pathway.
Despite the incredible turmoil of his thoughts, Raza looked remarkably calm on the outside. He stopped upon spotting the young woman, face impassive. Behind him, the trailing Totodile and Cubone also paused, peering around the Ranger’s legs. Raza’s jaw was tense with barely subdued rage, but a flicker of his gaze around showed there to be nothing worth killing. No infected, not yet. Instead he nodded his head to her in greeting, perfectly polite if not a bit stiff. “Good afternoon.”
She suppressed the desire to gag and smiled slightly at him. Sabina had seventeen years of experience in blocking other people, but the images from this man were still something.
"A good afternoon to you as well," Sabina said, looking at his vaccinated pokemon. She'd not encountered any EOS members with such tormented thoughts, but then she hadn't encountered many at all for that matter, and she supposed there would always be the types who lost everything and decided to fight back.
Sabina herself knew she was not that kind. Whether it was a regret or not was of no concern. Still, she supposed she ought to say something. Words of encouragement or condolence, at the least.
Raza stiffened more, if that was actually possible. He blinked, very slowly, once. His losses? Which ones? That wasn’t the most pressing matter. How did she know of the losses. Just thinking about loss brought many of his unpleasant thoughts back into sharp focus. Terrible flashes of carnage and death. The images of his parent’s faces seemed very pressing, constantly flashing to mind, a look of incredible horror on both of them as they were in the process of being devoured alive.
Raza still maintained a passive façade. “What are you talking about.” Even though it was technically a question, the way he worded it sounded more like a quiet demand. His Totodile tilted his head curiously at the young woman, wondering at her mysterious sentence.
"Don't play coy with me," Sabina said. She was staring at him intently now, turning over the pieces in her mind. "Evident scarring, and you were swamped with flashbacks even before I brought the topic up. It's not my area of expertise, but I'm frankly horrified that someone let you out on your own in this state, much less gave you pokemon--vaccinated at that, so you're EOS? A trainer, maybe? Suffering from PTSD would be my diagnosis, although we'd need a more thorough evaluation."
She actually seemed to have forgotten the man in question was standing right in front of her, rattling on without taking a breath.
"Have you fought the scourge since you were attacked? If not, I'd be interested in observing your first encounter with them."
Raza stared at the woman blankly, still blinking very slowly. Who was being coy? She was commenting on his inner thoughts. How did one properly respond to something like that? He let the stream of babbling wash over him, only mildly paying it any attention. For the most part, she seemed to be talking in order to listen to herself. His input was apparently unneeded.
He wouldn’t argue with her about having scars and PTSD. The scars were obvious enough, and after what he’d witnessed, mental scarring was just as likely. It didn’t much bother him, and thus her ‘diagnosis’ didn’t illicit much of a response from him.
Near the end, however, his thoughts went unnaturally quiet. Completely disconnected. “All I need to do is destroy the Scourge.” After another heartbeat of absolute nothingness from his mind, the usual din of fuzzy ‘background noise’ came back. His subconscious running about in a somewhat normal state. “My name is Raza Karimi. I’m a Ranger. I have yet to encounter the Scourge, but it is obvious they are in the area.” He answered her questions politely enough. He wasn’t sure how to go about that last comment though. “I would not think to contact you before a battle. Even if I did, you would not get there fast enough. If you are interested, you are free to follow me as long as you want, it doesn’t affect me.”
"Wonderful," she said. "My name is Sabina Heron. Microbiologist. My specialty is virology, hence why I'm out here. I'm interested in studying the scourge in order to work on a cure. I'll stay out of your way should you encounter any--I'm not interested in dying--but I would ask to reserve the right to defend myself if I'm attacked."
What she really wanted was to get one of her pokemon infected for testing, but that didn't needed to be stated, did it? It seemed like something people might take the wrong way. Even the other scientists back at the lab had seemed rather taken aback when she told them her plan.
He nodded very slightly in response to her explanation. That would make sense, and he didn’t give her reasons for it a second thought. For his part, the cure didn’t really interest him either. He simply wanted…no. He simply needed to fight them, to kill them. Until they were gone, or he died, whichever came first. The solutions of others meant nothing to him at this point, he was too far down his own path. “A pleasure to meet you, Sabina. Do as you like.” He bent slightly in what was probably a bow, still surprisingly polite despite the hollowness in his voice. It was good she felt capable enough to defend herself. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, promise to protect her. That wasn’t his goal. Even his sister had questioned him on it - “wasn’t the reason for becoming a Ranger to protect people?” No, for him it wasn’t. If people and pokemon were spared the horrors of his past due to his efforts, that was wonderful. But it wasn’t his reasoning, and he didn’t think he’d be able to tear himself away from the thrill of killing scourge in order to protect a civilian.
One of the more interesting things was the silence of his own companion pokemon. Neither of them had attempted to speak to their partner for the duration of the conversation, as if Raza’s own unnatural stillness had rubbed off on them. Though to be honest, the Cubone was simply too uncertain enough to speak up. Raza had taken very good care of him so far but, there was something unsettling about the human. Totodile just seemed content to match his partner’s quiet nature. He could tell, via their link, that his human was deeply troubled. But there was not much he could do, other than try and keep Raza alive through this self-imposed suicide mission.
She smiled at him and carefully memorized every word she could extract from his head. How very, very fascinating. She did hope he had an interesting reaction to the scourge he would inevitably encounter instead of just being slaughtered brutally. Picking apart his physical remains would be less fun than rummaging through what remained of his sanity, she was quite sure.
"A pleasure to meet you as well," she said. "Just go back to whatever you were doing before we ran into each other. I'll be so silent you won't even know I'm there."
Raza’s skin was practically prickling in anticipation. He didn’t need the reports to tell him this place was under attack from the Scourge. The signs were everywhere. The scent. The very feeling of it. It was repulsive overall, but it made his blood boil. The desire to destroy those corrupted, twisted creatures was strong enough to corrupt and twist him as well.
Raza stiffened more, if that was actually possible. He blinked, very slowly, once.
He nodded very slightly in response to her explanation. That would make sense, and he didn’t give her reasons for it a second thought. For his part, the cure didn’t really interest him either. He simply wanted…no. He simply needed to fight them, to kill them. Until they were gone, or he died, whichever came first. The solutions of others meant nothing to him at this point, he was too far down his own path.
