Bitter Work 3.1
October 19th, 2022.
I drifted in the current, watching the scene before me with a critical eye, the stuff of dreams whirling past me in a steady current, shepherded by the Baku, their pink floral skin shining with the light of the Dreaming. Guarding the gates of the sleeping, from the monsters that dwell within them.
I could see a young man and an older one investigating a strange plague that had infested the land.
“And nothing has changed in their water or food?” There was a scowl on the older man’s face, as he gazed at the black sores and illnesses of local domestic pig beasts, their fiery fur barely able to do more than summon sparks.
“Nothing besides a raid from those Waajin savages…” The rancher looked anxious at the looks the two foreign men gave him.
“Perhaps they brought an illness with their raid, if their own cattle were sick…”
“Nothing explains what that filth did to—” the rancher cut himself off. “It makes more sense than a kamuiy of that nature settling here. Our family would never dishonor itself and invoke their wrath.”
The two men convinced the rancher to let them walk his land, while keeping a close eye on the strongest victim of the plague, a dodrio with sharp eyes filled with indignant fury, biting at the rancher with any opportunity.
They followed where that strong bird of the land had grazed and watered itself, and the two adventurers felt the wrongness in the world, disrupted and tainted, a beacon for the Shugo Tenshi to bring itself into the physical.
And they found a young woman, declared missing after the raid, a war band of dishonorable soldiers had left their mark… and her family refused to be dishonored.
They argued with a grieving mother, who knew full well what her most honorable husband had done to protect themselves from the whispers of the town, who gave them what meager tools she had to guard the town from the ghost they had angered, the Angel of Azuma, full of well earned wrath.
To kill one with child was a great sin indeed.
The older man spoke. “Stay back, and protect Madame Luan.” He ordered sharply as the enraged spirit took shape and form and glorious purpose.
The creature before them was faded, stepping in two worlds at once, standing on nothing. It was a healer once upon a time, from the lands of the Occident, the Tabunne reborn as Shugo Tensei, a guardian angel, a doctor and healer even in death. A witch’s hat sat firmly on her head, arms folded behind her back as she offered a smile only an enraged messenger of death could give.
“You would guard a kinslayer, old smoke and broken promises, buried under grief and storms of sadness?” Witch lights danced around the ghost as she sang. “Child of the dragons, unhatched and unloved? Will you deny this old healer justice?
“No. But not like this, you are Shugo Tensei. In life you have healed even the damned, in death you guard the living. Mei’s murder is known, justice can be had, her proper rites given.”
She smiled with far too many teeth. “Then prove it to me, send your adopted child into battle and I will settle. I will rest once more.”
The old man blinked, and his nephew accepted the bargain, calling the three headed ranch bird into battle with a whistle.
The two monsters crossed paths and the battle began with a—
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I blinked awake, the clarity of the dream firmly stuck in my own head, and I took a deep breath, letting the memory consolidate, pointing out details and areas of strangeness and consistency. Ignoring some of the implications…
This was the first dream of that nature since we had arrived in Goruden and I wondered what had triggered it?
Strange dreams was a minor side effect of a certain slowking’s form of long range teleportation due to the exposure to the Dream World. But that was a far more specific dream than most, and I wondered if I had tapped into an old memory, a wisp of ideal, centuries old.
Those people… the nephew and uncle were Waajin, the village was Ebizu… so this was at least several centuries ago… and based on the style, maybe about five hundred years ago, when Galar, Risland, and continental Europa (Europe) had started the industrial revolution. Maybe something to do with that ghost type?
There were generally about… four kinds of ghosts, born from different circumstances and with various behaviors and structures. The Deathless, they were closer to natural spirits and bugaboos, concepts and emotions and ephemeral things taken form through certain physical mediums. Lots of pokémon besides ghosts had similar beginnings, but ghosts were the only ones that had it as a constant part of their life cycle rather than just their origin.
The Deathless included beings like shuppet, sinistea, and sandygast. Ghostly energies and essences taking hold of common objects like a lost toy, an old teacup or a sand castle, not far off from the concept of a tsukumogami or a ninety-nine year spirit though not all of them took control of objects. Some were just… made of ghostly essence stuff, like mimikyu, drifloon, litwick and duskull.
The next class wasn’t technically a separate thing, closer to a subdivision in truth. These were the Neverborn, the generations who were borne from unions between ghosts and any species compatible with them. They were the most populous of ghost-types, representing a large fraction of the collective population.
But not all of them since ghost types don’t tend to reproduce very often, usually through exchanging information through strange rituals. Sort of like sexual reproduction between single celled organisms. Kind of, it depends on the ghost-type.
Then there were the Dead, the souls of those with the determination and will to keep moving forward, with reasons to refuse to pass on. They were the rarest, and often amongst the most powerful, erratic and dangerous, especially if they had taken physical form instead of remaining as spirits within the Ghost World.
Pokémon like yamask, Galarian corsola, and revenant zoroark, like phantump and froslass and at one point dreepy in their earliest days. Technically any ghost-type could be one of the Dead, but certain species were known for it. The ghastly line was one, but their exact classification was muddled, were they Deathless with many Neverborn children, ghostly essence possessing toxic gas? Or were they the Dead returned to life in another form? Or were they the fourth category, and more mundane than one would think?
The last class was threshold ghosts, physical beings that had learned to tap into concepts and energies that related to ghosts and allowed them to have one foot in one world and one foot in ours. Pokémon like oricorio, spirit marowak, Sinnohan typhlosion, frillish, and decidueye. They weren’t actually ghosts, they were closer to mediums who had figured out how to draw on ghost energy.
Ghastly was annoying that way, was it a reborn soul, a whisper of ideal brought to life or a sentient mass of gas that had played the role so long it became true for them?
That ghost in my dream… It had been one of the Dead, a regional variant of audino that had first formed in Tohoku when their ancestors had fled from the west during the collapse of the Kingdom of the Vale. Hmm…
I should check that I’m not haunted or something, could be that just I got hit by residual emotion and memory-stuff but… stuff was weird in this reality.
To my chagrin the door to my room was opened without warning, and I blinked when I saw Happy slipping in with a smug expression.
“You are not avoiding your washing mister! A basic splash bath isn’t going to hurt you!” The door was almost torn out from its hinges as Akari barged in… while wearing only an ill fitting tank top and boxers. My attention was hyper-focused on her toned and curvy legs, and I could see her belly peeking out from her tank top.
Guh.
I pulled up my covers, and I could swear I heard my pokémon giggling from their pokéballs.
“Ahem?” I coughed to get their attention and the girl and fire pig froze in their wrestling match. “Can the two of you please vacate my room?”
Akari turned a lovely shade of red, but that didn’t change my opinion.
Privacy was important to me.
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After that little incident, the two of us had stepped out from our room in the Pokémon Center. It hadn’t taken us more than a few hours to walk to Goruden, and we had battled a lot of trainers on the way and inside the city. A few had actually been from Paldea… which I had been certain was the next generation since the moment I had looked up their regional Starters.
Fighting a floragato was an interesting experience, but I was now dealing with another issue when Akari had looked at my Trainer ID for reasons.
“We missed your birthday!” Akari sounded indignant, and I winced at her volume.
“I sorta… forgot about it? I was never very enthusiastic about it… and kinda had no friends for like two years… so it kinda fell to the wayside?”
Her expression told me that didn’t make her feel any better? Wait, why would I think that?
Akari placed her hands on her hips, pouting at me with her dark smoky eyes and her— nope. Skip. “Well we’re definitely going to do something for that, something small of course.” She circumvented my protest by taking into account what I wanted. “We can do something in the city, and I’ll get you something you like. How does that sound?”
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“It sounds better than a loud party at least,” honestly half the reason I hated parties was the noise. It was grating, painful and sapped my will to live, I just couldn’t do it. “Not sure where we’d even go?”
Akari offered a very unhelpful smile. “I know a place.”
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The Goruden Heritage District was a large mixed use area surrounding much older parts of the city, from what it had been much larger and more populous. With an average population density of about seven hundred per square mile, Goruden had a population of about thirty eight thousand.
Once upon a time, Goruden had been a city of over three hundred thousand souls with a splendor and glory that was every bit the equal of Ecruteak, ruled over by a samurai clan that had once dominated northern Nihoh for over a century.
It was eventually destroyed by the ruling elites of the Ecruteak empire, and that clan was erased from history, leading to the decline of Goruden as a new capital of a burgeoning kingdom. Honestly Nihoh was very strange overall, with a landmass area of over eight hundred thousand square miles, its… history was going to be rather different from the much smaller Japan it was a counterpart to.
For example, Japan had very little natural resources when it came to things like mineral wealth, such as oil, gas, and coal along with minerals like copper, iron and silver and gold. They didn’t completely lack them, but it wasn’t always enough when it came to keeping up with the demands of a modern industrialized nation.
The regions of Nihoh were a fair bit larger, and the existence of pokémon changed a lot of things when it comes to obtaining resources. Though certain realities hadn’t changed, for example their carrying capacity wasn’t suddenly six times greater because the wilds were far more inhospitable. You could only push so far without… consequences.
The total urban area of Nihoh was about… eighty two thousand square kilometers, or one and a half times the area of Japan… and they have about twenty thousand square kilometers of agricultural land, which with their yields being ten times greater lets them feed a population of about one hundred eighty million without a problem. However, that's about a quarter of the land usable by humans since being a 70% mountainous country has some drawbacks.
What was my point again?
“Brando.” I glared at Akari, and she smirked. “So Brandon and Brandy are fine but Brando isn’t?”
The taller girl towered over me, and I continued to glare. “Brando sounds terrible, Brandon is my name, and Brandy is a good simple nickname.” Changing my name wasn’t really in the cards, I liked my name, even if making some tweaks wasn’t out of line. Routine was rather important for me after all.
Anyways, this part of the district was well known for housing a rather large market square which was why Akari had brought me here. It was fantastical in person, and it was hard to focus on any one thing.
Stands, shops and people and most importantly pokémon dominate the wide old streets with a menagerie of color, sound and movement. Hollering merchants line the streets, customers approaching them, money changing hands with a flick of a trainer card or electronic device. I could see bird pokémon flying, starly and staravia and even rookidee and corvisquire. There were pidgey and delibird with packages, and huge pidgeot the size of small planes with whole pallets held in their talons.
The stands themselves are just full of stuff and interesting items. Jewels, textiles, food, berries, antiques and knick-knacks and other things. I even saw a clothing shop selling their wares with a machoke of all things wearing an elegant dress.
“So what kind of thing are you looking for?” Akari asked with her wide eyes and I pressed my lips together in thought. “A book maybe? Or something for your pokémon that fits your battle style?”
“Battle style?” I asked, I knew people had a certain… method of battle, but I wasn’t always good at asking questions.
Akari for example… she fought like a berserker, it was vicious and wild, ruthlessly exploiting openings that her own pokémon made, and when I thought back to battles she was very effective. She aimed to knock people off their guard, breaking a pokémon’s balance, by aiming moves at their feet or disrupting their movement. For example she had recently taught Happy Smokescreen and had used it to tear down her opponents with no mercy shown.
“Yeah?” Akari shrugged. “You’re kind of a mastermind trainer, you teach each of your pokémon a basic set of procedures, allowing for quick collective response, giving a standard operating procedure to fall back on. With your move classifications they’ve got a bunch of different ways to avoid getting caught out, but it can happen… so if someone freezes.”
“Bad things happen.” I admitted, but it was the best way I could manage, my reaction times weren’t the best, so I needed the time to think and strategize. “I’m compensating for my limitations, my mind is flighty and can take time to buffer. But I’m not stupid,” my nose scrunched up in distaste, hating how low my self esteem was. “So I try to plan out as much as I can beforehand, and watch the field to compensate for the greater complexities of a real battle.” The best way I could describe it was that I was the commander, while my team were my soldiers… but it’s magical creatures who are my friends.
“I’ve noticed, if it’s something you like you’ll put all your available energy into it.” Akari glanced around the crowd, chewing on her lip as she inspected store to store and stall to stall. “You’re kinda pig headed and stubborn though, and that can throw you off your careful plans.”
“True.” I didn’t disagree, I didn’t lack emotion as someone on the spectrum, I lacked the basic tools, and trying to shove a square into a round hole could be a recipe for disaster when it came to social interaction. I could explode pretty easily.
“There’s lots of markets like this in the bigger cities, though the largest and greatest tend to be in major port cities. They offer a lot of exotic goods, local foods, clothes, electronics, jewelry too. Plenty of trainers and pokémon, including some you can adopt from licensed merchants.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“Depending on the pokémon and their background, a common eevee egg could set you back fifty and ninety thousand pokédollars.” I flinched at the price, while it wasn’t that expensive, that was about the cost of a good TV, or a third to half a month’s rent. Which didn’t include a pedigree… which with pokémon was less inducing gross genetic deformities and more creating healthy living environments and providing them a good selection of mates and taking care of their needs. Pokémon weren’t stupid, and knew the consequence of a small gene pool quite well.
I stared at Akari. “How much can that increase?”
“I’ve seen some go for two hundred fifty thousand pokédollars or more.” Well that’s… my whole paycheck down the drain. About the equivalent of a really used car. “But… I remember you were looking for a poké-food processor weren’t you? Since your own old one kinda… melted?”
I nodded. “Turns out it was a lot less resistant to acid than they said it was… so when that grimer sat on it…” It actually pissed me off, because the device itself had clearly been over designed junk and that made me angry. “Figuring out how to make poké-pellets is gonna be a lot easier now.” While the common chow was basically canned food, poké-pellets was the standard when it came to creating a meal for a team.
They weren’t kibble, they were breaded pellets stuffed with ingredients, something like an empanada. It uses a special kind of multigrain flour, using many different varieties of grains, some mix of barley, wheats, oats, brown rice, and seeds. First you make the filling, in Mirko’s case, a mix of oats, vegetables and berries with preferred flavors, and smatterings of micro-bug for protein. Jericho has a lot of highly venomous herbs, root vegetables, berries and tauros and ekans meat.” The domestic variant of tauros was basically a dumb cow, while ekans was basically… well a snake.
Llayda gets various aquatic plants, berries, and seafood, mostly from effectively unnamed domestic species that were basically just animals with minor elemental powers. Which does explain why things named after animals exist… kind of. There were octillery, but there were also many lesser octopus species that took up the smaller niches. Sort of like the difference between a giant Pacific octopus, and the common octopus.
Akari had actually been teaching me how to make poké-pellets since she had seen the difficulties I was having, and the special pellets had interesting properties when it came to food preservation, they could last days on their own and closer to weeks and months in a cool environment. They lost some of their taste obviously, but it was a good option to turn them into rations.
My nose was suddenly poked, Akari silently chiding me with her expression. “I’m going to buy you one, an air fryer/dispenser/blender is a good tool to have. And an actual gift too.”
Well I wasn’t going to say no… she certainly had the money for it, even when it came to our total expenses. Food, water, rooming expenses whenever we got unlucky and Pokémon Centers were full, all the items and equipment they needed, clothing, potions and items.
With three pokémon, that was about… sixty thousand pokédollars… which sounds like a lot until you realize that’s the cost for three superpowered monsters with superpowers in a nation with minimum wage over twenty dollars an hour. And also accounts for keeping one’s pokémon, happy, healthy, and strong. Plus Jericho eats more than I do.
Accounting for… everything in terms of cost, I spend about a third of my wages on keeping myself and my pokémon happy and healthy. She spent a little more because of her munchlax but… it did mean we had built up a rather considerable bank account.
A stall caught my eye, as I found an older lady in her 50s selling a bunch of items… including a strange but interesting gemstone with an asscher-cut. It was clear but had a bright rainbow reflection in the sunlight, and I could see it was surrounded by other elemental items, fire stones, water stones and leaf stones along with jars of elemental dust, shimmering with power.
“How about that?” Akari followed my finger to the pocket-sized gemstone, her eyes narrowing at the object.
“Why a shiny rock? It’s just quartz I think?”
“Gut feeling, might be an elemental item… or just a pretty rock, that’s fine too.”
Akari rolled her eyes, and we walked over to the stall.
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Over the course of the next two hours, we visited more stores, and I learned quite a lot about the pokédex’s hand in the electronics industry. Turns out most devices were heavily modular and robust, easily upgradable both in terms of software updates and swapping parts from a standard assorted lot. It was necessary due to the diverse and complex needs of a pokémon wielder in any field when it comes to technology.
So stalls that basically modified your tech for a fee was just a thing they did. I had blown money on a few berries, and Akari had bought the gemstone from the somehow unsettling old lady, who had made it into a rather nice collar necklace. It had been a bargain for only fifteen hundred pokédollars, fifteen bucks wasn’t bad for jewelry, though it was sadly… inert?
My new cooking tool was resting in my backpack, and would let the creation of breaded super-meals be far easier on both myself and my pokémon.
“So that was pretty nice wasn't it for a late birthday?” Akari looked at me with wide pleading eyes and I bit back her laugh as I saw Kirby giving me an identical face as they both licked an ice cream cone.
I just smiled. “It was nice.”
I glanced at a shop, and slowed to a stop as I finally took notice of what had been done to it. Akari looked just as surprised, and Kirby growled.
It was a little shop called ‘Robert’s Reptile House’ and the most eye-catching thing was the fact it had been blown open, glass, metal and wood scattered behind police tape. I could see a shivering man speaking to a Jenny-clan member of the police force, along with other officers.
“What… the hell?” Akari cursed, and gently tugged me with her to the scene, to at least eavesdrop on the scene.
“Another Pokémon Pincher raid, those Cipher bastards brought them back from the dead after Oblivia took them down…” One officer spoke, and Jenny grimaced.
She sighed. “We’ve seen no signs of their leadership, but we know they’re out there after they were revealed to be dittos taking their place in prison.”
The Pokémon Pinchers… those were Pokémon Ranger villains weren’t they?
“There’s been hundreds of reports of stolen and poached pokémon across Mohto, Tohoku and Sinnoh.” I swallowed nervously at the realization there were multiple criminal organizations making their move on this region I had landed in.
This was all proving to be far more complicated of a region than I once thought.
And I didn’t like that at all.