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o. bull trapped in porcelain
Welcome to Saffron City. People are going to tell you all sorts of things about this place, so I'll tell you one more: don't listen. We're all liars.
It's the only way you can rest easy. Believing in something else is just a better way of lying to yourself. The elites in their ivory towers cannibalize the lie amongst themselves as early as they can—shit like getting their kids to believe that a kind and benevolent delibird will come to their house once per year and give out presents. And then that belief blossoms into something even stranger, more sinister: the idea that the good and bad always get what they deserve. It's their belief in a just world that lets them rest easy at night, the same way that the puercos sleep with eyes weighed down by bribes, the same way that the populace dreams of a brighter future because they saw one of their own managed to claw into the gilding and become the Champion.
Down here, down in the barrios, we don't have time for that shit. Instead of one magical bird that gives you gifts, we learn about three—and their gifts to Kanto of searing wrath, galvanizing secrets, and frigid indifference. We learn the rules early, and we learn them right. Gods don't give you jackshit. They take, and sometimes they take everything.
If the gods ever give you something, it comes at a price. That's something you gotta learn young if you want to make it out alive: whoever, wherever they are, the gods only have one type of currency, the same kind everyone has. The saffron price.
If you want something, you're gonna have to bleed.
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quick lil' author's note: this is, in a sense, a parallel story to my other longform fic, some rise by sin. That being said, it's a parallel, not a prequel; there's no real onus to read one to understand the events of the other. And while some rise by sin is very much focused on the minutiae of being a trainer in a particular flavor of apocalypse, this one is very much the reverse—there's will be a much heavier focus on human/social issues, some of which will be immediately apparent/explained, and a lot of which will not.