ID: 7
Username: [Redacted]
Title: Pariah

There is nothing profound enough to be said about war that has as yet escaped the tongues of poets and authors alike, but by far its most insidious crime is this: to the brave many whose lifeblood inks the borders of battle, who haven’t the luxury of viewing their lives from the perspective of the leaders that must spend them, the greatest acts of kindness become unmitigated sin, as the blaze in a dragon’s maw may look like blissful relief to the worn and weary.

Virbank City in the modern day is a concrete box. A box haphazardly stitched to another, even more barren concrete box with the greenery kept firmly at bay by immutable gray borders and the watchful eyes of the citizens as that is the way they now prefer it, for reasons the elders know with every laboured breath they take and the children merely accept as the way of things.

Few have the heart to explain to the next generation just why the ranch to the west stands so far afield from their walls.

Once, it was called the City of Second Chances, and rightfully so – if you were of able body, you were welcome to tend the fields or lend your efforts to the Complex; should your interests lay with the arts, the burgeoning artisans that would one day form Pokestar Studios welcomed you with open arms, eager to coax your talents to fuller bloom. Dreams of venturing overseas, grasping the horizon and dragging yourself across it only to be taunted by the next horizon beyond, could be sated at the harbor.

Every person had their place, and every place was flush with prosperity. It was for that reason, or perhaps as a hidden cause of those things, that Respite itself came to linger - at first little more than a whisper on the wind, but soberingly real to those who faltered in their journeys. Those who fell short, scraping at the heels of a second chance in precious Virbank if only, if only they could make it just one more step.

Those conscious and canny enough to see and recall from their delirium speak of pink fur so pale it shines white in the sun, of waking well-rested and with their possessions neatly ordered, a feeling pulsing in the back of their mind’s eye; a mother, ushering eager children across the threshold and out towards the world.

Travelers arriving on Virbank’s doorstep with teary eyes and unwearied bodies were not an uncommon sight. Many of those same vagrants, once established enough to have land to their name and wealth with which they may more easily part, took to leaving offerings for Respite in the ensuing years.

It was a welcoming place, and all the more disadvantaged for it when the tides of war eventually came knocking.

Its people and land toiled together, and for their troubles the Unovan regime’s beating heart - Castelia - could feed power to its infrastructure, could starve its populace with lies and convenient bitter truths of the war while whetting their appetites with pokéstar promises of dashing, home-grown heroes to stand in defiance of encroaching foreign villainy, could wrench every last drop of productivity from a land that was, in the eyes of the Ministry, eminently useful.

Useful enough to present a particularly inviting target to the allied National League, and just far enough away from the regime’s stronghold that further support could not be guaranteed in the event of - for instance - a sudden, overwhelming ground assault.

The plan was to enter quickly, destroy any structure capable of holding soldiers or supplies, exfiltrate before Unova could catch wind of their assault, leaving the regime weakened and without power across the western seaboard in the hopes that maybe then they could look towards an assault on Castelia proper.

Yet… 

They approached the walls in secrecy, warded by thin fogs of darkness easily mistaken for industrial fumes clinging to the ground, but their sabotage teams took on a strange pallor as they made their breaching preparations, hesitant to unleash their techniques. Regardless of their trainers’ attempts to stir them, they would not willingly attack.

Their forces had only just begun to suspect enemy action when they were at last spotted.

The battle lasted days.

Pyrobombs, cryobombs, and hails of elemental devastation rained upon the once verdant fields. The sun was never allowed to set on their stage by the sheer frequency of attacks igniting the sky anew. Each stationed soldier and their teams made up for a half-dozen of the League’s agents not by martial prowess but because they simply would not give ground, even on pain of death. Especially on pain of death.

Countless times did men fall behind the battlements, certain to have suffered debilitating wounds, only for their numbers to never dwindle. It took over a day for the League to confirm that the same people being sent to the walls to replace the fallen fighters were really those very same fighters, as though they’d not been harmed at all.

Respite abhorred violence. Its heart ached at the wounds men would so willingly inflict upon one another and the very land that fed them, but it ached all the more to see such suffering and do nothing.

The allies were posed a terrible question: how could they win, when Virbank may never run out of meat to feed into the grinder and their own forces were bitterly finite?

The answer came as it often does in times of strife: in a blaze of hellfire so furious, so utterly beyond the pale that neither man nor psychic could have conceived of such a thing being turned against them.

Indigo had sent a Master of such flames on the very same eve that Unova’s mainland reinforcements arrived in the harbor. One man, as opposed to several hundred new combatants.

An unjust fate, for the men on those ships.

And had it stopped there - had that been the extent of the tragedy and not the precursor to it - Virbank may yet have recovered its natural vibrancy and union with the wilds.

To see so many of Unova’s sons and daughters fall for such a thing, to bear witness to the encroaching total destruction of a city so beloved by so many. Such a thing, Respite could no longer bear. 

Respite believed in abnegation. Trusted so wholeheartedly in the pursuit of kindness that it could see no other choice, even in the direst of straits, than to provide just that. Even at the expense of itself.

It appeared in the city centre, shedding crystalline tears as a violent corona of light enveloped it. The League braced for attack, to no avail. Something far worse came to pass that night, as fading motes of brightness carried away the last of Respite’s physical form to enact a feat so monumental that those who remain to recall it are scarcely believed.

On that eve, the City of Second Chances embodied its name.

Men and pokemon alike rose from where they had fallen. Aside from those torn so thoroughly asunder that nothing remained of them, wounds were stitched, limbs regrew from stumps, and those that had only just ceased to draw breath instead gasped for air. 

Respite’s kindness was so whole, stretched so deeply, that even the broken and battered of the League rose to stand anew, embraced in Respite’s final act as lovingly as the citizens that it protected.

Left farcically outnumbered with retreat no longer viable and surrender to the regime unconscionable, there was nothing left for the League’s forces to do but ensure resounding victory.

With Blaine at their head and the majority of Unovan forces reawakening half-drowned in the harbor, they pushed forward. One of the bloodiest ground battles in the war’s history repeated itself, only this time no soldiers would ever stand up again. Virbank City was scoured almost in its entirety, razed so thoroughly that even the cinders suffocated under the rubble and fumes. 

None of the surviving fighters wished to see any of Virbank still standing, lest they look away and the whole city arise once more. 

Virbank City in the modern day is a concrete box. It is this way for reasons that none will speak of - built in haste by a broken regime to bring their power supply back up to snuff in the aftermath of war, leaving no room for the harmony it had enjoyed for so many decades prior.

Now, it is home to the only pokemon center in the whole of Unova that has not a single Audino among its staff. None who care to ask why are answered in truth.

The people whisper no longer of a healer, a carer, or a being of such profound compassion that it could change the nature of the world for one shining moment.

They speak of death and its herald, which revelled so joyously in the suffering of the Unovan people that it wished for it never to end.