Pokémon does not belong to me, I make no money from this. Original characters are mine, I make no money from them either.
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Do you know what is is, when a country goes Dark? It's not an official term. The word seeped into use, spreading from some hack who got five seconds of air on local TV, until everyone was whispering it in their houses and muttering it in the streets.
When a country goes dark, all communications in and out cease, virtually overnight. Phone lines are cut or rerouted. Journalists who dare step foot over the border, in the vain hope of finding the scoop that will make them big, never come back, or if they do they come back with nothing. Military drones are shot down. No one is allowed in, or out.
When the first Country went Dark, the world didn't really know how to cope. Yes, oil and coal were running low, but nothing to panic over. Nothing to imprison your population for, nothing to cause an entire nation to rise up against their neighbours with guns, knives and stones for.
Everyone was sent reeling by the ferocity of the attack. The barbaric nature of the pictures recovered. Huge tracts of land left abandoned and wasted, simply for another year's supply of power.
Imagine the surprise when another country dropped off the grid shortly afterwards. When we finally forced access, we found an entire government had been destroyed in the vain hope that the rich had been stockpiling.
Other counties started to fear their people. Some tried to appease them by openly revealing the dire power situation. Others tried to cover it up. By the end of the decade, all were arming themselves for war.
It was quite simple, really. If your neighbour had something you didn't, you marched over there, and you took it. Civility was gone. Peace was gone. There was the ever present danger that you'd wake up, drowning in smoke as a marauding band of looters ignited your house for refusing to pay the crime lord's taxes.
Some say that we were the worst. Back then, we thought so too. Our own people were repressed, enslaved, used. There were whispers that the underworld lords and ladies were financed by the institution that swore to protect us as a cheap method of crowd control.
The only way out was to join the army, to serve the new Federation. You can imagine how we reacted. We were told that we would be helping to save our families. I don't see what part of saving or families comes under murder. And that was just me. Others did worse things. On orders or for pleasure.
I was promoted to Sergeant. Sergeant Stoneway. I made a token effort to control the men under my watch, but they were bored. Restless. They deserved their fun. At least, that's what I told myself.
In the end, we thought we'd won. We had marched, carrying the flag of the Federation to the mountains and the sea, and we wept tears of joy, for the Federation had brought the entire world, or what we had of it, under it's wings of liberty. We knew there was more land out there, of course, but it was so far across the ocean that it was not feasible to leave, with the Federation only just holding on to it's new and widespread power, and we wept again for those poor souls we were unable to rescue.
We turned with heavy hearts and marched back and forth across the breadth of an empire, squashing rebellion and toppling those who were trying to bring us down. To the south, we burned the earth to lock off those who were trying to poison our hearts and minds, and to the north, we rampaged and butchered those who tried to poison our bodies. And when Supreme President Parkson's reach was secure, when the decade of infighting and civil war finally come to it's end, we cheered, for finally, we could be at peace. Finally, the surviving world was united.
Once again, we turned our gaze to the sea. We knew that there where other lands out there, lands we had not spread the Federation to. People that deserved to feel our warmth. Deserved to feel safe at night. We enlisted the help of towns up and down the coast, and assembled a wooden fleet the likes of which had not been seen for hundreds of years. When word rode in with the go-ahead, we launched across the waves.
When we landed, we pillaged and slaughtered those that stood arrayed against us. If the people would not join the Federation, we would not let them stand. After what must have been the most bitterly violent month of my life, we reached a new town just as it was evacuated. Good, we thought, they're afraid. But the next town wasn't just empty. It was dangerous. Pitfalls. Mines. Rabid dogs, mad with some plague that we could not fight. The deeper into their territory we marched, the worse the local fauna became. We found out later, much later, that some sort of biological warhead had been unleashed on this side of the pond, with disastrous effects on the wildlife. The virus was meant to be unable to survive outside a host. Be containable.
Starve them out, they'd thought. Create animals that hunt their livestock.
In the end, containable changed to controllable.
Eventually, when we were attacked in the night by eleven foot cobras whose bite could do anything from freeze your arm solid to send enough electricity through your veins to fry you, we gave the order to retreat.
Bad move.
Turns out the virus, whatever it was, could be carried by humans, undetectable without pre-war medical equipment. And once we hit shore, it spread faster than we could. When the retaliatory strike came, riding beasts capable of taking bullets and firing back with storms of fire and earth, we were unprepared. I don't think it was possible to be prepared. They marched to our capital. They had some sort of weapon far more subtle than we could have imagined. Where they marched, our own people became blank eyed robots. Empty inside, and dead in every way that counts.
We were forced to mow them down, and when their king, their Champion, stepped out from the carnage, tore our leader apart with his fucking mind and demanded our surrender, what choice did we have?
Communications are up. Somehow. Their beasts can generate electricity. Somehow.
Somehow.
It's a word we're all using a lot.
A word we were all using a lot.
The war has been over for years now. I went for a drink to ease my stiff arm, and saw a kid playing with something I knew was quite capable of tearing a man shoulder to groin and filling the remains with acid. It's a lot to get used to. I still have my old Federation flag, hidden under the rug. They say Parkson's son escaped with a squad into the hills. No one knows what they do, but everyone knows there are some mountains you just don't travel to. They remind me of the Dark zones. Just too much trouble.
They even named the monsters, you know? Like pets. Like they weren't the scariest motherfuckers to ever walk the earth. There are kids now who've never seen a real animal. Just these... these...
Do you know what the worst part is? The most terrifying thing? I still have my contacts. Guys who served under me and men I served under. I've heard about scientists working on getting the compression technology that was mere moths too late for the war, fully portable.
When they succeed, then there will be nothing stopping people carrying these monsters anywhere in containers the size of apricots. Monsters so powerful that four men, each armed with less than five managed to bring down our entire defence network in ten minutes. And there'll be nothing stopping a ten year old boy from wandering the world with a herd of these monsters in his pocket.
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Reviews are welcome, Flames will be set alight. This chapter is significantly different to how the rest of the story will be, and mostly just sets up background for the world.