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 wretched gala, as thalia had called it, wasn't as bad as it seemed on the surface. J had observed people who felt they deserved preferential treatment walk about in the gala, conversing only with those whom they thought was on their level. once he looked past that fact, he found that there was an equal amount of people who preferred to keep out of the limelight in the gala. namely, those who had chosen to come only because they were offered mystery eggs in return for their presence.
at the reception desk, he had been greeted with a small amount of fanfare. J thought that it was because they had mistaken him for someone else, and he was right. apparently, they thought he was someone else -- the heir to an old family name, or something along those lines. he'd only nodded and brushed past them wordlessly.
now that he had the time to knock back a few drinks, he started to glance through the crowd in search of someone; but given the amount of people present in the guild, he suspected that he wouldn't find the person he was looking for.
she had been loitering around the breeder's guild for awhile. her brother said that he would be here, and no matter what raza's become now, he wouldn't lie to her. he said that he would come, and karimi would wait for him for as long as it takes.
...except there's a lot of people here. finding him would be difficult. karimi recognizes more than a few faces in the crowds. it kind of helped that she was talkative to pretty much everyone that she met on the road.
including some weird bitter powder dude that she had met in a tavern.
"j!" she practically squeals as she catches sight of him in profile. "omigosh i'm so glad that you're okay" she practically tacklehugs him as she makes it to his side. karimi had called and gotten word from thalia about her wellbeing. she hadn't mentioned a thing about j. but that's okay, now that she sees that he's alright with her own eyes!
and then she remembers that she ... kind of ditched him in the land of nightmares. him and thalia both. "...sorry. the castle musta been...rough."
J's stature was undoubtedly one that was easily seen. he figured that once a blue-haired girl started making her way towards his general direction, she would be looking for him -- and he was proven right as she cried his name and awkwardly crashed into him. it was something of a hug, he supposed, but considering the situation he wasn't sure what it constituted as.
he took a step back. "i'm fine. i'm here," he said, baritone level and almost reassuring. oddly enough, she didn't strike a chord of recognition in his mind until she mentioned the castle.
involuntarily, he clenched his fist. his bone claws immediately unsheathed themselves, emerging from around his knuckles and into plain view. it was a reminder of what had happened in the castle; he had taken well to it, but it didn't mean that he was willing to live under the thumb of someone else.
he forced himself to relax, and the claws withdrew.
"we survived," said J, shrugging. "didn't need you."
had she hung around, J had a feeling that he would have ended up ripping her apart. thalia and her super strength -- and also the influence darwin had over her was immense. this girl wouldn't have survived.
neo said something about j, all those months ago didn't she? she said that being around j was like going home. for the first time, karimi thinks that she kind of knows what she meant. she thinks that it doesn't matter what she's done or where she's been - a home is home, all the same.
the new claws are a little surprising, though. "woah-"
at least... at least j had some control over them this time. karimi wills herself to relax. she can't cause a scene, not for something like this. "yeah....yeah, you...didn't." her face feels frozen into place, and the breeder's guild seems to drop ten degrees. "sorry, i just... i didn't want to fight you and thalia too..." that would have been the absolutely worst scenario. killing the scourge is one thing. if she had clashed with thalia and j back then - if she had clashed with her friends and something happened, she's not sure if she could have forgiven herself -
(so it was better to leave them?)
karimi didn't want to think about it. "i've...i've gotten a lot stronger since then." she says, as if it means anything now. as if she knows exactly how much stronger she's gotten. "next time, i'll... i'll succeed for sure"
hearing his thoughts affirmed by the girl was an improvement, he supposed. she had been remarkably foolish; his memories of their time in the land of nightmares was slightly warped, but he hadn't forgotten the time when her gardevoir had pried into his mind. it hadn't been a welcome intrusion. had the gardevoir stayed longer, it too, would have fell to certain might.
"did you think you could win?" J asked. he didn't think that she could. he was a mediocre fighter himself, but he saw himself as better than this researcher. their battle against the drifblim wasn't exactly a prime showcase of abilities. he judged from their brief encounter in the nightmarish land.
he glanced away as she elaborated. a lot stronger didn't mean anything in the face of the likes of hashr and darwin. he also didn't care if she would succeed the next time.
J was certain that the next time would never happen. even if he did, he would bring thalia and not her. it wasn't easy to forget the disparity in strength -- literally, too. thalia had demonstrated inhuman powers and he himself did, too.
"hm," he grunted, if only to acknowledge that he had heard what she had said.
"...it wasn't my first time against a giratina. granted, that one was vaccinated and fully regimented." fighting magnolia had not been the high point of her researcher career, but j had a right to know about her estimations. "i've fought enough scourge to adjust my model for scourgification, and i've seen a little of what you could do at pal park." karimi didn't go so far as to assume that it was all that j could do. a friend that thalia trusted enough to drag into the land of nightmares probably didn't need to go full-out for a pack of drifblim.
"thalia was my unknown factor, the trainer that i didn't get to observe. never met a real deoxys either. would have taken us a few hours, but...i think we could have taken them without getting completely wiped out." although truth be told, karimi doesn't think that they would have lasted hours. maybe even she would have ended up being possessed by a genesect or something.
"had i been alone... " alone, with her allies turned against her. the thought makes her feel cold. "we might have...wiped each other out before we even touched the scourge pokemon." or rather, thalia and j might have wiped her out with their pokemon, but karimi decided that wasn't a constructive way to be framing this conversation. these are her friends, and they would never think about doing anything to her in the waking world. that's what's important.
"...i'm glad that everything turned out okay." well. maybe not completely okay, seeing that j still had some oddities from the land of nightmares with him, but his heart still beat and that's what karimi really cares about. "...is there anything that i can do to make up for that adventure? any vaccines you need?" it wasn't much of an offer, but it was something. vertigo
J held no sympathy nor empathy for what karimi had to say. there was something overly sentimental and too much thinking involved with this researcher. it was a complete difference from the type of researcher he was used to: calm, calculated and methodical. perhaps even cold and distant when dissecting corpses, and talked with interest when faced with cadavers and carcasses. especially in the face of scourge and all the darkened, dead faces that he had gotten used to.
he wasn't interested in listening to her talk about being able to take something down. one didn't trifle with legendary pokémon and expect to escape unscathed. funny, how she offered vaccines at the end of her spiel. he had little need for those. and besides, he could easily afford many of them.
unknown factors and variables and constants and whatever. he brushed it all off as science, and it was very much apparent that he cared little for them. he could easily have been a researcher - had the role model, had the innate ability, had the drive - but he hadn't chosen that job.
he realized he would have liked to have caught her during the pursuit ordered by hashr. caught her within his grasp, torn her to shreds because he could and because he wanted to.
it would have been cathartic.
J exhaled. this was a gala. this wasn't the land of nightmares. this was him in a conversation with an acquaintance. this wasn't the time for his thanatos to rise. this was the time his thanatos awoke though. this wasn't the time to think about such things. this was the now.
he shrugged, looking out at the crowd that congregated in the center of the guild. he plucked a wineglass off an attendant's tray as she passed them by, and drank wordlessly.
if he thought that all researchers were careful and and calm, that's a sign that j has spent too much time hanging around neo. karimi is neither of those things - she sees the researcher life as a constant struggle. the world never stops trying to prove her theories wrong, and she's surmounted an uncountable number of failures to get to this point.
she's still here. she's standing at mercedes' gala as a successful researcher, and karimi thinks that it must mean something.
(righteousness? power? she's quite the whig historian.)
the silence drives her crazy (j's silence - the gala remains in full swing in the background). it wasn't something that ever sat well with karimi. it meant that she has to take a guess at what he's thinking at this moment, and none of her guesses are particularly pleasant.
so she stops guessing.
"so um." she attempts a bit of small talk. key word being attempts. "you ever think about filing those nails?"
J finished his glass of wine and set it back atop a server's tray as they walked past him. he didn't really care for any sort of conversation after that. he continued to watch the crowd.
he eventually pushed off the wall he was leaning on and melted into the mass of people. he didn't exactly cut an intimidating figure; there was something uncanny about J's ability to melt into a crowd that appeared to outclass him from a distance. dressed in a suit, he didn't look that much different from them.
