Chapter 135: Shell Game II

The headquarters is nearly empty, just a few agents left manning various posts. A few are still strapping on belts and rushing out to teleport by the time Red finds Looker, who’s sitting beside an old fashioned radio with a headset on.

He holds a finger up to Red as he enters as he finishes writing something on a pad of paper. “Uh huh. Red just walked in, I’m going. Stay on your toes.” He flicks a switch on the machine, then turns to Red. “It’s not Rocket. We got word from Bill, he’s taken responsibility for bringing the net down. Says something was invading it.”

“He can do that?” Red asks as he mentally lurches, trying to shift frames and reprioritize. “He’s allowed to do that?”

“That’s between him and your government, but since we’re using your infrastructure it’s going to be A Conversation. For now we’re taking his warnings seriously and not forcing a direct satellite connection.” He takes the headphones off. “Yet. Radio will do for coordinating with CoRRNet, but we’ll need wider communication soon. Is Cinnabar stable?”

It takes a moment for Red to ally his thoughts, which curve around the dull pain in his chest. “When I left, yeah. I don’t think it’s possible to be sure, too many new things are happening. I need to talk to Bill, was going to before you said he’s the one that brought the net down.”

“Talk to Bill about what?”

“Something happened at Cinnabar, new pokemon appeared that couldn’t be captured. I need to check if Bill has any idea why, or can start making a ball that works on them.” And a body I need to drop off.

Looker’s frown softens, and it takes a second for Red to realize what he’s seeing: fear.

Not a lot, but a touch of it around Looker’s eyes, the shape of his lip.

And then Red blinks and it’s past, the Special Administrator back to radiating grim determination. “Bill’s busy preparing for a reboot, and that’s got to be his priority until after he can make sure the pokedex network is safe to reconnect with. Maybe someone at the Silph labs can help instead, but I don’t have—”

“Wait, back up.” The words “Pokedex Network” sent a cold spike through Red’s gut. “What’s wrong with the dexnet?”

“He said that’s where the invasion spread from. Once it reached Pallet he pulled the plug, or whatever it… what’s the matter?”

Red’s shut his eyes against the recurring image of Artem’s pokedex twisting in his hand to impale him. Coincidence? Maybe, but he can’t stop imagining the same thing happening to Professor Oak or Dr. Madi or the others from the lab…

“Red!”

“I don’t… a pokedex attacked someone at Cinnabar, turned into a monster. I have to—”

“Fuck, okay, go, but just to look. Don’t go in without… where are—”

“I told them to meet me in Saffron in… 17 minutes.”

“Goddammit Red, you can’t keep—”

“Later, I need to make sure Pallet’s okay!”

“—doing that—” he hears Looker say just before his mind tilts in just the right way for Bagra to send him to the hill beside the Pallet Labs…

…where he sees the perimeter of trainers in a loose half-circle around it, pokemon in front of them attacking the hard-to-look-at things coming out of the broken and warped front walls of the lab. Streams of fire, bolts of electricity, beams of frost, all converge to slow the advance of the twisted things that move in jerky, twitching motions.

The momentary disorientation is enhanced by his feeling like he’s back in Cinnabar again, combined with the shock of seeing the Pallet Labs, usually so bright and beautiful against the backdrop of the green hills and blue skies, made into a warzone. The glass walls and doorways in the front of the building look like they’ve all blown outward, as though something exploded within the lobby, and there’s smoke rising from a hole in the roof somewhere just out of Red’s sight.

It hurts, seeing a place so familiar and important to him look so damaged. He wasn’t prepared for it to hurt, it’s just a building…

…but it’s a building that represents so much goodness in the world, to him. A building that brought him back to life after he lost his dad, along with the people in it. People who might be dead, now.

Battle calm rushes through him in the space of a breath, diffusing the rising panic and grief, and he breaks into a run, hands tracing the balls at his belt. Charizard, nidoqueen, machamp, starmie, butterfree, snorlax. He would like to have swapped for more more powerful ranged attackers, but with the nets down he, and everyone else in the region, is stuck with what he has with him… which means bringing Charizard back out, despite his pokemon’s fatigue.

His sensorium doubles as he merges deeply enough with Charizard to taste the smoke in the air, along with the salt of the nearby sea. It takes a moment to reorient and focus on the various pokemon and people around them, labeling the enemies through direct mental suggestion… which takes longer than usual, as even Charizard has trouble making sense of them—they don’t match visual patterns of any pokemon it knows, let alone prey or rivals, and their smell is completely off.

Red’s shoulders start to flex in tandem with Charizard’s beating wings, and he braces his legs against the gusts of wind and resists the urge to leap as the great lizard does, roaring as it stokes its inner furnace, then releases it in a strafing pillar of flame.

Red withdraws most of the way out of his charizard’s mind once he’s sure the impression of the next few targets is set, then reorients to the wider battle. There are about a half a dozen of the things spread out in front of the lab, each being contained by shifting clusters of trainers as new threats emerge, some of whom get one-shot by a single blow while others shrug off a handful of attacks from a variety of elements.

“One’s heading for the ranches!” someone shouts, and there’s a flash to Red’s right as a pokemon is summoned, its rider quickly mounting without a saddle and heading to the northeast. Red casts his thoughts out, heart pounding as he searches for a mind he recognizes…

There. Red starts running for Dr. Madi, who’s part of a trio that take turns blasting what looks, from the corner of Red’s eyes, like a pair of desk-shaped objects that have been welded together with a bunch of melted computers stacked on top of each other, with gaps between them. As he approaches he sees it start to glow, even in the bright morning light, and everyone starts shouting for their pokemon to dodge—

—too late for a pinsir, whose horns and upper body get snapped off with a dull crack when the thing blurs forward and smashes its “arms” together. Red’s horror at the abrupt kill lends speed to his arms as he summons Starmie and merges with it, preparing for when the thing starts to glow again… then directing a blast of telekinesis up from beneath the strange monster to hurl it into the air.

When the glow reaches its blinding peak, the creature moves in a blink again, a bright streak that doesn’t follow any sort of momentum starting or stopping laws Red’s familiar with… doubly so because it’s through the air instead of along the ground, the exact same motion it would have made to reach a defender’s arcanine if it were still on the ground.

It hangs for a moment above, just long enough for Red to think It can fly? and its trainer to yell another command that gets his arcanine out of the way before the strange pokemon abruptly comes crashing down. Red had hoped to at least stun it for a moment, but it starts moving in fits and jerks again as if it didn’t even feel the impact.

The pinsir has since been replaced by a scyther, which dashes in and begins to slice in a flurry. Red feels a distant part of him flinching from the ghosts of many childhood nightmares, and does his best to ignore it while directing Starmie to send more telekinetic blasts out, trying to keep it off-balance and apply more damage to the cuts. Dr. Madi orders his primeape to leap in and slam its fists down, which finally breaks the pokemon apart.

The pieces of the creature tumble in various directions as whatever was keeping it moving and together abruptly seems to just… stop. Red and the others watch them for a moment as the fights around them continue, but it seems to be staying dead. Dr. Madi turns to Red just as he takes in a breath.

“Red… thank you, but… what are you doi—”

“No time, what happened here?”

“—ng… they… computers around the lab, they just started transforming.” Dr. Madi looks like he’s still trying to come to terms with what’s happening, eyes too wide and breaths audible even among the noises of the battle. “Half the morning shift was… we couldn’t…”

Grief spasms across his features, and Red almost reaches out to hug his old supervisor as fresh grief and horror rise up in a distant part of him, not quite forgotten by amnesia or made emotionless, but recontextualized by some partition his inner self no doubt has been preparing in conjunction with the battle calm. “You tried capturing them?”

“I… yes, at first. It didn’t work for long.”

Red was really hoping that was a unique thing at Cinnabar. “What can I do?”

“Do…” Dr. Madi looks around, running a hand through his short hair. “More are still coming out, we need help. Couldn’t call anyone, but if you can get the rangers, the Professor, anyone—”

“Of course. Just hold on, okay?” He looks around, quickly counting heads again. Professor Oak makes sure that most of his staff can pass basic pokemon training and battle scenarios, but there are still barely a dozen people with pokemon out, and only a couple of them would be in the same class as Red’s guards, let alone Agatha. If more of the stronger creatures (pokemon?) show up… if they can’t contain them here…

All of Pallet might be destroyed. Maybe worse.

Red withdraws Starmie, then throws his thoughts as wide and far as he can, avoiding the inhuman minds around him as he summons the memory of helping hold a perimeter outside a town near Saffron while knowing that help was coming. He projects not just his battle calm, but a sense of determination, of hope in approaching relief, out to the various scientists and researchers…

…dips into a strong memory of visiting a nearby ranger outpost with his dad—

—teleports—

—reorients—

“Emergency!” He sends his mind out again, projecting the urgent energy dancing through his body as he runs to the front of the outpost and pounds on the door, then remembers they’re not locked and throws it open. “Emergency!” he shouts into the hall. “Pallet Labs, Code White, don’t try to catch them in pokeballs, this is Red Verres! I’m going back to help, but get there NOW as many as you can send!”

And then he’s closing his eyes as he hears the sounds of running steps, dipping into one of his happier memories at Blue’s house, and a few moments later he’s there, reorienting through the dull headache he’s feeling as he looks around the living room, pulses his psydar, then runs up the stairs shouting, “Professor!”

Samuel Oak steps out of the bathroom just as Red reaches the hall toward it, half-shaven and wearing only boxers and a bathrobe. “Red, what—”

“Pallet Labs code white internet down needs help don’t try catching them going back!”

Once more his mental states shuffle, once more he reorients to the battlefield, which is much as he left it. A brief merger with Charizard confirms that his pokemon is starting to tire, and he urges him to come back so Red can apply some ether.

As he does that, he tries to think of who else might be close enough to be worth getting. There are trainers in Pallet that would come to the lab’s defense, especially given that the rest of the town might be in danger, but getting them here is the problem. He briefly considers using his loudspeaker and teleporting onto some apartment buildings to shout for help, then remembers that he’s supposed to have gone back to report to Looker.

He takes one more look at the battle to make sure no one is in immediate danger, then withdraws Charizard again before he teleports back to Interpol.

Looker immediately takes his headphones off again. He waits patiently for Red’s disorientation to fade, then asks, “How bad?”

“Tier 2,” Red says, thinking of what might happen to Pallet and the areas around it if containment at the lab fails. “At least. Easily 3, maybe more.”

Looker swears. “Relaying info through the Ranger outposts will take some time, but you need to get to Viridian Gym.”

Right, the gym… he’s not used to Pallet relying on Viridian, since the powerful pokemon at the lab’s ranches, local outposts, and the Professor are usually enough to handle any major issues that come up nearby…

“I already let Professor Oak know,” Red says as he checks the time in the corner of his vision. “He might be enough to turn things around, with the Rangers. I’ll still hop over to Viridian, then I need to meet Jensen and the others, I told them—”

“Red, the net is still down. I was trying to tell you earlier, they won’t have their Saffron teleporters.” Looker is rubbing his forehead. “They’re stuck in Cinnabar unless they want to teleport back here, and we’re not much closer to Saffron.”

Red stares at him in stunned silence for a moment, then takes his helmet off and runs a hand through his hair as his heart slowly sinks into his stomach. Even after realizing the implications of what Looker told him about the dexnet, he hadn’t put those two bits of knowledge together, too distracted by what was happening at the labs… “I should… go back, let them know—”

“Much as I’d like you to stay safe, the lab needs you. Before you go, dump your helmet’s data here so I have some idea of what’s going on. You were recording, right?”

“Yeah.” The helmet records a ton of data when prompted to, which he did just before he teleported to Cinnabar the first time. He knows Looker is asking for the data now not just so he has a sense of what’s been happening, but also in case something happens to Red.

It takes just a couple minutes to plug his helmet in and let it dump its contents, and he runs to the nearby bathroom while he has the spare moment. When he gets back Looker is frowning at his screen as he watches a recording of the strange pokemon being fought outside Kanto labs. Red is about to ask if he skipped past the variants from the Cinnabar Lab when Looker taps the monitor and asks, “What the hell is this supposed to be?”

Red looks closer and frowns. He saw the vague shape from a distance, recognized the scene, and assumed it was showing the pokemon he fought with Starmie… but it looks wrong. Like there’s just a splotch of glitching pixels where the enemy is supposed to be, with hints of wood and metal occasionally glimpsed through the static.

“I… that’s not how it looks in person. Or, I mean, it’s not how it looks through the helmet…” Among its many other functions, the visor has a built-in Silph Scope effect, and Red wonders if they’re all Ghost types, and not just the one Agatha was fighting… “It may have gotten damaged when I dropped it…? Skip back to Cinnabar for a moment… huh.” The creatures there were doing the same thing in his helmet’s camera. “Weird.”

Looker turns to him, and the look in his eyes makes Red forget the fascination of the screen for a moment. “When this is over, we need to have a talk about the chain of command here, and what it means to be working together.”

Red blinks, and stands a little straighter, surprised by the sudden conversational turn but unwilling to back down on his earlier decisions. “Yes, Sir. I’ll—”

“I’m not done. We need to have that talk, but right now I need you to listen and hear me. Whatever this is, what’s happening, I don’t think it’s coincidence. Call me paranoid, sure, yeah. I am. It still stinks.” He jabs a finger at Red. “And you’re not taking it seriously. Look at you. You’re about to go back into danger, alone. No backup, very little chance of getting any. You’re about to face an unknown threat, without the ability to adapt by accessing your roster. You can still teleport freely, but suddenly your home town is at risk, and you’re not about to abandon it even if the rest of the region wasn’t at risk, are you?”

Red thinks of his friends at the lab, his neighbors in Pallet Town, of Professor Oak with shaving cream over half his face. “No.” He ran back into Cinnabar Lab earlier because Artem might have still been alive, because there’s still some chance, however small, to save him… and, if the’s being honest, because he still knew he could get away if he needed to.

He reaches back to feel Bagra’s foot, touches his mind to check reflexively how he’s doing. Hungry? Tired? No. Not yet.

Red tries to think through what Looker’s saying, setting his skepticism aside as best he can and re-examine what he thinks he knows and why. If this is some high-level, complicated plot for him specifically… which he can’t quite believe, but knows that stranger things have happened… what would he expect to see? What might happen next?

“If… after I go back to the lab, if an anti-teleport field is suddenly there when I try to teleport away again… I’ll summon Charizard and fly off.”

Looker’s intense gaze stays on his. “Just like that?”

“Yeah, I think so. It’s… too much a coincidence, at that point. I would believe, really believe, that it’s a trap set for me.”

“They’d know you have a charizard. They’ll be ready.”

Red rubs his hair. “You think I shouldn’t go back? I just go warn Giovanni and stay here?”

“No. Like I said, Pallet needs you to communicate, if nothing else; there’s a few spare radio in the container ball over there, and you need to bring one to them. You need to go to all the labs you can, share knowledge between them, drop off radios with each. But if Pallet isn’t the trap, one of them is. I feel it.” He presses a fist to his stomach. “You understand?”

Red swallows, thinking of what he said to Looker before he left for Cinnabar, and what Looker said in return. Legibility, illegibility, trust. “Yeah. I get it.”

“Then go with eyes open, and come back to report in every ten minutes.”

Red nods, collects the containers and his helmet, then closes his eyes and tilts—

—into Giovanni’s office at Viridian Gym.

He isn’t there, but Red didn’t really expect him to be. Some running and yelling through the hall quickly attracts enough attention, however, and after passing the warning on he teleports back to Pallet Labs…

…where the battle is still ongoing, despite the presence of some rangers, Professor Oak, and a few more researchers than last time.

Red reorients, projects his battle calm, and rushes toward another one of the massive, slow monsters that a handful of people are holding back, including the Professor. Red summons Charizard, Nidoqueen, and Butterfree; the first to get some rest, the second to attack, and the third in case these things are susceptible to spores and powders.

As far as he can tell the answer is no, but each glob of acid Nidoqueen spits at the hulking bundle of… fused objects…? causes more and more of it to melt away every second, until it’s reduced down to half the size it was when he arrived… which is when it abruptly splits into two, each part moving much faster and dodging every attack thrown at them.

Red has Butterfree send a Bug Buzz down at the one closest to him, while a researcher (Mia, he remembers her from the lab’s botanics department) tries to get her tangrowth to keep it still with a dozen vines wrapped around its various parts… only for it to suddenly leap into the sky, dragging the tangrowth up with it.

They can fly! Red thinks, and only the battle calm keeps his shock from being too much to save his butterfree, who he returns to its ball just as the thing is about to crash into it. He resummons it a moment later and orders it to send another Bug Buzz at the thing, hoping to knock it down for his nidoqueen, but instead it turns at an abrupt angle and breaks into two again, one spitting a stream of water at Butterfree while the other plunges into the mass of vines around the tangrowth’s body and out the other side.

Mia cries out in anger or pain as she withdraws the tangrowth and summons a victreebell instead. Red uses Butterfree’s compound vision to keep track of both split halves at once, and directs Charizard and Nidoqueen to attack with fire and acid.

Charizard’s attack is wide enough to hit, and his target crumbles into ash. Nidoqueen’s attack misses, and her opponent starts to glow.

Dodge! Red sends, nearly leaping himself with the impulse he’s sending his pokemon to move, but she’s too slow, as is his withdrawal; the hard-to-identify glob of stuff darts forward in a streak of light that abruptly stops on the other side of Nidoqueen, who stumbles, then collapses with a hole torn out of the tough hide at her chest and spine.

Red withdraws her a half-second later, and feels a wash of angry vindication as Charizard’s flames catch the thing that may have just killed his pokemon in a gush that shatters it into burning bits. Next steps, he thinks to prompt himself to start moving again rather than stop to check how his pokemon is. Mia is already running toward the others to help with their half, and Red follows after a quick look around to ensure no one else is in critical need.

There are more of the things coming. One of them seems to have torn a chunk of metal out from between broken glass panels in the lab wall, and now walks with a sort-of-tail that thumps on the ground behind as it lurches and jerks toward them.

Red wonders what the others are seeing without the Silph Scope tech, but not enough to take his helmet off. He rushes over to help the professor’s group with their half as well.

This one thankfully goes down quickly with their combined efforts, and they have a breather before more get close that aren’t already engaged. “Go,” Professor Oak tells the others as he sprays potion over his ninetails. “All except you, Red. What do you know about all this?”

So Red explains, keeping it as brief as possible while he empties the rest of his ether bottle for Charizard. “I only came because the things at Cinnabar were unlike anything I’d seen before, and the web being shut down so completely felt too coincidental. It seemed worth checking if anything had… escaped, or spread, or something.”

“And it did. They did. And now they’re… what, in the servers? Taking over every object they see, bit by bit?” Professor Oak is wearing a loose sweater with khakis, three-quarters of his face is still covered in morning scruff, and there are bits of shaving cream beneath his ears, but he looks more imposing than Red has ever seen him, practically radiating a tightly controlled fear, worry, grief, and most of all anger that lights his mind up like a beacon to Red’s passive mental scans.

“I guess so. We’d have to ask people who saw it starting to maybe know, but I saw someone… Artem… get killed by his pokedex as it turned into one of those things.”

Professor Oak’s gaze softens at that, and he abruptly steps forward to pull Red into a hug. It’s uncomfortable, and Red doesn’t know how to make it stop without upsetting the professor, he wants to say he hadn’t wanted a hug, he’d wanted…

He’s not sure what he wanted. And after another moment, the hug wrapped back around from bad to good, and he hugs the professor tightly back as dark, painful feelings stir in his chest and tears prickle behind his eyes.

But only for a moment, and then he’s pulling away. There’s no time for grief, not yet. “Professor, I need to go, I want to stay and help but I need to make sure the other labs are safe.”

“I understand. Stay for just a little longer, first? I want your help to make sure, after.”

“After what?”

“Buildings can be rebuilt, data can be regathered.” The professor’s emotions are all plain on his face, without any effort put into hiding or covering any of it up. “There’s no way to know if they’ll stop coming out of the lab, or what’s happening in there, without going in. Instead, I’m going up on Goldie.”

It takes Red a couple seconds to put the meaning of the words together with his first sentence, and when he does it feels like a punch to the gut.

He reaches out, trying to think of an objection, but the professor has already turned away to withdraw his pokemon and walk toward an open space. “Watch for any that get away!” he calls over his shoulder, and Red summons Starmie to extend his range while Professor Oak summons his strongest pokemon.

The dragonite is twice as large as Red’s charizard, sleek and glowing an orange-gold in the morning sun. She gives her trainer an affectionate nuzzle that nearly knocks him over as he quickly outfits her with a riding harness, then climbs onto her back.

Then the wings spread thunderous wind around them, gusts making Red have to brace his legs to keep from being pushed back as Goldie roars and rises, accelerating far faster than it seems like such a large creature should. He quickly starts to saddle up Charizard as well while she darts in a circle above the battle, an erratic spark that seems to be playing in the bright blue sky, moving this way then that overhead…

…before she starts to glow, like a reflection of the sun and then bright as a second one, until the light bursts down from it in a streak, down toward Pallet Labs, splitting into two, then four, then eight, each tipped with a sphere of energy that bursts in a crackling staccato of booms.

Red watches numbly as the first wave of Draco Meteors demolish the lab’s roof, hot wind blowing past him and making him unzip part of his jacket to not overheat. The helmet protects his eyes from visual glare or wind, and it’s only the tears that blur his vision as the second scattering of meteors blows out the outer walls, then a third collapses the inner ones.

Those not battling watch in solemn silence as the most eminent researcher in Kanto destroys his life’s work. Most snap out of it quickly and finish rejuvenating their pokemon before joining one of the various fights, but Red can sense their grief, even from the rangers.

He does his best not to get sucked in by them, nudging Charizard to take off in one direction while sending Starmie in the other, the two of them circling the melted metal and glass of the destroyed lab. Even after multiple lessons with Misty to get used to Starmie’s unique sensorium, it’s a challenge to keep from seeing everything it senses as strange and alien… but there are definitely a few spots of extra strangeness that he can identify through his own, smaller psychic range, and he zeroes in on them one at a time, breathing fire down—having Charizard breath fire down—to mark them for the others, then moving on to the next.

Once he’s sure they’ve all been tagged and are being battled, he nudges Charizard to the outer edge of the perimeter again and brings Starmie back to him, detaching his thoughts from theirs and just resting against his pokemon’s warm neck for a while, breathing hard. He wants to take his helmet off, but it provides too many benefits, and he’s not sure if fresh air will make his headache better or worse.

Take this seriously. If someone wanted to ambush Red right now, they would sure have an easy time of it, and Red belatedly notices how much less effective the battle calm feels, and has felt lately.

He checks Bagra’s mental field for anything identified as threat, then withdraws again, realizing belatedly what a pointless idea that was. Everything feels like a threat to his abra, and what Red needs most right now isn’t immediate physical safety but a lack of mental strain.

Red unlatches himself from Charizard and takes one of the radios out of his container ball, then unsaddles his pokemon and withdraws him and Starmie. He waves to get someone’s attention, points to the radio, then teleports back to Interpol.

Once he’s reoriented he feels vaguely like he did something wrong, leaving everyone like that. But once he started paying attention to how he felt, he realized how risky what he’s been doing is.

“Update?” Looker asks, voice gruff as he takes Red in. He’s not sure how much of what he’s feeling is coming through his body language, but he keeps his helmet on so as not to have to worry about his facial expression, which Looker shouldn’t be able to make out at this distance.

“The lab is gone. Destroyed by Professor Oak.” Saying the words makes Red’s throat feel blocked, a heavy weight settling around his heart. “I did what I could to make sure there aren’t any survivors.”

“Good. No sign of a trap?”

“Nothing obvious… except for, maybe, one thing that just occurred to me before I came here.”

Looker leans forward. “What happened?”

“Nothing, yet. But I’m… feeling the strain. Of all this, but specifically from using my psychic abilities too much. The last time I felt this was—”

“Silph.”

“Yeah. It… knocks my partitions out, makes it so I get emotionally overwhelmed and jumbled memories. I think, maybe… if this is a trap meant for me, it might be one meant to wear me down, make me overextend myself first.”

Looker nods, frown having shifted to a slightly-more-thoughtful frown. “It makes sense. Good catch.”

“It’s just a thought.”

“It’s more than that. You’re thinking like your enemy might, at least a little. And that’s not a bad thing when you have so many enemies.” Looker lifts the wire, and Red reluctantly pulls his helmet off to plug it in again keeping his face in what he hopes is an attentive, not too strained expression.

“You’re thinking of going back out?” Looker asks, gaze on Red’s face. “Even still?”

The man might as well be psychic. “The labs still need me. But I won’t be… sticking around. Helping. I’ll drop the radios, share information, then go.”

Looker sighs and rubs his eyes. “There could be an ambush set up at any one of these.”

“My gut says that’s not it.”

Looker lowers his hand, watching Red even more attentively now. “What does it say, then?”

Red takes a moment to introspect again, and not just because he knows Looker is skeptical that Red isn’t just finding an excuse. “My gut, or maybe unpartitioned Red, says that the plan is doing two things at once.”

“Good plans often do, so long as their steps stay simple and not independent.”

Red frowns as he thinks back on what happened. Were there simple steps anywhere in all this mess?

Maybe one obvious one. Maybe two.

“First, sowing chaos? That feels weak, but…” Red shrugs. “I don’t know what else the point of all this would be. The implications for unown research… it’s too much to imagine right now, good or bad. But second, it’s keeping me too busy and distracted to notice something else that’s happening.”

“While also tiring you out.”

“Right. If a confrontation is planned, which… I’m not sure one needs to be, if there’s something happening right now that we’re not hearing about because the net is down and I’m too busy doing all this stuff to notice anyway.”

Looker rubs his chin, gaze distant. Red lets him think, just enjoying the peace, the silence, even as part of him is still on the battlefield, twitching at sudden thoughts and half-imagined sounds. After a moment Looker pushes a tray toward Red, one he didn’t even notice has a mug of tea and some biscuits on it, and he gratefully starts to eat and drink, being careful not to scald his tongue.

“The obvious places for a trap,” Looker says after a minute of gentle blowing is enough for Red to sip. “Involve Pallet, your mother, your friends. Here too, but that would be too bold. If they’re not planning to take you down, just distract you, my best guess is they’ll be after Silph again. They have redundancies though, their security won’t get caught with their belts off just because there’s no net.”

Red frowns slightly as the words hook on something in the back of his mind. “Who might?”

“I don’t know. Not my specialty, and Tsunemori left to cover her own set of bases. You could check with her, but we’re better off working backward from the goal.”

“We don’t know their goal,” Red says, feeling antsy again now that the biscuits are eaten and the tea is mostly drunk. He should be checking out the other labs, maybe going back to Cinnabar to reassure Jensen… maybe checking on his mom?

A brush of cold fear, which he quickly dismisses. It wouldn’t make sense to set a trap for him with her, he’d have no reason to go see her now unless he suspected a trap in the first place, which… is too circular, surely…

“If it’s Rocket, they could have half a dozen targets,” Looker says. “And it’s probably better that you don’t go teleporting to each of them along with the labs that you still need to check. We could let the latter go, rely on Tsunemori and my people to ensure they’re okay.”

Red slowly nods, though he doesn’t like it. A dozen dice rolls, more or less, and he’s sure at least one will have a catastrophic result. It’s chilling to think one might already have, given what he’s seen today. And it’s not even noon yet. “If it’s Rowan, the labs probably are the thing. He could be at any one of them, but probably not the ones in Kanto unless he really is looking to face me.”

“In which case you should, again, not be checking the labs.”

Red sighs and shifts in place, taking his helmet back but not putting it on yet. He thinks back to Looker’s earlier words about how Silph wouldn’t be caught out just because the net is down, and wonders again who might. “I should check on Sabrina.”

“Revenge for something?”

“Nothing specific comes to mind, but the way he spoke about her…” Red frowns and closes his eyes. “I want to go to the labs, I feel like I need to, but…”

“Got something?”

Do we? Red asks his unpartitioned self, but gets no response… other than a vague shrugging impulse, which he acts on. “I don’t know. I keep thinking of what you said about Silph security, and what I did when I was there, to stay ahead of the renegades. It wore me out, but it worked. I’m worried about that turning against me, if I try it again. Or, not turning against me, but being turned against me? I don’t know if I’m making sense.”

“You are to me.”

“Cold comfort.”

Looker raises a brow, but cracks a small smile. “Keep talking. What does your gut say?”

Red almost tries Focusing, but a question comes to mind first. “Everyone else is protected, right? Everyone important I can think of, I mean, maybe not everyone, but who would attack Professor Oak or…”

Red trails off as the feeling stirs in his chest, and as Looker asks, “Or?” Red is already putting his helmet on.

“When did you last speak to Bill?”

“I… haven’t. I was relaying what I was told.” Looker shakes his head. “It doesn’t fit, his place is a fortress. He’s got his own power, backup radio, security measures…”

“He’s alone, and he’s not a trainer, and his lab has a ton of stuff in it.” Red activates his helmet, checks with Bagra, then says, “I’m going.”

“Wait, Red!” Looker is flipping through a notebook, headphones half-on. “If it’s a trap—”

“I won’t go straight in. I’ll scout first. But I have to check.”

“The radio, just need to find his frequency—”

“Is it an instant response?”

“Not if he isn’t near it.”

“Then it’s slower than I’ll be.”

And with that, he teleports to the front of Bill’s home, the place where he and Leaf encountered a talking Clefairy that nearly gave him a heart attack…

…arrives…

…reorients…

…pulses his psydar…

…and immediately feels it. The offness. The second mind.

Red rocks on his heels, heart in his throat and pounding hard. Would he be stepping into a trap, or interrupting the true objective? Is he in a good shape to face Rowan alone? Does he have time to tell Looker?

What decides him are the two pulses of psydar that give him a sense of what’s happening below:

A chase, through the tunnels of the lab.

Red rushes forward to join it.

Chapter 134: Invasion

The room Artem leads Red to is totally empty, a “control” chamber without even any carpeting for the unown to interact with. Jensen still gives it a full walk-around, head on a swivel, as Red turns back to Artem. “I’ll wait inside with Jensen. Send Agatha my way when you’re done?”

“Sure.” Artem looks like he’s second guessing all this, but just adds, “I’ll poke the other labs meanwhile.”

“Thanks, Artem.”

The door closes behind him, and Red puts his helmet on, then relaxes his mental shields so he can at least get a vague sense of the unown floating around in the room with them. They’re clearly alive in a way unown mostly aren’t from surface readings, or even deep mergers, though Red doesn’t get any sense of complexity from them at all. Just a mild buzzing—

—which becomes a jolt before they go suddenly still, and silent—

“Was that you?” Jensen says as he unclips a pair of ultraballs.

“No—”

“Then go.” He summons his houndoom and haxorus.

Red’s hands instinctively reach for his pokebelt as well. “It’s—”

Small spheres appear around the unown, some looking like stone, others like balls of plasma or purple flame, and then Jensen barks a command and a stream of fire washes over the unown, heat sending a prickle of sweat all over Red’s body. A few of the spheres fly out in various directions, but half of the unown are down, still burning, while the haxorus leaps toward the others, blade swinging.

“Go, now, Re—!“

—and the part of Red that’s still processing all this is shunted aside as a partition in his mind opens, connecting with Bagra and sending sensations of safe and home to teleport them both to his personal saferoom at Interpol HQ.

Red stares around in confusion for a moment as partitions close and open again. The sensation is like waking from a dream, only to find himself waking again from a second one to realize that the first was actually reality all along.

“Shit,” he breathes as he reorients and remembers what just happened. Adrenaline floods his body, too late to do anything useful. He yanks the door open, prepared to run down the hall toward Looker’s office yelling about the emergency, but months of drilling on the protocols for Rocket incidents brings him up short, and another quick shuffle through partitions teleports him back to Cinnabar Labs, this time just outside the building.

The domed lab looks deceptively peaceful in the morning light. The only sounds are the wind, and the distant waves crashing against the beach, as if even the wingull know something is wrong.

“Command: Beta Lambda Tau,” Red speaks into his helmet, and sees the notification pop up on the corner of his vision. “Code White at Cinnabar Labs.”

Step 1: Send distress signal.

Step 2: File report for people who respond…

“Sitrep minus… about a minute. Unown incident at Cinnabar Labs. They went still, then started—they turned aggressive, I’ve never heard of attacks like these, they were summoning spheres of different kinds of material or energy and flinging them around. I saw rocks, electricity, I think fire though it may have been something else, I only got a glimpse…” What else? What’s important, what might be useful? “A few got easily defeated by a Flamethrower, so I have no idea how bad the threat is, but there are a lot of them in the lab, and their mobility may make them hard to clear out.”

He’s rocking on his heels, blood still pounding in his ears, but he’s glad he mostly managed not to stumble over his words and realizes too late that he should be using…

The thought barely starts before he feels it. His breaths start to deepen, his pulse slows, and he feels his awareness sharpen and focus on just the relevant next steps. “End, send flagged CoRRNet Priority One. New message, Looker plus Tsunemori, start: I’m going back inside. Send others but we’ve got Agatha already here, check the other labs too. End message, send.”

He wants to call Jensen, see how bad things are inside, but he doesn’t want to distract the man while he might be fighting for his life, and he knows what his chief bodyguard would say: follow protocol. Stay safely away, report incident, coordinate reinforcements.

A flash of memory, of cold rain and numbing despair as he watched a burning building collapse in on itself…

He keeps his feet where they are by force of will, banishing the thought of what Blue would say if something happens to Artem and everyone else in the lab while he just stands here.

No, he doesn’t have to just stand here. There’s at least one thing he can do, even while staying outside.

Red rushes over to the side of the building and flings his psychic perception out to cover as much of it as possible. It’s immediately clear that he and Jensen weren’t the only ones attacked, and he does his best to ignore the strange mental jangling from all the unown, instead narrowing his attention to project the battle calm to everyone he can reach.

Without already being in it himself it would be hard to endure their combined emotional turmoil, even as light as the connection with each person is, but within moments their fear and anxiety diminish. When Call: Looker flashes on Red’s HUD, he spends a few moments making the projection more focused and efficient so he can maintain it without too much effort before he says, “Receive. I’m—”

“Where—”

“—at the lab, outside.”

“Come back to base.”

“I’m saf—”

“You are not, the whole island could explode for all we know, get back here now.”

“No.” The word comes without hesitation, and a part of Red wonders why he ever lets the battle calm go. “I can help Jensen and the others here by projection.”

“Fucking hell, Red, if unown have turned hostile we have no idea what the next few hours have in store. They could go around infecting every psychic around, and you are irreplaceable if dead and catastrophic if corrupted. This is an ord—”

“Elite Agatha is here, and I genuinely believe there is no place safer for me to be than near her if there’s any risk like that. I’m ending the call soon if this doesn’t become productive, it’s hard to maintain the projection and talk at once.”

There’s a moment of silence, maybe stunned, maybe just fuming, before Looker says, “The team is already on the way, stay visible so they can easily spot you.”

“Okay. Meanwhile, the other labs—”

“We’re already on it. Don’t broadcast your location any further, the last thing we need is Rocket taking this as an opportunity to snipe you.”

Woops. He should have anonymized that alert to CoRRNet. “Got it.”

Looker ends the call, and Red continues the projection until he notices the sudden presence of something… else, in the mix of humans and pokemon and unown.

His mind reflexively tries to get a better sense of them, and—

—Red blinks, momentarily disoriented as his thoughts seem to reach for a thread that isn’t there anymore. He shakes his head and focuses on projecting the battle calm to the trainers again. He must be more tired than he thought…

No, wait. Out of the corner of his eye, Red notices the time on his HUD is a couple minutes later than it was a few seconds ago, when he ended the call with Looker.

Before he can think through any of the implications of having amnesia’d himself, he hears the grinding, whirring, sound of metal moving, and feels another jolt of adrenaline even through the calm.

They’re opening the roof.

If a bunch of hostile unown start pouring out… should he stay? Go inside?

He looks up, but doesn’t see anything rising above the lab. If they’ve turned totally hostile, maybe they won’t leave at all… which may be better for the island, all things considered.

Ghosts. It’s unmistakable when they start to appear at the corners of his awareness, and he wonders if he amnesia’d himself because he merged too closely with one already. He’s fairly sure these are Agatha’s, given the way they’re clustered together, and quickly withdraws his senses as he feels the sudden spike of their hunger. He waits a few breaths, then sends out a few quick psydar pulses.

The unown are disappearing in swathes, until finally he barely detects any left.

Red releases a long, slow breath as he lets the tension slip out of him, noticing the way some of the muscles in his shoulders and neck ache. He already asked Blue once if he experiences that sort of thing after battle calm, and Blue said he didn’t, which implied that there’s something imperfect in Red’s “copy” of it… or maybe something about his partitions interfere with it working the same way.

Still, after a minute he feels mostly back to normal, and a few more psydar pulses confirm that the danger inside is past. “Call: Jensen.”

“Where are you?” his guard asks as soon as the call connects.

“Outside the lab.” Just check your trackers instead of asking all the time guys. It’s not a fair thought, but it is mildly annoying to have to keep reassuring people he’s at a reasonably safe distance. He hasn’t been that reckless before, has he? “I’m glad you’re okay. Wait, are you?”

“I’m fine. Wait there.”

“If the danger is past I’m coming in to talk to Agatha.” He doesn’t think this counts as reckless. “I barely sense any unown left.”

“The remainder are being wiped out now, but they revived some fossils. The others are almost here, wait for them before coming in.”

It’s a reasonable ask, and he already told Looker he would. “Okay.” He hesitates. “How bad…”

“I don’t see any dead.”

Red closes his eyes for a moment as he feels more of the tension ease out of his shoulders. “Right. Thanks.”

The rest of his security team arrives a minute later. Lin insists on making him wait outside with Brady and Noah while she checks the entrance hall, and only at her message do they follow her into the lab. There’s signs of damage long before they get to the central chamber, and it’s clear to Red that some of the unown, or the pokemon they created, must have gotten out and wreaked havoc throughout the lab.

Luckily, as Jensen said, they don’t pass anyone dead or in obvious mourning; just a few scientists or engineers who are being healed of their wounds or talking in worried clusters, some huddled around damaged equipment. The automatic doors to the dome aren’t functioning right, but thankfully they’re stuck in the open position.

The inside of the dome is a chaotic sea of debris, and a quick scan from left to right helps him find Jensen, who’s spraying potion onto his houndoom, and Artem, who’s aligning a ball with his pokedex. Red smiles in relief, which his friend returns after spotting him. Brady and Noah fan out along the outer walkway, while Lin stays beside Red at the head of the stairs leading down.

“You’re safe,” Agatha says from Red’s left. Her pokemon are all back in their balls except for her mismagius, who hangs above her head slowly fluttering in an invisible wind. “Good. There was some worry when only he came out of the room.”

He follows her gesture at Jensen, who now appears to be systematically capturing every dead unown he can find. Director Tai is occasionally glancing at him in a way that implies he’s trying to work up the courage to stop him, but can’t quite bring himself to, attention too caught up in the rest of the catastrophe around them.

When he spots Red his lips firm into a thin line, and for a moment he’s afraid he’s about to get blamed for all this. It’s been in the back of his mind, the timing; was it coincidence? Something about his mind touching the unown in particular, or would any psychic have triggered the same response? He’d have to ask if they have any here in the lab before he arrived…

But instead the director bows deep, first to Elite Agatha, then to him. “Thank you both for coming when you did. I’ve confirmed that we haven’t lost any staff, but this could have been much worse without warning, or without your assistance, Elite.”

“Were the auto-catchers helpful?” Red asks. He doesn’t begrudge the man for not acting before Agatha arrived (for all they know the unown wouldn’t have left even if the roof was opened sooner), but if this might happen in other labs they need to know what worked and what didn’t.

“They activated, but sporadically,” someone else says, and Red turns to find a woman frowning at a data pad that she’s rapidly tapping with one hand. “My guess would have been that they were confused by all the unown… they’re not registered as targets that should be caught, but they were still acting aggressively, and of course simple visual clutter may have made it harder to spot the revived fossils…” She frowns at the same time a notification alerts Red that he’s lost internet connection. “Oh, come on, now?”

Elite Agatha steps over to Red as he takes off his helmet and fishes an earphone from his bag’s side pocket, leaning on her cane. He does his best not to let his attention get caught by the purple bundle of cloth bobbing in a slow circle above her. “Let’s find a room to talk, Red. I’d like to know how you suspected something would happen here, but first we should compare notes about the unown.”

“Yes, for sure, but we may need to get to the other labs as soon as possible, and… one second, please.” He looks around at his guards as he inserts the earphone and taps it on. “Test?”

“Heard,” Lin says, giving him a curious look.

“Heard,” Jensen repeats, followed by the others. “Something wrong?”

“Internet’s out, wanted to check short-range.”

There’s a pause, and Agatha raises her brow at him as Dr. Tai frowns and takes out his phone. Lin has already done the same. “Mine too.”

“And yours, I’m guessing?” Red asks the woman with the tablet.

“Yeah,” she sighs, and strides off. “I’m going to check the modem.”

Red watches her go, then turns back to Lin. “It’s weird though, because—”

“We’re not using their wireless.”

Jensen is making his way back toward Red, gaze up at the open roof. “Teleport back, Red.”

He hesitates. “Wouldn’t they jam local signals too, if it’s prep for an attack? And Rocket knows I can teleport anywhere, why tip their hand by jamming first?”

“Theorize later, for now play it sa—”

“Hey,” Artem says as he walks over, pokedex in one hand and ultra ball in the other. “Something’s weird with the dex.”

“Internet’s out.”

“No, it’s not that. Loo—kch…”

Artem has frozen, arm half extended and screen only partially turned toward Red, who frowns and steps forward and to the side to check—

—and sees the spikes of metal that are piercing his friend’s arm and chest from the side of the pokedex.

“What?” The word comes out of Red’s lips on its own, in the gap between conscious thought and reflexive, growing horror, growing faster and stronger as the shock fades, as more and more blood drips down the length of the spikes every second until drops start to patter onto the floor. “Art—”

He’s yanked back and to the side, hard enough to stumble and fall—

The world shifts around him, from the grey of the lab to blue and green.

—No!—

—back, dropping his helmet to reflexively slap the dewy grass below before he lands on Bagra.

“—em!”

Everything feels fragmented, even his disorientation. This wasn’t like his last emergency teleport, there were no partitions involved, no projections for Bagra. His abra reacted to the momentary panic of the fall and took them somewhere safe, just as whoever pulled Red off balance probably intended.

To get him out of the lab. To get him away from whatever just—

No

—hurt Artem—

“No!” Red scrambles to his feet, blood pounding through his temples as he shuts his eyes tight and tries to think… Calm, I need to be calm! Deep breaths…

He’s just finishing his second one when he feels the battle calm spread over him, only remembering about it after it’s stilled his trembling limbs. A distant part of him wonders what took his unpartitioned self so long to activate it, but the rest of him is more focused on next steps.

Next steps for what?

He’s breathing harder than he should be, and his pulse is erratic. The battle calm feels… cracked, fragile, as the image keeps replaying in his head over and over.

His heart…

What happened? His pokedex was acting up and then just…

Red snatches his helmet up from the grass and checks for a signal, but there’s still none, despite having teleported all the way to… wherever this is. He triangulates between Mt. Moon and Mt. Silver and realizes he’s probably in the field near Bill’s house where Bagra was caught.

He can’t call and check what’s happening. He has to go back.

It isn’t fear of whatever happened to Artem that makes him hesitate, makes his hands tremble as he lowers the helmet. It’s…

His HEART!

…the knowledge contained in that brief glimpse of Artem with spears of twisted metal going through his chest.

Potions need pumping blood to distribute them.

Revive capsules need a functioning heart to resuscitate.

But Artem’s heart was pierced by multiple thick twists of metal, which means he might already be—

A wave of grief nearly brings Red to his knees, tears rising in his eyes, and instead he closes them and screams. Screams his denial of the reality the grief would represent, and his fury at its return, after having dealt with so much already for his dad and Aiko.

The scream seems to echo across the empty field, and he feels Bagra’s unease at the sound, nearly enough to trigger another reflexive teleport despite its training. He takes a deep breath, and pushes himself up to his feet again.

“Not yet,” Red whispers, eyes closed. “I know I need to accept you, I know you’re not the enemy, but… not yet. So long as his brain survived…”

He keeps taking deep breaths until the calm is back, feeling it flow easier around him as he forms a goal, a plan.

He needs to go back and help with whatever is happening.

And then, if Artem is… not able to be helped…

Red doesn’t have a pokeball hacked to take in a human form, but he does have containers. He has to try, even if the odds of safe storage and eventual revival are miniscule, even if it still means saying goodbye to his friend in this lifetime, it’s better than just accepting his death.

The grief rises up again, the mental flinch, but this time Red is ready, and he rides the wave of emotion for a moment and finds the spark of energy it lights in him to move.

Large container ball, release. Box, open. Tilt it onto its side until all the wilderness survival gear inside is dumped out.

He’s moving on impulse, and can’t tell how much of what he’s doing is decided already by his unpartitioned self and how much is newly occurring to either of them…

No time for more than a couple cycles. Predict this fails: how surprised?

Not surprised. At all.

Why does it fail?

Ongoing danger. Can’t reach his body.

Then we fight. Imagine that’s solvable, but we still fail. Surprised?

No.

Why not?

Someone stops me. I could shut off the lights, so no one sees.

Roof is open. Smokescreen?

No—

—won’t be able to see, container won’t be able to take box back in. And it could be chaos in there, we still don’t know what it was…

“Too many unknowns,” Red murmurs as he puts the lid back on, returns the box to its ball, then clips it onto his belt. “Unknown unknowns. But even still, we have to try.”

Maybe. But they’ll know we moved him.

The realization hits like a punch to the stomach, despair doubling Red over in fresh pain.

The cameras. Of course they would wonder where his body went, and while he hoped they’d just chalk it up to the same disappearances from Lavender Tower, this time they would have recordings to check and see Red arriving, would notice the body being gone after whatever Red does.

He takes a deep breath, tries to think it through again from the beginning. What if he just gets Artem out first? He can pretend the body disappeared elsewhere…

But it would mean directly lying, instead of hoping people draw their own false conclusions. Bad enough that false beliefs about what’s happening could lead to false hypotheses about the phenomenon, but is he prepared to lie to people who are relying on him to be honest? Maybe even to Artem’s own family, who surely deserve to know the truth?

If they know, they might stop me. Is that reason enough, to give up on any chance of saving someone’s life?

Frustration, futility, despair. Each one rips through his battle calm, and another scream erupts from his throat. He presses his fists against his closed eyes and takes deep breaths.

The clock is ticking, and others might be fighting for their lives right now.

From the beginning, again: what can he do to save Artem?

The obvious answer that comes to mind is nothing. But he’ll only accept that after he’s exhausted the other possibilities.

…but he doesn’t have time to go over each option. The longer he waits, the higher the chance someone else gets hurt or killed, and not just at the Cinnabar Lab. He needs to go to the others, warn them before it’s too late.

It’s not despair or grief that rises up now. It’s the weight of responsibility pushing in from all sides, redirecting his thoughts toward what he should be doing at the other labs, or to help coordinate…

He takes his phone out. Still no signal.

Keep it simple. Get Artem somewhere safe (and private) first. Preserve him after. Determine what to say if needed.

If anything would come up as a higher priority… he needs to focus on that. Even if it feels like giving up on… on sacrificing, Artem.

Red takes one more deep breath, then merges with Bagra, focuses his memories and partitions to project safety and home onto the lab…

…and a moment later he’s there again, disorientation fading rapidly as the partitions return his memories to their proper places.

Even in his haste, he takes a moment to send psydar pulses out… then breaks into a run for the entrance.

There are still a lot of people inside, some hiding, some fighting. Many are on the edge of panic.

And just like that, he knows he can’t stay outside this time.

He projects his battle calm out at everyone he can reach, but almost immediately has to end it when he reaches the entrance and sees that the security pair who let him and his guards through before aren’t at their post. Red takes a moment to teleport just inside the entrance before sending the projection out again as he breaks into a run, unclipping balls as he goes.

Blood is dripping down the stairs that lead up to the dome’s walkway.

Red’s panic and grief threaten to rise through his battle calm again, which would affect everyone he’s projecting it to. He pushes himself to move faster up the short flight of stairs until his head clears the walkway, and all the battles happening throughout the dome are visible at once.

The first thing to snag his attention is to his left, where Agatha is facing down what looks like a… floating black splotch in the air, with a vague tail and hands. It almost looks like a haunter, but rounder, bloated. The surreality it exhibits is so extreme that even a glimpse of it in the corner of Red’s vision makes him dizzy… or maybe that’s the combined effect of Agatha’s team of ghosts all moving around it as they battle.

He forces his gaze to the right, where Jensen and Lin are at either side of what looks like a… kabutops skeleton, wrapped around some office equipment.

Their pokemons’ attacks don’t seem to be hurting it much, but they’re hounding it from multiple angles and directions with a raichu, houndoom, victreebel and glaceon, keeping it from making much progress toward either of them as it shoots out streams of water, bolts of electricity, and even random bits of shattered chairs and desks. The hunters are cycling through new pokemon every few seconds, either trying to keep it off balance or trying to find a weakness.

The last attention grabbing cluster is the handful of lab employees and security blasting chunks of metal and wood off a towering… shape, which seems to be made up of bits of the broken terrariums around it, as well as two and a half autocatchers that form something like arms for it to swing.

Its parts shift with every slow movement, bits of it breaking off as new things take their position, forming short, awkward legs before collapsing apart entirely and reforming in a new configuration. The trainers are staying ahead of it, but it’s continually taking in material from objects around it to patch the bits that get destroyed, either by its own movements or by attacks.

The rest of the battles he sees are individuals facing off against various pokemon that seem to have freshly spawned, the most attention-grabbing being an aerodactyl that’s flying around the inside of the dome, hurling chunks of fossils at a jolteon that sends crackling bolts back. And on the floor in front of Red…

Artem is lying still, face nearly as white as his coat… a coat that’s now half crimson. He’s not where he was when Red was shoved away, a streak of blood showing where he was dragged closer to the doorway. There’s a potion bottle next to him, but no one else is around.

Someone tried. Probably even after these new threats appeared, someone tried to save him, then gave up.

Because they believed there was no hope.

The mental flinch is nearly as bad as looking at the strange beings, but he forces himself to look, to assess… and then to decide.

People need his help right now, but Artem isn’t beyond all hope yet, and no one else can help him.

It takes only moments to summon the box, lift Artem into it, then withdraw it back into the container ball.

He’ll have to answer a lot of questions, later. Possibly he’ll be charged with a crime.

But that’s for Future Red to deal with. Present Red needed to do that, to live with himself as he focuses his attention on the rest of the room.

Three mysteries in front of him. Three problems that need to be solved. A different amount of lives are at immediate risk in each.

He moves toward the big blocky thing first, ignoring Jensen’s sudden shout for him to get out of here. A dozen trainers are attacking it with various pokemon, chipping away at its mass. One more charizard adding Flamethrowers to the mix might tip the balance, but—

Well, no reasonable “but” he can think of makes it not the obvious thing to do meanwhile, either way.

“Go, Charizard! Go, Nidoqueen! Flamethrower, Sludge Bomb!”

The blocky thing begins to stumble and sway as more of its bits get two different kinds of melted. Red leaves them to it, then shifts his attention to the strange kabutops skeleton.

“Why aren’t you catching it?” Red yells from a distance he hopes Jensen will acknowledge is relatively safe.

“It burst out of the ball that was holding it!” Jensen yells back. “Why the hell did you come back?!”

Red ignores him, too shocked at the comment and paying closer attention to the strange monster now. The ultraball Artem had in his hand?

Another distant stab of pain in his chest, but he tries to focus on the puzzle in front of him. If it burst out of its ball, is it more massive than it looks? The delay would be odd, but there’s no other hypothesis in mind. “Heavy ball?”

“Tried it! Red, if it starts glowing, teleport out immediately! It got Noah in a blink!”

Noah? He realizes he didn’t see the hunter anywhere, and another stab of shock threatens the calm, along with guilt. Noah is one of his newer guards, not someone he’s gotten to know much at all… but he was here to protect Red, and now…

Out the corner of his eye, Red sees an omanyte crawling out of a broken terrarium near him, and leaps back while summoning Venusaur to put it to sleep, then catch it. Focus. Grieve later. “It’s resisting everything?”

“We’re taking it down, little by little,” Lin shouts. “Leave it to us, help the others!”

It’s hard to tell if she’s right or not through the surreality that comes from paying too much attention to it, but he thinks he can see that it’s nearly unable to move now as its bones crack and break under the continuous assault. Red hurries over to Agatha, checking along the way that his pokemon are still helping with the big one… which already looks smaller as well.

When he gets close enough to the Elite, his battle calm gets another jolt at the sight of her pale, sweating face. He hasn’t been projecting it onto her, not wanting to jostle whatever mental plates she’s spinning by directing three ghosts at once, and now he wonders if that was a mistake.

“Agatha,” he says once he’s close enough, still keeping his gaze away from her pokemon or the thing they’re fighting. “What can I do?”

“It’s immune to all the others’ attacks,” she pants between deep breaths, hands clutching tight around her cane’s head. “But also mentally impenetrable, like… flicking paint at a wall already covered in graffiti. Any Ghost or Dark on your belt?”

“Shit, no—wait…!”

He quickly sends a mental impulse out across the dome, and after Charizard finishes another Fire Blast, he whips around toward Red, body moving in a sinuous line around the various broken terraria. He growls as he approaches, head craning around and up until he spots whatever it is Agatha is fighting, wings half-opening, then closing, feet shuffling his weight from side to side. Red partitions a part of himself for calm, projecting it at his pokemon to relax him.

Unlike charmander, who emit smokescreens in response to fear, charizard tails emit black smoke as a result of being chased, which is not quite as “afraid” as it is a complex mix of feeling endangered and challenged. A similar change occurs in the impulses for melee fighting; charmander rely equally on their claws and flame in an attempt to conserve fuel, but charizard have fire to spare, and will usually avoid physical combat unless exhausted.

It’s not hard for Red to project some of that feeling, and Charizard is pretty receptive to it given how much fire it just spewed out against the block-thing. He adds in the mental maneuver for Shadow Claw, and watches from the corners of his vision as his pokemon flies up toward the blobby ghost-like thing and rakes it with his talons.

The thing seems to go through a whole-body spasm that suddenly flips it around toward Charizard, revealing flat white eyes near the top of its round form. Whatever it’s about to do next gets interrupted as it spasms again as Agatha’s mismagius swoops by, and then Charizard loops around for another raking strike, wing gusts sending bits of debris everywhere as he works hard to maneuver within the constrained space.

Another few hits and the “thing” abruptly falls to the ground as a messy mass of black sand.

Red stares at it for a moment, blinking, then rushes over to Agatha. “Are you alright?”

The Elite takes a handkerchief from her pocket and wipes her brow before answering. “Consider me put through my paces. It’s been a while since I lost a pokemon I brought into the field, even those I’m training.” She closes her eyes, face tight. “Mentally, I need a ‘shower,’ something to clear out contaminants, but I can manage a little longer.” She tucks her handkerchief away. “Let’s make sure the others are alright, then we can figure out what’s happened here.”

As she passes him by, still clearly recovering her breath, her hand reaches out to pat his shoulder… an action that immediately reminds him of what they’ve already lost.

He partitions the emotions for now and rushes after her to help the largest group finish off the blocky-thing, while Lin and Jensen finish the kabutops-shaped one.

Rather than dissolve into sand, the other two fall apart into their constituent bits and pieces. Once the last of them is gone, pokemon seem to stop forming from fossils, and within minutes the fighting stops.

Red wanders in a slight haze, vaguely helping out as once again, it’s time for those in the lab to heal their wounded and clean up the mess. He wants to stay and ask questions, figure out what happened, exactly, and why, especially about what happened to Artem, or why Agatha was so taxed by the battle.

But he knows the questions will come soon after that, and he heads them off when Jensen and Lin and Brady find him by saying, “Internet is out even on the Kanto mainland. I need to go to the other labs to warn them.”

“Not without us,” Jensen says. “And we need backup, especially without Noah.” At first glance he seems as cold and professional as ever, but there’s an extra stiffness in his words and posture, and the other two guards seem more obviously masking their grief.

“You’ll only slow me down,” Red says, but quickly adds, “I need to speak with Looker first, either way, and then I need to speak with Bill. Meet at Sabrina’s gym in twenty minutes.”

He teleports away before they can argue; this is too big, and he’s been careful enough.

Something caused all this, and Red aims to find out what or whom. And if it was Rowan…

The time for holding back, and letting others pay the price, is over.

Chapter 133: Interlude XXVIII – Null Reference

In Artem’s dream, the lab is being visited by some big names. It’s not quite clear who—Lance maybe, Professor Oak and Elm, probably, maybe even Wally? He’s rushing around, trying to get everything in order for their arrival, helping the rest of the team prepare to show off their research breakthrough… he’s not quite clear what the breakthrough is, but feels pretty strongly like it’s going to change everything—

—until the dream is shattered by the sound of his phone ringing. Not an alarm, not a message notification, but full-on ringing, and his immediate reaction, once he gets past the befuddlement of finding himself in bed rather than at the lab, is sleepy indignation…

…up until the implications catch up to his foggy brain and he scrambles to pull the phone toward him and open the call. “Hullo?” He clears his throat. “Hel—”

“Check your messages.”

Artem blinks. “Lian?”

“Check them. And, sorry, Tai asked me to poke everyone who’s not in yet.”

The call ends before Artem can respond, and he sits up fully as he rubs his eyes with one hand and swipes at his phone with the other until he sees it:

[everyone] Novel unown activity. Report in ASAP.

He stares at the message, then the time, then the message again, then pushes himself out of bed and lurches toward his closet, alarm and fear shifting closer to nervous excitement.

Novel activity. As in something that’s never been seen before… ever, or just at their lab?

New patterns in the unown clouds? New sounds that haven’t been recorded before?

Or pokegenesis, at long last, from one of the lab’s samples?

The sooner he gets to the lab the sooner he’ll know, and he tries to keep his expectations low as he pulls his coat on. They’d mention in the message if there were a new pokemon, surely…?

His stomach feels full of fizzy water as he rushes out the door, distantly wondering if he’s still dreaming, deposited from the middle of the events back to the beginning of a new loop. He’s been having dreams about some major breakthrough on and off for months, from even before he started working at the unown lab. Like his brain got a taste for notoriety at some point, and was looking forward to the next hit.

Not that it’s a mystery about what that point was. When his research took him to Lavender Town, meeting the Pallet Trio had felt surreal enough. Their fame was still relatively mild at the time, but he’d felt vaguely dissatisfied with his trainer journey that only grew in contrast to seeing from a distance what they’d accomplished during theirs.

That dissatisfaction, along with his desire to tackle bigger mysteries than the work that got him his researcher license, is what gave him the extra push upon seeing the message about investigating Lavender Tower to bid his journeymates a temporary goodbye and taxi halfway across Kanto to meet them.

It wasn’t until the battle in the tower, a far more dangerous and unique experience than anything else in his life until that point, that he realized how much that impulse that got him to Lavender, that dissatisfaction, had been looking for more than just some big achievement to list on his profiles and CV. Not the battle itself; that had been terrifying, and he’d barely kept his composure together afterward. It took two weeks before he wasn’t having nightmares every evening, and he gave up on his trainer journey altogether to focus on more research for a while.

But it all felt worth it, after, because he’d found what he really wanted all along as a result. Getting to meet Professor Oak, pursuing unown research with Red, getting increased attention and opportunities after his observational studies, that was all icing on the cake.

What made life feel more, well, alive after, was the memory of brushing up against something truly unknown. He’d been part of first contact with it, had helped defend against it and contributed to understanding it. It made him feel simultaneously like the world was too big for him to ever fully grasp, but also more empowered than ever to actually get up in the morning and try.

Everything he’s done since has been in pursuit of someday getting a text like he did this morning. Another moment where he’ll get to stand on the cusp of the truly unknown.

Or, once he’s outside and has a clear path toward the lab, get to bike toward it, practically standing as he pedals hard and fast.

Winter has finally come to Cinnabar, encroaching little by little through the early morning hours until a few snowflakes are melting in Artem’s hair as he finally steps through the lab doors, breathing in deep gulps. He lets out a grateful sigh as he feels the insulated warmth seeping through his jacket, shows his ID to the guards, then hurries for the lockers to swap his jacket for a lab coat, looking around all the while for any clues as to what’s happened. He lives close to the lab, it wouldn’t surprise him if he’s one of the few here who wasn’t already on shift…

“Nuri!” he calls out as he spots his coworker hurrying from one room to another. “What’s going on?”

“Have you seen them?”

“No, just walked in twenty seconds ago—”

“Go look, you’ll see!”

Then he’s gone, and Artem jogs the rest of the way to the central unown chamber where all the samples are laid out in their various biomes, heart pounding as he finally steps through the final soundproof doors to the central chamber, and is immersed in the sound of the cloud.

The first thing he registers is that the sound is off. The chaotic blend is usually so diverse and numerous that it’s almost impossible to pick out any particular noises in the static of the combined sounds, but now he almost immediately picks out distinct warbles, pops, clicks, murmurs…

He looks up at the dome above the terrariums, half expecting to see most of the unown cloud gone. Instead it looks as numerous as ever, but… almost organized? The diffuse cloud is no longer bouncing off each other on the individual level, but rather moving in strings and cluster, some moving in almost-patterns that his brain seems to insist it can predict until a minor change keeps the next iteration from being predictable.

Artem tries to focus his attention on a small subpart of the cloud, watching as an H, T, M, A, and Z fly in a curving orbit around an almost-diamond-shaped cluster of Hs and Ls, some of the Hs swapping between both as they pass each other. This continues for a few revolutions, the string altering its trajectory each time, the diamond rotating in new directions until a passing R, U, W, P, E, R string collides with it, and the whole triple assembly of unown disperse and reform into new shapes and strings.

And everywhere he looks, it’s similar. Order among the chaos, or chaos among order, but nothing like the cloud of the past few months, or any other large scale gathering of unown he’s seen.

Artem isn’t sure if he stares for just a few seconds or several minutes before he takes note of the various researchers rushing around, both on the walkway and below. Excitement pumps new adrenaline through him as he realizes some of the terrariums are broken, and he grabs Zhen’s arm as she rushes past. “Which ones?”

“Omanyte, kabuto, aerodactyl.”

Three! No new species, but it’s still more than he dared hope. “Aerodactyl? Did it cause the damage?”

“Most of it, also ate some of the unown cloud before it got caught. We’re still trying to catalog which ones we’ve lost.” Zhen gives him a pointed look.

“Right.” He releases her arm. “I’ll get on it, just gotta… this is huge!”

Zhen grins and winks before rushing away. Artem watches the cloud for another few moments, then jogs toward his office, breaking into a run when he reaches the long hall. He’s hoping he can identify what they lost from the cloud quickly so he can start looking over the logs and recordings of what happened around the genesis points. Or was there just the one…?

Two minutes to pull up the list of active tags in the building and double check which are still active, two more to write up a quick report to share on the lab’s intranet, and then he can finally open the logs and start reviewing the sensor data on one monitor while the raw video feeds plays at 5x speed on the other. He’s distantly aware of his phone ringing as his eyes dart from electromagnetic sensors to decibel ratings, and reaches for it without looking as he skips the footage ahead to match the time of a spike coming up—

He glances at the screen even as his thumb prepares to end the call—if it’s not someone from the lab it’s probably not important enough to answer right now—until he sees that it’s from Red.

They haven’t spoken in over a week. To get a call now, this early in the morning?

Not a coincidence.

He puts it on speaker so he can set the phone down and keep working. “Red, what—”

“Are you at the lab?”

A thrill runs up his spine as his suspicion is confirmed. “What’s happened?”

“Are you?”

“Yeah, I’m in my office—”

“One sec.”

The call ends, leaving Artem staring at the phone. It takes him just a moment to realize what’s about to happen, and he stands and looks around, tense and waiting…

…and waiting…

…until he realizes Red has never been to his office before, and relaxes, just in time to hear a knock at his door.

He strides over to open it, and there’s Red Verres, dressed in his black and red hunter uniform, complete with the abra-backpack combo and that (kinda scary, kinda cool) high tech helmet with the dark visor. “Red, what—”

“The unown did something?”

Artem is still staring, brain still trying to integrate all the things his friend’s call and arrival might mean with what’s happened today. “They revived some fossils, and if you passed by the central chamber you’d see, they’re incredibly active, we’ve never seen anything like—”

“Listen, who’s in charge of the lab? Are they here?”

It finally registers that Red being here likely means something is wrong, wrong in the way their trip to Lavender went wrong, and cold fear floods Artem’s stomach. “How bad is this?”

He can’t see his friend’s face through the helmet, but his voice sounds hard as he says, “Worse than you’re thinking. I need to talk to your director as soon as possible. Can you help?”

Much of Artem’s status has been well earned, not just from his participation at Lavender but for his research as well. But he got an additional, sizable share secondhand, just from being Red’s friend before he became… well, there isn’t really a label for it, but “one of the most famous young trainers in the world” is fair to say.

He never really felt the price of that, other than a few questions and comments that compelled him to defend Red from the suspicions of others. A favor now and then, asked for or not, assuaged his conscience. Pushing himself to help with extra wild battles now and then did too; Lavender was, among other things, a strong reminder not to let his trainer skills suffer for his research.

But it feels like he suspected, in a half-conscious way, that the true price would come due sooner or later, because he barely registers the question, doesn’t even consider the potential implications or fallout, before he says, “Follow me.”

Back to jogging through the hallway, this time to the director’s office. Dr. Tai is an older man, lean and as bald as Leader Blaine but with a gray beard lining his jaw instead of a mustache. Artem is half expecting him not to be in his office, but he can hear people talking inside, and when he knocks there’s a pause, followed by a “Come in.”

Artem steps inside to see his boss standing in front of one of the wall monitors. There’s no one else in the room, meaning they just interrupted a call. “Artem, what’s the ma—” He blinks and stares at Red. “Are you…?”

“Red Verres. I’m sorry to be so abrupt, but there’s no time for a full introduction; there’s been an incident at an unown lab, and I want to make sure it doesn’t happen here too. What’s the process for releasing the unown, and how long would it take to do it in an emergency?”

Tai stares at Red incredulously, which Artem only gets a glimpse of because he turns to do the same. Release the unown? “What happ—”

“Release them? Now? Do you have any idea what just—”

“I’ve been informed,” Red says, sounding calm in a way that feels at odds with how urgently he arrived here. “I didn’t know before I arrived, but I suspected, it’s why I’m here.”

“What happened at the other lab—” Artem starts to ask again, before his boss cuts him off with “It took us months just to—”

Red holds his hands up toward both of them. “Guys. I’m here because I can teleport anywhere I want, including directly indoors, but Agatha should already be in Cinnabar and is likely arriving soon, and I can have Director Tsunemori on the phone if you’d rather talk to her. Please treat this as seriously as if they were all already here in the room, and tell me how long?”

He didn’t raise his voice, but there’s a steel in the words that helps Artem feel, for the first time, the true weight of authority his young friend now has. Authority enough to teleport right through the lab’s security, walk into the director’s office, and demand compliance… maybe even get it, if it’s an important enough reason.

A flare of indignation rises up as Artem thinks of what this might mean. It was bad enough when the Champion forbade any unown research months ago, after all the effort he and everyone else put into trying to learn more about them. Labs like these were carefully designed compromises, attempts to show that they could be researched with safety in mind. To just give up on the research, now, when they’re so close?

The director is squeezing the edge of his desk, knuckles turning white… but he seems about equal parts worried as indignant, now. “Is Elite Agatha visiting in an official capacity?”

“Yes.”

“Red, how bad was it at the other lab?” Artem asks, finally getting the question out.

“We have word of multiple casualties.”

The words douse Artem’s frustration as his thoughts turn anxiously to friends and acquaintances at the other unown labs. Neither he nor Tai have an immediate response, other than to ask, “Which one?”

“Rustboro.” Red reaches up to remove his helmet before holding it under one arm. Without it he looks, well, less intimidating, and his age is contrasted even more with Dr. Tai’s… but the determination in his eyes wasn’t visible with the dark glass over his face, and seeing how calm he is despite his words lends even more authority to him. “I know how frustrating this must be, but I’m not here as your enemy. I would be on my way to Hoenn if not for the fact that I might start an interregional incident if I go and investigate it directly. But I believe that whatever you’ve had happen here is connected, and the start of something dangerous.”

The relief in hearing it happened in Hoenn is shallow. He never met anyone there in person, but there are forums and other online spaces where unown researchers have all chatted, now and then, both formally and informally… “And our lab has Indigo’s largest wild unown population,” Artem says, feeling the fear prickle through his stomach again, cold araquanid legs that skitter around and make his heart beat faster.

The director’s jaw works, lips twisted to one side. “With all due respect, it sounds as though you have a hunch, not evidence of danger. A lot of time and money has been poured into this research, and I’ve only been empowered to make a call such as you’re suggesting due to an imminent and obvious threat, which we’re nowhere near to seeing. Maybe the other lab wasn’t properly prepared, but so far we have been.”

“I’ll admit that I don’t know what happened here, so it would be stupid of me to make presumptions,” Red says after a moment. “But my assumption is any safety measures you have are not going to scale properly. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Can you explain what happened?”

“We’ve only just begun investigating it ourselves, but the overview is that a few hours ago the unown began to shift their behavior. Most began flying in formations instead of staying an endlessly shifting cloud, and their sounds changed as well.”

“According to our instruments, some of the sub clouds or strings began canceling each other out, audibly,” Artem adds. Both Tai and Red are looking at him in fascination, and he smiles. “It’s really cool, actually.”

Red briefly smiles back. “And then they started reviving pokemon?”

“No, not for a few hours yet. I was in the middle of looking into what was happening around then when you arrived, but a few others are also looking over the data. Maybe one of them will pinpoint what it was.”

“Sorry.”

Artem thought he kept the disappointment from his expression and tone, but, well, Red’s a psychic. His sincerity at pulling Artem away from something so interesting reminds him why they’re friends. “That’s alright. This is important too.”

“Once the pokemon began appearing, our automated systems took care of them,” Tai says. “State of the art proximity tracking and capture systems—”

“Yes, I’m familiar with them.”

The director spreads his hands. “You mentioned scaling, but we’re equipped for every specimen in the central chamber to be captured even if all are turned into a pokemon at the same time, let alone in waves. I’m not sure what else would be expected of us.”

“Stop me if this is obvious,” Red says slowly. “But you know the unown might turn anything into pokemon, if they’re the ones doing it at all. What makes you think they won’t turn other things into one, besides the samples we’ve left so carefully for them? What if they turn the autocatchers into pokemon? Who catches them then?”

“We have trainers on staff and on standby every day as redundancy backup, despite the extra costs,” Tai says, and rubs his eyes. “We’ve had a recorded, controlled instance of pokegenesis. You were a scientist, once, you must know how vital it is to continue observing and testing our hypotheses.”

At the words you were a scientist, Artem winced at the same time Red’s jaw clenched, and he steps forward. “Sir, I’ve worked with Red on numerous occasions, and I’ve rarely met anyone as interested in discovering the origin of pokemon genesis, or learning new things about the world in general. But if he’s this worried… Rustboro lab was funded by Devon. They must have thought they were prepared too.”

“I understand the risk, but as I said, risk was anticipated. My authority only allows the drastic, costly action being suggested with something substantial.”

“I see.” Red closes his eyes and runs a hand through his hair. “You have no idea how much I’d love to just spend the next few days here helping learn whatever we can from what happened. But the unown can be recaptured if need be, and your staff are more important. Is there anything you can do?”

Tai taps his fingers against the desk in a rapid beat, three, four, five times, then shakes his head, but says, “I’ll alert everyone of the danger. Rescind the all-hands, make sure they know work shifts today are voluntary, for those willing to take on extra risk. But I won’t release the unown without a more obvious sign of danger, or a direct order from the League. If the Elite is coming to give that order, then we’ll do as much research as we can in that time.”

Artem thinks Red is going to argue more, but after a moment he just nods and says, “I’ll be investigating in the meanwhile.” He holds a hand up again as Tai opens his mouth. “I understand you’re concerned about trade secrets and publishing priority, but I swear to you I will keep anything I learn in this role confined to it.”

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

Red pauses a beat before saying, voice a little stiff, “I can cite Article 7 and call Director Tsunemori if my word isn’t good enough.”

Director Tai is already flapping his hand and turning back toward the monitors on the wall. “Go, go. Please tell the Elite that I’m at her service when she arrives.”

Red nods and turns to leave, and Artem follows him. Once they’re a few steps away, he murmurs, “You kept your temper better than I would have.”

His friend glances at him, then… relaxes isn’t really the right word, it’s like his expression and posture collapse into a completely different form. One with about half as much “chill,” judging by the mix of anxious energy in his gait and how wide his eyes are. “Artem I have a really bad feeling about all this but I can’t explain it and I know it’s a shitty thing to do but I need your help—”

“Woah, hey.” He’s never really been the huggy type, but he puts a hand on Red’s shoulder because it definitely seems like the young teen could use it. Artem’s fear was starting to fade, before, but it’s back now in full. He looks around, then steers Red into a nearby storage room. “You saved a lot of lives in Lavender, including mine. I’m a bit anxious about the lab losing its cloud, especially now of all times, but I trust you. What do you need?”

“I’m not sure.” Red takes a breath, eyes closed as he rests the back of his head against the door. “I was hoping we could just release the unown first and figure things out later. But I get why your boss doesn’t want to do that, and I don’t actually have a good, legible reason for it, so… I think the best way to figure out what’s happening, if something is, is to merge with the cloud.”

Artem isn’t sure what to say, but Red must have read something in his expression when he opens his eyes because he quickly adds, “Not all of it! But if it’s possible to section some of them off…”

“Red, isn’t that the thing that may have driven that guy, Rowan, uh, crazy?”

“We’re not sure, but… listen, when I heard about what happened in Hoenn, I really wanted to go and see myself because I think… for some reason I believe it’s connected to Rowan, directly or not. Coming here, where I’m allowed, was the compromise. If I can find something more tangible that can justify Interpol sending me, or me going independently to Hoenn, then I have to try.”

The sense of surreality washes over him again as he realizes what the stakes are, here. Just like in Lavender, he feels swept up in something bigger than himself, something that he can either contribute to or step aside from, but not take lead on, not play the pivotal role.

But maybe still a deciding one. Red’s other friends aren’t here this time to help him this time, and while Elite Agatha may take point on the psychic stuff when she arrives the way Jason did at Lavender, there’s no one else to assist with the lab side of things.

“So long as we’re not releasing them, I should be able to isolate a few. Maybe a whole string if they’ll stay together?”

Some of Red’s rigidity seems to ease, though whether it’s because the suggestion is that good or because it’s a sign of some support, Artem can’t tell. “That would help a lot. Thank you.”

“Alright, come on. I’ll take you to one of the containment rooms, then let someone know to try and herd a few your way.”

“Not yet, I should wait for Agatha. In the meantime, I’m going to talk with your security guards and see if they’ll consent to being checked for signs of memory tampering. Can you get someone to herd them there first?”

“On it.”

They part ways, and as Artem walks his mind keeps turning to what Red said about being here because of what happened in Hoenn. If there’s a connection between that lab and this one, there’s reason to think this, or something, might be happening at the other labs too.

If so, there might be more he can do to help. He’s not sure if he should, but Red thinks this is important, and needs information… and Artem’s own curiosity wants answers too.

He starts sending messages as he walks, a simple Good morning to an older colleague, a hey, you up? to a friend. Six in all, to the people he’d consider closest and most trustworthy among his acquaintances and friends in other unown labs.

Simple messages, ones that wouldn’t mean much to him if he received them on any other early morning. Ones that he would probably ignore, if he was sleeping when he got them, since none are expressing any alarm or sign of danger.

But on a morning like this?

It only takes a few minutes before a response comes back, and it doesn’t beat around the bush:

hey. you guys too huh

Artem’s pulse kicks back into high gear, and he takes a few breaths to think of how he should respond. He can’t reveal lab secrets, particularly not to competitors… but he’s pretty sure he can keep the conversation such that a lawyer looking over the texts wouldn’t be able to find any obvious signs of revealing private information.

Exciting stuff, he replies. But also a bit freaked.

He reaches the control room and lets them know about Red’s request, and that the director has signaled cooperation for now. By the time he’s done, there’s another response:

freaky yeah. expected a one-off if something happened but doesn’t seem to be

Feels like something else is coming?

yep

Artem nods to himself and watches as a string of unown gets herded, with some difficulty, into a separate room. Before he can think of a response, a new message arrives from another person he texted: I’m up, yeah. Everything okay?

He considers a moment, then sends an emoji of a person looking dazed and overwhelmed. The response is almost immediate: a sweating laughing face, followed by a hug. Artem sends a hug back, then goes to look for Red to let him know about the “confirmation.”

When he finds him, he’s talking to one of the security guards, and he’s not alone. Artem recognizes the tall hunter with shades from the day Red, Leaf, and Blue came to see the lab and drop off their fossils.

“—reckless to not have someone else to do it.”

“If Agatha agrees, I’ll step aside, but I think I’m better equipped than anyone else to not be affected by it.”

“Even if that’s true, and if anything I’d say you’re at a higher risk, a ten percent risk to you has a much worse outcome than a thirty percent risk to someone else.”

Red shakes his head. “That’s your priority, and I get it, but if—hey, Artem. All set?”

“Yeah, ready when you are. Also, thought you should know…” He glances at Red’s guard, who stares impassively back from behind his shades, then returns his gaze to Red. “Plausible confirmation, from private chats, that at least two other Kanto labs have odd activity happening.”

“Shit,” Red mutters. “Shit. Okay, I need to figure this out then head to them next, or find a way to send someone else… they’re okay at those places, so far?”

“Yeah, though… I sent six messages out, no response from four of them. All at different labs, last I knew.”

Red is rubbing his face, and for a moment Artem feels bad about bringing it up, about burdening Red with extra issues he may not be able to do anything about. But after a moment Red just sighs and nods, then pulls his helmet on. “Poke them again in a few minutes, then send their names and what labs they’re at to me or Jensen and we’ll get people over there to check. Thanks, Artem.”

“No problem.” He holds his phone up and raises a brow at Jensen, who does indeed pull his phone out for a tap, looking fairly neutral about everything as he scans their surroundings, despite what he said. “Did our security agree to being examined?”

“No. Not unless it’s mandated, which goes back to convincing police of one kind or another.” Red sounds frustrated, and starts to pace, pulling out his notebook and scribbling some things down. “It’s fine, it’s a long shot anyway, but it leaves an uncrossed checklist that keeps us from being able to systematically determine we haven’t missed anything.”

The hunter puts two fingers to his ear, then says, “The Elite has arrived.”

It doesn’t take long for her to get through security, and they hear her cane clacking on the tiles before they see her. Soon the thin, gray haired woman is stumping over to Red and shaking her head. “You’re going to insist on doing this yourself?”

“It’s safer,” Red says. “I can’t help you the same way you helped me in Lavender, and I think I’ve got more defensive ability, with the partitions. Unless I’m wrong about that?”

“Hmph. No. But they may be counting on you doing this.”

“They?”

“Them. Whatever is behind the unown. Maybe even Rocket, somehow.”

Red smiles. “You sound nearly as paranoid as Looker.”

“Nearly? Ha! Must be my age tempering me with all this offsetting wisdom.” She smiles as she looks over the others for the first time, and takes a second look at Artem before nodding her head. “I remember you, though names escape me often these days. Doing well?”

“Artem, and yes, very.” He bows. “It’s good to see you again, Elite.”

“Too early in the morning to be seen, truth be told, but my beauty is behind me and duty is duty. Shall we?”

“I’m going to wait at the area where the unown have been prepared for me,” Red says. “You should talk to the director before you join me, then we’ll begin?”

“I still object strongly to this,” the hunter bodyguard says.

Elite Agatha reaches out to pat his arm as she passes. “He’ll be safe with me, don’t you worry. Show me the way so we can get down to it. I’ll admit to being curious, even if this all turns into an unholy mess.”

Artem quickly walks ahead of her to lead her to Dr. Tai’s office. Once she arrives, she walks in without waiting for announcement, and he and Red glance at each other. Red shrugs, and Artem smiles and leads the way to the holding chamber beside the main floor of the central hub, where a handful of unown were herded.

Word has clearly gotten around about what’s happening, both from people having spotted Red and from the Director’s message about the danger they may be facing. On any other day they’d probably have a small crowd following them around, but everyone’s so busy that by the time Red is ready to go into the room, there are only a few others who seem happy to take a short break to surreptitiously gawk.

If Red notices, he doesn’t comment, simply flashing Artem a smile before saying, “I’ll wait inside with Jensen. Send Agatha my way when you’re done?”

“Sure.” Part of him is disappointed he won’t be inside with them, but maybe he can join when Agatha does… “I’ll poke the other labs meanwhile.”

“Thanks, Artem.”

He nods, then closes the door behind the two…

…and within moments, all the unown in the lab stop moving or emitting sounds, suspended in midair like bugs in a massive invisible web.

Artem slowly looks around, blinking as a pit of dread forms just below his heart. He reaches back slowly to open the door, let Red know what’s happened…

…but a moment later the unown cloud is moving again, and Artem’s hands dart for his pokebelt by instinct despite knowing the unown aren’t violent.

He summons his magneton just as a cluster of spheres appear around a string of unown, whirling and shooting out in rings that smash and burn and freeze and and scorch everything around them indiscriminately.

Within moments the screams of people, panicked or hurt, fill the air to contend with the resumed sounds of the unown cloud, the chaotic mix once again sounding off from what he’s used to in a whole new way. “Thunderbolt!” he yells, and a handful of unown are zapped to the ground, which seems to break the paralysis for others who have summoned their pokemon to also start attacking.

About a dozen unown fall within moments. But a few are getting back up already, and their cloud has nearly a hundred. If they start attacking in concert instead of seemingly at random, they don’t stand a chance.

Artem hasn’t had much time to be afraid just yet, still running on instincts and adrenaline as he yells, “Protect Red!” and runs for the control room. He passes by rows of terrarium, all thankfully still but many damaged in a variety of ways. A cluster of unown swoop down toward him at the same time an omanyte pulls itself up out of the destroyed remains of a terrarium, and he yells “Thunderbolt” until everything coming at them stays down.

It works somewhat, though more of those spheres hit his pokemon and the habitats around him, destroying glass and cardboard and even some fossils. Artem rushes past the destruction and toward a communal work desk set between inner and outer rings…

Wait, no. The desk and chairs are gone.

In their place is—

—he flinches, whole body drawing back in response to the spike of wrongness that hits his brain. He looks away, tries to shake the image out of his memory, and realizes after a moment how nonsensical that is. But it feels like a bit of the image is stuck in his eye, like a floater across his vision, and panic starts to claw at his chest and throat as he keeps backing away, rubbing at his eyes…

Calm.

It floods through him like potion against a burn, washing away the fear and replacing it with clear thinking. There’s confusion, and a distant sort of alarmed awareness that something is wrong, but he can prioritize his thoughts.

He opens his eyes, keeping them pointed down as he backs away from whatever-the-thing-was. There’s a sound like a high pressure stream of water hitting metal, and his magneton is sent spinning into his field of vision, causing him to skip a few more steps back, half-turned to make sure he doesn’t trip over anything. “Thunderbolt!” he yells, and hopes his pokemon will attack the right thing.

Artem knows the calm isn’t normal, but it’s helping, so he ignores it for now. He has to prioritize the thing in front of him, has to find a way to deal with it, but he doesn’t know what it is…

So start with what it’s not. It’s not any pokemon he’s ever heard of before. Artificial pokemon like the ones he favors have some sort of structure to the way they’re built. This thing looked a mashed together bunch of objects in a sim, clipping through each other and exposing bits that shouldn’t be visible, normally.

Another stream of water hits his pokemon, and a part of him is wondering how is that thing a Water Type but the rest of his thoughts are already flowing naturally to the next; there is at least one type of pokemon that he knows affects people like this, and he remembers Lavender Town enough to move automatically as soon as it occurs to him.

He unclips the container ball from his belt and points it to the side, summoning his supply box. As soon as it appears he rushes over and lifts the lid, resisting the urge to rub the floating weird blob from his vision again as he pulls out the Silph Goggles inside and straps them around his head.

When he finally looks back toward the new pokemon, it… doesn’t look much better.

It doesn’t hit his brain as painfully wrong as before, but he still can’t make any visual sense of it. It’s like someone just jammed a bunch of objects together to form a thin, rectangular tower, shaving off everything that wouldn’t fit at the edges and jamming them elsewhere to fill in the gaps.

It even moves unnaturally, jerking across his field of vision with no obvious contraction of its parts. As it passes some kabutops fossils, it seems to shatter apart, then draw itself back up together, and now it looks a bit like a skeletal kabutops, much of it still trapped in stone, sharp arms reaching forward with each step.

It suddenly becomes very important to Artem that this thing, whatever it is, doesn’t get in reach of him or anyone else.

Why aren’t the automatics working? he thinks as he enlarges an ultra ball, aims until he hears the ping, then throws.

To his surprise, it connects, and sucks in the skeletal “pokemon,” despite it being a collective of animated objects, as far as he could tell. Which implies that the reality the goggles are trying to show him is even more strange than it can manage.

He snatches up the ultra ball just as more unown swoop down, and he dives behind a terrarium wall as they attack indiscriminately all around him, ducking and covering his head as bits of wood and glass shatter around him. “Thunderbolt!” he yells, legs trembling and heart fluttering in his chest as the calm from before continues to slowly fade.

After a moment he looks up, noting the destruction around him and feeling mildly shocked he wasn’t hit. His magneton has taken a few too many hits, however, and he withdraws it, unsure if it’s even still alive before bringing out his claydol.

The small part of Artem’s mind still running analysis of what’s happening has been mostly drawing up blank in terms of theories, but as he forces himself to start moving again he looks around for some kind of pattern in what the unown are attacking, if anything in specific.

Nothing obvious pops out at him as he makes it to the control room at last. He barges through the door, shouting, “Open the roof! We have to release the—”

“I know!” Kiran yells back, looking halfway between panicked and infuriated as they type something on their computer. “It’s not working, the whole system is acting up!”

“Manual release?!”

“I need a second key, either from Shen or Tai!”

Artem curses, says, “I’ll get it,” and turns to rush toward the director’s office…

…only to see Tai run over himself, wide eyed and pale, key clutched in his hand.

Artem falls back against the wall in relief, and to get out of the director’s way as he stumbles to a halt inside and jams his key into the console. Kiran scrambles to pull another from his pocket, then does the same, and both turn together, followed by Kiran slamming their palm down on the big red button between.

There’s an immediate rumbling as the roof retracts, and even from in here, with just the doorway open, Artem feels the air turn colder. It’s also fresher, the smells of destruction fading as snow starts to fall into the central chamber.

“Is everyone… okay…?” Dr. Tai pants, but Artem is watching the unown, heart sinking. “Artem? What’s—”

“They’re not leaving,” Kiran murmurs, watching out through the glass as well.

The unown are acting exactly as they were before, randomly attacking everything around them (though not, so far as Artem can notice, each other) as they fly around together.

He tries to think of what else they can do, whether there’s some sound or widespread attack like Hurricane that might drive them out…

…and then he hears the clacking of a cane, and turns to see Elite Agatha walking from the direction of the director’s office.

With his Silph Goggles on, he can see the shapes around her clearly enough. A gengar, a haunter, a gastly, and a mismagius all out together, all facing the same way with her as she looks over the rampaging cloud of unown.

He watches her place both hands on her cane as she looks up at the open roof, then back down at the unown as they continue to battle with some of the researchers. A moment passes, and then she distinctly but quietly says, “Feast,” and her pokemon rush forward as one.

Artem’s knees nearly buckle in relief as he watches, equal parts fascination, relief, and fear. The ghosts move through the unown cloud like sharpedo in a school of fish, and within moments the cloud has been cut in half, small bodies floating gracefully down until the unown carpet the ground.

The sounds of battle quiet one by one, until finally the remaining dozen or so unown are back to wandering on their own in discordance. As the ghosts return to their mistress, Artem takes a few deep breaths to calm himself down, still amazed he got through that unscathed. After checking to make sure there’s no one around him that needs help, he hurries back toward Red to make sure he and everyone he left there are okay.

The entire chamber is a mess, broken glass and limp unown everywhere. It doesn’t feel like the danger is really past, yet, and in the distance he sees a couple people finish catching a few kabuto and kabutops that were put to sleep by one’s venusaur. He feels foolish for having run off and not accomplished anything…

…well, except the capture of the strange blocky “changing” pokemon. He looks down at the ultra ball still gripped tight in his hand, then takes out his pokedex to see what happens when he registers it, hoping to have at least some answers for the others when they talk…

“Sckkhh Alert.”

“Say again, Eva?” Bill shifts half of his concentration away from the microscope, frowning slightly. “I didn’t catch that first word.”

“Network Alert. A sckkk is spreading through Kanto Pokedex Network.”

Bill’s attention is now fully removed from the circuit board he was examining. “Isolate from all Pokedex Networks and run diagnostic on previous sentence.”

“Complete. Null pointer corruption.”

“In the database?”

“In referent.”

Bill frowns. Whatever the bug is, it’s messing specifically with Eva’s ability to articulate that she couldn’t articulate it? “Veto both token and referent, identify through description, then answer: what is the thing spreading through the network acting most like? Worm? Wiper? Mimikyu? Something else?” Please don’t say another AI…

“Higher priority detected.”

His heart sinks. “Speak.”

“Referent detected in Pallet lab intran—”

Bill is already running. “Isolate all Indigo networks!”

“Command code ne—”

“Code Usurper!” He passes out of Materials and reaches Computing, running straight to the central cluster and starts disabling the safeties to swap everything in the labs to manual control.

“Executing. Complete.”

Sentiment rises up, surprising him with an urge to say something. Words of gratitude, or congratulations for doing so well. This would be a pretty thorough reversion, and while he doesn’t believe Eva is sentient… that’s the rub of it all, isn’t it? How could they even know?

He pulls the final lever, shutting Eva down, followed by another lever to cut all power to his home and lab. Only afterward does he whisper, “Goodbye.”

Bill only stands still for a few moments in the dark before the emergency lights come on. He takes his phone out and messages a few people before they start freaking out too much, then navigates by the red glow to start removing all pieces of Eva so he can switch the lab over to the backup version from last week.

He works quickly, anger burning like hot coals in his stomach. It’s possible all this was an accident of epic proportions, but if not he’s eager to get some payback against whoever or whatever just derailed his morning… not to mention inconvenienced everyone in Indigo relying on the internet today.

He can only hope he caught and isolated it in time, and the others know what to do next.

Chapter 132: Interlude XXVII – Implicit Knowledge

The hush of the lab after midnight is Sakura’s favorite time and place.

In many ways, she was the perfect pick for the night shift. Devon’s science division is a bit more flexible in their hiring than most labs, probably in an attempt to be more competitive than rivals like Silph after The Incident… something which worked, in her case, to get her to stick around in Hoenn after Groudon’s emergence collapsed part of her street and tilted her whole apartment building sideways.

Waiting out the violent quakes and storms at her office had been harrowing, and when she finally got home only to find it half collapsed in on itself, she considered leaving along with some of her friends. But there was also something exciting about the rush of energy that coursed through the region in the aftermath of the island-wide (the worldwide) shock. Resources and people poured in to help those most affected, somewhat offsetting the emigration, and she only had to stay with a friend for a few weeks before a functional, if basic, apartment in a shelter was available for her back in Slateport.

Still, despite all the construction efforts, the price of living is still too high, and she almost took a job in Johto before she saw that Devon was advertising for their new unown lab in Rustboro city. The politics of it all is fascinating in its own right, but the idea of cracking the origin or purpose of the enigmatic pokemon was too great to resist… and when she saw the hours they needed covered…

“It just felt too serendipitous to ignore,” she says as she walks through the “green room,” one of the sample labs with plants growing throughout it. “I mean, I got lucky here, but what if the next great job offer wants me to work 9-5?”

“I hear you,” Phil says through her earpiece, and yawns. “I’d say to lay off the coffee or tea, but I rarely see you drink any.”

“Just now and then, for flavor. I’ve tried going caffeine free a couple years ago, didn’t change anything. I’ve just always been a bit of a noctowl.” Sakura makes notes in her pad as she walks, simply recording that all is as it should be after the unown cloud was transferred from here back to their holding chamber, then to the next sample rooms.

“Hmm. Asked a therapist about this, once.”

“Didn’t know you went to therapy.”

“I didn’t, it was a friend. He said it might just be biochemical in some people, feeling more creative and alive at night for reasons related to light or heat or some other thing.”

“Seems right.” She checks the “fruit aisle,” as they’ve dubbed the area where the various berry bushes were planted. A few are tasty enough for humans that she’s tempted each time to pluck one for a snack, but so far she’s resisted. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not really, fully awake until the sun’s down.”

“Well for most people, his guess was that staying up later than they planned comes from things like not getting as much free time as they wanted during their day.” She hears some typing as she finishes checking the last plants off. “All done in the green room?”

“Yep, heading to minerals.”

“Cool, cycling now.”

She hears the muffled sounds of the metal covers and flaps shifting to direct the unown cloud back into the central chamber. “So you’re saying people don’t want to go to bed because they ‘lose’ precious time, and even if they end up tired in the morning, that’s when they need to prepare for school or work, so it doesn’t feel like it costs them something they care about?”

“Right. But going to bed when you could be doing other fun things?”

“Yeah, that feeling sucks. I can see it.” She thinks back to her college days… “But I don’t think it applies to me now. My shift doesn’t start until 6PM, I’m usually up by 1PM. Unlike most people I’ve got free time before and after my ‘work day.'”

“Yeah, you’re one of the lucky ones. Okay, cloud’s back in the central room… hm, also, looks like we have a guest at the entrance.”

“Wait, really?” She checks the time to confirm that it’s nearly 2AM. “Someone leave their personal computer behind?”

“I don’t recognize him. Security’s on it, though. What was I saying?”

“That I’m one of the lucky ones, and the mineral room is clear.” She makes her way there.

“Right. Brings up my therapist friend’s third point, which was that some people just really value time to themselves, and it’s hard to get real solitude during the day because everyone’s awake. Even if you stay home alone, people might message you.”

“True. Most people like being messaged by their friends and family though, right? I’m probably just too dysfunctional to live in normal society.”

“Hey. Stamp it.”

She rolls her eyes, but, smiling, pulls the stamp from her pocket and gives herself a gold flower on the back of her hand. It joins two others there, both mostly faded from when she gave them to herself last week. “Done.”

“Okay, try again?”

She takes a breath. “I’m probably just too… misanthropic isn’t better, right?”

“You asked me to help you notice negative self-talk, not define your whole sense of self. Are you misanthropic?”

She thinks about the people in her life, and even people around the world. She doesn’t dislike others. She wants them to be happy, overall… just… mostly away from her?

“I’m not sure, honestly. But I don’t think so?”

“Well alright then. Try something else.”

“Okay, I’m probably just too weird, is that good enough?”

“Is it?”

“I think so. Weird’s not bad, in my book.”

“Alright, so long as you really feel that way I think it works.”

“Thanks.” She goes back to examining the next samples, looking for any potential changes, no matter how small. “So yeah, just too weird I think.”

“Maybe. Or, there’s just nothing exciting enough about your mornings.”

“Well, yeah, obviously.”

“Is it obvious?”

She considers. “I do remember times when I was happy to go to bed earlier, to wake up earlier, for like… holidays, when I was young? But I can’t make it an everyday thing. I mean, there isn’t anything exciting to wake up for every day.”

“Why not? For me, getting a girlfriend in a different timezone did it.”

“Aww.”

“Seriously, it worked wonders. I really wanted to wake up as early as possible to maximize how much overlap time we were both awake for, and it was suddenly easy to get to bed on time and wake up early.”

“Huh.” Sakura steps into the room where the lab’s fossils and various minerals are kept in their individual mini-habitats. “Okay, so I guess if I ever need a new job that starts early, I just have to get a girlfriend in a different timezone at the same time.”

Phil snorts. “She doesn’t have to be, just make sure she’s not a noctowl and it should have a similar effect… huh… what’s going on out there?”

“What?”

“The guy at the front is still there talking to security. Oh, hang on…”

“I’m hanging,” she says, but the line is already dead as he ends the call. She’s near the front entrance, and wonders if she should walk over and see what’s going on… but before she can, she hears the ambient noise of the open call return.

“Hey Sakura, apparently there’s someone named Mr. Langley here? That name sound familiar?”

“No?”

“Not on the list of approved visitors but says he’s with Devon. Asato says he’s asking for you.”

She blinks. “I’ll be right there.” She tucks her pad away and walks quickly toward the front entrance, trying to remember anyone named ‘Langley.’ There’s a vague recollection of a man with long hair…?

Not, as it turns out, this Mr. Langley, who is tall and thin and wearing a suit. His hair is long, but combed neatly behind his ears, and he has a beard that makes it hard to tell how old he is. Her first thought is that he’s younger than her, but when she meets his gaze there’s a wild second where she thinks His eyes are older than the rest of him…

“Good evening,” he says, voice light. He’s smiling and holding his hand out to hers, which she only realizes after she tears her gaze from his, wondering what’s gotten into her. “You’re Dr. Hayun, I believe?”

“Yes.” She reaches out automatically to shake his hand, and now that she’s not staring into his eyes, she realizes he does look vaguely familiar, but his question reassures her they hadn’t been formally introduced, at least. She glances over his expensive looking suit again and wonders if the place she’s remembering him from is Devon’s recent tech exhibition. “And you are…?

“Edward Langley, from the Slateport lab. We weren’t introduced, but I saw you at the exhibition last month.”

The memory of his face in the conference crowd clarifies a little. “Yes, I think I remember.” She looks at Asato and Hajime, the former of whom is watching the stranger while the latter keeps his gaze moving over the area around the lab entrance. “What can I do for you, Mr. Langley?”

“Oh, did you not get the message from your supervisor? It would have been about a week ago, maybe two.”

Message? She racks her brain, trying to remember… “Oh!” There it is, yes, some vague memory of skimming a message from Daishi while busy and thinking she’d ping him about it later… she must have forgotten to do so, and then forgot about it entirely. “Yes, I’m sorry, I’ve had so much on my mind—”

He smiles. “Not a problem. I’m just here to look over the lab floor, make some notes? Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.”

“Of course.” She nods to Asato, feeling slightly embarrassed as she opens the door behind her. “Come on in.”

Edward nods to Asato as well, then walks past her, and she quickly follows, trying to mentally bookmark what she’d been doing before the interruption. Ten minutes isn’t much, but she wishes she had a bit more warning… it’s weird that Daishi didn’t remind her, he’s normally a bit of a micromanager. “Just through there. The quickest path to the central chamber from here is through our mineral lab, where I was about to catalog as you arrived…”

They make their way there, and she leads him between each divided section that stores its own samples of fossils or stones of various kinds. “Our unique division system puts the unown in a central hub by default, which is accessible through any of these sample labs, and cycles them back and forth through the hub and each lab.”

“Similar to the Mossdeep lab.”

“So I’ve heard, though I believe theirs is a bit more high tech.” She smiles. “Not that that’s necessarily a good thing. I think we have a good system, and more tech might make it more fragile without adding any real functionality.”

“I agree,” he says as he scribbles in a small notebook he’d pulled from somewhere, voice cheerful. “Even this seems a bit overengineered, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Not at all, I get it. None of it may turn out to matter, but someone has to try. Have you been to many unown labs?”

“Oh yes, at least a dozen.” He’s looking around, and her gaze is drawn to his suit, which isn’t quite fitted. It’s a bit of an odd choice for a lab visit, but maybe he likes to look professional, even if it’s off the rack… in fact, is that the store tag still attached to his collar?

He suddenly reaches back and tucks it out of sight, and she pretends not to notice. “Wow. I’ve only been to visit two others myself, one smaller to get a sense of how they ran things, one larger when Wally visited for a safety review.”

Sakura doesn’t have to clarify which Wally; all of Hoenn knows how he and then-Leader-now-Champion Wallace helped save the region by helping Rayquaza “mega-evolve” and directing it to defeat Groudon and return to the upper atmosphere…

(…though she’s heard skepticism about the official story, and surfed a few conspiracy sites out of morbid curiosity. It’s not hard to admit that the official story is a bit light on explanations for how exactly communicating with the unown helped them do that, but either way, it’s hard to deny that the young psychic has a way with the mysterious pokemon.)

Edward was looking over the habitat holding a bunch of leafy fossils, pen moving rapidly, but pauses in his scribbling to turn to her with a sudden, avid interest. “You met Wally?”

“Oh, not really. I just listened to the questions he asked, and the answers he gave to the psychics and scientists who were staffing the lab.” Warnings and cautions that have become standard guidance for everyone experimenting with unown in Hoenn, as well as many beyond it.

“I see.” He starts writing in his notebook again. “So you don’t know where he is.”

The statement (not a question) is a bit strange, and she feels her brow crease as she wonders why she would know where he is even if she spoke to him. “This was before he went off with Steven. As far as I know they’re still traveling together.”

“Of course. The world is getting stranger, more dangerous, and busy bidoofs build hardy homes, as they say.”

Sakura half smiles. “Do they? I’ve never heard it before.” The note of disquiet that’s been at the back of her mind is still there, and she finds herself wondering who this person is, exactly, and why he came to see the lab so late. She tries to think back to the message from Daishi, tries to remember any details…

Edward’s head tilts up, catching her attention. She’s about to ask if something’s wrong when he says, “I hear them.”

“Good ears.” It’s not until they cross through the next room and its (mostly?) soundproofed walls that she can make out the cacophony their 81 unown make with their overlapping noises. “I’m guessing you’ve seen a larger cloud, considering how many labs you’ve been to?”

“Yes. I’ve definitely seen larger.” The warehouse’s central area is set up to allow the unown cloud to be shunted via strong fans between the various other areas of the lab, where they have different equipment and samples kept. Despite what she said to Edward, at first Sakura thought it was an overly complicated setup, but she has to admit after working here for a few months that it’s surprisingly efficient compared to transferring everything in and out of the main chamber where they are depending on who’s working, even with storage balls to help. Most importantly, it lets them bring the unown back into the central chamber away from everything else on emergency notice, if needed.

As a result, the central chamber seems fairly sparse by comparison to the various specimen labs; just a round walkway with various stairs that lead down to the warehouse floor, the cloud of unown floating above. But the interesting bits are all above them, and Sakura looks over at Edward, expecting to see him paying careful attention to the sealed portholes, fans, and flaps that would adjust to help funnel the unown wherever they’re needed… but instead he’s just staring at the cloud, arms limp at his sides, eyes half-lidded.

Sakura’s unease returns. Why is he here? Why did she bring him here?

Her gaze moves to the notebook held loosely in his hand, and sees…

There’s nothing written on it. Only scribbles, black swirls looping over and over again to make a dense, dark blot that fills most of the page.

“What—”

“You should go back to work,” he says, not taking his eyes from the unown. “I interrupted you, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” That’s right, she was in the middle of…

“I won’t be long. It would be best if I see myself out, after.”

“I appreciate that.” She’s still bothered by something, but it’s hard to think clearly while listening to the warbling-hissing-popping-static cloud of unown; she thought she got used to it, over time, but the sounds are just making her more and more unnerved, and she hurries away to return to her office.

Halfway there her quick, sure steps start to falter as her phone vibrates, and she wonders what she was just doing. Going to her office, after visiting the unown… to show the guest their lab layout. That’s done, so she can get back to what she was doing beforehand, which was…

Checking off the mineral room, right. She stops and turns to head back the way she came, feeling embarrassed. She’s getting so forgetful lately… are there other messages from Daishi or others she’s forgotten?

When did he message me?

She takes her phone out, ready to call him… but no, it’s late. She shouldn’t wake him up just to ask about an old message she can’t remember.

Her free hand taps a nervous beat against her hip as walks, scrolling on her phone to search through her history with her supervisor. Some notification pops up as it vibrates again, a chime playing in her earpiece, and she quickly dismisses it to keep searching her message history. What did the man (Edward Lang? Langtree?) say? A week or two ago?

She’s three weeks back before she decides to look over everything again, a sinking feeling developing in her stomach. By the time she reaches her office, she’s searching through her deleted messages, and then her private messages in case it was there for some reason… why had she been so convinced there had been a message?

She can’t remember.

Her heart is pounding now as she considers calling Daishi again, torn between worry she’s overreacting and sick feeling of fear that she screwed up. If only her phone would stop distracting her with its random notifications and buzzes… was this corporate espionage, or some random eccentric? What was he after, and…

She looks around, real fear suddenly spiking through her body.

Why is she in her office?

Why had she left him alone, and why did she come to her office instead of continuing with her rounds?

She can’t remember that either, and wishes suddenly that there was someone else working with her during the night shifts… if only her phone would stop vibrating so she could concentrate—

She pulls the earpiece from her ear and strides across the room to toss it in the trash—

—and stops, staring at the back of her hand.

Hey. Stamp it.

Are you misanthropic?

A small cry of fear and anger tears from her throat as she feels the gulf in her mind around those words, tries to connect them to a name or face. Her hand shakes as she sticks the earpiece back into her ear, looks at her phone history… taps the most recent entry…

“Sakura, what the hell?”

“Phil.” The name comes out shaky, but it’s there, she has it, his face in her mind as she takes a deep breath, eyes closed. “Something’s wrong with me.”

“I was tr… what? Say that again?”

“Phil, something is wrong with me, and it’s not… not a stamp thought, it’s… what was I doing, just before… when we last talked?”

He sounds less frustrated now, but more worried. “You were about to start checking the mineral room.”

“And then?”

“Then… that’s it. You said you had to go check something at the front gate, but didn’t explain anything else. I gave you a few minutes, then tried messaging, then calling a few times… what’s wrong, Sakura? Should I call someone?”

Sakura’s heart is pounding, her eyes still closed as she tries to remember what brought her to her office . “I… I don’t…” Tears prickle at the back of her eyes, and she presses the palms of her hands against her eyelids, trying to force her mind to think through the white fluffy clouds that seem to fill the past half hour of her memory. ‘The cameras, Phil. Can you… check them, please, tell me what I did?”

“Tell you what you… okay. Yeah, of course. Just one second…”

He sounds like he’s about to call for an ambulance. Or possibly the police.

At this point she doesn’t think he’d be wrong to. But some part of her feels like she first has to know…

“Okay, wound back half an hour… you’re entering the green room… I’ve got you sped up so you’re zipping from place to place, let me know if you want me to slow it down—”

“That’s fine,” she says, voice small. She tries to play her memory forward from the point he’s describing. “Keep going, please.”

“Okay, you’re still going around the green room… still going, still going… you stop, stamp your hand—”

“Dysfunctional,” she whispers. “Became weird.”

“Yeah. Okay, now you’re heading to mineral… you’ve stopped… now you’re heading to the front.”

“To meet someone.”

“Maybe? Oh… huh, yeah. There’s a guy there. How did I miss him before?”

Long hair. New suit. “Is he talking to security? Do I talk to him?” There’s an edge in her voice, she can’t remember, why can’t she—

“Yeah, you’re arriving now, talking to him… you guys leave, Asato and Hajime stay there… Woah, Sakura, you’re taking him through the lab! Who is he?”

“I don’t know, Phil, I… the unown hub, is he there?”

“You guys are walking through mineral—”

“No, Phil, check now!” Her blood feels like ice, she can feel each pound of her heart in her throat. “Check if he’s still there!”

“I… okay, I’m… checking…”

She listens, breaths coming out in harsh pants, adrenaline making her feel close to a heart attack despite her feet being frozen in place. An eternity passes with ten or twenty hurried breaths, an eternity of silence. “Phil?”

“…Sakura. Hi.”

“Phil? Are you checking?”

“Checking? What am I…”

The dam bursts in her chest, and dark terror floods her veins, sending her running through the door… but not before she snatches her pokebelt from beside it. She’s not a trainer, but there are basic self defensive pokemon on it… “Phil, call the police!”

“What…? Sakura—”

“Call them, Phil, call them now!”

“…okay. Okay! I’m calling, I’m—what do I say?”

“I don’t remember!” She feels tears threatening and shuts her eyes tight. “Just tell them to come, to bring paramedics… tell them there might be a… something’s messing with our memories, just… tell them, please, Phil, are you calling them?”

“Yeah! Now, I’m doing it now, it’s… dispatcher, this is Devon’s Rustboro Hub Lab—”

“Front gate,” she says under her breath as she runs. “Front gate, intruder, front gate…”

She feels the details slipping away, Phil’s voice a background buzz. She almost ends the call, but no, she needs the connection, Phil might need… they came so close to losing each other…

Twice she finds herself looking around, muttering to herself, unsure why until she pays attention to what she’s saying, and follows that, running again. She pulls out her pad, opens a note app and writes as she goes… then realizes her scattered thoughts are still missing the obvious, and just messages Asato directly.

She reaches the entrance just as he’s stepping in from outside, frowning at her. “Doctor? Your message—”

“Intruder,” she gasps, doubling over and breathing hard. “Asato, I was… there was someone here…”

“Where?” His gaze is hard, hands on his belt. “When?”

“You don’t… remember?” He’s frowning at her. “Phil said… I was here, I was here just a few minutes ago!”

Asato’s stare shifts out of focus, and she nearly slaps him back to attention, worried she’s about to lose him, when he abruptly twists around. “Hajime! Ghost protocol!”

What?

A moment later both security are standing in front of her. “Doctor, stay here, and call emergency services. Tell them to send dark officers. We’re going to do a thorough scan, room by room. Take this key, lock the door from the outside—”

She’s nodding, already moving to do it, as they stride away, summoning pokemon as they go… then stops herself as something in her gut sinks. “Wait!”

When she opens her eyes, they’ve turned back toward her, and she runs up to them. “The hub.”

“You think the intruder is there? Can Phil see him?”

Her mic is still muted, she can still hear him giving info to the dispatcher about the situation. Hopefully reinforcements are already on their way… She unmutes herself. “Phil.”

“One second—Sakura?”

“Do you see anyone in the labs?”

“Sakura, I was just telling the dispatcher… the cameras have been shutting off, one by one. We lost the hub first, but all the interior cameras are out now.”

The fear returns, and she mutes herself again. “Cameras are gone, but he says the hub went first, and from there we can check all the sample labs in moments. If we wait for police, if we go room by room… I think it’s going to be too late!”

The security guards look at each other, then nod. “Come on.”

They move together, straight for the central hub. She can hear the unown again, and they’re more irritating than usual, the warbling, discordant mix of notes scraping at the inner walls of her skull. Her hands rise automatically to cover her ears for a moment even as she walks forward, but somehow they do nothing to muffle the sound… and a moment later she realizes she’s hearing it in her head, not her ears.

The lab itself is silent.

Before she can process this the final doors open, and her blood freezes, feet reflexively taking her half a step backward.

The unown are no longer moving in a chaotic cloud. Instead they spin around the intruder in an expanding upward cone, each row containing more and more of them until, at the top of the funnel, there’s an arrangement of unown spelling out some word that’s hard to read, each letter bndeign in her sivnio and witstnig her tuhgthos whti mteh…

“They won’t do it if there’s anyone watching.”

The intruder’s voice is low, but carries through the stillness. He stares up through the funnel, looking directly at that shifting mess of ltetser nda mbsolys… then turns back toward the three of them, expression sad. “You should have just gone back to work. I’m sorry.”

Hajime recovers first, and throws a great ball. Asato throws an ultra ball a moment later—

—but both balls stop mid air and get sent back in a blink, sailing over Sakura’s shoulders on either side.

This time it’s Asato who recovers first, pulling another ball from his belt and bracing his arm to manually release the vileplume inside. “Sleep Pow—”

The unown screech, a cacophony of pure noise that once again has Sakura clap her hands over her ears, and she watches in disbelief as a small cluster of unown separate from the swirling funnel to divebomb the vileplume.

But unown aren’t dangerous she thinks, feeling numb as spheres of fire and electricity, ice and rock materialize and pelt the vileplume. Hajime summons a houndoom, and its flamethrower drops three of the unown out of the air… but more come to replace them, and while each of their attacks don’t seem to do much damage, they keep attacking until the vileplume and houndoom lie in twitching heaps.

With something that feels like a mental snap, Sakura’s hands finally drop to her belt… then she turns and forces herself into a sudden lurch, the movement translating to a run after a few unsteady steps—

—which turns into a hobble as she screams, pain lancing through her shoulder and thigh.

She keeps moving through the feeling of being simultaneously burned and impaled, trying her best to run through the mineral lab, to get away…

There are unown around her.

She sees them in the corners of her eyes, bobbing and rotating through the air. A fleeting confusion over how they got through the containment area, but then one pops into existence to her right, causing her to stumble and fall as she jerks away from it.

Pain stabs into her palms. There’s broken glass everywhere…

Glass from the sample habitats.

She turns just in time to see the strange form approach, limbs fluttering at its side as it crosses the ground in a scuttling flash, pincers raised.

I’m sorry.

“Misty is hiding something,” Verres says. “But I couldn’t figure out what. A couple people in her gym are in on it, helping cover for each other during missions that aren’t talked about, but I was able to find out that it leads them somewhere to the northwest of Cerulean—”

Looker spots Tsunemori holding her hand up without raising her arm, a flash of her palm turning toward Verres to catch his attention. “Sorry, Red, but we actually know about that already. It’s fine, nothing related to Rocket.”

The young man deflates a little, then rubs some lingering sleepiness from his eyes as he looks back at the wall where his presentation is being projected. It’s not even eight in the morning yet, but Red insisted in his message last night that he had important things to share and wanted to do them early in the day so he could get feedback on some of his suspicions before he met with any of the leaders again. Tsunemori was available, so she teleported in and joined the two of them in one of the Interpol office’s smaller meeting rooms.

Looker sips his coffee as Red sighs and uses a few swiping motions to change the font to gray and collapse the whole section under the Leader Misty header. A few more swipes turn the Speculation subsection, which is much longer, grey, then adds a cross through for good measure, and Looker notes the way Tsunemori suppresses her smile; the head of the Indigo police has shown a continuous soft spot for Verres’s childlike qualities that he’s come to accept is probably genuine.

For Looker’s part, the young prodigy’s maturity has been mostly sufficient, and the lingering worries he had about giving someone so young as much power as he has were mostly alleviated by the way Verres has changed in the past month. Trusting him with more autonomy and decision capability could have backfired enormously, but coincidentally or not, the young man has been in a much better mood since he had more control and input over what he was doing… and with that improved mood has come a lot more energy and creativity.

Creativity which only occasionally results in some pain in Looker’s ass.

But it’s a lesson in management that Looker didn’t realize he needed. It was tempting to assume the change in Verres was just an effect of his age, but Looker still quietly took a second look over his entire division, just in case. A few tweaks, often subtle, to equalize people’s power and responsibility, seemed to pay itself back with more problems being solved more smoothly, overall, though it did often increase his own interteam management workload. It also led to a few terrible outcomes, but even in those cases, the causes of the problem were clear, and the feedback loop tight. Only a few people had to be demoted, and thankfully no fuckups big enough to warrant a firing so far.

They’re closer to pinning Rocket down than they were a month ago, and not just because of the discovery on Cinnabar, or Verres’s efforts with the leaders. A number of hideouts and interregional coordination routes have been exposed, two new attacks disrupted before they even got launched… but he can’t deny how much harder this would have been without Verres or his friends,

“Alright well, at least that simplifies things a little,” Verres says once he’s done reorganizing things, then flips back to the outline at the start of his presentation. “So next up is Surge… and for him there was basically nothing. He’s more ambitious than Brock, like he definitely has plans that he doesn’t talk about, but as far as I could tell they’re all about keeping Vermilion secure and preparing for war with other regions.”

Looker raises a brow. “Interesting.” He glances at Tsunemori, who doesn’t even bother trying to look unsurprised.

“Yes, it’s interesting, but not news to anyone who’s listened to enough of his speeches,” Tsunemori says, tone dry. “The man doesn’t try to be too subtle about it, and ever since the Young Oak shook his Challenge system up it’s become more clear. He’s got opinions and plans that might make some nervous, but he’s not the type to help renegades.”

“That’s my read of him too,” Verres says. “For what it’s worth.”

Looker crosses his arms. “Even if he thinks they might be a strategic advantage?”

Tsunemori shrugs a shoulder. “If it comes out that some other region is allying with Rocket or similar organizations, that’s a different story. But he would be putting at risk everything he’s built in the meantime. It’s not a good match for our profile.”

“Your profile puts too much weight on an unambitious Leader who wouldn’t want extra attention drawn to them. I get why, that fits most criminals maintaining a white collar job or public figure lifestyle, but our profiles say anyone working with Rocket isn’t doing so to get rich. It even fits circumstances like the Mt. Moon assassination.”

“Which is why I was extra suspicious of Misty,” Red says. “Her, Brock, and Giovanni had the most influence and presence in that whole situation. But as far as I could tell, she’s as confused and frustrated over that as anyone.”

Looker nods. “I don’t know how it connects to the rest, if it even does. Not every act is going to be part of some grand scheme.”

“And of course there might be more than one compromised Leader.” Tsunemori is watching Looker. “Independently so. You’ve implied as much before, but if you disagree with the motivations our main profile is drawn from, I don’t see how yours are much better. Ambition, grandiosity, those sorts of criminals tend to out themselves sooner rather than later, and neither of us believes all this is new.”

“Not new, no. But the smartest criminals, the hardest to catch, they’re not stuck in one mode forever. They adapt.” Looker turns to Verres. “Don’t write Surge off just yet.”

Verres glances at Tsunemori, but nods and tugs his cap down a little as he scribbles something in his notebook, then turns back to the projected screen. “Next is Erika, and with Misty crossed out, we’ve reached the first of my top suspects.”

“The others being?” Tsunemori asks.

“Sabrina, Koga, and Giovanni.” Red swipes his hands until they’re listed beside each other, then drags some highlights between them. “Giovanni and Koga are Dark, so without an excuse to use Miracle Eye near them they remain the biggest unknowns. Sabrina is an even better psychic than Misty, and I’ve only ever gotten things out of her when she was taken off guard.”

“An option for later, but best not to tip our hand yet.”

Red nods. “Erika by contrast has the most organized mind of any non-psychic I’ve ever met. She’s definitely hiding things, but without direct interrogation it’s impossible for me to tell how much of it is personal or private details compared to something illegal. But more than any of that, Sabrina, Erika, and Koga have had organized renegade or suspected renegade activity in their cities.”

Looker slowly nods, thinking about his conversation with Erika after the Casino incident. “Why not Blaine, by that token? Because he reads as innocent?”

“Basically, yeah. His mind is… I don’t know how to describe the difference from Erika. It’s organized, it’s disciplined, but he’s not using it to hide anything, as far as I can tell.”

Tsunemori stirs. “What about Giovanni? Viridian city hasn’t had any incidents.”

Red nods, turning back to shift the display to the last listed leader, expanding each subheading. There’s not much there. “This one’s hard to explain…”

“Is there a reason Giovanni is last?” Looker asks, mind already searching for a pattern in the list to the side. It can’t be amount of content, Misty was after Brock despite having much more written…

“Hm? Oh, no. I just… they’re all listed in the order Blue has been doing them.”

Verres sounds mildly embarrassed, and Tsunemori subtly hides another partial smile with a sip of her own coffee. Looker purses his lips, but just nods and rotates his hand in a carry-on gesture.

“Right, so if I start explaining my gut feeling on Leader Giovanni, I’d have to start with what Leaf said about her first meeting with him…”

Looker’s phone buzzes where it sits facedown on the table, and he flips it over fully intending to give it a perfunctory glance… but the words of the notification hold him fast, and he stares, everything else forgotten.

There’s been an incident. One of his sources in Hoenn.

It takes him a moment to realize he’s holding his breath, body tense, waiting to feel even the smallest vibrations… but no, there’s nothing.

The realization is only a minor relief.

He opens the message and watches the animated ellipses of her incoming message as a spring slowly coils tighter and tighter in his stomach, possible catastrophes spinning through his mind. She wouldn’t be contacting him if it was just one of the titans having turned toward one of the towns or cities…

“Looker?” Verres asks.

“Something’s up,” he says without taking his eyes from his phone. “Not sure what, yet. Tsunemori?”

He sees her take her phone out from the corner of his eyes, thumb swiping around. “Nothing.”

“I don’t see anything on the news,” Verres says, voice tight. “Should I suit up?”

“Not yet. It’s in Hoenn.”

Tsunemori lowers her phone. “Then why might I have—”

“Because someone told me directly.”

“So it must be Rocket,” Verres says, and Looker is about to say again that he doesn’t know when the next message comes through:

Wild pokemon appeared in unown lab. Multiple dead. Devon and gov keeping it hush while investigating possible lab design flaw, staff error, sabotage. Also worried about secrets if caused by breakthrough.

Another, briefer pause, then:

Thought you should know. Will keep an eye out.

“Unown lab,” Looker says as he types back an acknowledgement and thanks her. “Unlucky breakthrough or sabotage. Casualties, but so far it’s being kept quiet, so probably not a ditto level event.”

The tension in his stomach is slowly starting to relax. If it was sabotage, he understands why his source let him know—it could be a domestic rival, but if it’s a foreign one, interpol would get involved. He hopes not, or else some of his people might get siphoned off to help; he’s already drawn in most of the talent stationed at the islands, and many more besides.

He checks a few other messages, including another source giving him a less detailed alert about what he assumes is the same incident. Eventually he sets his phone back down. “I think it’ll keep, for now. Sorry for the interruption.”

When he looks up, however, Verres is staring at him with more… fear? alarm? than he’s ever seen. “I need to go.”

Tsunemori is frowning at him. “To Hoenn?”

“Yes. Maybe, if… could I get access to the lab?”

“Tricky,” Looker says, and takes a sip of coffee to buy himself time, keeping his face calm and speculative as alarm bells go off inside, all his instincts telling him the same thing:

Something’s up.

Nothing in his memory would explain Verres’ reaction… which implies he’s been hiding something from them. Something about Hoenn specifically? Doubtful. Something about unown? He claims he never got the dreams, but he was involved in some unown research before…

He’s spent enough time with Notebook and Tsunemori pushing back against his paranoia to know what they would say. That he’s jumping to the worst conclusions, ignoring the possibility that Verres may just be concerned, or scientifically curious.

He doesn’t buy it.

“Would need evidence of a crime, specifically international,” he says. “And given the political climate around unown research, they’re going to be extra critical about what qualifies and what doesn’t.”

The young man bites his lower lip and starts pacing. “But I could go as a private citizen, right?”

Tsunemori steeples her hands. “That’s… complicated. You’re interregionally known, Red, and not interregionally trusted. On top of that, I suspect Hoenn will be worried about an Indigo scientist there, if not on Interpol business… or even if you were.”

“What do you expect to learn?” Looker asks. What makes this so important?

“I… I don’t know. It’s just… I get these feelings sometimes, hard to put into words but also hard to ignore.” Verres looks frustrated, though it’s hard to tell if it’s with himself or the situation or being told no, he can’t just hop on a plane and go. “I don’t know why, but in this case something inside me says this is important!”

“Your partitioned self?” Tsunemori asks, voice light, and Looker gives her an irritated glance. He was hoping to get Verres to say more, first, get a sense of what he’d say if he got more frustrated.

Verres has stopped pacing, however, eyes closed and brow furrowed. Looker can see his chest rising and falling with his breaths, notices the way his hands twitch every so often, and wonders distantly if the tracker he’s had put on Verres’s things would reveal any locations that shed light on this in a way that Verres himself wouldn’t be able to, if he’s locked out of certain memories.

Eventually he opens his eyes and shakes his head, looking both frustrated and a little lost, maybe doubtful. “I can’t tell. He’s… Glomarizing, basically.”

Arceus wept. Glomarized by his own brain… a stark reminder of why he’s been so hesitant to give Verres too much power, totally separate from his inexperience and capabilities.

“Time for a hard lesson in coordination,” Looker says, and both of their attention shift to him. “I’m not going to address this specifically to the unpartitioned Red Verres, since I know he’s listening anyway. But right here, right now, this is the sort of situation where being explicit in what you communicate matters a hell of a lot.”

“I wish I could, but—”

“But nothing. You can’t because part of you can’t or won’t, fine. Most people who get hunches, gut feelings?” He points at his own. “They can’t because it’s hard to put them into words. And I’m the last person you’ll find telling you to ignore your gut.”

“Lot of the best detective work happens under the surface,” Tsunemori remarks. “Taking a walk or a shower, bubbling up when you least expect it.”

Looker nods. “Exactly. Our subconscious brains are powerful, but they’re not verbal. And that’s fine if it’s just about what you do, but if you want others to do something? There’s only three ways I know that goes.” He holds up his thumb first. “Hierarchy. Someone’s the boss, they don’t need to say shit about why they think someone should do something. They say jump, you say how high.” He sticks his index finger up. “Trust. You get to know someone really well, you start to be willing to say, okay, I don’t know if you’re right or not, but I’ll take on some risk trying your way. And last…”

He sticks up his third finger, points them all at Red. “Explicit arguments. Things I can understand, I can follow, I can check against what I know and what I believe and what I predict. Without that, why should I listen to anyone else? Unless I’m willing to put some risk in trusting them, or they’re my boss.”

“Or they’re paying you,” Tsunemori says, watching him. “That’s the fourth way. You trade one thing for another.”

He waves a hand dismissively. “I’m talking about people working together, an ongoing, working relationship. Yeah, you can exchange money, or favors, or whatever, but I’m not after that.”

Verres is looking between them, fists clenched and lips twisted to the side. Anger? Frustration?

Desperation?

Looker stands, drawing the young man’s gaze to his. “I hear you saying this is important, but I’m not looking to blackmail you, Verres. Either of you. Any of you,” he says, turning slightly toward Tsunemori. “I think there’s too little here to go on, but if you disagree, if you think there’s something to it… I won’t try to stop you, but I won’t help you, can’t help you, without trust or understanding. Maybe not even then; like I said, it’s not our jurisdiction.”

“But you have sources,” Verres says. “Contacts.”

Looker tilts his head in very slight acknowledgement. “So talk to me. Maybe we can figure something out. But if we do, we’d better do it quick, because if word’s getting to me, it’s getting to others, and if there’s something you know, Verres, subconsciously or behind a partition that makes this a sudden, immediate priority… someone else out there might know it too, and they might not be as limited in what they do about it.”

Chapter 131: Lines of Retreat

The sky is overcast when Leaf teleports into Fuchsia city. Infrequent, heavy drops of rain fill the air with a soft patter as she looks around the familiar skyline, remembering nights walking the streets to ask questions about the mysterious masked figure. She idly wonders, if she’d told that past self where her determined curiosity would lead, if she’d have decided to drop the investigation.

She supposes it depends on how this meeting goes.

Wiseguy is happier flying in the rain than Crimson, but there aren’t many others above the city, which makes it easy to spot Red in the distance; not because he’s riding on Charizard, but because of the loose escort around him. If she wasn’t looking for them she might have thought they were just a random group of trainers flying in the same direction, but she’s seen their formation often enough, loose though it is.

They dive down to a field a decent distance from the gym, and Leaf sends Wiseguy down to meet them. She sees Red land a moderate distance away from his escort, not so far that it looks intentional, but enough that when Leaf lands beside him, they’re out of earshot of the hunters.

She slides off her noctowl just as Red dismounts from his noivern, and approaches him for a hug. “Thanks for coming.”

She can hear his smile. “Well, I already reached my quota for mysterious meetings this week, but I decided what the hell, I could fit in one more.” They part, and his smile fades as he lowers his voice with a glance over his shoulder. “There anything else I should know, now that we’re face to face?”

“Not yet. It’s not that bad.” Leaf sees Jensen approaching. “Just… fly around nearby, and be ready to come in with a heroic charge if needed. Maybe even to join the talk, if not.”

“You got it.” He raises his voice a little as Hunter Jensen approaches. “The only times I’ve been to Fuchsia were to help with Blue’s training before his battle. Anywhere you’d recommend?”

Leaf smiles. “Yeah, I just sent you a list of nearby places. Blue and I should be done with our meeting soon, then we’ll join you wherever you are.” She turns to the head of Red’s bodyguards and nods. “Hi Jensen.”

“Hello, Juniper.” He’s scanning the area, features hard to read with his shades on, and she does her best to hold onto what she hopes is an innocent smile. “We won’t want to linger too long; Looker is worried there might be people watching from every cityscape, zooming in on anyone who flies around.”

Leaf can hardly fault the paranoia, though it only makes her feel a little guilty for secretly coordinating with Red to bring him to a potentially dangerous meeting place as backup in case things go wrong. He still doesn’t know the exact details, but he trusted her enough to come anyway. She suspects he thinks this is a meeting with someone who might be related to the secret lab. “We’ll try to be quick.”

Red nods, gives her one last smile, then heads back to his mount to withdraw it. Leaf does the same for Wiseguy, then heads toward the gym entrance.

The front desk is manned, but the halls are empty, and when she emerges back outside she finds an inner courtyard that’s just as abandoned, its various sand gardens and arenas dark with the rain. Everyone’s been sent on some field exercises, apparently, and Leaf has the whole gym to herself, passing by empty classrooms and rippling ponds until she reaches the inner courtyard, where one continuous sand garden spread around the Leader’s structure like a moat.

Blue stands on the bridge over it, umbrella keeping him relatively dry as he watches Maturin rub her belly along the wet sand below.

“Hey. Congrats on the badge.”

“Thanks.” He stares down at his pokemon. “Did I ever tell you that my parents died near Fuchsia?”

She blinks, then takes a closer look at Blue, wondering where this is coming from. He seems somber, but not… in pain? “I think so. When Moltres hit the city, right?”

“Yeah. They weren’t actually here, they were a bit to the east helping evacuate some of the farms. It’s why it never really came to mind that much, while I was here.” He shrugs. “Not sure why it’s coming up now.”

She bumps his shoulder with hers. “Gloomy sky. Dangerous meeting. Or maybe it’s because you’re on your last badge, and it’s making you think of what they would say to you, if they were around.”

“Maybe. You’re getting along better with your mom these days, right?”

“Yeah. Seeing her every other day, without having to be around her all the time, helps.”

“But you haven’t told her about this stuff?”

“No.” Just the thought makes her stomach heavy with expected reactions. “We’ve done a bit of sparring now, though. She’s never been that focused on battling, so she’s closer to my level, actually. It’s interesting, doing something so… competitive, with her.”

The paper door slides open, and Janine steps outside. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Hullo.” Leaf has met up with Janine a few times since she’s taken off her mask, and it’s finally stopped feeling incongruous holding both her and her vigilante self in Leaf’s head at the same time. She also feels a lot less… not dangerous, exactly, Leaf never really thought she’d be a danger to her after their first (or second) meeting, but less danger-sense-inducing.

Which is silly, she knows they’re still the same person. But spending more time with her “regular” side makes her criminal side feel less meaningful, somehow, which feels like a dangerous psychological effect that she should probably keep an eye on.

(Also Janine has mostly stopped her direct espionage and terrorism, both as a result of the new discoveries and because of all the heightened police reactivity from the Rocket attacks, so that helps a bit… which is also an interesting psychological effect she should probably keep an eye on…)

((Also also, maybe all this is hypocritical of Leaf after what she did with the laptop she grabbed under the Rocket Casino but somehow it does feel different for reasons but maybe those reasons are bad and this is also also etc etc.))

“We good to go in?” Blue is asking while Leaf forcefully heads off her thoughts before they spiral further.

“They’re ready when you are. I’ll be out here, making sure no one tries to pull anything.”

“Thanks,” Leaf says, while Blue nods and withdraws Maturin. “Any rules we should know? This is, uh, my first peace summit.” Or whatever this might be called. Negotiations?

“Yeah, simple stuff. Belts off, no reaching into pockets, no sudden movements in general. I don’t think they think you’re a big threat, to be honest, not directly, not to them today, but it’s the spirit of the thing. They’ll be doing the same.”

“Right.” It’s part of the imbalance, here, that they could afford to send some ninja on a suicide mission if it meant killing her. “Thanks.”

“It’s nothing.” The older girl looks discomforted, for a moment, and Leaf wonders why. Guilt, maybe?

It’s Blue who asks, “Hey, you alright?”

“Yeah. Just strange, that’s all. Meeting them.” She jerks her head over her shoulder.

Leaf wonders what she means—strange because of them? Strange for her, because she’s only ever heard stories?—but Janine is already summoning her pokemon, a crobat first, then a clodsire, and Blue is already stepping up through the doorway. Leaf is about to follow when Janine puts a hand on her arm to stop her. Blue notices, and turns curiously.

“One extra thing. Father said they’re the real thing, even more than he was, and I believe him. Whether they’re assassins or spies, ninja work through deception. Don’t take anything they do at face value, and I mean that literally. They won’t show you an emotion unless they choose to.”

Leaf slowly nods, taking that in, then briefly puts her hand over Janine’s for a squeeze. “Thanks, again.”

“Thanks to you, for doing all this.” She pulls her hand back. “Good luck.”

They take their shoes off before walking together through the Leader’s office and into the cozy inner room, where Koga and two strangers sat. Leaf had half expected them to be dressed like ninja from the shows, faces covered by dark cowls, but they’re dressed plainly.

Leaf sees the family resemblance in the woman immediately. She has the same sharp jaw as Janine and her father, and the same severe eyebrows, though with his green hair rather than her purple. Leaf looks for similar resemblances in the man beside her, but doesn’t spot any obvious ones except maybe the noses… and he’s a bit too young to be Janine’s grandfather.

Both guesses go unconfirmed, however, as all Koga says is, “Thank you both for coming.” Koga bows his head to them, shoulders dipping a bit as well. “I’m merely here to facilitate this conversation, and provide reassurances of safety. I have my own thoughts to share, but will first let you speak among yourselves, and only step in if needed. Begin however you deem best.”

“You know us,” Blue says, before anyone can start to respond. “Seems fair to start with introductions.”

“I do know you, Blue Oak, and you, Leaf Juniper. You may call us whatever you wish.”

“We didn’t expect to get your real names, and don’t expect having them to matter,” Leaf says, voice soft. “But I’d still rather call you names that you choose for yourselves.”

“Why?”

“It would make the conversation feel more… comfortable.”

They’d discussed yesterday whether one of them would play “good cop” or “bad.” Ultimately they couldn’t decide on whether it would be more help than just being their authentic selves, and adapting as needed moment to moment.

“Feeling comfortable is unwise when life is on the line. Yours, yes, but ours as well. But,” the woman says before they can respond, “For the time being you may call me Sevi.”

“And I will be Zang,” the man says. His deep voice is bland as he says it, face showing no emotion, but “Sevi” still glances at him, a quick flicker of the eyes before she returns to looking at Blue, who shifts his weight.

Leaf wonders if they had the same thoughts. Seviper and zangoose… a random association? Supposed to be some sign that they’re not quite on the same side? Or maybe they’ll be doing their own Good Ninja, Bad Ninja… “Alright, Sevi and Zang. You, or maybe someone above you, asked for this meeting, and you’ve acknowledged that lives are at stake. What do you hope to gain from it?”

“A few things. First, a sense of who you are, as a person. Second, to understand your plan in writing the story of our village. Fame? A way to open communications with us? Blackmail?”

“No,” Leaf said, brow furrowing as she glanced at Koga, whose face remained blank. Did he not mention that he expected her to write the story when he shared the details with her?

“You look to him, as if he might answer. But we understand his motives; it is yours we are uncertain of.”

“Alright, well, first of all, it isn’t your village,” Leaf says. “It’s inspired by it. I know I put a lot more detail and emphasis on parts Koga remembered from living in yours, but there is some broader body of work about historical ninja clans, and making it a fictional amalgam serves many purposes, at least one of which is potentially beneficial to you.”

This clarification is important in part because, speculative fiction or not, they might reasonably wonder what the inspirational source for her hybrid story is, given they know the one about them isn’t completely made up.

“And second of all, I had a variety of motives, but blackmail wasn’t one of them. A way of bringing you to the table did cross my mind, but what we do here isn’t something I think will go best through coercion.”

“Would you allow a psychic connection to be formed, as we ask you questions, to reassure us?”

Leaf almost reflexively says no, but inhibits the impulse, instead thinking over what would make her say yes. Blue shifts in his seat, but holds his tongue, not looking at her.

“If Red Verres is allowed to merge with my mind at the same time, to ensure I’m safe, yes. Otherwise, no. I’m sorry, I know it seems suspicious, but I assume you would turn down the same thing?”

“We would,” Zang says, “Because our thoughts contain risks of anyone in the village being in danger. We swore oaths to do nothing that might better allow an outsider to find it or harm its inhabitants.”

“As Koga did,” Sevi says in an arched tone. Leaf wonders if Janine’s warning about expressions applies to tone too, then decides not to overthink it; if someone’s trying to manipulate you, the intersection of most-effective-and-low-effort response is often to just ignore whatever you need to ignore.

“The exception clause was fairly reached,” Koga says, voice low. “And the world has changed around that oath’s relevance, eroding its failure mode into inevitability.”.

“There are different interpretations of the first,” Zang says. “Not everyone trusts the honor of a man who abandoned the clan and lived apart for so long.” He holds a hand up, palm out. “I speak only the truths I’ve observed, without comment.”

Koga had barely reacted, as far as Leaf could see, but he slowly nods.

“As for the second point,” Sevi comments, “That remains to be seen.”

“If you’re talking about what I think you are, I’ve got to say, that’s pretty optimistic,” Blue says. He holds himself differently here, speaks a little differently, not quite like the way he is in front of a crowd, but not his usual self either. More… stately.

“Strange as it may seem, Young Oak, I am an optimist at heart.” Sevi’s smile is small, but fleeting. “You are the young man that Leader Koga believes may become Champion, someday… and a Champion unlike most others. That earns you some consideration, as our—potential—future leader. And something you should know about our clan that stories may not fully capture is that we are old, and have undergone many changes. We adapt, and this new world is one we may adapt to as well, in a number of unpredictable ways.”

Blue’s eyes had widened at the mention of “future leader,” and he seemed to catch himself leaning forward a little, taking a moment to return to a more neutral pose. “Are you saying Lance—”

“This visit will neither confirm nor deny any particular member of the Indigo League or government as being aware of our clan, let alone interfacing with it. My point was that, historically, it was rare for someone to be in such a position prior to their ascent, and so the usual procedures must be abandoned for new ones.”

“Is Blue at risk of being killed before he ‘ascends?'” Leaf asks, and ignores his glance at her. “Because if so, that would violate your code as I understand it.”

“Some things have changed, since Kyo—since Michio, left us.” Koga turns to Sevi in obvious surprise, but she continues to meet Leaf’s gaze. “The core of our traditions are intact. We will only act at the will of the region’s leaders, or in protection of our village. But since Michio’s father died, there have been splinters from that core.”

Leaf glances at Koga, whose lips are pressed into a thin line. He doesn’t seem surprised, however; apparently his dad’s death isn’t news. “That doesn’t sound like a ‘no.'”

“The village is more exposed today than it has ever been, even before your story,” Zang says. The more Leaf looks at him, the more his expression seems like a zangoose. Or maybe that’s just her imagination being primed. “Pre-emptive actions are sometimes necessary.”

Leaf puts a hand on Blue’s arm before he could speak, and turns to Koga. “I’d like to hear what you think of this, if it doesn’t undermine the role you think is best for this conversation.”

Koga slowly nods. “I cannot decide between disappointment, that the tools have continued to act as tools, or be perversely glad that some have finally shown themselves capable of more, even if it’s to dishonor the clans so thoroughly.”

The two ninja don’t respond, even by expression, and Leaf wishes she’d asked Janine what it means if there are reasons they might choose to obviously mask their true emotions. Is this particular silence a form of embarrassment for them? Or are they diplomatically avoiding rising to bait?

“I wrote this because I believe we have a common enemy, and I hoped to bring them to your attention,” Leaf says before tensions escalate further. “I wrote it because I believed you were being used by people who turned you against your own mission.”

“You say you are not intending to coerce us,” Zang says. “But you seem intent to reveal us to the world if we do not agree that you know our mission better than we do.”

“Leader Koga has shared more details with me than I’ve put in the story,” she says. “But I haven’t shared them with the police either. Only kept them hidden in case I’m killed.”

“We can respect such forethought, and it is possible that such a predictable countermeasure protected you from the more extreme splinters. But such protections may not hold, and that is, ultimately, why we’re here.”

“You want a win-win,” Leaf says, feeling some relief under her rapidly beating heart. “You’re here to talk options that we all benefit from, not just deliver a coercive threat?” Or secretly kill me?

Sevi nods, and after a moment, Zang does as well.

“Great. Really, that’s what I want too.”

Koga seems to take that as a sign that it’s time for tea, and carefully swirls the pot with both hands, then pours some for himself, then the two ninja, then for Leaf and Blue. He leads the way in drinking, and the others follow his example. The mugs don’t have handles, and Leaf follows their example of holding one hand below while the other wraps around it. She doesn’t really understand why people still use mugs that make their hands uncomfortably hot, but it’s a local tradition that she’s gotten mostly used to.

It’s good, a subtly sweet macha that makes Leaf think of green and healthy things. She does her best to enjoy it, and not incessantly worry about Koga’s ability to keep them safe from overly convoluted poisoning attempts that would involve things like identifying his tea supplier or pre-ingesting antidotes.

“I suggest,” Koga says once they’ve all had a sip, “That we begin with what we have to offer each other.”

“Can I point to the copperajah in the room, first?” Blue asks, and when Koga nods, looks at each of ninja before settling on Sevi. “I’m guessing Leaf is the only one here who’s not dark. I heard what you said, about your clan adapting, but some people are probably stressing about what happens if a psychic goes rooting around in her head. I don’t think Leaf is safe so long as that’s a worry, and that worries me. More than that, I don’t know how often your people get captured, but with Miracle Eye out there it’s just a matter of time. So yeah, you could adapt your lifestyle, split into smaller groups that communicate less, minimize risks. But the public knowing you’re out there… it’s coming, one way or another.”

“Granted.” Sevi says, and glances at Zang, who takes a moment before nodding as well. “All granted. And yet, the pace of that introduction, how it occurs, the initial framing, all might matter a great deal. The story takes control of that away from the clan, and on existential matters, reactions are predictable.”

“That’s just—”

Koga clears his throat, and Blue falls silent, frowning at him. The Gym Leader slowly takes another sip of his tea, and the two ninja do so as well. After a moment Blue, face smoothed out, does so as well, and Leaf follows suit.

She’s not sure if it’s some explicit “thing” for good conversation etiquette or negotiations or whatever, but it does help remind her to take a breath, and widen her attention from the fear and stress that had been growing. She takes another sip of tea for good measure (it’s actually really tasty) and lets her breath out slowly.

After another moment, Koga says, “Again, I move to begin with what we can offer each other.” He waits a moment, meeting each of their gazes, and when Blue gives a small nod, turns to the two ninja. “You know my ambitions. A measure of belief and respect for the original principles at the clan’s heart, not to mention some sentiment, would have me deal with you as fairly and leniently as you could hope for. Of all the possible ways the clan might come through this period of inevitable change, I expect my way to be the least disruptive. But perhaps that does not make it the best.”

He turns to Blue, who seems to take it as his cue. He leans back, takes a slow breath in, then says, “It’s hard to know exactly what I can do for you that you’d care about. My goals are simple: I want Indigo to be a beacon of safety and stability in the world. A beacon of ambitious safety, which means an end to the Storm Trio, and now, an end to Rocket. I want more trainers and pokemon alive and safe to focus on other things, including securing the region against future potential threats, like another Hoenn incident, or whatever those dreams were about. With enough spare resources, we could even start expanding our borders.”

“Which might cause tension with other regions,” Sevi says. “You could end up needing us more than ever before… particularly if the Master Ball destabilizes interregional politics.”

Blue nods. “I understand that this is where your focus lies, and I admit I haven’t paid as much attention to it as other stuff. I won’t act like I know more than you about how big the problem is, or how necessary you are. That all might come later. In the meantime, I can promise I’ll keep an open mind, and that so long as our mutual goals are to keep Indigo safe, I won’t turn down potential allies, so long as they aren’t using that alliance to help other potential threats.”

“Not as enticing as Michio’s offer,” Zang says.

“You think so?” Koga shrugs. “But I would be a different sort of Champion than he. If the clans are as necessary as I was always told, then it would not surprise me if a result of Oak’s leadership is your work being more respected, more valued, in the long run.”

“We do not do what we do for respect,” Sevi says, tone mildly disapproving, or offended, as if Koga should know better. It makes Leaf wonder again if she’s actually his mother, or maybe an aunt or something. “And we cannot be effective in the light you would drag us into.”

Leaf couldn’t tell Laura about this meeting, but she did ask for advice, a couple weeks ago, by asking about a hypothetical scenario where she’s negotiating with a mob boss who reached out about leverage she holds.

“When you’re trying to show someone something new, something that might change their mind or turn them from a path they’ve been on for a while, it’s important to give them lines of retreat. An army with its back to a river will fight harder not to get pushed in. An army with a clear, safer way to go will take it if pressured. Anyone who has some investment in a belief or action being right, who might find it painful to admit to themselves that it’s not, will find it easier to accept they were wrong if you can make them feel safer for doing so, more reassured that they won’t be punished or called a fool. This is particularly important for those with a big ego, or who have a lot of others to answer to for their decisions; give them a way to save face, not just with others but themselves as well.”

“There’s a mistake I see people make a lot,” Leaf says, bringing everyone’s attention to her. “Myself included, sometimes, when reality leads to a shitty thing happening, and we don’t want to accept that shitty thing. So we come up with a solution that seems like it will help, but only because it ignores the part of reality that makes the shitty stuff happen in the first place.”

“And what part of reality do you believe we’re ignoring, exactly?” Sevi says, and her tone and gaze both convey that she is Not Happy with where this is going.

“I’m getting to that. Anyone could say that someone they disagree with is just missing some part of reality, but a thing that can help check if it’s true is focusing on how well the person understands the depth of the problem they’re facing.” She looks between Sevi and Zang. “I’m not sure this conversation is worth having until you both show us that you really, actually get what it will mean if, when, the ninja clans are revealed to the world.”

“You speak of the single most pervasive consequence of living life in a hidden village,” Zang says, and he does less to hide his annoyance with Leaf. “The risks you casually imply we might not have thought of are things we’ve spent generations living in worry of, generations considering and preparing for.”

Put like that, yeah, she probably does come off as arrogant. But if she doesn’t have the right to question them, who will?

“If they’re reaching out to you, it’s a negotiation, and there’s no surer sign that you have power than an honest attempt to work things out verbally instead of through violence.” Laura said. “Be civil, but don’t cower. Most violent criminals have an ego, but they don’t respect weakness.”

“And maybe that means you’re completely prepared,” Leaf says. “But my guess is it means that all the kinds of revealing you’ve spent generations preparing for became mostly irrelevant once Miracle Eye was invented, let alone the other unprecedented things that have happened in the past year. I would have a hard time admitting that, if I were in the clan. I would have a hard time accepting that maybe the legacy I’ve worked for is at actual risk of destruction. If you think I’m wrong, I’d like you to show me how. Otherwise, we’re probably just going to talk past each other because we have different estimations of how big the threat you’re facing is.”

The room is quiet, and Leaf simply sips her tea, and waits. As she expected, the others drink some tea as well, and afterward Sevi bows her head to Leaf.

“Your argument may have some merit. Perhaps we can discuss it further at a later meeting, if this one goes well. Until then, the question that remains most relevant is what you can offer us, and what we can offer you.”

Leaf nods, then lets out a slow breath, trying not to feel too happy about how that went. It’s possible she’s just being diplomatic, or maybe she just wants to hear more at some point to shore up defenses.. “I don’t plan on becoming Champion, or holding political power beyond the influence of my words. If you want to know why I’m writing the story, it’s that. I won’t lie for you, but I don’t have to; the most important part of the story I’ve been writing is that the ending is unwritten.”

Zang’s brow creases. “Your offer is empty. You would continue writing in any case, and so long as you have principles, all that would change in the story would result from our own actions, unless you plan to misrepresent us again.”

Leaf’s refutation dies on her lips, and she tries not to look at Koga. “Again?”

“The assassinations you wrote the clan engaging in, at the behest of the criminals,” Sevi says, and to Leaf’s surprise, carefully reaches into her pocket and pulls out a piece of notebook paper, which she opens to examine. “Starting on Chapter 19.”

Is that a list of inaccuracies/grievances? Leaf would love to take a look at it… which is no doubt the purpose it serves. She does her best to pretend the woman just recited the information from memory, and not seem too eager for the paper, which returns to the woman’s pocket. “If you have a side of the story you believe is being misrepresented, I’d be happy to discuss matters of accuracy at any point.”

“But I will assist her in ensuring your perspective is taken with the proper skepticism,” Koga says, tone and expression politely neutral. “If you would justify the work we’ve done for criminal elements, you must provide better arguments and evidence than I was given all those years ago.”

“Your sense of purity in our purpose was a credit to you, Michio,” Sevi says. “But that same purity was also blinding, at times. Self-righteous anger does not detract from what we protected, even at the behest of criminal elements.”

Oof. Now Leaf is hoping the woman is an aunt or something, instead of the Leader’s mom, and finds herself getting angry on Koga’s behalf. She does her best to tamp the heat in her chest down.

“If you wish to debate this here, I will,” Koga says, voice holding only a hint of hardness. “But I don’t believe it’s productive.”

Zang leans forward, slightly. “It does not require a debate. But the whole story must include the implicit endorsement of our wielders. So long as we did not act against the region’s interests at the behest of the criminals within it, our purpose was being fulfilled. Not everyone will share your naivete, and if we are to treat this as a fair recounting, it must include the specifics of the work we did that you would condemn, rather than calling it all corruption.”

Koga shrugs. “After living among the region for decades, now, and having risen to one of the highest positions of power within it… I am more confident, not less, that however much the village has changed since I left, the rest of society has progressed much more quickly, and would disagree with your justifications. But I don’t object to truthful explanations, if you wish to provide them. Without knowing what information may have been withheld from me, I obviously cannot be too confident.”

Leaf holds up a hand before anyone can respond. “I appreciate this sort of exchange, and think it proves the value of my offer.” She smiles apologetically. “Which may not seem like much, but I will note does actually take me a fair amount of time. Your village is going to face public perception at some point. Maybe you could honestly say what matters to you is being revealed, and you don’t care how the public thinks of you… but whether it’s Leader Koga, Blue, or someone else in charge when you’re revealed to the region, those ‘legitimate wielders,’ the political leaders, will care about public scrutiny.”

The two ninja are silent again, and it’s Sevi who brings her teacup to her lips this time, followed by a (maybe slightly reluctant-seeming?) Zang. Leaf has to put her attention into actually appreciating it again rather than letting her mind loop on stressing over the things she just said, her word choice (which is already blurring in her memory), how quiet Blue is being and if he’s stressing about something she hasn’t noticed, etc.

When Sevi speaks, it’s with her tea cup still in hand. “The offers have been received. Ours are simple, but commensurate. We can help you find Rocket’s head and heart.”

“And we are confident that without us, you will not be able to,” Zang says. “Consider that comment an up front payment, and sign of good faith.”

Leaf blinks at him, and sees Blue lean forward slightly. “Are you saying Archer is one of you? Or from another clan? Or that he’s leaving Indigo soon?”

“I’ve said all I will, for now.”

“To continue negotiations,” Sevi says. “Delay further chapters of the story. We will return to the village and share what we’ve discussed.”

“I can do that,” Leaf says. “But there are more people we’ll need clued in, if we talk again.”

“Red Verres.”

Leaf nods. “And his mother, Laura.”

Zang shakes his head. “Interpol is a non-starter. If some form of arrangement is reached, some new form for the village takes shape, it will be done as an Indigo matter. The interregional police have no say in how we protect ourselves, and will only deepen the rift by their predictable response to our existence.”

“I understand the concern,” Leaf says. “But Red is a unique case. He’s technically an Indigo Hunter,” the words sound bizarre to say out loud, even now, “Who’s collaborating with Interpol. And he may be one of the only people in the world who can actually keep a secret.”

Sevi leans forward. “But will he? A secret like this, given the stakes?”

“Yes,” Blue says without hesitating. “He cares about stopping Rocket, not boosting his career as a Hunter or whatever.”

Leaf is less sure than Blue, and feels suitably bad about that. Red does have a sense of loyalty, and he might not feel like he has the right to make decisions like this when he’s been entrusted by the police and interpol; he is, after all, still in a sort of gray zone of trustworthiness, and stuck representing trustworthiness for psychics as a whole.

But what makes her confident is that he held onto so many secrets for so long. “I still don’t fully understand how his powers work, but from what I do understand, he can hear the proposal while pre-committing to not sharing any secrets if we can’t reach agreement, then decide if he wants to help while holding the secret or not, then forget the secret if no agreement is reached.”

“A truly bizarre existence, if true,” Sevi says, speaking slowly. “But a valuable consideration.”

It is bizarre, and Leaf thinks of Rowan, suddenly, and suppresses a shiver. She again hopes that he just… continues to stay missing, and that Red isn’t at risk of becoming like him.

Zang frowns. “Assuming we can trust that he will honor his precommitments in the first place.”

Sevi nods, and puts her tea cup down. “We have much to discuss. Thank you for agreeing to this meeting. We will reach out to you again soon.”

Leaf doesn’t ask if they’ll agree not to kill her or Blue in the meantime. It would be an empty reassurance, in multiple ways. “I look forward to it,” she says, mostly honestly.

Koga stands. “I will escort you out.”

The ninja rise to their feet, their movements smooth and effortless, and Leaf and Blue stand as well. They all exchange bows before Koga leads them through the back door.

Leaf nearly collapses onto her seat once they’re gone, and takes her hand out of her pocket, where she’d been intermittently holding her phone, prepped to signal to Red that they needed him. She lets out a shaky breath, then rubs her face. “That was…”

“Pretty intense,” Blue says. She hears a thump, and turns to see him flopped onto his back, arms splayed. “I don’t trust them.”

Leaf hesitates, then nods. “It seemed… too easy, right?”

“Too easy, and too… I don’t know. Set up, knock down? It was like—”

“—like they were putting up a token resistance to each thing, then changing their minds as needed.” Leaf drinks more tea, but it’s not as calming as it was during the meeting, oddly. “Maybe they’re just feeling us out? It’s not like they committed to anything.”

“Yeah, was kind of hoping for something more solid from all this, to be honest. How much longer are we going to be strung along?”

The door slides open and Leaf’s heart jumps, nerves still on edge, but it’s just Janine walking in, followed by Leader Koga. “Probably a while longer,” Janine says.

“Unfortunately so,” Koga adds, smiling slightly. “But you two did very well.”

“Thanks.” Leaf tentatively smiles back. “Doesn’t feel like it.”

“We were just saying—”

“That they’re hiding something can be taken for granted.”

“Right, but also that it seemed too easy?”

“Ah. That… may not be the sign of what you think it is.” Koga sits, smile a bit wider now. “My people are not used to this, you see. They are excellent infiltrators, but this was not an infiltration. They were here as… not themselves, exactly, but a representative of the clan, which put them far closer to reality than most training or missions would. My guess is they came cloaked in a role of themself, a shadow clone, if you will, with a cover personality that could act truthfully but also be dismissed, pivoted into a different perspective and stance.”

“Wait,” Janine says. “I wasn’t here, someone needs to explain.”

“They were… play acting?” Leaf asks, not sure if she should be skeptical or laugh. “Like putting on a play, complete with standard ninja tropes?”

“A fair comparison.”

“Wait, seriously, explain what I missed,” Janine says as she pours herself tea. “Oh wow, you brought out the good stuff huh?”

“It wasn’t that much,” Leaf says. “I mean it wasn’t… I don’t know, overacted? Overdramatic?”

“They were professional,” Koga agrees. “And it served a purpose, both for them and us. But while I only have guesses as to what, I would caution against worry that there’s some deeper deception occurring, and focus on preparing for another meeting… as well as what our long-term goals will be, once they give the appearance of compliance.”

Blue sits up, and Leaf feels her stomach grow cold. “You think they’re going to betray us?”

“They will almost certainly reach out to Rocket to try and get a better offer,” Koga says. “But their goals don’t align nearly as well, so I am not too worried about this leading to a complete loss for us.”

“Ah,” Janine says, and sighs. “They’re going to split.” She sips some tea, then looks at Leaf and Blue. “Basically, the ones that are okay with being outed will agree to try and make some kind of new thing work.”

“And the ones who aren’t will join Rocket?” Blue asks, fists clenched and lips twisted in disgust.

Koga shakes his head. “Other villages might, but not quite. No, the remainders won’t join Rocket. They will form another village.”

Leaf rubs her eyes. “A secret secret ninja village? One that… what, continues their current methods and mission, after convincing everyone they’re not any more?”

“That is my best guess.”

“So what do we do about it?” Blue asks. “It’s better than them joining the enemies, but I don’t want crazy vigilante ninja around my region.” He looks at Janine. “No offense.”

She rolls her eyes. “I get it. We’ll see how all this goes before I make any promises. Maybe you’ll end up needing ninja to fight ninja.”

“Isn’t that exactly what their justification is?”

Leaf listens to them argue, slightly distracted as she takes her phone out and messages Red to let him know they’ll be done soon. She’s hungry, and needs to fill the guys in on what they’ve found at the Cinnabar mansion lab, but her thoughts keep turning back to the conversation with the two ninja.

She’s not sure she’s ever had a civil conversation with someone she knew might be willing to kill her before, and she probably hasn’t spoken to any ninja besides Janine and her dad before. But as they leave the gym to meet up with Red, she can’t shake the feeling that the conversation with Sevi felt… familiar, somehow.

Chapter 130: Unadorned

A shard of sky rests at the bottom of the volcano’s caldera, the smooth lake at its center reflecting the slow drift of the clouds above Cinnabar’s highest peak. Taming the volcano was a major step in establishing the gym on Cinnabar in the first place, and now the inner caldera has been converted from its role as a natural habitat for rare and powerful wild pokemon to a massive stable for tamed ones.

All of which means the view would be more impressive than Misty’s oceanside arena even without the occasional sight of a charizard flying in the distance. Building Cinnabar’s arena in the caldera would be pretty reckless, even in a long-dormant volcano, which is why Blaine had it built around the lip instead.

One of the camera drones buzzes slowly by as Blue climbs the stairs to his podium, and he forces a smile despite the biting cold. The volcano isn’t high enough to be capped by snow, but it’s still nearly winter, and only his thermal jacket and pants make it mostly comfortable being this high. A while back he bought the best trainer gloves he could find, insulating ones that barely reduce his dexterity, while also having better grip than bare fingers, but they still feel slightly off compared to the thousands of hours of experience he has bare handed. He’s glad he’s practiced with the gloves as much as he has; their handicap is still way better than frozen fingers, and he’s trained with someday battling in Articuno’s blizzards in mind.

From the top of his podium he can see Blaine standing opposite him, white labcoat worn over a thick red turtleneck instead of his usual button up and tie. Blue has always thought the coat stands out on a Leader who otherwise seems allergic to presentation and theatrics, but despite the months he’s been here, it’s only seeing Blaine wearing it again here, combined with the breath-taking view of the island and ocean spread around them, that he wonders what it means to Blaine rather than what it might be signaling to others.

The stands are packed despite the remote location, everyone bundled up against the cold, with some holding flameless Fire pokemon in their laps for warmth. There’s extra distance between the arena and the audience compared to other gyms, and he can’t make out any of his friends in the bleachers, but Leaf said she’d try to make it, and he knows the rest of his crew are here.

Red isn’t. Too predictable a time and place where he might be, too much risk of Rocket trying to take him out.

But he’ll be watching, Blue knows, him and Gramps and Daisy and others.

“Blue Oak,” Blaine suddenly says. “What is your Challenge?”

Blue manages to hold in his laugh. The lack of prebattle speeches is one of the more infamous aspects of Blaine’s Leadership, and Blue isn’t actually surprised that the man wouldn’t break that norm for him… even if he did help revolutionize the island’s recruitment and defenses.

Once Brightfire and his “clan” showed up, other online influencers were close behind. Some were people Blue had on his list of influencers to reach out to, others were the kind he considered too volatile or unserious to be a good influence on the younger trainers in the program. It’s been taking a lot of time and effort, along with social nudges and maneuvering, to ensure they don’t destabilize the process.

But overall, it’s been working so far. Dozens of trainers, working together in coordinated teams to help maintain control of the island, turning yellow zones green and orange zones yellow and red zones… mostly orange, with some exceptions.

Maybe it’s those exceptions that led to Blaine not acknowledging what he’s done. In the end, Blue failed to deliver an island at peace, even if he helped it get stabilized enough for Blaine to resume his challenge matches at a pre-Ditto pace. In a sense, Blue is only here because his number finally came up… but he still feels like he earned this match in a way that part of him wishes would get some public acknowledgement from Blaine.

“I challenge for Mastery.”

“Cinnabar accepts. You may use three pokemon against my six. The first trainer to achieve three knockouts wins. If any pokemon is killed, their trainer loses.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“Rule one of battling trainers: you don’t go in with a plan.”

“That’s rule one? And I’m only learning it now?”

It was their fourth time meeting to teach Leaf trainer battle tactics, and the first time she managed put up at least a bit of a real “fight” against Blue. She still hesitated too much, didn’t seem to notice most of the paths to victory that were available to her pokemon… but she was improving, and Red had started out mostly the same, if with a somewhat different set of blind spots. A younger Blue might have found the sessions a waste of time, especially with a gym challenge coming up, but he’s been using them as opportunities to train up some of his weaker pokemon, as well as practice less common combat commands… plus, it felt good to help Leaf get up to speed in her battle tactics.

And strange; he’s never coached someone who was so skilled as a trainer but so bad at this particular aspect before, and it felt like a fun puzzle in itself to figure out the best ways to help her close the gaps.

“It wasn’t relevant before now.” He shrugged. “If you’re only fighting one pokemon at a time, and you know what it is ahead of time, sure, you can strategize. A trained mon will do stuff a wild one won’t, and will have TM moves, but you can learn all that, make a spreadsheet or whatever. But you can’t do that against a whole trainer team.“

And, he didn’t add, renegades add an extra layer to all that, doing even more things than most trainers, being an extra element as a direct threat… but they’d get to that part later, and a couple battles didn’t make him an expert. If she stayed serious about it, there are renegade defense training courses taught by police that she could attend, or some ex-hunter she could hire as a tutor.

But all that could come later. First they’d cover basic stuff.

Leaf was giving him a skeptical look as she tossed a handful of berries at Raff, who finally evolved into a venusaur after their third day of battles. “I’ve seen you poring over spreadsheets ahead of gym challenges, back in Vermilion with Red and…”

“Aiko.” For all the good that did, given the surprise Membership battle that was itself cut short by Zapdos. “Yeah, but remember what I said? You don’t go in with a plan.” He gave it a moment, and when she continued to frown, “You go in with—”

“—multiple plans, ugh, Blue, having multiple ‘plans’ in one flowchart is still ‘a plan!’ Even multiple flowcharts could still be called ‘a plan!'”

“Details,” he said, waving it all away with a smile to match hers. “Point is, even knowing what type a leader will use, even predicting every mon on their belt, any plan I put together needs to be ready to get dropped. What if I rely on Soul acting as a pivot to absorb fire attacks, and he gets taken out by an unexpected matchup? What if I use my whole team to set up a sweep, and Blaine has the perfect tank to fully wall it?”

“Well… I remember you once ranted at Red to not become ‘one of those bigbrains’ who… relies on too many pokemon to set up a sweep, or something?”

“Wow, you didn’t tune me out nearly as much as I thought when I talked about battle stuff.”

She smiled, brushing windblown hair out of her face. “Or you underestimate how much battle stuff you rant about.”

“Nah, I’m fully aware. But yeah, any more than two pokemon per strat is just showing off, I think. Not just for sweepers. A hazard team maybe gets better with three to set up, but I think two is enough, with the rest as redundancies or an alternate strategy.”

“So that leaves you with three sets of potential winning conditions, at most? Or maybe one win condition and multiple ways to achieve it?”

“That’s one way to do it, yeah. But that assumes you’ll be using a full belt. One of the reasons you can’t rely on any single plan is you never know exactly what kind of battle you’re walking into, which is why different formats exist; to simulate different circumstances you might face outside of a battle arena.”

Even at this distance, the air is still enough that Blue hears the murmur go through the crowd. He keeps his expression steady, pulse having spiked only a little at the verbal confirmation that Blaine would be going… not all out, but close. It wasn’t entirely unexpected; 8th badges are when the safety bars usually start dropping, but Blaine has been known to do it on 7th badges before, as have Giovanni and Surge.

As an admission of Blue’s skill, it’s gratifying. But as a sign of what Blaine has planned for him…

Three pokemon against six.

But still only three knockouts to win. Which means Blaine has twice as much leeway to go all-out with his pokemon, since he doesn’t need to conserve strength or stamina… and because, much as it would be a mark against the Leader if he kills a challenger’s pokemon, it’s generally seen, fairly or not, as a slap-down against someone who wasn’t ready. Blue’s not tempted at all by the victory he could get by killing one of Blaine’s pokemon—the mark of that would follow him worse than a loss (and would be a waste of a powerful pokemon, besides), not just in public perception, but in the way it would justify the next Leader or Elite he faces in coming down even harder on him.

Blue’s mind races through his plans, discarding them as Blaine reaches for his belt. The battle calm is slow to descend as his own fingers trace over his pokeballs. Maturin, Rive, and Soul are the powerhouses on his left hip, while his newer sandslash, pelipper, and poliwrath are on his right. Should he go more defensive, in case he’s about to get hammered? But if Blaine tries to stall, he’ll have twice the ability to. It may come down to what Blaine sends out first…

Fire/Grass can handle Water and Ground types and Fire/Ground or Fire/Fighting will cover Rock but he can’t cover all three at once…

Blaine is unclipping a ball from his belt—

—Rock/Ground is my best bet but he knows that and—

Blue almost unclips Soul’s ball for the safety of matching Fire against Fire, but Blaine locking Blue into the first three pokemon he swaps between makes each non-coverage ‘mon far less valuable—

Blaine is throwing—

—and Blue snap-decides on the double Rock/Ground coverage, with only 3 pokemon he has much less to gain by holding a particular counter back as a surprise sweep—

“Go, Coalossal!”

“Go, Rive!”

His rhyperior materializes on his hind legs, arms extended and ready to blast stones out at whatever Blue summoned him for… in this case a walking mountain of glowing coal, with the fairly unique capability among Fire pokemon of shooting not just fire and tar out, but jets of steaming water.

Which on its own is often enough to take a Rock/Ground pokemon down in one hit.

He has moments to predict how Blaine might have trained it. Speed or Durability? Preservation or the long game?

The choices narrow in the space of heartbeats, and Blue yells “Ras!” just as Blaine shouts his own command. Scalding water blasts out at Rive while he slams his fists into his own body in a rapid staccato that sends chips of stone flying forward in a cone that coats the battlefield.

Rive roars in pain as the water hits, white cracks snaking over his torso… but his body is extra compact compared to most Rock types, heavy scales arranged to minimize gaps in his armor, and a shout of “Rad!” sends him barreling forward on all fours, horn spinning.

A second gout of scalding water jerks to the side as the titans clash, water and steam and flames venting from the coalossal as its body is torn into, and a moment later it’s withdrawn, while Rive manages to rise onto its back legs with a groan.

3v5.

“So okay, both trainers are trying to set up sweepers or hazards or whatever, while denying the enemy whatever they need. Is it basically just a more complex Fire-Water-Grass? Do sweeper teams beat hazard teams but lose to stall, which are beaten in turn by hazards?”

“Sort of, except each mon is its own thing too, and there are brawlers who are just there to wade in and wreck shit. That’s Soul, for me, and Maturin a bit too. Well rounded bulk and speed and damage, plus decent coverage options just makes them a pain to try to set up around. You might do it, but it’ll cost, and enough costs add up to bring everything collapsing down. Some people form entire teams of them, each there to wreck a different strategy up by brute force.”

“Why isn’t that the default, then?”

“Well, because they’re vulnerable to all three if they get unlucky. If Blaine has a Volcarona that starts Quiver Dancing, I’ve got Rive and Soul to take it down, but if I lose them before it’s sent out, or they’re too weak to beat it even un-boosted? Good sweeper teams are built with a win condition in mind, and the rest of the team is there to get them to it. Or look for opportunities to sneak it in if the enemy missteps.”

“Huh. So that’s your plan for Blaine? Fire pokemon don’t really do hazards or walls, right?”

“They have a few, but yeah it’s not really their thing. And Blaine should have a good sense of my capabilities, even if he doesn’t know what’s on my team—that’s part of the point of having challengers fight competent gym members first—so he should know that anything too obvious won’t work on me.”

“Unless that’s what he wants you to think, and you prepare for something less obvious, and—”

“Yeah, yeah. So it goes.”

Blue watches Rive sway slightly, then stabilize, and lets a slow breath out, pulse quick even through his calm. It was a gamble that the coalossal would be slow enough for Rive to use Stealth Rocks and take it out after. If he’d been wrong, he would be down to two pokemon and not have put a scratch on Blaine’s frontrunner… but he knew Rive could take at least one hit, and he’d gain the field advantage either way, one that will be particularly important if Blaine ends up swapping pokemon a lot.

But Rive won’t take much more, even against a Fire pokemon, and the part of Blue that wants the cleanest win regrets letting him take that hit when he could have knocked out the enemy instead, leaving him with an easy 3v5 and the ability to set up the rocks on whoever is sent out next.

He doesn’t need Red to poke him about hindsight bias to notice that the train of thought isn’t helpful, and toss it aside. That battle’s done, the next is coming, and he’s still well positioned. Not the best he could be, but he avoided disaster, and Rive may be able to help soften up one more—

“Go, Blaziken!”

“Return!” Blue’s arms snap into position to withdraw Rive before he gets pummeled unconscious. His new Fire/Fighting opponent manages to dodge most of the floating rocks that immediately zip toward it, and Blue barely has any time to pick the replacement pokemon, but he knows there’s a Scovillain waiting for any Water pokemon he sends out and so instead he sends—

“Go, Gulper!”

His pelipper appears over the battlefield and immediately banks to the side, managing to avoid a direct hit by the blaziken’s leaping kick. Blaine probably doesn’t have another Rock type to send out, which means Gulper should be mostly safe—

“Return!” Blaine throws as Blue brings the whistle necklace to his lips and blows a command for Water Pulse—

“Go, Rotom!”

—which hits the newly summoned… levitating convection microwave, which

/spasms/

in Blue’s vision, like one eye is seeing the microwave and the other is seeing something wearing a microwave costume that’s too small for it as it thrashes inside.

The two overlapping realities snap together as the microwave suddenly turns on, lights blinking rapidly as the cover opens, bright with heat.

And the trap becomes clear.

“And what’s his plan for you?”

“Dunno. Blaine isn’t exactly the most attentive Leader, wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t even know my starter is a blastoise, let alone that I have a rhyperior. But Fire having only three weaknesses does help with predictability.”

“Not a lot of Fire pokemon that can handle those weaknesses, though.”

“Yeah, and there’s basically zero overlap in the types that resist each, so he has to choose with each one. Maybe that’s why, when you look at his past battles, sometimes Blaine is the most straightforward Leader. No fancy strats, just spamming Overheat and Flare Blitz and Burn Up, not trying for sustainability, just keeping the pressure on, Fire Blasting his way through any Type resistances. Other times he’s definitely got a well crafted team, like you can see the thought he put into building it, and sometimes it’s brilliant, but he’s not Erika or Koga.”

“Tactics over strategy?”

“Exactly. I’ll be pretty surprised if he’s got some trap in mind, especially if he’s got one prepared for me, specifically. I’d guess that in his head, it would be showing favoritism or something, boosting my status even more, and I especially doubt he’ll do something like that given I failed to make the island safe fast enough to skip the queue.”

The rotom’s obvious upcoming move, despite appearances, would be an electric attack that would take Gulper out in one hit. Blue could swap to Rive to negate it… but there’s no chance Rive will outspeed it to get another KO, and an Overheat would take his injured rhyperior the rest of the way down, even through his resistance.

Which means Blue has to swap in a third pokemon, and lock himself in for the rest of the match despite only seeing half of Blaine’s pokemon.

“Return!” Blue yells before his pelipper gets electrified, fingers of his other hand twitching from one ball to another.

Blastoise, sandslash, poliwrath…

“Go, Soul!”

His arcanine appears just in time to catch the bolt, muscles locking up and hair sticking up all over his body. Once it passes, he shakes himself and roars.

Blastoise and poliwrath would be so damaged by the thunderbolt that they might not be able to withstand an Overheat after any better than Rive would. Sandslash could take the thunderbolt instead of Rive, and (probably barely) withstand an Overheat to finish off the rotom… but being stuck with a Ground type would make an enemy Fire/Flying or Fire/Grass twice as dangerous to him.

It had to be Soul, who on top of everything else—

“Ca!”

“Return!”

—is fast enough to take the rotom down before it can get another attack off, forcing Blaine to withdraw it.

3v4. Sort of. He still needs two knockouts, but the rotom can’t come back out without being taken down by the Stealth Rocks, so it’s effectively out of play…

“Go, Turtonator!”

Unless Blaine can clear the field.

Soul’s jaws close around the Fire/Dragon turtle that appears, Crunching hard enough into the thick, spikey shell it keeps between them that a crack runs through it.

It wouldn’t matter. Turtonators have the toughest hides of any Dragon in the world, their shells even harder than the metal scales of an archaludon—even Rhyperior would struggle to break through it with a Drill Run, and the resulting Shell Trap explosion would give nearly as good as it got.

And thanks to its Dragon blood, even Maturin, if Blue could use her, would have to spam multiple Hydro Pumps to take it down. Gulper doesn’t stand nearly as good of a chance.

But.

Dragon blood comes with its own weakness, besides the Ice attacks that turtonator’s heat protects it from.

And combined with the damage from Stealth Rocks and Crunch…

“It’s starting to sound like you’re saying there’s basically nothing you can do to prepare.”

“Nah, not quite. There are some things that are easy enough to predict that they’re worth preparing specifically for… and of course, some things are just a good idea to train regardless, if you have the time and money.”

It should be a more dramatic moment, this reveal. He hasn’t talked as much as he could have, about the anger that used to pace inside him, anger he always imagined taking an arcanine’s form. A couple off-hand mentions, once in an interview, once in a blog post after he caught Soul.

It felt too private, most of the time, and a little embarrassing. He was still half a kid, two years ago, and a lot of things from that time feel farther away every day.

But a part of it all still feels real, a core part of how he experiences himself, and that part feels there’s something special about this moment, even if Blaine’s unadorned directness forces Blue to match it.

“Soul,” Blue shouts, just as Blaine gives his own command. “Rage!”

Flickers of purple flame start to lick around Soul’s body, and then the arcanine bursts into motion as they spread and connect all around him. He lifts the turtonator off the ground and slams it back down to the side, then lifts it up to do it again, and again, whole body bending from side to side as he kicks off with his hind legs.

The turtonator tries using its rock-hard head to smash Soul away, but can’t get the right angle to make contact. Blaine gives another command, and instead the turtonator jabs its beak into the ground the next time it’s slammed into it. The earth below them explodes upward and outward, flinging Soul across the arena as the purple flames around him flicker and fade.

The crowd gasps, and Blue tracks his arcanine with his ball… but Soul rolls to his feet upon landing, patches of fur blasted off by coarse, heated earth. Blue almost withdraws him anyway—his pokemon is clearly dazed and confused, shifting unsteadily between his feet and shaking his head—but a glance at the turtonator makes it clear that his opponent is down for the count, and Blue wants to give Soul at least a few moments to recover before he’s withdrawn for later.

Now it’s 3v4, with only 3 viable pokemon left, thanks to another risk paying off. The path to victory should be clear by now. Just take down one of the remaining three pokemon Blaine sends out next, using all three of his pokemon to do it if he has to.

But he knows it won’t be that simple. Two of his pokemon are weak, and the Blaziken could possibly sweep both, depending on how long Soul takes to regain his senses. That would leave Gulper against three opponents who could each probably trade a free blow or two with it before being safely taken out…

Blue blinks as he realizes a few seconds have passed. Longer than the usual swap-in time, though not in a way that would call in a penalty; Soul isn’t poisoned or bleeding out, if anything the extra time helps him.

“If you’d used such a powerful attack against an even slightly weaker pokemon, you might have killed it. Especially after it was hurt, and its defenses damaged,” Blaine says.

Now they’re talking? Blaine doesn’t do half-time speeches any more than he does pre-battle ones… not unless he’s delivering a browbeating.

A cold hand clenches around Blue’s heart—did the turtonator actually die? But no, Blaine didn’t check with his pokedex, it’s probably fine…

Blue does his best to keep his face calm as he breathes past his quickening pulse, the cold air stinging his nose as the battle calm slowly fades. “I taught Soul to use Outrage specifically to face a turtonator—a pokemon I believe couldn’t be stopped in any other way.” And he’d needed to stop it. If he’d let it stay on the field, it would have likely used Rapid Spin to clear out the stealth rocks, bringing the rotom back into potential play (and being an unstoppable ongoing nuisance, besides).

Maybe now is the time to say more, about how rage against the unfairness of the world has always been a motivating part of his soul, or how he wanted to prove that impossible-seeming things could be done… but the words die on his lips, attention drawn again to their surroundings.

The island stretched out below. The distant lake, reflecting the sky, with a couple charizard flying in a slow loop around it. The sound of the cold wind, filling the silence without taking away from it.

And he thinks he gets it. The reason Blaine built his arena here. The reason he’s so anti-showmanship or attempts to persuade… which are different to being anti-appearances, or anti-presentation, maybe.

Because this volcano, it is a spectacle. The view from here, the experience of being so high up and feeling it, both literally in the cold air and somewhere in the deeper stillness… it’s just not one that needs creating, or gets meaningfully added to by anything else Blaine could do. Or anything Blue can do.

Blue lets it in, a different sort of calm, and says nothing, simply watching Leader Blaine across the arena. Letting his actions speak for him, and keeping his words a simple explanation of those actions.

Leader Blaine looks back at him, though it’s hard to make out his expression from this distance, especially through his sunglasses. But through the corner of his eye, on the monitors for the viewers, Blue catches the eventual nod.

A test? If so, it’s not hard to guess; Blaine’s virtue is responsibility, and Blue squarely took it. Not just in retrospect, with a turtonator who survived the use of such a powerful attack, but by binding himself by his word that it was a move learned for the turtonator, and thus would not be used against other pokemon.

And what does passing mean, given they’re already in the middle of the match?

Maybe it’s just this moment to rest. Down below, Soul stops his confused swaying, regaining some balance as he moves to stand guard in front of Blue, who continues to take in the silence, letting go of any anticipation or stress about it. His hands casually move to rearrange his belt, putting Rive and Gulper on his right together, Soul on the front of his left. Sorry, Maturin. Next time.

It feels like an age has passed, but in reality it’s probably less than a minute from withdrawing his pokemon before Blaine unclips a new ball. “This match result has likely been decided, and I dislike wasting time—”

Another spike of panic. Decided which way?

“—but you have yet to show the pivotal pokemon’s mettle. Bring out your pelipper, and see if it can secure your victory.”

Blue hesitates for half a breath before his hands start moving, confused but willing to trust… whatever is happening, even if it slightly disadvantages him. A quick withdraw of Soul, which he expected to do anyway, and then:

“Go, Gulper!”

“Go, Charizard!”

It’s large, almost a quarter the size of the arena, and its roar shakes the stillness from the air. A second roar follows the first, this one of pain, and the air grows hotter with the sound, warmth spreading over Blue’s face as he watches the Stealth Rocks puncture the great lizard’s tough hide.

Gulper is about half its size, but to her credit she barely reacts to the roars (a third one sounds, far in the distance), and Blue quickly brings his whistle to his lips to blow another Water Pulse, which thankfully comes after the overwhelming blast of fire that’s sent in her direction, heating the air further and blowing Blue’s hair back.

Now whose moves are capable of killing?! he doesn’t yell, watching through the returned calm as his pokemon catches itself out of a plummet, burnt feathers falling in a cloud, then retaliates. The charizard recoils as the ring of water hits, and tries to launch itself up after the struggling pelipper… but its wings are in tatters from the rocks, and a quick whistle from Blue has Gulper banking around to dodge the second Overheat, which is thankfully weaker than the first, and looks like it just grazes Gulper.

The two pokemon fly above them and Blue relies on Gulper’s easier turning ability to get behind the charizard and divebomb it with another Water Pulse. A sharp whistle from Blaine has the charizard flip itself over and smack Gulper out of the air with its tail, in a maneuver that would be awesome if not for the fact that the combined damage sends the charizard plummeting down after to crash against the arena floor.

Even with that, it still turned out pretty cool.

Blue blows a new tune for his pokemon to Roost while their opponent picks itself up, looking at least as unsteady as Soul had. Blue is distantly shocked it’s still able to lift its head at all, and knows in his gut that without the Stealth Rocks, this thing would have (metaphorically) eaten Gulper alive. Maturin or Rive could probably match it, but if Blaine used a TM to teach it Solar Beam… would he, for a 7th badge challenge? (Come to think of it, that’s another reason this arena was probably set here…)

Gulper is resting on the ground, shedding burnt and broken feathers as new ones quickly regrow, and Blue is ready to end the Roost as the charizard regains its focus—

—”Return! Go, Scovillain!”—

There it is, and unfortunately for it his quick whistle gets Gulper out of the way of most of its Bullet Seeds. They practiced for hours on those tight spiral climbs and dives, which can be easily followed up with an Air Slash, itself enough combined with the Stealth Rock to nearly take the scovillain down—

—quick check that Gulper can survive another Bullet Seed, maybe not a direct one but—

—”Return, go Blaziken! Brave Bird!”

what

The flaming, wingless bird crouches down, then leaps in a blur to meet Gulper mid-air, and Blue’s pelipper is knocked out of the sky for the second time in under a minute. Blue’s heart leaps as she flaps rapidly to catch herself… and retaliates with another Water Pulse—

“Blaziken, return.” Blaine’s voice cuts through the roaring in Blue’s ears, and he’s ready for whatever comes next—the charizard again? No, the rocks… the scovillain?

Instead nothing comes but words, the words: “I consider all my pokemon unable to fight, and forfeit. Blue Oak has earned the Volcano Badge.”

And then the wind is drowned out by the cheers, and Blue lets himself sag against the banister. No tricks, no posturing. Just relief, and a wide, open smile.

One more.

Chapter 129: Reframe

“Let me see if I get what it means to be Leaf Juniper,” Dr. Sotala says. “If I may?”

“Please.” Leaf smiles. “If you do, you might be the first.”

He smiles back, then shifts on his couch seat to be a bit more relaxed, staring up at the ceiling with his hands gently folded across his chest. It’s a nice ceiling, with dim lights at the four corners and a painting of a starry sky. Leaf is positioned cross-legged on her couch, a position she’s found surprisingly comfortable since she tried it during her love-and-empathy-for-pokemon lessons at Sabrina’s school. Doing it on the couch is even more comfortable than doing it on the meditation cushion they had there.

“I, Leaf Juniper,” Dr. Sotala begins, “Believe that pokemon suffering is as important as human suffering. In practice I accept that humans have more intelligence and agency, and so have the ability to affect the world in ways pokemon don’t, but this power comes with a responsibility to be good caretakers of pokemon, the same way humans feel a responsibility to be good caretakers of children.” His gaze drops to her. “So far so good?”

“Yeah.”

His gaze rises again, hands steepling under his chin now. “With some exceptions, most people believe the suffering of human children should be reduced, in theory at least. Children are the ultimate innocent, and in most humans we have a part that believes deeply that innocence matters, and bad things should not happen to good or innocent people. It feels deeply unfair, and triggers our protectiveness.

“Many people do not feel this with pokemon, who are considered threats first… but they should, because pokemon are no more responsible for their actions than human children are, and so long as they’re made harmless, the acceptable amount of suffering for both should be equal. We can already see the potential for them to be treated equally, where just a few generations since pokemon could be reliably made safe, people often bond with them as pets and friends, or even consider them members of our families.”

Leaf nods along, thinking of the old woman in Pewter, decrying the “disrespect” people today feel for majuu. Much as she could understand many of her concerns, it does feel more than ever like lack of understanding is what leads to difficulty living well alongside pokemon, not too much knowledge about them.

But would she change her mind, if there was some fact she learned about pokemon that would reliably lead to people caring less about their suffering…?

“But there are still a lot of reasons why people allow pokemon to suffer. When the children’s suffering is out of sight, it’s harder for people to motivate themselves to act. But so long as they don’t see it, such as on meat farms, or they believe it’s necessary, such as for training, they prioritize other things. And if it’s pokemon living out in the wilderness, it’s just accepted as part of life… which is a whole other issue, but not relevant to the rest of it for now.” He looks at her again. “So far so good?”

“Yeah, I don’t think I would have summarized it that well myself if asked!”

“Great. Okay, so as an extension of all of the above, I, Leaf Juniper, believe that for most pokemon, life with a trainer who treats them as a friend or family member is better than life in the wild, even if used to battle wild pokemon. Because dying painfully in the wild is the default, they have a better chance of a longer, happy life with a trainer… even with the added risk of occasionally fighting wild pokemon. Right?”

“Right.”

“And, the pokemon can do more good for others, both human and pokemon, if they help capture more wild pokemon, and generally defend against their attacks, since the better human society does, the more people are available to save pokemon from dying in the wild.”

Leaf blinks. “Huh. I… don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way, but… no, it’s not wrong.”

“What would you have said instead, for why it’s okay to use captured pokemon to fight wilds?”

“That it’s like defending their family. Assuming the trainer is treating them right, of course, but this is what the initial training after being captured does in the first place, for most species.”

“This is part of why it bothers you so much, if trainers mistreat their pokemon.”

“Yeah. Pokemon can’t really agree to take the risks we ask them to take, but we’re also not really giving them a choice. We almost literally program it into them. To do that but then not care about them feels… pretty horrible.”

Dr. Sotala nods and strokes his red beard, face thoughtful… but not in a way that makes Leaf think he’s just putting on generic-thoughtful-face. It took her five tries to find a therapist who she not only felt both was a good match for her in personality and therapy style, but also seemed to take her beliefs seriously enough to actually help her think through them more clearly. This is their second session, and she reminds herself not to feel too optimistic—she had multiple sessions with some of the previous therapists before stopping—but she does feel like he seems to get her, at least, regardless of whether he agrees with her positions or not.

“And,” she continues, feeling a need to expand further, to make it clear that she’s not ignoring reality… “I know this is something like the best possible world we could be in right now. I know that the alternative to humans catching pokemon is that we just stay in barely surviving tribes, most people suffering and dying young, and pokemon are caught in an endless cycle of suffering and dying too. I do believe this is a necessary stage in getting to a better world. But we still have to own what we do, and I don’t see that ownership in most of society, or even most trainers.”

“Especially not from trainers who engage in battles with each other?”

Leaf bites her lip, thinking of Blue. “A lot of them just have different priorities. I’ve debated with plenty about whether fighting other trainers is necessary to better defend against wild attacks, but… while I wasn’t really convinced before, the renegades have changed things.”

“And so there’s a part of you, I mean me, Leaf Juniper, who believes any unnecessary suffering among pokemon is unconscionable, and a part of me that believes I should learn to fight renegades, but that belief requires me to train my pokemon specifically against other trainers, and I feel…”

“Stuck.” She swallows. “Lost.”

“Pulled between two opposing values?”

Leaf reflects on the words, then shakes her head. “I think I… do feel pulled more toward trainer battles, now. It feels like the thing I should do. But I don’t know how to, with the way it makes me feel when I consider it.”

“Like it would make you a bad person?”

“…maybe. I don’t know that I worry much about what a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person would do, though. I think I care more about how to be a good caretaker for my pokemon, a good friend, a good journalist… things like that.” She reflects a bit more, then keeps thinking out loud. “I don’t know if that’s enough. People can definitely be good friends or good journalists but ‘bad people.’ But if I try to think in terms of ‘what’s a good or bad person,’ I get, like, error signals internally, or… I don’t know, flashes of people sacrificing themselves for others, or kicking babies or something? Whereas I get more useful thoughts if I think in specific contexts.”

“Understandable. So the tension is between ‘what would a good caretaker do’ and ‘what would a good friend do,’ or possibly ‘a good citizen?'”

“Yeah, basically.”

“But not something like, ‘what would a hero of justice do?'”

She shifts in her seat. She can’t tell if the motivation is flattering or not, but she also doesn’t know if it’s true. “Is that… Do I seem like that?”

“I’m exploring, not trying to get you to admit something,” he says gently. “Journalists are often driven by an interest in justice. You’ve helped stop renegades twice. Does justice not feel like a motivation, here?”

She takes a moment to consider, to search inside the confusing mix of feelings that led her to where she is. “I do care about justice, of course. But fighting renegades isn’t… I’m not about to become a hunter, or an interpol agent, or anything. Things have come to an extreme point, and I want to be prepared to help, but it’s not something I feel passionate about.”

Do hunters feel passionate about their work? Probably. Hopefully? She can’t actually decide which seems better; people doing a job like that because they’re passionate about it, or because they believe if they don’t no one else will.

He watches her for a moment, maybe waiting to see if she’ll add anything more, before nodding. “You’ve described your symptoms when watching pokemon get hurt as a jittery, empathetic pain. It doesn’t happen as much if you watch footage, and it also isn’t some latent psychic power, since it happens when dark pokemon are hurt, and you don’t feel it as much when you’re in battle?”

“Yes to most of that, except… I don’t know if I’d say I don’t feel it as much when I’m fighting, but those situations are always serious enough that I just push through it.”

“Understandable. Then I have two questions.” He holds up a finger. “First. Earlier I said, as you, ‘unnecessary suffering.’ Last session we talked about—”

“Frames, yeah. It’s definitely a framing issue, I realized that a while back, when I tried to force myself to get used to seeing it happen. It didn’t work, but… I guess maybe I just didn’t find the right frame, yet.”

He nods, and holds up a second finger. “What happens if you just try anyway?”

“Try what?”

“A trainer battle. You said it feels bad to watch one. You said it feels bad even to fight wild pokemon, but you are able to get through it because the situations are dire, and you must. But that sounds like an assumption. What if you do not get through it because you ‘must,’ but because some other factor involved in the battle process counteracts the jittery pain?”

Leaf stares at him, and feels her pulse quicken just by imagining it. “I…”

“It is okay, if you are not ready to try.”

She shakes her head, then stops herself, unsure what she’s even indicating. She takes a deep breath, then lets it out. “I want to try. But just the thought of it feels bad.”

Dr. Sotala nods. “If you do decide to, we have things we can do to prepare you. As much as this may be in your nervous system, and you want to soothe it, we can try exposure therapy. We’ll start with basic relaxation exercises, followed by simple, minimal stimuli that you practice acclimating to while relaxing your system, before we move on to more real experiences.”

Leaf slowly nods, feeling herself relax just from the thought that maybe she can practice this as straightforwardly as working a muscle. “I’ve heard that a hundred hours thinking about how to solve a problem is often less valuable than a single experiment. It seems worth trying, yeah.”

“We can also explore different framing devices; I’m curious what happens if you watch footage of a pokemon battle, without knowing if it’s between trainers, wilds, or a trainer and a wild, and how your mind jumps from one conclusion to another, and how your body reacts to those assumptions, and what happens if you imagine different contexts instead.”

“I’d like to record that process, if possible. I think there are others it might be useful to.” Others she found, here and there, online, but mostly for Natural, who she knows has been considering something similar.

“Of course. And finally, we can do some parts work. We want to know what the stressful, debilitating part of you is protecting against, what it’s afraid of, and how you can reassure it that it will be okay… assuming we can, after listening to it more fully to ensure you’re not missing something important by trying to stop it from happening.”

Leaf slowly nods, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve been having trouble doing that last thing, so far.”

“Oh?”

“I… there’s a part of me convinced that all this isn’t just for helping pokemon or helping my friends or helping society. This part thinks I need to do this because I need to ensure I survive.”

She knows he’s going to ask, Survive what? And then she’ll have to decide if she wants to tell him about the whole ninja thing. Even for therapist-client confidentiality, even though he lives in a region on the other side of the planet from Kanto, it still feels too risky to talk about it.

But instead he just says: “It feels too selfish, for you to accept it?”

“I’m not sure. None of my parts want to die, and if I wasn’t willing to risk pokemon’s lives to save my own, I wouldn’t have become a trainer. But it’s a step further than I was ever willing to take before, and I think I need to know this will actually be worth it, in some way, before I’m willing to make my pokemon take on extra pain for it.”

“If you put them through trainer battles and then never face a renegade, you’ve hurt them and your opponent’s pokemon for nothing?”

“Basically, yeah.” She likes that he recognized the hurt to the other pokemon matter to her too, not just her own. “And getting stronger to face wild pokemon isn’t enough, because I haven’t needed it so far. I won’t say there’s no lateral transfer of experience and skill, but…”

“A big part of your belief structure is that it’s not the optimal thing to do if you really just want to get better at catching wilds.” Dr. Sotala strokes his beard. “Ultimately, the skills gained from battling trainers is primarily good for battling trainers. But I looked into some of your friends, when checking your online presence. From what I gathered from some of his noted accomplishments, your friend Blue Oak seems to disagree with that.”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, he’s worked hard to set up different kinds of trainer battles, scenarios that are more like wild battles, so I think he gets that it’s a problem?”

“Nevertheless, do you think he’d agree with your position?”

Leaf shakes her head. “We’ve argued about it before, once or twice.”

“And you still disagree?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you sum up his argument, in a way you think he would agree with?”

Leaf opens her mouth to say yes, then stops. She frowns slightly. “I guess I… I mean I could philosophically. But not from a pragmatic perspective.”

“Then perhaps try speaking with him about it again? Or rather, try listening. Whether he’s correct or not, without the desire to convince him, you may be able to learn to better see the world as he does.”

Neutral ground.

It’s a phrase that has a powerful effect by the contrast it creates, and Leaf felt her stomach twist the first time she read it.

“…insisted the meeting take place on neutral ground, such as my Gym, which they accepted…”

“Implying, that places other than Fuchsia Gym might not be as safe?” she asks as she paces back and forth, Raff following her movements as if it’s part of a game.

“…will assure your safety, and believe they wish to reach some agreement… Yeah, not just you, that’s fucked up,” Blue says as he hands back her phone.

“Great.” Leaf sighs and sticks it back in her pocket as she looks out over the ocean. They’re on a plateau above Cinnabar Mansion, high enough that they can’t be observed or overheard but low enough that Leaf can make out the people below as they eat their lunch break. Picnics on the grass around the mansion have become something of an unofficial tradition for the project, which felt odd to Leaf given they all work for interpol, but she’s certainly not complaining. “I think I’d prefer it if you said I was being paranoid.”

A few clicks of her laser pointer send Raff bounding around and throwing razor leaves at the targets Leaf set up, while Maturin seems to be trying to knock a tree over using headbutts. Blue finishes mixing a vitamin supplement for his pokemon, then looks at Leaf. “You’re going, then?”

She realizes she’s biting her lower lip and stops. “If there’s a chance they might be willing to step out of the shadows, maybe even help with Rocket… yeah, I think I have to. They may even know who ‘Archer,’ is, or how to find him.”

“If Koga can’t convince them…”

“I think him getting them to show up is all he could do. It’s obvious they won’t go to the police or interpol without something more.”

Blue is silent, with the exception of a sharp whistle that makes Maturin blast water out toward her own targets. One gets knocked clean over, but the other is only winged, and spins in place.

“You think it’s a bad idea.”

“I think that I trust Koga and Janine, but I’d rather have more than trust. You need backup.”

“Anyone I bring would be putting them in danger too.”

“Is that supposed to scare me off, after what you said about wanting to help fight renegades if you have to?”

Leaf can’t help but smile, though she still tries to articulate why she’s averse to accepting help. “They’re not just renegades, they’re assassins.”

“Right, so we won’t drink any offered tea, and we should probably wear gas masks. What else?”

Leaf laughs, but Blue looks serious, and she nods after a moment. “You’re right. And I appreciate the support. Particularly since if it goes well… maybe I’ll stop feeling like going anywhere predictable is dangerous, and can actually attend your match.”

He grins. “Well it’s just this one and the next, so we really have to make sure it goes well then, since there won’t be many opportunities left for that. Speaking of which…”

“Right.” She turns back toward Raff, getting ready to call him over so they can get on with their battle… but instead just watches him play for a few moments.

Then a few moments longer, until finally Blue says, “It’s okay if you’re not ready.”

His tone is neutral, and he looks so serious, his whole focus on her. Aside from the occasional grumbling, especially early on in their journey, Blue has always been respectful about her not wanting to do any trainer battles, but his excitement was obvious, and a bit overwhelming when she finally reached out to him to see if he’d be willing to be her first sparring partner.

It’s one part flattering, and one part heartwarming, and one part nerve wracking, and also makes her stomach do weird things. She already had the talk with him that Dr. Sotala recommended, by messenger, asking him if he could point her to some of his writing or give her his best attempt at why trainer battles matter for people who only want to fight wilds.

He’d asked her to give him a couple days, even though she insisted it didn’t need to be too robust, that she wasn’t planning to argue with him, just to read and absorb. After three days, he sent a ten-thousand word long “outline,” and from there the conversation eventually moved to…

She smiles at him. “I don’t know how to tell if I am or not, but if all the exposure therapy hasn’t been helping in the real world, I want to know sooner rather than later. Let’s go. Raff, ready!”

“Maturin, ready!”

Their pokemon come to join them, standing opposite each other, and Leaf feels her muscles tensing even before she puts a hand on her pokeballs. Blue waits patiently across from her, despite the fact that she only has another hour before the break is over, and she’ll be back down in the excavated lab as they breach a few more sections.

Leaf takes a deep breath, like she’s about to leap into cold water, then yells, “Raff, Stun!”

“Gaw!’

Leaf flinches as the water hits Raff. Even though it was a weak attack, even though Raff shrugs the attack off fairly easily. Maturin gets covered in spores, movements slowing almost immediately, and Leaf reaches for an empty pokeball—

—then stops, remembering—

—”Gaw!”

“Dodge!”

“Gaw!”

Raff avoids the first, but not the second, and Leaf’s arm twitches to return him, even though that would be ridiculous, he can take more than this, he’s fine… he’s waiting for her to give him another command…

“Raz…V-Vine W…”

“Gaw!”

“Dodge!”

“Gaw!”

She feels the jittering discomfort growing under her calm as Raff gets partially hit again, and knows she can’t just keep dodging forever…

“D-Toxic!”

Another blast of water, a spurt of powerful poison, and Blue yells, “Stop!” as he withdraws Maturin just before the purple goo can splatter over her.

“Stop,” Leaf yells back, needlessly, given her pokemon is just standing there, staring at the spot its opponent used to occupy. She rushes to spray Raff with a potion, hand shaking, while he beams up at her, and she can imagine him being elated at having defeated the big, scary blastoise that was threatening her, not even realizing she wasn’t in any danger. The big scary blastoise that was his friend for most of his life… Swords of Justice, why didn’t she think of that sooner?

“Could you re-summon Maturin?” she asks, voice shaking. She needs to see…

Blue’s blastoise reappears, and for a moment Raff tenses, and her heart leaps into her throat. But the “stop” commands did their work, and neither pokemon is primed to treat anything around it as an enemy anymore. Blue sprays his pokemon to remove her paralysis, and Maturin shakes herself, then looks around, sniffing, before she stomps toward the edge of the cliff, watching some wingull wheeling overhead.

Raff ambles over to join her, vines brushing through some grass on either side, and Leaf feels her muscles unclench one by one. Only then does she sag, falling to her knees.

Blue jogs over, and she waves him off before he even arrives, but he still crouches beside her, looking concerned. She finishes taking deep breaths until she feels the jitteriness fade. “Honestly… that went better than I expected.”

Blue’s lips quirk. “Does that mean you’re open to some feedback?”

“Lay it on me, coach.”

“You should attack more.”

She gives him a weak grin, which quickly fades. “I know. I got the two off, though.”

His look is negative-impressed. “I’ve seen you chain two attacks and a maneuver into a single command. I know Raff’s gotten less agile over the years, but two attacks to my five? You were holding back, hard.”

“Yeah.” She sighs. “I get that Raff could take those Water Guns. I get that Maturin could take Raff’s attacks too. It was still hard not to prioritize avoiding pain for either of them.”

“Mmm.”

“Go ahead, you can say whatever it is.” She shifts into a more comfortable cross-leg, leaning back on her palms as she watches Raff exploring Maturin’s shell with a vine until she growls and bats it away.

“Hm? Oh, not another criticism. I was actually thinking… your normal strategies are very status heavy, and normally I’d say, let’s lean into that. You know? If it’s how you like to fight, you can totally make it work. But the only reason you’re doing this is to fight renegades if you need to, and those strats… don’t work so well on them.”

This is the main reason she wanted her first battles to be with Blue, rather than her one of her other friends, or her mom, or even Red. They’d all be supportive, and Red could even sense how her pokemon were doing and convey that to her, which would be reassuring.

But Blue is the best battle trainer she knows, and he’s had experience fighting Renegades. She wants to learn more than just how to get through a trainer battle; she needs to learn to win, or she’s better off just staying out of them. “Yeah, I figured that out during the battle too… my strats are built around going for a capture as soon as possible.”

“Oh, that part’s fine, actually! I mean I appreciate you not doing that to Maturin, but it is an option against renegades.”

Leaf blinks. “Huh. Right.” She’s… worried about the damage it does to an already trained pokemon psyche, but… they’re renegade pokemon. Their best alternative is getting killed no matter what she does.

Just the thought of it makes her queasy for a moment, and intensely, deeply angry at Rocket and everyone like them.

Blue rolls Maturin’s ball in his hand. “Maybe we can adapt your style. You’re perfectly positioned to fight in a really unique way, and wanting to avoid direct damage will totally throw your enemies off. It might not be good for every circumstance, but it’s just spicy enough to take most people by surprise, and secure wins against even trainers strong enough to be on Victory Road, though maybe not Elites.”

She blinks. “Really?”

“Really. I’m even getting new ideas about how to pull some version of that off with my teams… but either way.”

The idea of developing a whole battle style around non-violent-capture interests her, almost enough to want to take out her phone and start brainstorming ideas. But…

“You said they don’t work like that, though?” Blue is right that against Renegades it would just be more wasted training. “Do you have any suggestions, then?”

“Maybe. But it won’t matter if you can’t do any attacks at all, so let’s try again. This time, your only job is to hit with at least two Razor Leaf attacks. I promise, she’ll be fine even if one hits a critical spot. Okay?”

Leaf takes a deep breath as she tries to internalize that assurance, then nods and gets to her feet. They square off again, and this time Leaf pushes straight for the goal. “R-Razor Leaf!”

“Gaw!”

The sharp, spinning leaves cut into Maturin’s blue hide, and she feels her heart ache even though the big turtle barely reacts. “R-…dod-Razor L-”

“Gaw!”

“Dodge!”

“Gaw!”

“R-” The word sticks in her throat, and she struggles to take in a deeper breath. “Raz…”

“Gaw!”

She winces as Raff gets hit again, unable to even shout for him to dodge, and can only force out a “Stop!”

“Stop!”

They both move to heal their pokemon, Leaf’s hands trembling, as Raff looks up at her with a toothy grin, and she feels her eyes tearing up as she strokes his head, then rises to help heal Maturin…

But she’s already fine, and Blue is walking over. “That was… oh.”

She sniffs and wipes at her eyes. “Sorry, I—”

“No, it’s fine, hey. It was progress, right?”

It didn’t feel like progress. She sits and rubs Raff’s head, and Blue just sort of stands awkwardly nearby until her pulse slows down, and she can breathe more easily again.

“Did I push too much?” Blue asks after a minute.

“No. This is pretty normal, for… escalating stuff like this.” She takes a deep breath, lets it slowly out. “My therapist said that ‘mental frames’ might be the most powerful piece of psychotechnology that exist, and might be the right path to try finding a way forward. But I’m having trouble finding the right one.”

“Frames, like…?”

“Like… you know how some people are taught to treat failure as a sign that they’re bad or weak, while others treat it as a learning opportunity? Or like, taking for granted that people mean well and just make mistakes, instead of assuming that anyone who hurts or disagrees with them is malicious.”

Blue nods and sits beside her. “Got it. People with a growth mindset will keep working to improve, while those who believe everyone’s limited by their circumstance gets stuck in place. But you’re on the right side of all of those, yeah?”

“I… don’t think it’s that simple, they’re not all good vs bad. Dr. Sotala said that people who are perpetually pessimistic may still end up right as often as not.”

“Well, sure. Life can suck pretty hard sometimes, often for a long time.”

She wonders if he’s thinking of his parents, or Red’s dad, or Aiko, or something else altogether. “Yeah. Which combined with availability heuristics or confirmation bias would reinforce their pessimism, while at the same time creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if their situation is just good enough to get by, and their environment is bad enough that taking risks has a low expected value, they avoid wasting energy on things that don’t succeed.”

Blue slowly nods. “So you’ve got a frame where you’re protecting your pokemon from being hurt, and that’s what it means for you to be a trainer. And a frame where you’re helping keep others from being hurt, but that requires letting your pokemon get hurt. And each of these frames does something for you, but they’re bumping against each other?”

“Like a pair of rampardos knocking heads.”

“Rough.” He pulls up some grass, lets it fall through his fingers. “We should definitely have Red come to the meeting.”

It takes her a moment to process the change of topics. “Really? You think it’s time to loop him in? I’ve thought about it, but… I think he might be the last person the ninja clan would want there.”

“He doesn’t necessarily have to know what’s going on. But him just being around lowers the chance they do something, and it means his bodyguards will be around too.”

“Ah. I think that would be a hard veto from them, but I guess it’s worth asking.” Leaf smiles slightly. “Is it as weird for you, thinking of him as this… force of danger, to others?”

“Yeah,” Blue says, voice low. “It’s not what he wanted. Not what he set out to be.”

“I’ve been feeling a bit left behind by both of you, to be honest.” Leaf feels embarrassed, admitting it out loud, but she knows Blue won’t laugh. “It’s a weird thing to care about, coming from me, I know. But for a while I thought I was holding my own with you guys… I mean obviously you’re stronger from all the battling you do, and Red’s caught up a lot from all his interpol training, but it still felt like my own training and battles with wilds let me at least fight in the same weight class. Then you guys just shot ahead of me, and I wonder if I should even bother with all this.”

Blue turns to look away, and doesn’t respond. It hurts, a little; she wasn’t fishing for reassurance, but she did expect it, somewhat.

“It’s fine, really, I mean it makes sense—”

“There’s something Red and I haven’t told you. About how he helped me train to beat Sabrina.”

Leaf blinks. “If it’s something private—oh.” She sits up, anticipation prickling up her spine like a jolt of lightning. “It’s… one of your guys’ secrets?”

“Yeah. So, remember the Dragon Dojo I spent some time in, back in Saffron?”

Leaf listens as Blue describes what he learned from Koichi about adverse improvement, and how being brought close to death before beating their opponents actually helps pokemon grow stronger, faster.

“You’re saying… what, unless I’m fighting wilds, my pokemon aren’t experiencing enough real danger to grow?” Leaf feels not so much shocked by the revelation as mildly numb.

“Basically, yeah.” Blue shrugs. “I mean, it is impressive how strong your pokemon have gotten without ever doing any trainer battles, but… I’m sure you know bulbasaur tend to fully evolve sooner than charmander or squirtle do. I know you train with your pokemon a lot, and just hang out with them most of your days, but…”

“I’m still hampering his growth,” she says, looking at Raff as he chews on some grass, or maybe a small dandelion bud, before spitting most of it out. “Is that… sorry, I’m stuck between trying to understand why you’re telling me this now, and noticing the implications, why you’ve kept it secret… why you kept it from me until now—”

“It was actually in part because you’re not dark or psychic,” Blue says apologetically. “But yeah, part of it was assuming you’d disapprove.”

She’s still absorbing the enormity of it, with no spare processing for her feelings, but… “Disapprove of making pokemon feel extra fear and pain than they normally would while fighting?” Ah, there’s the anger.

“Sort of, yeah. Though, Red says trained pokemon don’t really feel that much until they get really badly hurt? So what works about as well is just something like, ‘intensity.'” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m going to say this badly, talk to him about it. But he also used words like ‘sharpness’ and ‘aliveness,’ feeling like every moment matters more. Worked nearly as well as the original feeling of being about to die… which, dunno, makes sense to me. You feel it too, right? The rush when things are dangerous? It’s not all bad, you know?”

She frowns, remembering all the confusing and terrifying experiences she’s had throughout the region and trying to focus on other aspects of the intensity. There was definitely something like excitement intermingled with them, and afterward in particular she’d get a rush of relief and… something like an ego boost from competence…? “Yeah. I guess I’d say the opposite, like it’s not really pleasant, but… not ever entirely bad? Except for Zapdos. And that time in the Rocket Casino.” When she thought they were all going to die. When she thought Blue might have already been dying, Red bleeding out… she shudders. “I don’t ever want to feel like that again.”

“Yeah. For me it’s Viridian, Vermilion, and at Silph. Feeling like I was helpless, like my friends were in danger and I couldn’t do anything. But other times, it’s… the battle calm helps with fear, but doesn’t stop me from feeling alive, you know?”

“Not really.” Leaf gives a wan smile. “But Red can do it now, and he can project that feeling into his pokemon even when they’re not facing real danger… and it actually helps them grow stronger, faster? You guys took measurements?”

“Yeah, data’s saved in our dexes. Anyone who sees Red’s numbers in particular would think, wow, he must be battling hard every day. And some of his training with Interpol would cover some of that, but he started a little before.”

“But not everyone can make such precise emotional states to project at any time.” She feels her hands clenching, and tries to relax them. “And Red started by doing the one he knew would work, just the feeling of being about to die. Right?”

“Yeah,” Blue says, and some of his earlier, almost apologetic tone has faded. “Might have made the difference, in Silph.”

She closes her eyes, trying to absorb this, but nods to show that she’s paying attention. “Sure. But… again, most people would be pretty careless with this, if they knew. Which I guess is part of why you haven’t talked about it…” Along with wanting to retain an advantage. She doesn’t say it because she’s not sure it’s true, and it would be terribly unfair to Blue. It’s also certainly not why Red wouldn’t have. “And another part is politics?”

He shrugs. “Maybe the public’s shifted on it, what with all the crazy things that have happened lately. But the way Koichi talked about it, people don’t usually like the idea. And I’ve gone around, asking some Leaders I trust, and of course Gramps. Sabrina claims she didn’t know beforehand, but her tests were ‘supportive of that hypothesis.’ Gramps also seemed surprised, but said it would fit some observations. Neither of them started shouting it from the rooftops.” His gaze on her is a little wary, a little curious. “Gotta say, bit surprised you’re not more upset.”

Leaf shakes her head. “I don’t want it to be true. But I doubt you and Red would be totally wrong about a thing like this, and I…” She wants to say she understands why he’d use it, particularly with Red’s help, though it makes her feel sad and frustrated at the world.

A feeling that grows the longer she contemplates it. Why? Why? She’s trying to create a world where pokemon are safer, where people care for their wellbeing… but not only are there natural incentives to eat pokemon, not only are there obvious incentives to use them for battle, but now there’s actually a beneficial reason to put them at greater risk, even if they don’t have to be? The universe just hands out more value if you’re willing to let your pokemon suffer for it, and everyone else who tries to learn and grow without pain, they just lose out?

“Fuck,” she mutters. For once society is choosing the don’t-spend-pokemon-suffering-like-currency option, but not necessarily for good reasons, just because they don’t believe they can… but if it becomes more obvious that it really works…

“Fuck,” she says again, louder, and stands, arms crossed over her stomach as a sick roiling goes through her at the thought of how people will try to take advantage of this. Of how people undoubtedly already do, in secret… “Fuck! What the fuck, Blue?”

He winces. “Yeah, there it is.”

“Ughhhh!” She presses her palms against her eyes, then lets herself slowly collapse down until she’s lying on her back, palms still covering her closed lids as her elbows stick out to either side. “Why is life like this?”

“Uh… I mean it’s probably something evolutionary, right? Red was going on about—”

“It was rhetorical, shut up, I’m venting now, this is venting time.”

“Oh, sure.” She hears him settle onto the grass beside her. “Vent away.”

“Thank you. Why is life like this? We’ve unearthed enough stuff in the lab to know they were doing some crazy stuff, but not enough yet to confirm anything! Were they growing completely new life forms, or are we just finding some other kind of genetic engineering failures? Were they trying to develop some kind of disease, or trying to counteract it? Or both! Were they maybe trying to create a disease to spread and then sell the cure? We still haven’t found the central specimen chamber, but between the three different sources of damage, wild pokemon, explosives, and earthquakes, it’s possible the pod room from the story would be the most completely destroyed.”

“Likely, even,” Blue mutters.

“Yeah. Yeah! So what, we just don’t get confirmation ever? All this was… not for nothing, Blaine and Looker are pretty confident there’ll be clues to who was behind it all, but living with this suspense about the hybrid has been one of many really stressful things lately!”

“I’m guessing the ninja clan stuff is the second?”

“Yes! Yes it is, I have no idea what they might want or how far they’ll go to get to me or even anyone I know, maybe? I’ve been living a pretty paranoid life lately, I don’t know how Red deals with it but at least he has bodyguards, though those probably drive him crazy too… and now this letter comes and I have to make a decision and ahhhh!”

“Ahhh,” Blue softly agrees, nodding. “You don’t have to do it alone, though, you know that, right? I was serious about what I said.”

“I appreciate it, but I’m not done venting yet.”

“Sorry, please continue.”

“Thank you. Also did I mention that there’s still a crazy psychic out there doing stuff we have no idea what and where and also of course there’s Rocket and also there’s all the pokemon out there who are suffering and my program is testing stuff in Safari and it’s going well but it’s all way above my ability to help with now and maybe if I didn’t have ninja assassins and hybrid pokemon to worry about I would put more time into keeping up with it and helping more but also…”

“…Also?”

“…there are probably other things but I can’t think of them right now.”

Blue nods. “Stormbringers might strike at any moment?”

She reaches out to pat his knee, then replaces her hand over her eye. “I support you worrying about that and will help if I can, but sorry, I’m one of those people that mostly forgets about them until they’re doing something.”

“I get it.”

“I’m sure there was something else though… oh, right, what started all this. Also I now have to fucking worry about another fucking secret that might cause more harm if it gets out and spreads… and uuuuughhhh! Grrrr!”

“Ugh,” Blue nods. “Gr.”

She does another brief knee pat of appreciation. Blue waits respectfully, probably expecting more, and there are more, but they’re a bit more private, like her worry about Red… no, that’s not private, he’d share that one, more her uncertain feelings of maybe liking Red and maybe not and being unsure how to tell or what it means, if anything, or if she should do anything about it or keep waiting for him to bring it up, in a way she’s been waiting since their trip on the S.S. Anne but so much shit happened after that, and then just kept happening, even directly after other nice moments like the one on the way to the Rocket Casino…

…and also it’s harder and harder not to notice the way Blue has been growing, he’s nearly as tall and muscley as Glen now and he’s always been cute, but his personality never attracted her before, and also they have some pretty drastic differences in views…

“Venting over?”

“I guess,” she sighs, glad her cheeks are also covered.

“Sorry life’s been tough.”

“Thanks. I know you’ve been dealing with a lot too, here, I heard about all the new people coming, and the way you guys have been clearing out the danger zones…” Sometimes with methods that seem, to her, unnecessarily damaging to the local ecology, but if the rangers signed off on it then she hardly has as much local knowledge to argue the case.

“Things have gotten better, lately, yeah. But overall I’m dealing with less than you, I think. Just, you know, the usual small dreams.”

Leaf smiles. “Life’s not all bad, for me, I don’t want to give that impression. It’s nice seeing Mom and Grampa more often. And Mr. Sakai, the ranch… it’s going well. And I’m glad the Safari experiment has been progressing so much, they’re expanding more and more species for release experiments.”

“That’s cool! I was hoping we’d get the chance to go and help, but you know. Always something else to do.”

“Yeah. And I appreciate you helping with this, a lot, even if it doesn’t work out.”

“No problem. But as for that… I think I might have found an answer to your frame problem.”

Leaf absorbs this silently. After a moment to check and ensure her cheeks aren’t still warm, she uncovers one eye and turns partway toward him. “Go on.”

“You’re treating pokemon like kids, though dangerous kids. Like you know better for them what they want and don’t want.”

“It’s hard to know what someone wants after they’ve been so thoroughly brainwashed.”

“I’m talking about something deeper than that. So like, our starters practically grew up together, you know? Raff and Maturin and Charmander—he really needs to name his pokemon—”

“—I know!—”

“—I don’t know if I should call him by his current evolution or his first—”

“—so annoying!—”

“—anyway, they went on all these adventures together, and they’ve been growing alongside each other, and meeting new friends like Pik… Pichu, and Joy, and Tops, and now they don’t travel together much but once in a while they still get to meet up and talk about their solo adventures.”

Her frown is half a smile. “Dial it back a bit, I know you don’t anthropomorphize them half as much as I do, and I don’t think they’re that human.”

“Hey, don’t be so sure. I think all my pokemon that fight hard, the really fierce ones who push through tough battles, share something like the pride of would-be-champions.”

“Oh.” His tone sets her aback as much as his words. “Sorry, I… that was pretty presumptuous of me.” Now she’s blushing again, for a different reason, so it’s fine.

He smiles. “No worries, I was playing it up a bit. You get where I’m going, though, right? Like at least I can see Raff being like ‘hey, what happened to these guys? Why are they so much bigger than me now?’ And sure, none of them ever fought before so he’s probably not wounded in his pride or anything. I don’t know much about their social structure, bet you’ve got a better sense of that than me, but… does Raff consider himself a strong potential mate or defender of his family, in your head?”

Leaf stares into the sky, feeling something odd inside. “You’re saying… I’m neglecting their growth. Not just their literal growth, but their ability to flourish. If pokemon evolved to grow by combat, serious combat, and their psychology is built around that too… my pokemon might actually want to fight?”

He shrugs. “We haven’t tested it on every species, but it does work on even pokemon who naturally avoid fighting like abra. It’s a bit hard to imagine wild caterpie or chansey missing the thrill of combat, but Crimson? Or your magmar, or nidorino? Any Fighting types? I’d bet on it.”

Leaf frowns and sits up, watching Raff use his vines to swat at some dandelions. “Maybe. But Raff is so… cheerful. Pikachu has always been really timid, even now that he’s gotten so strong. I guess I just have a hard time imagining them being stoked to fight, let alone nearly get killed, you know?”

“Maria was super timid when she joined up. She still pushed herself to battle a lot, and felt proud of herself for doing it, even when she lost. And Elaine’s gotten less… cheerful, or bouncy, or something, over time…” Blue’s face is hard for her to read, but she hears something heavy in his tone. “But I don’t think that was because of all the fighting she’s had to do, and she always brought that positive energy into her fights, even the ones against wilds.”

Leaf finds herself slowly nodding along, as some sort of shifting sensation spreads through her thoughts. It’s precarious, like balancing on her tiptoes on a fence, wavering back and forth, until she says, “I think… I want to try again.”

He grins and stands, then holds out a hand to pull her up. “You got it.”

Her cheeks warm again as she’s lifted up with a single pull, and a minute later they’re facing off again, Maturin snorting as she levels her cannons at Raff.

Raff, whose usual cheerfulness is hard to see in the fierce protectiveness he’s showing instead after her “Ready” command. Or maybe it’s not protectiveness. As she thinks about what Blue said, and imagines her ivysaur as someone who, if still wild, would need to battle regularly to survive… she’s always known that evolutionarily it would make sense that some pokemon at least enjoy battling, which is why Dark pokemon in particular have a reputation for being sadistic…

Well. It’s not so hard to imagine, suddenly, that maybe her cheerful, affectionate ivysaur gets something like fulfillment and purpose from intense battles, if not quite joy.

Her heart is still hammering as she imagines their pokemon tearing into each other with sharp leaves and jets of water, but she clears her throat and calls out, “Gonna start.”

Deep breaths… relax the muscles…

What’s my strategy?

Blue said tanky strats aren’t good against renegades. So… just offense?

No, stun first, again. Or sleep? No, less accurate, less reliable.

“Ready whenever!” Blue calls back, and she’s sure she’s just imagining the impatience, but it helps suddenly to think of her own pokemon as impatient as he occasionally darts quick looks back at her. Not scared looks, and not just protective ones.

More like… Come on, let me go. Let me show you what I can do.

She realizes, suddenly, that this is dangerous. This sort of narrative imagining could justify almost anything… it’s probably what Dr. Sotala meant by frames being the most powerful bit of psychotech…

But.

But she wasn’t doing that less, before. She wasn’t imposing her own narrative on reality less, when she assumed that pokemon wouldn’t get something meaningful or fulfilling out of fighting.

Just because she finds it unnecessary, just because she wishes the world didn’t contain that sort of thing… doesn’t mean her pokemon don’t have it in them.

She can’t assume they don’t any longer. She just has to observe each one, and see for herself how they are afterward, and do her best to help them flourish as individuals.

She breathes deep, one last time, and her voice does not shake as she yells “Stun Leaf!”

“Gaw!”

Raff’s bulb aims forward as he leaps, sending a cloud of spores at Maturin before his vines fling out a handful of razor leaves, and when he shrugs off the Water Gun that hits him a glancing blow in return, Leaf feels more than just fear or pain.