TWO YEARS AGO, A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION GOING BY THE NAME TEAM IMUM WRECKED CHAOS ACROSS THE LAND, DAMAGING CITIES AND KILLING THOUSANDS OF CITIZENS. While Imum itself has long since been disbanded, however, the region remains broken: entire towns have been laid to waste and the Association struggles to find homes for those who were lucky enough to survive the attempted genocide. Reconstruction trudges on as usual... but with three factions - the Association, the corporations, and the people - each wishing to take the rebuilding of an entire region down opposite paths, how long will it be before Lyeant's last leg gives out permanently?
03.01
first activity check is currently underway. regardless of your green status, please be sure to check it out and make extra sure your characters make it safe and sound after the eighth of march.
01.28
we're officially re-opened! come check out our event, the pokeathlon forever to enjoy some fresh restart activities. let leap know if there are any skin bugs, and they'll be sorted out accordingly!
Care to hear about our lord and savior Operation: Mindcrime? In all seriousness: Hello, hello! I'm Pharaoh Leap – or just Leap – local head admin and rock opera enthusiast. On the rare chance you catch me in a time when I'm not bawling about characters entirely written into song, you may see me actually doing work around the site, like skinning, making too many characters, and encouraging others to also make too many characters. I only know how to write angst, and in no fewer than six trillion words an app or post, so if you like dying while reading like I like dying while writing, I'm the girl for you. ;o
Howdy guys! The names Astro and I am your resident Brit & Red muse (you'll honestly see me more on him than any of my other characters). I'm a moderator and my main job is to make sure everything is running smoothly so the Admins can focus on other things, you'll often see me within the apps and shops, etc when I'm not on Red. What can I say about myself? Apart from being a Red fanboy I like music and games and yaoi huehue, I honestly never now what to put into these sort of things but ohwell, I'm more of a "ask me and I'll tell" sorta guy. Anyway, from my personally I hope that you enjoy the site and what we produce here but also if you're new, please look around and if you like what you see please consider joining for rad plots that everyone gives! :D
Hey there~ Nano over here! I uh.. Wait, I'm doing this right, right? Bleh. So I'm a moderator over here - fun, fun - who kind of just.. Keeps an eye on everyone. You know, the whole app thing and what not. Uh.. Lets see.. When I'm not doing school work (because I may or may not be trying to be a good student) I'm probably storming up new ideas like events and etc. Or plots. Plots are always good, too. As you can see, I uh.. Have the horrible habit of making way too many characters. I swear, I was tempted with plots, ships and angst. It's like, the holy trinity. Uh.. What else is there about me? Oh, right! Please excuse my obnoxiousness. I'm just really loud in general so don't be surprised if I start screaming as loudly as I can caps. So yeah. Nice meeting you!
tbe: take two! is inspired by, but not associated with nintendo's pokemon franchise. the current skin was created by pharaoh leap using font icons primarily from ion icons and fonts from google fonts. banner art by vav of pixiv. characters, with the exception of canons from the manga, belong to the members who write them, and all posts and templates on site are credited to their respective authors and artists. we claim nothing that is not ours.
Post by Lydian Nicos on Feb 6, 2018 17:44:38 GMT -6
A
world where she didn't have to go out each day and kill someone. It felt like a really, really, really realistic dream. But Lydian didn't have dreams this realistic and most of them were nightmares to boot. Usually about pulling the trigger and slitting someone's throat with a golden dagger she used to own. There was oh-so-much blood in those nightmares with people screaming and coming after her because she had made those mistakes. Taken lives without so much as a second thought for the families or the lives she had been destroying. Each breath she inhaled was another lot of guilt landing on her conscience. Whenever she closed her eyes those images still haunted her. Maybe it was just in her head but... that was why she'd run away.
Jeezus she really had some issues.
Sighing, her eyes fluttered open to see the streets ahead of her. They were chaotic, but friendly. Like everything that her life hadn't been before. Still wasn't. There was no escaping what she'd done, even if she had renounced killing other people. Even though she refused to do anything that might hurt people, Lydian had become a freelance hacker. If that meant she fed information to assassins so be it, so long as it would never be traced back to her. But like anyone could do that. She was way too good at what she did for anyone to trace it back to her trusty laptop. "OKAY! THAT'S ENOUGH!" She yelled at no one in particular. It was time to stop moping. Yeah she'd messed up. Big deal. If those victims came back to haunt her memories, so what? Right now what was important was getting back on her feet and focusing on what she'd been given. A second chance. A job. Peace. Or at least better than being on the run from a dangerous revolutionary group which was already better than her situation had been.
With that she began walking along the streets. Or at least she tried to until her gaze settled on one particular person. She remembered him - of course she did how could she not? Nikki had been one of the best operatives she remembered in the Operation which always had rubbed her the wrong way. Sure he worked closely with DX himself but did that really make him the best? Wow even now she was thinking competitively when she didn't even work that way anymore. Old habits die hard it looked like.
He'd been captured - Lydian knew that much. Probably interrogated considering they used to kill members of the Pokemon association. In a way she felt for him; but was also glad that it hadn't been her. Were they still in the same situation? The whole 'I ran away for reasons oops' thing. Actually Nikki was part of the reason she ran away in the first place. Her inspiration for it. Not that she would ever say that but if he had done it, why couldn't she? Plus DX had disappeared off the face of the planet (as far as she was aware) so she was safe. Yeah that was right.
But how should she approach this? Just going up and talking wasn't right. Nope. Ugh this was annoying. She would even let out a groan as she paused to think about this, unaware of what the other's reaction might be.
It was like a scene in a movie: the camera, too close, hyper fixated on his head space, wrapped up in his world, until suddenly it wasn't, moved, instead, to bring light to the presence of a person who was absolutely not meant to be there, panning so slowly, too slowly, the visual heralding of a tragedy slated to happen in just a matter of moments. But he'd seen that very movie once too many times. It'd been mediocre the first time – laughable, perhaps, in its attempts to impress – and after he'd seen it time and time again, it'd lost even its charm in mediocrity. If misfortune was so hellbent on stalking him at every turn, he'd simply have to give it a reason to fear him, rather than the other way around. Too long had he sat and played victim for it. Not today. He wouldn't be backed into a corner by it. He would not be a pawn of revenge for her. Nikki knew a revolutionist when he saw one – the ones who had stood by his side and made his mistakes. He also knew what they'd do to him if he didn't do much worse first.[break][break]
They locked eyes from a distance in one minute, and the next, the streets were filled with the sound of screaming, nearly buried beneath a sudden torrent of water.[break][break]
He doesn't know her name, but he knows her face, hazy, a pixelated image corrupted by trauma and needle. Still, the fact that her visage begs a memory at all is proof that she needs to be dealt with immediately, lest his location and identity be compromised. An ideal world would have had them crossing paths in an empty street, but he didn't need Mary's corpse to tell him that the world they lived in was anything but that; instead, he'd simply had to take the metaphorical Tauros by its horns and separate her from the crowd in the only way he could possibly think to on the fly: blast her into an alleyway with a typhoon strong enough to push, but not enough to kill. It wasn't a crime, after all, to misfire a Pokemon attack in a public area (not that he would place any money on anyone look his way long enough to see the very blatantly non-misfire he enacted). “Oh no,” he called flatly, words pushed through grit teeth, the words themselves concerned but the tone of his voice seething with barely-contained rage (never mind the way his mind was running in a panicked frenzy; kill or be killed, murder or be murdered, that was the only way with a person who once bore the cross named Mindcrime). “Someone just got blasted by a Hydro Pump. Wonder where that came from. Doesn't matter. I'll go check on her myself.”[break][break]
The initial shock of the attack was enough to ward away the others long enough for him to cross the distance between his original position and the no doubt soaking space between rotting buildings that his victim must have been recovering in. By the time he stood at its mouth, the crowds may have been recovering. He didn't know, nor did he care, standing in the newly cast shadow that Big blanketed him, a new guard for their just-starting party, a bouncer who would let no peeping Toms by until the corpse had been hidden. This was a private affair, after all, and he wouldn't stand to have anyone getting in his way.[break][break]
“You oughtta be rotting in some Arceus forsaken prison cell right about now, but look at you. Runnin' free as a Pidgey. An' people try to tell me Lyeant isn't totally fucked.”[break][break]
The moment his hand wrapped around the hilt of his gun, the hitman felt undoubtedly more calm, soothed somehow more by the illegal weapon than the Chesnaught standing watching just behind him. In a sense, though, they were both just tools, carved into different shapes, fit for different functions. His Pokemon was loyal, but it would never be the sleek killing weapon that he needed to preform his duty. “So spill it,” Nikki spat, pointing the barrel square at her forehead. “Did X send you to kill me?”
Post by Lydian Nicos on Apr 5, 2018 4:04:47 GMT -6
[googlefont=Open+Sans]
i'm going to break down
[attr="class","firstfriend"]
your walls, hijack your brain, run through your veins.
T
he last thing she expected was to have a violent blast of water slam into her, sending her flying backwards. No second was there to regain her balance as it flung her into a nearby alley. How could she fight against an actual freaking torrent of water? Not even the most powerful Pokemon trainers could stop one without their Pokemon. And Lydian was no powerful trainer. She'd learned to use her skills without them, only raising one Pokemon with specialist abilities. There was no chance to think now though, her thoughts flying everywhere at the same speed as the water around her. Before there were any more chances to do anything, the blonde made contact with a brick wall with her arm wedged between herself and the impacted object.
Hissing Lydian crumpled to the ground. It was definitely broken, not severely but enough to say that she probably needed to see a doctor. But doctors were dangerous; whether they studied the medicinal arts or no. That was a fact she'd come to terms with as soon as she'd left Imum. When she got home she'd have to look up some underground healer or Pokemon Trainer... or she would if her eyes hadn't drifted to her laptop which was now in pieces nearby. "Oh you have got to be kidding me."
Seeing someone walk toward the entrance of the alleyway, her next action was to reach into her pocket to reveal her Pokeball quickly followed by Lucas. Her Pokemon wasn't as fast as some, but fast enough to get a job done. Physical combat was his strong point and based on the shadow now blocking the exit she had been planning to escape out of? Conflict was unavoidable. This was a shitstorm. Her laptop was busted, meaning she'd be out of a job till she got a new one. Her arm was broken, meaning she had one less weapon at her disposal. Her exit was blocked, meaning no escape. Damn she really was gonna die here. "Yeah like you're any better. If anything you're worse than me Mr. Poster Boy. Always the special little snowflake. Like you've never extinguished a human life. You're just as guilty as I am." A smirk crept onto her face. She might be broken, she might be at a disadvantage. But at least she'd cause one of Doctor X's lackeys a bit of grief before she went beyond. If there was one thing she knew, it was that Nicklaus Strauss didn't hesitate at the trigger. No member of their little division did. It was part of why they were so successful at what they did.
The gun pointed at her didn't phase her. It wasn't the first time she'd come face to face with the barrel of a gun. So what caused her to swap from a smirk to outright laughter while flirting with death? The notion that she was still working under Doctor X. The idea that she was still one of those people who killed for not fucking reason. She was done with that. Never again did she want to have to touch her dagger again (damn her ego for leaving her knife behind). "I was done with all you shitbags before the operation was shut down. Now you think you're oh-so-special enough for the great and powerful Doctor to send someone to kill you personally? How egotistically big headed of you. You're not the only one on the hitlist." Propping herself up on the wall, clutching her broken arm, she motioned for Lucas to move in. There was a high chance that he was still gonna pull the trigger and if he did? She wanted Lucas to destroy his gun. Not kill him - she was done with that shit - but destroy his firearm. At least that way it'd be some time before he fried another bullet.
"Go on. Pull the trigger I dare you. It just makes you as bad as X."
Sorry to say, Lydian, but Nikki has, like, two backup pistols and a knife on his person alone, not to mention the snipers he's got back home. Breaking one gun ain't gonna stop him for any more than an hour. c':
The faces those on death row made were no mystery to him. After so long in his bloody business, it would have been more of a surprise for him not to know them better than he knew the tracks littering his own arms. Shock almost always came first, courtesy of a lifetime fixated on the mindset that money equaled power and power equaled some untouchable god-like status, one such mindset that shattered just moments before their skull did the same. Some never had the chance to move past it, that initial fear-stained incredulity. Those who did took their pick from disgust (as if they had any right to be disgusted by their killer when they were the worst filth of all) or pleading (truly, the worse option; what an insult it was to have a man offer to pay him more money than his mind could wrap itself around if only to spare a traitor to society his life). There were deviants, of course, whether they be new takes on the old tale or the rare soul who decided to try to fight for his life – each attempt unsuccessful, of course – but the song and rhyme was almost always the same. The beginning and the end were, anyway. There had only been one man in his memory who had ever stared down his wrath with anything but. He could still see it in his mind's eye: that man, postured and poised behind the desk his own hands slammed into, eyes twinkling with mischief (deceit), a smile on his lips even as his most promising member forsake everything they had worked toward. And oh, how he had laughed, melodic, beautiful, but it was different than it had been before, like all of the warmth of the human soul had been sucked from it dry. Had something changed, he still wondered? Or had it always sounded just like that – empty, twisted – and he'd only just then recognized it, it's maker, for what they really were?[break][break]
She smiled at him in that moment, too, almost as though oblivious to the gun pointed in her general direction. There are most certainly differences. The Doctor, all those years ago, had been unshaken, immortal; he knew that Nikki would not kill him, and that nothing in the world could harm a hair on his head; that status that all the rich had worked so hard for, that he, and he alone flaunted so effortlessly. The revolutionist who sat, arm broken, Lucario at the ready, seemed almost resigned to her fate. Go out with a bang, she may have been thinking; go down, but not without a fight. The similarities were enough to make him sick, and had he any doubts of her position as another member of Mindcrime before it and Imum's fall, they would have been gone now – but the contrasts were very much real, and enough to set him off-footed, unprepared. Somehow, he thought to himself, her squealing like a Tepig and begging for her life would have been better to the mirthless smile she flashed him in that wet alleyway.[break][break]
“Yeah, like you're any better. If anything, you're worse than me, Mr. Poster Boy,” she said, and as soon as the words sunk in, a sound not unlike the hissing of a snake or a balloon letting loose all its air in a slow, painful stream snuck out through his teeth. “Always the special little snowflake. Like you've never extinguished a human life. You're just as guilty as I am.”[break][break]
“Don't talk like you an' me are the same!” the hitman spat, leveling her with a look caught somewhere between a dangerous man and a child pitching a fit over having his toy taken away. In truth, he did not know her. His understanding of her entirely, in fact, was limited only to that she had been a co-worker at one time in the past, and his conclusion was that she was as rotten as the lot of them. Nikki was not a smart man, after all, and he knew that, he accepted it. Someone else had to have known that X's movement was corrupt. Someone else must have known that it was hypocrisy defined! Why was he the only one who ever tried to leave? Why was he the only one to say 'no more'? The rest, then, had to be killers. They had to. Self interested, devoid of empathy; he'd kill them all, alongside the rest of the scum infecting their region. “And don't you dare talk like you get the weight of an Arceus damned 'human life'! I'm not a murderer, no matter how you try an' spin it. At least I left when X turned his back on us. If you fuckers had gotten it your way, all of Lyeant would be dead by now!” Almost as if knowing, however, what it was that he was thinking in that moment, the words she spoke to him in the moments that followed painted a very different picture: “I was done with all you shitbags before the operation was shut down. Now you think you're oh-so-special enough for the great and powerful Doctor to send someone to kill you personally? How egotistically big headed of you. You're not the only one on the hit list.”[break][break]
That was – ah, but that meant – was she implying that she, too, had fled the organization before Imum's ultimate fall? It wasn't... impossible. He'd been the first, certainly, to flip the Doctor the metaphorical (and quite literaly, while he'd been at it) bird, but that wasn't to say that he'd been the last. He'd never heard of talk of another former member of Imum, much less their particular sect breaking free and spilling their secrets – but then, he'd been cooped up in white walls, white sheets, white brain, blank, blank, blank for nearly three whole yars of his life, and it wasn't as though the first thing he'd done upon regaining his freedom was sift through years' worth of old news stories. … But that was too convenient (that meant that he'd attacked an innocent person), and he couldn't afford to trust a former member of Mindcrime (he couldn't find it in himself to trust after what his faith in people had earned him before). And then, there was was she said -[break][break]
“Go on. Pull the trigger, I dare you. I just makes you as bad as X.”[break][break]
As bad as X.[break][break]
The words exploded from his lips as liquid fury, an inferno of rage, hate so raw it'd tear him apart if Nikki didn't spit it out of him and into their battleground:“Say that again! Do it, say it, I'll fucking -” … He'd what? Shoot her? Already, his index finger had tensed in its place on the trigger, tighter than before, poised to end but stopped just a second too soon – because she was right. If he shot now, he really wouldn't be any better than him. So quick had he always been to violence, so reliant had he been on the bullet, and all it had done was leave him a place where he couldn't even defend his very basic human decency. I'm not like him, I'm not, I'm not. But if he wasn't, why was he holding a woman he knew absolutely nothing about at gunpoint in a place where no one would be around to give him justice? Why was he moments from snuffing out a life that could have been just as, if not more innocent than his own? (In a flash of horror, he saw not the Doctor on the ground before him, but Mary, and just like that, the worst of the fight went out of hi like air.)[break][break]
“... I want proof,” he said, instead, and the pistol he'd pointed at her forehead found its target shifted to the ground. Terror still rattled in his bones at what his rage had almost let him do, but there was still no guarantee that she was who she said she was, and even if he was willing to spare her life now, that did not mean his trust was so easily earned. Not anymore, anyway. “You're tryin' to tell me you left the Operation, too? Give me one good reason to believe that, and I'll let you live.”
