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.