Hey everyone, with great thanks to a patron named Felix, there’s now a script that creates a pokedex chapter at the end of my epubs and turns pokemon names into a link that goes a picture and short description of them! I’ve had in mind for years to do something like this, and I’m very excited to offer it to patrons. Thanks a lot, Felix!

---

Blue feels like he should be pacing, but that would reveal nervousness to any potential watchers. So instead he just bounces his feet as he lies on one of the comfortable couches in the break room he was stowed in, listening to the hum of the vending machines and typing on his phone.

There’s something about this meeting that’s felt off to him from the beginning, and after Red left the call, Blue asked Leaf for a more detailed download of what he might have been missing that she could share. By the end of the call he was still unsure whether Silph was using Red as a pawn or not, but either way he doesn’t like the idea of just sitting back and hoping for the best.

Which is why he almost sends a message to Glen to get everyone who’s free and make their way to the Silph building. What slows his fingers to a stop is the expected next question:

Why?

The honest answer would include that there might be renegade activity here soon.

Which he expects them to do… what, about that, exactly?

He suddenly can’t shake off images of Glen struggling through physical therapy, of Maria’s occasional distant, haunted gaze, of Lizzy’s occasional sleepless nights that she admitted came from nightmares of facing down the renegade once again, except this time without the miraculous save…

Blue tries to convince himself that he shouldn’t be making this decision for them. It took Lizzy a while to find a therapist that worked for her, but she’s doing better. Glen would ask what the point of his working so hard to get back to his peak was for, if he’s not even called in to help. Maria… he’s not sure what Maria would say, actually. As for Elaine, that’s an easy one.

Don’t borrow so much guilt ahead of time, Blue. It’s very noble of you, but it’s patronizing as hell.

And still, he can’t bring himself to keep typing. Because Elaine isn’t traveling with them anymore, she’s taking a break, and Bretta and Slav and Sumi are focusing on different gyms with some of the others who already finished at Fuchsia, and that makes sense but it also might be to avoid being around Blue Oak, the danger magnet. Jamil and Viraj are new and eager to please, and they’re not novices just because they’re new to his group, but knowing they’ll come isn’t the same as being sure they’d come for the right reasons.

The scenarios they’ve been running prepare them for unusual battles (particularly since they’ve been watching the ones Vermilion continues to run so they can steal their good ideas), but it’s no good pretending that they’d prepare them for actual renegades. Maybe the average renegade, a little, but not the kind that would be infiltrating a place like this.

(Assuming there are any renegades and Silph isn’t just looking for excuses and justifications to get his workers scanned… but that’s a thought for later.)

Which means that despite getting immensely lucky a couple times, none of them have trained for this sort of situation. He thought about it of course, but there always seemed to be more important, more likely threats to prepare for.

And this doesn’t really change that. There’s no reason for anyone to get involved in this… not even him. His goal is to become Champion and stop the Stormbringers, not take down renegades.

But he’s here, and there’s no way he’s leaving until he knows how it shakes out, and makes sure Red is okay.

So he deletes the message to Glen and sends out new messages instead, canceling his plans for the day and filling grandpa in. If Gramps knew about the Master Ball and didn’t tell him Blue is going to be pissed… No, not really, he’d get it if it was part of some big secret thing with Aunt Laura. Still, he’s having trouble grasping what the invention might mean.

People have tried capturing the Stormbringers before, of course. Past champions, gym leaders, even some random trainers brave enough to attempt the impossible. A lot of words were written analyzing their failures, and what steps are required to get the job done.

The first barrier of course is just reaching them. Even the toughest pokemon tire quickly when flying through a storm under Pressure, and even fully insulated suits can’t protect their riders for long against the intense heat, electricity, and cold around the birds themselves.

The second is getting a ball lock. The storms reduce the range of even the strongest beams down to nearly nothing, and Blue knows first hand how hard it is holding one steady on a moving target while riding a pokemon, let alone doing it on a flying one in a storm.

Then there’s the throw, assuming you even get a lock. It’s hard to hear the confirmation over the storm, and those few who have sworn they felt the haptic feedback of a lock, thrown and hit, and still didn’t capture them. Damage to the balls from the intense temperature or electric currents was the primary guess for why.

And of course, all of this assuming the giant bird god is just flying in a straight line, and not concentrating its unstoppable power at you. Which is how most attempts failed, even with others helping support and distract.

There’s also the question of mass. While larger than any other birds, they’re probably not as dense as corviknight, most of which don’t hit the 200 kilo limit on ultraballs. But what if they don’t have hollow bones? How dense are their beaks and talons? Some fancy programs were run on video footage that tried to evaluate their weight by the way they flew and maneuvered compared to other pokemon, but they weren’t conclusive given the unique environment they created around themselves, and their unique immunities to it. The main thing Blue remembers from looking at that info years ago was that they somehow determined that articuno seems to weigh less than moltres, which made no kind of sense to Blue but made Red nod thoughtfully in what Blue suspected was just him acting like a know-it-all.

All of which is to say that if Silph really did create a ball that would stay undamaged, could scan through a storm, and could guarantee a capture if thrown… the stormbringers might get caught before he even becomes Champion, something he hasn’t actually considered likely before.

He’s not sure how he feels about it now.

On the one hand, massively relieved. On the other… disappointed, that it might not be him. He knows plenty of others have just as much a right to get revenge on the birds, he doesn’t need it to be him. But he’s not sure how he’ll feel if he doesn’t at least help take down one of them, if they’re all gone before he even has a chance to try.

And deeper beneath that worry, there’s fear… and anger.

That’s what has his foot bouncing, as much as anticipation. His inner arcanine, who resembles Soul now, scars and all, is pacing for him, spreading heat through his chest and stomach.

Someone is trying to steal their best chance at stopping the Stormbringers.

It’s one thing to worry about how to keep the peace once he or some other trainer gets a legendary. If a renegade gets it, or some shadowy organization…

No, the answer would still be the same. Become an ideal champion, one that can rally the region and take it on. He’s not sure if renegade controlled Stormbringer would be more dangerous than a wild one, but better to avoid that altogether, if possible.

The more he thinks about it, the more obvious it is that this is part of his path. He can’t just walk away from something that has this much chance to ruin the region, the islands, plausibly even the world.

Even if there’s no real chance of making a difference, he can’t just walk away.

He finishes messaging his grandpa, then starts drafting one to Red to check if anything new has happened. He gets interrupted within seconds by a call. “Hey, Gramps.”

“Who else is with you?”

The straight to business tone, with none of his usual levity, makes everything feel more real. Blue sits up, checking the glass door to see if anyone is coming by. “It’s just me and Red.”

“Were you invited?”

“Nah, I kind of talked my way in.”

“Then keep your involvement off the web until you know how things shake out.”

Blue feels a surge of affection for his grandpa, who doesn’t even try to talk him out of staying, and instead goes straight to what matters. “You think it’s a bad idea? There still might be time to talk Red out of it.”

“I honestly don’t know, Blue, but it’s different for him in any case. We can get away with some things you wouldn’t be able to.”

“If it costs political power—”

“Not just that, there’s social drag to you admitting your mistakes, if you make one.”

“Right.” It feels unfair, but he gets it. “I’m going to stick around.”

“I figur—”

“Attention all personnel.”

Blue twitches at the sudden gruff male voice, then turns to find its source: an intercom in the corner of the ceiling. “Hang on, Gramps, something’s—”

“I heard.”

“—be doing a full update of the SecuriPass system, and will begin distributing new cards throughout the day. Please be aware that if you leave the building before receiving your new card, you won’t be able to re-enter until we can get you one.”

Well now Blue definitely isn’t leaving…

“Please pay close attention to your intramail so you know when it’s your turn to receive your new pass. We hope to get done with everyone within a few hours.”

Nothing new comes, and Blue says, “Okay, go ahead.”

“You said the police are involved?”

“The city commissioner is here himself. Burrell.”

“Hm. I don’t know him.”

“Problem?”

“Maybe not, but I want to know why interpol isn’t there. They were helping in Celadon.”

“Huh. Dunno. Think Aunt Laura can check if they’re in the loop, somehow?”

“I’ll do it myself. Try not to rush into anything, Blue. If a larger game is being played, you’re as likely to wreck things as help if you don’t know what’s going on.”

“Yeah, I get it. But if Red is being used—”

“I know. I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks, Gramps. I know you will.”

---

Red thought they might go through the whole building, merging with Silph employees one department at a time. Instead he’s led from the president’s office down to the fourth floor, where the building’s security headquarters is. There’s already a small team of rangers and police inside, as well as a pair of hunters.

Red met some hunters while working with the Celadon police, and always found the experience a little surreal. He’s so used to seeing them in movies and shows, which portray them either as heroic, misunderstood figures just trying to do a hard job despite stigma, or hardened loners balancing on the edge of their duty and its effects on their conscience.

In reality most seem to just be quiet and reserved, fading into the background and just following the lead of the police and rangers. These two stand at either side of the door, one with his hands clasped behind his back, the other with a thumb hooked into her pokebelt. Red’s eyes get drawn, as usual, to the extra black line that splits their balls vertically. He knows it’s conditioning from shows and films that make such simple change cause the hunter balls to look so sinister, but just being in the same room with them makes part of his attention constantly track where they are.

The Silph staff members who come in for screening seem to feel the same, gazes darting nervously toward them even more often than they do Commissioner Burrell, or President Silph, or the company’s psychic, or even Red’s kadabra. He listens as each is told the real reason they were called in, and each agrees to be merged with rather than leave work for the day and pick up their new security cards tomorrow. Silph’s CAO, CTO, and CHRO were apparently told and screened ahead of time, which is why they were all waiting for them in the security office when they arrived. His CMO was the only C-Suite executive not to be pre-screened, and so she was the first to be called in after the announcement went out over the intercom, followed by the various other heads of departments.

Red wonders whether the consent they’re giving will feel less real if no one decides against it. Does it even matter if Silph is being honest about the lack of consequences if no one believes it? But then, what could he do about that? If it’s really costless to them, why would they subject themselves to it instead of taking the paid day off?

Unless they’re really just that dedicated to their work. This is Silph HQ, after all, and so far they’ve all been fairly high up in the hierarchy. They’re probably intrinsically dedicated, and if they really have nothing to hide or are used to being scanned, this sort of thing would seem routine to them.

Things change when they reach the first dark employee, one of the R&D managers. He gets a longer explanation, and his reaction is more nuanced, a nervousness woven into his acceptance.

“You’re sure you’re okay with this?” Red can’t help but ask, looking into the man’s eyes himself.

“Yes, yeah, I’m good.” He wipes a palm on his pantleg. “You did it on Blue Oak, right? And he’s fine? There was no pain?”

“Yeah.” Red didn’t expect the main worry to be whether it was painless, but at the man’s nod he just accepts that he’s being over-cautious and mentally commands Kadabra to use Miracle Eye. “Okay, it’s happening now.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the man says after a moment, cheeks pink as he keeps his gaze on the floor. “If something… uh, unusual comes up.”

“It’s fine, Sir.” The company psychic, Lin, has been clinically professional with everyone, and Red has wondered whether he’s a full time Silph employee or a contractor that works for other organizations too. “It’s very common for people to inadvertently think of things they try not to during a merger, but it doesn’t bother us.”

That’s a polite fiction, of course, some psychics do find the thoughts that come up in people’s minds disturbing, but that does fade with experience. It’s fair to say that someone in Lin’s position, at least, is probably long past any embarrassment or shock, but either way, he’s too much of a professional to show any.

After a few pointed questions to direct the manager’s thoughts to the Silph company, his feelings about it, and his career plans, the psychic nods to indicate that he’s withdrawn his mind, and Red tells Kadabra to end it.

“That’s it?” the man asks, looking around with another moment of apprehension.

Lin nods, and the head of security, Sicong, hands the man his new passcard. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

“Of course. Um, good luck.” He takes the card, bows to the room, and leaves.

“I think that went well,” the head of HR says, and President Silph nods.

“Let’s hope the rest do as well.”

And for the rest of the company’s dark senior staff, they seem to. There’s surprise for most, but not all; many are calmly, almost resignedly, accepting, as if they expected something like this. A few are even cheerful about it. Red can’t tell how genuine those are, since he’s just assisting with the Miracle Eye and not doing the mergers himself. But from what he can pick up by the brief period of surface thoughts, there’s nothing obviously incongruent.

There’s a brief break as Lin pauses to use the bathroom, and Red stretches his limbs by walking over to the glass wall that looks over the city’s main street and cranks one of the levers on the side to open a window slot, letting some fresh air into the crowded room. One of the cops is leaning against the glass with Pranav, another Silph security. “I don’t like it,” Red hears the cop murmur around her coffee cup. “If they talk about what we’re doing, give warning…”

“What’s the worst that happens? Someone leaves early?” Pranav shrugs. “Doesn’t change much.”

“Tips them off, if they’re planning something.”

“I’ll take it. Know you guys want to grab them, but so far as I’m concerned a boring day where everything goes smooth is a win.” He glances at Silph, who’s sitting at a desk and answering emails. The president said he prefers to be present, ensure the employees know the orders and assurances are both coming straight from the top, but Red can imagine it strikes the company’s security as an unnecessary risk. “Besides, not like they’re going to subject themselves to a merge anyway, if they are planning something.”

Red has to admit that he’s also unsure how this would help capture the potential renegade. There’s always some chance they’re overconfident, or feel trapped and let themselves be merged with rather than raise suspicion… but the more likely outcome is they just leave.

But after another half hour of working their way down through the middle managers and to the lowest ranks, no one’s done that yet, and Red starts to feel more nervous about it. Not the sort of nerves that makes him feel like he’s in danger; one of the hunters has a wigglytuff out and earplugs in, if anyone who walks in tries to start something they’d be unconscious in seconds. But still, his feet keep tapping restlessly under his seat.

He’s just about to try Focusing to see if his unease is coming from moral ambiguity, or something else when the CAO, whose name Red has already forgotten, claps his hands together with a satisfied sigh.

“Alright, that’s everyone in leadership. Kazue, I think we can deal with everyone else without you.”

President Silph looks up at him. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” says the woman in a three piece suit that Red is pretty sure is the CHRO. “They’d probably feel more intimidated than anything. Go get some work done.”

President Silph smiles. “You know me too well.” He fiddles with the mouse and keyboard for a moment, then straightens his cuffs as he stands. “Alright, I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

Sicong looks to his subordinate. “Pranav, go with him.”

“Yes, Sir.” He gives the female cop a small wave and escorts the President to the door, where Silph pauses and turns back to Red.

“Be sure to come back up before you leave, Mr. Verres, so I can thank you again.”

Red just nods, and then they’re gone. As soon as the president leaves, some tension leaks out of the collective minds in the room, and the CHRO doesn’t waste a moment before turning to the CAO and CTO, saying, “Same goes for you two.”

They exchange glances, and the CAO opens his mouth, then closes it with a wry smile and nods. “Yeah, alright. Call me—”

“If I need you, yeah, yeah.”

“You alright here, Valentin?” the CTO asks the guy in the room who’s been reprogramming people’s new security badges. Red presumes he’s in charge of cyber security, but it’s been hard to tell what the organizational structure here is.

“I’m good, Sir.” The IT engineer flashes a thumbs up without looking away from his computer. “Everything looks good from the lab, too.”

“I’ll go see how they’re doing with the rest, then.”

Once the two men leave, the room starts to feel a bit less crowded, with just the CHRO, Valentin, Sicong, and Lin from the company, while Burrell, the female officer, and the two hunters represent the city. Red didn’t even learn their names, but the guy is lanky while the woman is short and muscular, so he’s been thinking of them as Tall and Stocky.

Red has been a little surprised by how casually everyone’s been acting toward each other, particularly given the high ranks of some of them, but he can tell that they’re all more than a little nervous. Still, that does seem to be decreasing, even for the cops and hunters, who are getting more and more relaxed over time. Even Burrell, whose hat has gone uncreased for nearly ten minutes now.

A steady stream of employees continues to trickle in, most of them non-dark, and as everything becomes more and more routine Red starts to wonder if it would be disrespectful to fiddle on his phone while he waits for Miracle Eye to be needed again.

He checks in with Kadabra instead, merging with his pokemon to send reassurance at some of his restlessness, then sending their combined senses outward in every direction. With Kadabra’s incredible range, he could count every employee mind on the surrounding floors if he wanted to, and it’s a little dizzying being aware of so many anonymous minds at once. At best he can aggregate, emotional impressions: a dozen people feeling anxiety, another dozen or so deeply focused on some task, a small scattering of people who seem to be on break, or relaxing in some other way, particularly clustered in a couple rooms that he guesses are kitchens.

It’s particularly interesting noticing where people’s attention is focused, and how “open” they are to the world around them compared to something specific that they’re deliberately paying attention to. He wonders whether his own awareness shifts, and, as he notices the way it automatically seems to “glance” at the people around him, what triggers it for himself when he’s not deliberately focused on anything…

“This is Red Verres, who will be allowing me to merge with your thoughts…”

Red pulls his mind back and focuses on the employee in front of him, trying to look attentive and unthreatening. The woman doesn’t seem too concerned, though she asks some questions about privacy expectations before agreeing.

Once the merger is done and she leaves, he decides to finally pull out his phone to message Blue and see how he’s doing. The text doesn’t go through, however, and after a moment he notices that his phone has no signal.

The sight of the error sends a small jolt through his stomach, and even as part of him knows he’s probably overreacting he looks around to see if anyone else has noticed something wrong. Maybe they just block it in here, and he has to get on the local wifi…

THUD

Everyone jumps, turning to face the door. The loud noise came from just the other side of it, and seemed to rattle it in its frame.

“What was that?” Commissioner Burrell asks. Everyone in the room with a pokebelt has a hand on a ball.

“I sent for lunch,” the CHRO says, but her tone is doubtful, and when one of the hunters twists the handle and pushes, it doesn’t budge.

“What in the h—”

BOOMMMMMmmm

Red waits until the floor stops vibrating to stand, knees slightly bent. “That came—”

“—above us—”

“Attention Silph Employees. This building is now under our control.”

Red stares at the intercom speaker in what feels like a haze of surreal shock, even while part of him feels like all of this is totally normal. Burrell swears, and the hunter tries to open the door again, this time shoving his shoulder against it.

“Everyone below the fourth floor may evacuate immediately. Everyone on the fourth floor and above, remove any pokebelts and lie facedown, hands on your head. If you attempt to stop us, we will kill our hostages, including President Silph.”

The room is frozen, for a moment, and Red has to withdraw his senses to avoid getting overwhelmed in the mix of emotions pinging off everyone’s minds. There’s a click from the intercom before the voice returns.

“Commissioner Burell and associates in security, you’ve no doubt noticed by now that you’re trapped behind a ton of iron. This means we can’t assure your disarming compliance. However, we have people throughout the building, and if you use any pokemon to break through the doors, walls, ceilings, or floor, we will kill the President. Just sit still, and no one needs to die.”

“Who is this?” the Commissioner asks, and Red is impressed by how even and commanding his tone is despite the vein that’s visibly throbbing on his temple. The man’s face is flushed to a dark mahogany, and his hat lies crumpled on the ground, fists clenched at his sides. “What are your intentions?”

There’s no answer, and Burrell takes out his walkie talkie. “Haru?” He twists a knob. “Emiko, come in.” Another twist, this one going through multiple clicks. “Burrell to all points, come in, over.”

“Internet’s down.” Valentin says, voice low as he starts typing rapidly. “Lost landline and wifi—”

“Jammer for phones and for radio frequencies,” Sicong says, breathing hard. The head of security is twisting his own radio through frequencies, each click sounding incredibly loud, then seems to force himself to stop.

Burrell seems about to throw his own radio, then catches himself and places it on the table next to him, palms flat beside it as he stares at the wall.

“What do we do?” the CHRO asks, voice low. “How did this happen?”

“I’m thinking.”

“They have Mr. Silph—”

“I’m thinking!”

The hunters have stopped trying to bust down the door, and Lin just sits with wide eyes. “The window…?”

“Four stories up,” Burrell says. “Any of you have a pokemon that you can ride that climbs walls?”

No one answers.

“They’d probably count that as trying to escape too,” Sicong murmurs. “And kill Kazue, and whoever else they have.” Red can tell he’s thinking of Pranav, maybe wondering if he’s already dead.

We’re trapped.

Red’s heart is beating hard in his chest, but steady. He merges with Kadabra and sends their psychic range out as wide as it can go, sensing the minds fleeing the floors below them, doing his best to filter out the universal fear and shock radiating from all the others in range.

They’re all trapped.

---

In a way, part of Blue had been waiting for the first boom that shudders through the building all along. It should have been like a shot of espresso, a jolt of adrenaline that set his heart racing. Instead Blue immediately enters his battle calm as he swings his feet around and stands, then moves out the door and into the hall that led to the elevator Red went up, hands automatically moving to unclip the airmask from the side of his bag and slip it on.

Maturin, Gon, Ion, Soul, Zephyr, Rive. The last two wouldn’t be able to be summoned indoors, and Soul would be pretty cramped too…

Soon he’s in the office area that leads to the private elevator. It’s a wide open room with a couple dozen desks scattered through it, each pair forming the Silph logo when placed side by side. The office workers are still at their desks looking mildly confused as they stare at the ceiling, or look around to see what others’ reactions are, and Blue’s steps slow as he wonders whether he should tell them to evacuate or ignore them and head for Red.

Which is when he notices one of the people take a pokebelt out of a suitcase and clip it on.

In any other context, Blue would admire the person’s level-headedness and reaction time. If you hear something like that, regardless of where you are, your first step should be to reach for your belt.

But there’s something too calm, too sure, about the man’s movements, and the memory association is immediate and impossible to ignore; it’s been nearly a year since he helped catch Yuuta, but he still dreams about it, sometimes.

“Renegade!”

The word comes out before he can consider it, an explosion of sound that gets more reaction from everyone than the boom had.

Only too late, in the moment where everyone turns to him in shock, does Blue consider other explanations for what he saw: an ex-trainer or ranger, or even an undercover cop or security guard…

And then the man throws two balls at the only relatively empty parts of the office: the spaces in front of the doors. One releases a vileplume, the other a blastoise. The pokemon have barely been summoned before he takes a facemask out of his suitcase and has clipped it on. “Nobody move—”

Blue has already started kicking rolling chairs and shoving over desks, throwing himself behind one as he tosses out a ball. “Go, Gon! Sa!”

As the freshly summoned breloom shoots a cloud of sleep inducing spores at the blastoise, Blue has a moment to uselessly wish he had a chance to use a PC and switch his pokemon, and then he’s rolling across the floor to shove more things out of the way so he can summon his arcanine, which takes twice as long. As he works, a barked command from the renegade sends a splash of acid onto Gon from behind, causing him to cry out in pain.

Blue grits his teeth and finishes clearing a space. “Go, Soul!”

People start yelling and rushing out of the way as soon as the arcanine appears, head brushing the ceiling. Blue almost orders a Flame Charge as a second blob of acid sails through the air, drops leaving smoking holes in the carpet, then remembers where they are and shouts “Faf!” instead, pointing up and vaguely toward the vileplume from behind cover.

The next few moments are full of screams and crashing sounds as Soul goes charging through the office space. Someone has started making an announcement on the office intercom, but Blue has no attention to spare for it, and cranes his head up to see how the battle is going… which is how he spots the renegade clearing some space around himself.

If Blue had been asked how annoying it would be to have a real pokemon battle in an office building, he could have gone on a two hour rant. Just because he hasn’t trained to battle renegades doesn’t mean he hasn’t trained to battle indoors; after everything he and his friends have been through, particularly stories of Leaf and Red’s battles in Vermilion, he’d have to be a fool to expect most incidents he ends up battling in to be in the wild.

So he practiced in sims, and looked up advice online, and even found a few buildings marked for demolition to set a few of the Fuchsia scenarios in. One of the main difficulties involved not having space to summon pokemon, so Blue got good at thinking and acting in ways that would create space while acting on new ones that show up naturally in the course of the battle, even while he found it incredibly annoying and tedious compared to the smooth back and forth of even a wild outdoor battle.

Of course his practice sessions didn’t include battling a renegade who was also trying to make space, and at the end of the day who uses it comes down to who’s got better reflexes.

His arm snaps out while the renegade is still raising his ball, and Maturin appears just as the man tries to summon his own pokemon.

The renegade’s ball gives a low error beep to indicate that the summoning area isn’t clear, and as the man scrambles to create more space Blue quickly checks the other battles.

Gon has put the blastoise to sleep, but is clearly hurting from the vileplume’s acid. Thankfully Soul is savaging the flower pokemon, flame-lined jaws tearing burnt petals off one at a time, so Blue rushes over to spray some potion on his breloom before a “Sab!” has it spitting seeds out in a rapid stream at the blastoise’s tough shell.

Blue turns back to see Maturin standing in ready expectation, its attention shifting between the pokemon fighting around it. It has nothing that he could order it to do to a human, but once the other battles are done the three pokemon he has out should be able to easily overwhelm whatever the renegade summons. Still, better to deny that one too, if he can…

He prepares to throw Ion’s ball, then notices that the renegade has stopped pushing desks out of the way and finished yanking a greatball out of his pocket, a variety of others falling and scattering on the ground, and a jolt of energy sends Blue rushing forward even as the man enlarges it and takes aim at Maturin.

He’s not going to make it.

Time fractures, two futures splayed out before him. In one he sacrifices his starter to what might be permanent psychological damage. Maybe he’ll be able to clean up the confused mix of conditioning, with months of careful reprogramming and retraining, but maybe not.

In another, he withdraws Maturin, the renegade summons a new pokemon in the empty space, and Blue probably dies before his other pokemon can come save him.

It’s the sort of decision that can only ever be made one way.

He wants to believe he’s fast enough to withdraw and throw at once, but he doesn’t have another ball prepared and the renegade does, and the renegade will just do the same thing to whomever he sends out to replace Maturin anyway.

And so he has a full second to accept that he’s likely lost Maturin, a second to prepare to summon his luxio, the only other pokemon he has on him that would fit in the cleared space, and then finds himself throwing Ion’s ball just as the man does, pegging the empty greatball out of the air with a tink.

He doesn’t stop to think about what he just did, other hand already moving to get an empty ball of his own, which he enlarges and chucks directly at the man’s head.

The renegade’s reaction to his ball being deflected midair is admirably/annoyingly unphased, but he also clearly doesn’t see Blue’s followup coming, and gets smacked in the temple, which sends him stumbling back a step. Unfortunately he recovers quickly, and Blue feels a rising frustration as his options grow more and more limited. Tactics that keep the renegade from using his pokemon aren’t enough, Blue needs some way to end the fight. Maybe Blue can pull the man’s mask off and have Gon use Spore, but the renegade is bigger and stronger than him, and probably knows how to fight—

Something hits the man in the back of the head, and he stumbles forward a step. A stapler clatters to the ground, and Blue sees a woman standing behind the renegade, half concealed by her desk, a half-panicked, half-furious look on her face.

“Nice shot!” Blue yells, a savage grin splitting his face. That was an ex-trainer’s throw, or his name isn’t Oak.

The renegade regains his footing and spins toward her, and Blue winds back another empty ball as she scrambles away—

Another object flies by, this time from the left. It misses the renegade by a few inches, but makes him reflexively crouch, which makes it easier for Blue to peg him in the back of the head and almost sending him headfirst into the desk beside him.

Blue has the fleeting, annoyed thought that this scene is going to look ridiculously cartoonish in whatever film gets made about his life, but the renegade does seem to be having trouble standing straight now, so he starts to look around for something heavier to throw.

And then three objects fly at the renegade within a few seconds, one striking him in the back and another in the side, and he starts to spin wildly, eyes wide behind his mask. Blue sees a marble paperweight and dives to scoop it up, rolls into a crouch, throws—

—but the renegade is running now, withdrawing his unconscious blastoise before dashing through the doorway it was blocking.

Blue curses and chases after him before he can stop to think, scrambling to swap balls and bring Maturin with him. “Return!” he yells, then adds “Soul, come, Gon, come!” before realizing there’s no way Soul will fit through the doorway and giving a yell of frustration, pumping his legs faster as the renegade turns a corner ahead of him. He must be running for the front lobby, and if he reaches the open space there first…

But when they arrive Blue sees it’s full of people, all rushing for the building’s front entrance. The renegade doesn’t stop, and within moments he’s lost in the crowd that’s shoving its way through the main doors.

Blue slows to a stop, then looks around to make sure people aren’t running from something more immediately dangerous. He almost grabs one to ask what’s going on, if there are other renegades elsewhere, but then Gon rushes up beside him, tail bobbing as he hops protectively around his trainer.

Blue takes a moment to catch his breath, then returns Gon to his ball and rushes back the way he came, past open and empty offices to where Soul’s head is stuck through the doorway of the room they were in, clearly trying to find a way to squeeze his body through. He makes a plaintive growl as he spots Blue, rotating his head as he tries to shift a shoulder past.

“That’s alright, Boy,” Blue murmurs, stretching a hand out to pet the arcanine’s snout before gently pushing so that he backs up into the room. Blue checks him for injuries, rubbing at the stitch in his side, then withdraws Soul and looks around the wrecked office area. “Everyone okay?”

The Silph employees are still mostly cowering around their desks, but one has gone over to the vileplume’s corpse, presumably to ensure that it’s dead, while another is going from desk to desk trying phones. It’s the woman who threw the stapler at the renegade, and she smiles and nods to him.

“We’re all safe, Trainer, thanks to you.”

Blue is about to express his own gratitude to her and the others for the part they played when a shrill voice yells, “Thanks to him? What kind of maniac starts a battle in a crowded room?!”

He turns to the source, an older woman who’s sitting beside an upturned desk, a broken PC in her hands, and tries not to let his incredulity and anger show, reminding himself that she’s probably just scared. “You’d rather I let the renegade do what he wanted?”

“Ben wasn’t a renegade, he was… I mean, he…” She shakes her head, eyes wide and confused. “He probably would have let us go! That’s what the guy on the speaker said!”

Blue frowns at her as he vaguely remembers the intercom saying things while he was fighting. “What did he say, exactly?”

“That anyone below the fourth floor was free to leave!”

“He also said they’ve got hostages,” the first woman retorts. “If he was going to let us leave he wouldn’t have blocked both ways out of here.”

“Hostages?” Blue asks before they can get into an argument. Why the fourth floor? “Who?”

“We don’t know, but President Silph is one of them.”

Blue’s fists clench, and he takes out his phone to call Red, then grimaces at the lack of signal and puts it away. “It doesn’t make any sense. They block communication but let people leave… what starts on the fourth floor?”

“I don’t know, it’s… there’s some storage? Security?”

“Not IT?”

“No, that’s fifth.”

Security probably, then. Maybe they put most of their people there? Fuck it, he doesn’t have time for guessing. “Alright, I’m sure there are a bunch of people calling the police and rangers and news and so on once they leave, but when you leave could you message my grandpa, let him know I’m okay?”

The woman’s eyes widen. “Yeah, of course. You’re… going up? What about the hostages?”

“Renegades don’t take hostages,” he says, trying to ignore the churning in his stomach. Red’s okay, he’s got to be…

The woman on the ground is shaking her head. “You can’t just decide that! They’ve clearly got a plan, you don’t know they’ll kill anyone—”

“Renegades don’t leave witnesses!” Blue yells, heat filling his chest thinking of what happened under the Casino. “They’re evil, pure and simple, and whatever they’re here for they can’t be allowed to get it! If Silph is alive it’s because they need him for something, but once they have what they want they’ll kill anyone who saw them! Letting others leave means they know they’ll be gone before the police and hunters get here.”

What they’re not accounting for is him being here.

The lady hangs her head, staring at the broken computer, and he feels his anger flare up again before he forces it out with his next breath and turns back to the younger woman. “Is there a PC connected to the storage system on this floor?”

“No, I don’t think so. But they should have one—”

“On the fourth,” he guesses, and sighs when she nods, running a hand through his hair. He’d like to swap some of his pokemon out… hell, he’d like to get some backup. He’s painfully aware that he didn’t win that fight, just stalled it until he got lucky. The whole reason he didn’t tell Glen and the others to come is that none of them are equipped to handle renegades, and part of him is kicking himself for not having called them anyway.

With time to think, to imagine what’s ahead, he can feel fear trying to creep through his body, to freeze him in place. Red would tell him not to be stupid, not to rush into the field full of beedrill, or the burning building.

But he has no idea what’s happening upstairs right now, and if delaying a few minutes means the renegades get the Master Ball, or something happens to Red…

He goes to find Ion’s ball and reclip it to his belt, trying not to think about the way he threw one pokemon away on a slim chance of saving another, then heads for the private elevator, picking up the marble paperweight along the way.

I’m coming, Red.

---

Once the shock starts to wear off, it’s not long before tempers begin to flare.

“Thank you for your advice, but the presence of renegades makes our job clear.”

“My job is to keep President Silph safe—”

“It’s also to keep company tech from falling into the wrong hands,” Burrel says, facing the chief of security down with a flat expression. “And I could imagine the president would say that if it’s between his safety or the Master Ball—”

Sicong shakes his head with a look of disgust. “Whether you’re right or not, there are other lives on the line too. I’m not assisting with any plan that might put them in danger.”

“If you expect the renegades to let him live,” Stocky says. “You are badly mistaken.”

The hunters have completely changed. From passively fading into the background, their bodies are brimming with energy, and they seem a hair’s breadth away from sudden action at any moment, which makes it hard not to feel an adrenaline kick just from being in the same room as them.

Red is spending half of his attention soothing Kadabra, who began to grow agitated from picking up on the tension and fear around them. Red would have withdrawn him, but it’s useful having the extra range for his psychic senses.

“Reinforcements will be here soon,” Lanky adds. “But they plan to be gone by then.”

“The hostages—”

“Renegade activity presumes constant danger to everyone,” Stocky says, then turns to the police commissioner. “With your permission, Sir?”

“Now wait just a minute—”

“Not yet,” Burrell says, ignoring Sicong and turning to Valentin. “I need you to tell me how compromised the labs might be. Is there any chance they can take what’s there?”

Valentin stares at the commissioner for a moment before glancing at his livid security chief, then back. “I don’t know. It’s… they shouldn’t be able to get anything, the Master Ball is being digitally stored in multiple parts, but if they have hostages… they might be able to convince someone to give them what they need?”

“Which is likely, if they threaten to kill them or those around them.” Burrell takes a deep breath, then lets it out, vein still throbbing in his temple before he turns to the hunters. “Suggestions.”

“Bring the building down,” Lanky says, one hand patting an ultraball on his hip.

“Can you do it from here?”

“No, Sir. Would need to get outside first.”

The commissioner nods, then turns to the other hunter, who shrugs.

“If they need hostages to get the ball, call their bluff,” Stocky says. “Fight our way to them. But Jenson’s right, they’re confident they can get it and leave soon, so—”

“We need to know where they are first,” Burrell says with a nod, then turns to the female officer. “We could split up. Cover all bases, do our best to slow them down until reinforcements come.”

“But it’s not certain, Sir,” Lanky—Jenson—says. “And they could teleport away as soon as they realize they’ll lose.”

“That’s still a win, right?” Lin asks, speaking for the first time. “Getting them to leave—”

“Every renegade that escapes is a potential slaughter,” Jenson says, voice flat. “That goes twice for renegades as organized as this. The only acceptable priority is extermination.”

“You can’t,” the CHRO says, voice low and obviously scared. “You can’t just… bring down the whole building, on all the people in it, just to…”

No one answers. They don’t need to: the hunters could, in fact, do just that.

Assuming Burrell agrees. He’s still the ranking officer, and they’re under his command.

Everyone watches the commissioner as he slowly runs a hand over his cropped hair, then walks over to the window, staring out at the bright day outside. As Red picks up on the tension in his mind, the wavering fear and certainty and dread, he feels his own fear spreading and growing, sinking him into the sense that this is all a prolonged nightmare. If the commissioner gives the word, the renegades will start fighting their way out… the hostages will be killed… and then, if they make it to the ground floor, they’ll bring the whole building down.

Options, options, we need options…

What do the renegades believe?

That they hold all the cards. That as long as the police and hunters are stuck in here, and as long as they have hostages, they can get the master ball.

So they need to get the hostages away from them.

But they can’t do that while they’re stuck here.

Red feels sweat beading his skin despite the cool breeze, and glances at the window beside Burrell. They’re not actually stuck here, any of them with a teleporting pokemon can leave… he could leave, if he’s willing to wash his hands of all this. Make it not his problem.

Save himself, and maybe consign Blue and the others to death.

Or, perhaps worse, let the renegades get the Master Ball.

His heart starts to beat faster, and Red closes his eyes. Options, he needs options. What can he do that the renegades won’t expect…

…and then his partition is down, and he’s his full self again, considering all the options he’s already cataloged while it was up.

They don’t know he can perfectly lie to psychics, but that doesn’t help him at the moment.

They don’t know he can project sakki, but that only helps if he can merge with their pokemon.

Most importantly, they don’t know he can teleport indoors. Not unless they believed his claim that he could, which most who don’t know him don’t seem to, and which they’re certainly not acting like they do.

Of course, whether he can isn’t the issue. It’s whether he will, if he tries. His abra was able to teleport him to his room because he fundamentally believed it was safe. There’s no way he’s going to believe that about any part of the Silph building…

Unless he tricks part of him into believing it by partitioning and amnesia’ing what he’s doing it for.

It feels like a dangerously convoluted plan that he wishes he’d thought to try practicing earlier, but… it just might work.

Lin is giving him a strange look, and Red meets his gaze and sends a wordless question. Trust?

The other psychic holds his gaze, then nods.

“I think,” Commissioner Burrel says, voice rough, and Red can sense his decision from the sense of dull finality in his thoughts. “That we don’t have a choi—”

“Wait,” Red says, heart hammering even as his resolve hardens to certainty. “There’s another option.”

Burrell’s face doesn’t show the hope Red senses from him, only skepticism. “Speak.”

“I can teleport out, and—”

“Help won’t come on time—”

“—save the hostages.”

The skepticism is radiating from everyone now, but it’s mixed with an odd kind of hope from the non-hunters, a desperate kind that’s looking for miracles.

Burrell’s hope isn’t that kind. He’s staring at Red as if seeing him for the first time, and giving an odd smile. “Knew there was another reason Silph wanted you here. You’re his ace in the hole, aren’t you? All that stuff with Celadon, you did more than help search buildings.”

“What can you do, exactly?” Stocky asks, and Red senses suspicion from her.

It’s understandable. Only the best trainers could hope to fight renegades without having pokemon that could go for a trainer kill too, and Red doesn’t have any badges. Which, to them, implies he might have illegal pokemon.

“I can teleport indoors, and I have a secret psychic ability that lets me shut down renegade pokemon.”

“That’s imposs—”

Jenson cuts himself off, and Red both senses and sees it. The moment they remember who he is, and what he’s done.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling, in some ways, but also makes some part of him relax, his back straightening as he meets their gaze one by one. Another part of him is terrified of what the consequences of his secret coming out might be… but maybe, if he’s careful…

“He’s not lying,” Lin confirms after a moment, voice quietly awed. Even without being merged, Red knows the other psychic can sense his resolve. “He’s scared, but… he really believes he can do this.”

Burrell’s eyes are wide, and he licks his lips, hand going to his hair again. His gaze jumps to his hat where it’s lying on the ground, then back to Red. “Ten minutes. Get Silph to safety, if you can. Stop the renegades, if you can. And then we’re breaking out.”

Red nods and turns to Valentin. “I need to know where I’m going. The only spots I’ll be able to teleport to are Silph’s office and the back elevator.” They’re the only places in the building he formed enough of a strong emotional memory to return to. “Can you tell me how to get to the lab from either?”

“I’ll do you one better. Give me your phone, I’ll transfer you our security codes and the building schematics.” Valentin hesitates, then turns to Sicong. “Assuming—”

“Yes, fuck it, give him whatever we’ve got!”

Red hands his phone over, then prepares himself for a very strange conversation with his partitioned self. After a moment he turns to Lin. “How far is your psychic range? Does it reach the bottom floor?”

“It doesn’t reach the top floors, but I can sense most of the building.”

“Then I’m going to need your help…”

It’s a testament to how good the food is that Red notices it at all, given the circumstances. Nothing exotic or fancy, but the karp is buttery-smooth in his mouth, and he’s never had more fresh seaweed salad. President Silph eats slowly, clearly savoring every bite, but Red gulps it down as he listens to Commissioner Burrell explain why he’s here.

“Our investigation has been slow and careful.” The short, heavily built man creases and rotates his cap between his hands as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. When he noticed Red looking between him and the food, he gruffly explained that he had a late breakfast. “But this ‘Miracle Eye’ changed everything. As soon as it became possible, even hypothetically, for dark people to get scanned, we knew any dark criminals would start scrambling. And they knew we knew, so they scrambled as quietly as they could. Do you have any idea how many dark folk just flat disappeared in the week after your announcement?”

Red shakes his head as he slurps up some seaweed, suddenly feeling a sick turning in his gut. They predicted this sort of use case for Miracle Eye, of course, but it’s happening much faster than he predicted… and he should have predicted it, after Celadon.

“About a dozen reports in Kanto alone. Government, corporate, even some gym members, all in the wind. And we have to assume they were only the most cautious, or the least desperate.”

“Or maybe just the ones who weren’t close enough to completing their goal,” President Silph says and takes a sip of tea before clearing his throat. “I believe those in Silph can’t pull out now, because our latest project is too important to miss, and too close to being complete.”

Red pauses to drink some too, and is about to wipe his mouth with his sleeve before realizing he’s showing off bad table manners. Even the napkins are absurdly soft and comfortable. “Sorry, but just to be clear… you said ‘renegade,’ earlier. What makes you think they’re… that, instead of just, uh, spies, or thieves, or…?”

“It’s a fair question,” Burrell says, and glances at President Silph. “But not one we’re prepared to answer at this time. What we can answer is why you, in particular, would be helpful.”

“Today is just a normal day, as far as my staff knows,” Silph says. “Except I’ve allowed some controlled leaks to indicate that our most secret project will be ready for testing tonight, which means it’s in a complete enough form to be stolen, if stealing it is the goal.”

Red doesn’t imagine they’ll explain what this project is about, and they don’t. “So… you’re using it as bait? Isn’t that risky?”

“Risky is letting the renegades melt away, either with the tech or without it,” Burrell says. “Most don’t have access to the engineer labs it’s being held in, but we plan to do a full sweep of the building, just to be sure. Normally there’s only a slight chance something will turn up, if a previously scanned employee has been recently corrupted or blackmailed, but with someone to use Miracle Eye on each dark one we have a real chance at stopping them before they put their plan into action.”

“I would just change the testing date and location, but there’s no way to know who’s compromised,” Silph says. “If we coordinate with the police, however, we can ensure some level of preparation when our company psychics merge with them.” He holds up a hand to forstall Red’s objection. “And to be clear, all of my employees have signed paperwork allowing mental merger during internal investigations. The use of a pokemon to assist is new, however, and extensive legal consultation has produced new waivers. Anyone will be free to say no, upon which they will be asked to leave the building.”

Red frowns. “That still seems like they’ll be pressured into saying yes.”

“The alternative is to ask all my dark employees to leave for the day, and that we can’t do without seriously disrupting work, not to mention the test itself.”

It’s hard not to imagine that being something of a logistics nightmare, not to mention a PR one. Whatever Silph sees in Red’s expression, it makes him sigh and set his food down.

“I won’t deny that society has not always been fair to dark minds, but at Silph we have strived to treat everyone equally where possible, and I must admit to feeling some gall at the thought that this generosity may have been taken advantage of. At the same time, I take no pleasure in distrusting my employees like this.” He fiddles with his chopsticks, then puts them aside too and considers his linked fingers. “In fact I detest it. But it has been a difficult year for my company. I’ve seen and heard the seeds of suspicion blooming throughout it, and another piece of stolen technology may cause permanent division between my dark and non-dark staff.” He meets Red’s gaze. “But your new technique can change all that.”

“By letting people trust dark people,” Red guesses, feeling his stomach churn again.

“Yes. No longer will dark people have to deal with the suspicion of their peers, or their resentment at being exempt from such checks. Normally those feelings might be mixed with some pity over limitations they endure, like training psychic pokemon or not being able to teleport, but with that no longer a block, I worry resentment will grow. Instead, with these inspections everyone will be on a truly even playing field.”

Red hadn’t thought of any of this, and is unsure how much weight to put in that prediction. It strikes him as strange, and oddly petty… but Red knows that might be a blindspot of his. He’s never worked in any kind of corporate environment, while Silph has had decades of experience managing hundreds of people; if he thinks it’s a real concern, it probably is one.

A sudden feeling of rebellion rises up, and he remembers to be cautious in taking the older man’s word on anything that might persuade Red to do what he says. “It may have been unfair that some people could get a job with less scrutiny than others. But those who weren’t dark did sign up for the expectation of scrutiny, and those who were signed up without it, and that feels… important? There’s this thing called meta-honesty—”

“—yes, I read your post on the concept, and your own policies on it.”

“You did?” If so, it’s the first time in the past few weeks that someone he’s had to explain it to has actually saved him the time.

“Twice. My guess is you’re worried that those who were not dark and had some private secret that outweighed their desire to work here had the opportunity to make that informed decision, while those who were dark made a different mutually agreed-on decision, which is now being changed. How close am I?”

Despite the circumstances, Red smiles. There’s something like… relief, to be understood so quickly and easily. “Yeah, that was basically it.”

“It’s a reasonable concern, and I won’t pretend there would be zero pressure. But you have my word that I won’t fire anyone simply because they refuse, not least of which because it would set a terrible precedent. I simply must ensure that, while this research is being completed, we minimize risk as much as possible.”

“On that note, I want to reassure you that this would pose minimal danger to you,” Commissioner Burrell says. “We’ll have officers present in case anyone tries anything.

“Will you do this for us, Red?” President Silph asks. The older man’s voice is calm, his gaze piercing. “It is ultimately your decision, and I’ll understand if you say no. But this is the best chance we have to end this peacefully, and safely.”

Red doesn’t respond right away, simply stirring the remnants of his salad around with his chopstick. He understands that he’s being manipulated in every obvious way. The stakes are high. There’s a time pressure to give a response. He can’t ask others for help. And he doesn’t even have to take responsibility for the actual violation of others’ privacy; he’s just putting everyone on an equal playing field.

Still, it feels wrong.

“I’m sorry,” Red says after deliberating carefully on his words. “I understand that the prospect of a renegade in your company is a serious issue, but… the Miracle Eye is too new for me to feel comfortable making moral decisions like this with it. I’d like to help, but… I don’t think I can.”

President Silph doesn’t look disappointed, but he does set aside his chopsticks again and steeple his hands together as he inspects Red, who tries not to shift under the scrutiny. “Then I must tell you what’s at stake. It will be public information soon enough that we’ve developed a new pokeball that we believe will be able to capture legendary pokemon…”

Red listens as he describes the “Master Ball,” implications bouncing around in his head even before President Silph starts talking about their worries of one ending up in the wrong hands. The idea of a pokeball that could catch the Titans, maybe even the Beasts or Stormbringers, would change the world. It would provide real hope that things could change, might even calm people’s fears about the mysterious threat everyone’s been dreaming about… Blue is going to absolutely flip…

Oh shit, Blue! He completely forgot about him, he’ll have to remember to mention that he’s here at some point.

“…top secret, but I’m sure you can understand, now, how many degrees of caution feel appropriate.”

Red swallows, then drinks some tea. “I do, yeah. My friends and I talked about the idea of someone catching a legendary pokemon, and the good it could do… but also what it would mean for interregional peace. Is there… a plan for that?”

“Simply put, to sell as many of them as possible, so that all the power is not concentrated in any one person, or region’s hands. One of the features of this ball will be that it can capture a pokemon that’s already caught without causing permanent damage.”

“Woah. Okay, so using a legendary against anyone who might have another masterball would be a huge risk…” Red feels himself being convinced, little by little, and takes a breath. “Okay, so I get that this is important. I think… I need to get some outside counsel at this point.” It’s still strange to Red that he has a personal lawyer who he can call up and ask questions now, but he also means his mother. He knows she’s waiting to hear from him anyway.

“I completely understand. But I have one request: no journalists.”

Red meets his gaze and decides not to ask for the obvious exception. “If you expect all this to stay secret…”

“No, it’s not about the use of Miracle Eye itself; that will be public information soon after.”

“Then why?”

“Because I have little doubt there are many throughout my company that act as sources for them. Even in the best of times, it’s a troublesome thing to balance the good of the company and its proprietary information, and the freedom of individuals to freely associate as they choose.” There’s a stiffness to the way he says the second part, and he lets out a breath. “But in this particular case, it’s imperative that we not lose the element of surprise, and I don’t trust any journalist to hear of this sort of thing and not immediately reach out to learn more.”

Alright, much as he dislikes it, this seems like time for a firm condition of his own.

Even if it’ll end up sounding… really juvenile.

Red puts his pride aside and forces himself to say, “I’d really prefer to talk to my mother before agreeing to something like this.”

“I understand that you’d want some advice from those close to you—”

“Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough.” Ugh, why is this so hard? He feels like he’s pushing against some invisible force, some sense of… not just politeness, but basic decency, to be so openly suspicious.

But if his relationship with Silph requires keeping secrets from his mother then it won’t survive for long anyway. And if he wants it to be anything like an equal relationship, or one of respect, then just going along with everything Silph says is probably not the way to get there, if he can at all.

“I’m saying that I won’t do this without the ability to get counsel from anyone I feel the need to.” Red lets out a breath. “I’m not trying to be difficult, and will understand if you don’t trust me to be able to convince others to hold off on doing anything like that. But I at least want to be clear that it feels like a test of my judgment too.”

The older man across the desk meets his gaze for what feels like a minute straight, but is really just a couple rotations of Burrell’s cap in his hands before saying, “Of course. I suppose I’m extending enough trust as it is, and if you’re sure you can be persuasive about how dire the situation is… I have a private room to the side, if you’d like to use it.”

What he’d like to do is leave the building entirely, but saying that would imply that he’s being spied on, which he has no particular reason to believe President Silph’s own quarters would be. “That would be great, thank you.”

“I’ll go check with your people to ensure everything’s okay,” Burrell says as he puts his cap on. “Either way this goes, we’ll be ready to start within the hour.”

“Thank you, Commissioner.”

“Message me if anything changes.” He tips his head at Red and strides for the door.

“Uh, same for me. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but probably not an hour?”

“I understand.”

President Silph begins eating again, and Red looks at his mostly eaten food, scoops up one more piece of fish, then walks over to the door and enters a plush sitting room with a large screen in the wall and a minibar. Red messages his lawyer first, who asks for a ten minute wait while he wraps something up, then calls his mom in the meantime.

She answers before the first ring ends, and he can tell she’s trying to sound calm and neutral. “Hello, Red.”

“No emergency. Well, sort of. Also I might have to pause to take a call from my lawyer soon—”

“Red…”

“Right, so I’m in President Silph’s private office, there’s something going on that he wants my help with…”

It takes a surprisingly short amount of time to explain it, and when he finishes he feels a little silly. What exactly is he expecting his mother to say, other than—

“You can’t trust him, Red. Whatever he’s got planned—”

“Okay, sorry, this will sound rude but… can we jump to when I convince you I don’t, and you try sharing your models first before giving advice?”

Part of Red winces as his voice comes out more annoyed than he intended, but he doesn’t take it back, and after a moment his mother says, “Your voice is changing.”

Red blinks. “It is?”

“Yes. Getting deeper.” She sounds… he’s not sure how she sounds. Not angry, at least. “I’m sorry, Red, give me a minute.”

“Sure.” Red paces the room a little as he waits, then wonders if he’s being watched, then reminds himself President Silph’s own office isn’t likely to be bugged… then realizes that it could have been, particularly as he invited Red over and probably predicted he’d want somewhere private to talk to others…

He keeps pacing, hand tapping a rhythm against his leg as he tries to decide whether he’s being too paranoid or not paranoid enough. Clearly not enough up until now, if he’s being this slow to think of these things… what if his mom is right to worry he’s trusting Silph too much?

He’s about to say so when she lets out a breath. “Okay, so I’m still in a bit of shock that he told you about the Master Ball—”

Red almost reacts out loud to the revelation that she knew about it, but stops himself at the last moment.

“—and that it’s nearly ready. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that makes this clearly a trap for you, so long as Burrell is there and you check with your lawyer and get something in writing.”

“You trust Burrell, then?”

“More than Silph, sure, but coming from me that’s not saying much.” His mom hesitates a moment. “He could be corrupt, but from what I’ve heard he’s clean, just a bit of an asshole.”

Red almost says that he seemed nice enough, if a bit understandably high strung, but a few sentences in a few minutes (while around President Silph) wouldn’t be a particularly good window into his character. “So if there’s no major risk for me, is there any for you?”

“It might undermine things I’ve said about him, when it comes out that you’ve helped him. But that seems like a reach for something this major, and also might serve to show impartiality if people assume we’ve got a more friendly relationship.” She sighs. “It also puts you in the middle, which I dislike on a number of levels.”

He understands why, but if he can act as a mediator or go-between, that seems better for everyone. Red wants to reconfirm that there’s no evidence Silph has personally done anything illegal, but is aware of the potential for bugs, and instead just says, “We’ll be okay. You know I wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t turn against me? Wouldn’t take his side?” Despite the words, she laughs. “No, Red, I know you wouldn’t. You’ll side with what you think is true, and I can’t be anything but proud of that.”

An unexpectedly strong surge of emotion fills Red’s chest, and he feels tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, and after a moment the wave fades, leaving him wiping at his eyes and trying to process what he felt. There was something in it that felt more like pain or grief than he expected…

“I’m just worried you’ll be misled,” his mom continues, and sighs. “But in this case, if there’s some hidden knife, I can’t see it.”

Red clears his throat. “Okay. Let me know if you do. I might still say no, but…”

“I understand. Let me call some people—”

“Wait, you can’t do that! This has to stay secret for at least the next hour, or else we might tip them off.”

His mother is quiet for a moment. “That’s Silph speaking, but I can’t argue the logic of it. I won’t check with anyone in the company.”

“Or anyone who might check with anyone in the company.”

“Yes, Red, I understand. But there are some people who need to know. Do you trust me?”

Red forces himself to relax. “I do. Sorry.”

“It’s alright. Be careful, Red. I love you.”

“Love you too, Mom.” He ends the call, then just stares at his phone for a minute, trying to untangle the stew of feelings he had during the call. A moment later he feels a renewed sense of urgency and messages Satori to let her know what’s going on.

His lawyer calls just as he finishes up, and Red goes over the details a second time. James doesn’t react particularly strongly to any of it, just going “uh huh” and “okay” and “right” through revelations that would set most people on the edge of their seat, until the question of whether Red might be liable comes up.

“Well, that’s an interesting bit of new jurisprudence you’ve landed in,” he says, and Red can hear his smile. “I’d have to see the waivers myself to be sure, but Silph is likely to be sure to cover their—their butts.” When they met, James told Red that he’s the youngest client he’s ever had, and it’s obvious now and then that he’s not used to it. But he never talks down to him, and Red enjoys the way he nerds out over legal things. “Send me a copy and I’ll let you know if they’re covering yours too.”

Satori is calling him now, so he says, “I will, thanks James, gotta go,” and swaps. “Hi Satori.”

“Hello, Red. I have… many questions, but I’m not sure which are time relevant.”

“I don’t want you to feel rushed. This was your discovery more than mine, and your primary project for years. If there’s any part of this that feels off to you, or like it might have a negative impact…”

She sighs. “When we talked about this happening, we imagined far less pressing scenarios. You know that this side of things always felt less interesting to me.”

“I do.” It was pretty clear she wanted the ability, or something like it, to exist for personal reasons, and her altruism extended mostly to what it would do for others like her or her sister. “Still, it feels important to make sure you’re okay with it.”

“For your own feelings of permission, or for potential public backlash?”

Red hesitates. “Both? But permission is the wrong word, I think. I just don’t want you to…”

“Regret having created it?” She laughs. “You know better.”

He smiles. “Okay, I guess now that you say it out loud, I do. It helps to hear it.”

“It isn’t ours anymore, Red Verres. We discovered it, shared our knowledge, even profited from it. But it belongs to the world, now, and if you are not the first to do this, someone else will be on another day. My legacy, such as it is, will be untouched whatever you choose yours to be. Do as you will.”

He’s not sure what to say to that, other than, “Thanks.” He almost says goodbye, but then has a thought. “I’m not seeking permission, but I am actually curious… what would your sister say?”

“You’ve met her. What is your belief?”

From what he could tell from a few conversations, what drove Koishi beyond the desire to be closer to her sister was to be like everyone else. “Insofar as this helps her, and those like her, be treated ‘normally,’ I guess she would be for it.”

“Having shared her mind as much as I have over the past weeks, I can confidently say you guess correctly. Be well, Red Verres, and good luck.”

“Thanks.”

Red closes the call and wonders if he should check with anyone else. After a five minute internal check, the only people that come to mind are Leaf and Blue.

He pulls them both into a group call, and for the fourth time goes over everything.

“…make sure you don’t say anything to anyone in the building obviously, Blue, and Leaf if you could avoid—”

“I can’t believe the Master Ball is almost done! This is way too early!”

Red blinks, then puts it together. “You and Mom knew about—”

“How do I get one?” Blue asks, voice hard.

“I don’t know, it’s not even done yet—”

“Blue you don’t want one—”

“The hell I don’t—”

“—there’s something Silph hasn’t told you about it, Red, it’s not just something that captures legendaries, it turns them into slaves!”

Red has a spare moment to notice his confusion in the ensuing silence before Blue says, “Uh, don’t you already think that regular pokeballs do that?”

“No,” Red says as it clicks. “She thinks it makes them tame, but the Master Ball… what, makes them completely obedient? Without the need to… get to know them or something?”

“Worse than that, it wipes their mind completely, turns them into robots!”

“How do you know that?” Red asks at the same time Blue says, “Oh come on, we’re talking about the Stormbringers.”

Red has a sudden sinking feeling, but he can’t think of something to say before Leaf retorts, “They might not only be used on Stormbringers, Blue, and they’re still feeling creatures—”

“They killed my parents—”

“Guys—”

“—and a million more—”

“Guys, shut up a sec!”

Silence, and Red belatedly remembers to lower his voice. “Sorry, but… I’m not really here to decide whether these things are good or not.” He’s also closer to Blue’s side on this, but it’s clear Leaf feels strongly about it and he’s not sure how to talk about it yet. “I’m just being asked to try and prevent them from getting stolen, which we can all agree is bad, right?”

There’s a pause, and then Leaf mutters “Right,” sounding more… surly, than Red’s ever heard her.

“Damn right,” Blue says. “What can I do?”

“Nothing, Blue, you’re not even supposed to know—”

“It’s been weird here, I knew something was off—”

“—I just wanted to check if you thought it was moral for me to do this with Miracle Eye.”

Silence again, and after a moment Blue says, “Huh. Didn’t really think about it, honestly. Kind of saw it coming, you know? Thought it would happen with people in power first though, what few of them are allowed. Guess that was naive of me.”

Red bites his lower lip. “Sounds like you don’t think it’s okay, then…?”

“I mean, it’s not my head being looked in. So long as they can walk away, not really my business.”

“Oh. Well. Alright, then.” He’ll dig into that later. “What do you think, Leaf?” He has a sudden worry that she’s mad at him…

“I’m not sure how to feel about it, honestly,” Leaf says. “It’s hard to put aside my feelings about Silph and the Master Ball enough to give any sort of answer. I’m not sure how to say this, but it feels bad to justify this sort of thing by how much is at stake?”

“What do you mean?” Blue asks. “If that was true we’d stop using hunters to catch renegades.”

“I know, I just don’t like that it’s being pushed on Red like it’s his fault if he says no and something bad happens. If they know there’s a renegade there then asking them to let their minds be read feels weird, because of course they’ll say no… but he’s saying they’ll just let them walk away and not treat them differently after? I guess they can’t know for sure who just has a really big secret, but I’m skeptical this will make people less suspicious of dark people. It’ll just make a new split between those willing to let someone read their mind and those not willing to.”

“Shit,” Blue says. “She’s right, and anyone not willing to will be seen even worse than they are now, since they have the option but are refusing it… ugh. Red, I may need you to casually comment about what merging thoughts with me is like at some point so people know that I’m not hiding any deep secrets.”

“Sure,” Red says, leaving unasked whether he’s actually going to want Red to merge with him first. He’s not sure how comfortable he’d be lying about that, though he does trust Blue… “So you think I shouldn’t do it?”

“Nah, doesn’t change anything. Was just saying, it’s going to happen, right or wrong.”

“Obviously if I had to choose between renegades getting it or Silph selling it to the Indigo League or whatever, I’d take the latter. Though that’s easy for me to say, since Unova isn’t near Indigo… no, obviously I’d still want it out of the hands of renegades.” She sighs. “I don’t know, Red. When this gets out, you’re going to get asked to do it a lot more by others before more people learn to. Are you ready to decide what makes the cut and what doesn’t?”

Red’s pacing slows, then stops as he stares out the window over the city. He didn’t think of that.

“I don’t know. I guess… it’ll depend on what’s at stake.”

“And how much they offer.” Blue says.

“What? I’m not going to charge for it!”

“Why not? Don’t tell me you turned down money!”

“They didn’t offer any, and I didn’t ask. That would be like charging for, I don’t know, saving people from a pokemon incident!”

“Nah, totally different. You think hunters and police don’t get paid? Is the Commissioner there on his off-time?”

“Blue’s right,” Leaf says. “Plus, it’s not like Silph can’t afford it.”

Red rubs his eyes, trying to decide if this is good sense or just a difference that comes from growing up poorer than the other two. “If I charge money for it, I can’t be sure I’m just doing it for moral reasons.”

“Hmmm… I guess from a PR angle…”

“Yeah, it’s a good point on both counts.” Leaf sighs. “Well, I’m out of wisdom on this one. Sorry, Red.”

“No, you’ve been helpful, both of you. Thanks.”

“Of course. Good luck!”

“Hey, seriously, if I can help—”

“I’ll let you know. But probably you should just sit tight, or maybe we can meet up later, in case this takes a while?”

“Fuck that, I’m staying.”

“Alright. Later guys.” Red ends the call and stares out over the city for another minute before he takes a breath and enters the main office.

President Silph is still sitting at his desk. Some dessert has appeared, and the older man carefully adds some crushed nuts onto his ice cream before he turns to Red. “That was quicker than I expected. Do you have your answer?”

“Mostly. I need to send whatever waiver you have to my lawyer…?”

“Of course. I’m still waiting on confirmation from Burrell and my head of security, so I’ll send you a copy now.”

He does so, and Red forwards it as he sits across from him again and looks over his own ice cream, wondering if it’s meant to further nudge Red into agreement. There’s an awkward silence as they wait for responses, or at least awkward for Red; President Silph seems to be enjoying his ice cream, and after a moment says, “Well, as we have some spare time, and didn’t have as productive a lunch as we might have liked… is there anything you’ve particularly wanted to discuss since our last one?”

Red half expected the President to bring up something related to his mother, and is wondering now if this is his way of inviting questions around that. Maybe give his side of the story, or judge whether Red is upset about it.

But Red doesn’t really want to talk about that, and bringing it up would put them in a frame of potential argument and conflict. He’s more interested in getting the President’s thoughts on his guilt over the pokemon prices going up…

“Yes, actually. I recently made a lot of money by selling pokemon capable of Miracle Eye—”

“Yes, I saw.” Silph’s smile is warm. “Congratulations are in order, not just for the discovery, but for capitalizing on it even better than you did the abra catching technique.”

“Right.” Red shifts in his seat. “It’s just, I’m not sure how to feel about the people who can’t afford abra, or other Miracle Eye pokemon, now.”

President Silph spoons another bite of ice cream up, but studies Red rather than eating it, smile gone. “You feel you’ve done something wrong?”

“Sort of, yeah. It felt good making abra easier to catch, since more trainers could get one, and it brought the price down so more non-trainers could buy them… but this feels like, I don’t know, I just made them harder to get than ever.”

“Nonsense.”

Red blinks at the older man. “Nonsense as in, I didn’t?”

“Absolutely not.” He gestures out the window behind him. “They are all there, just as easy to catch as they were before. Their numbers have not dwindled, their supply has not shrunk. What changed is that your discovery increased the value of them, and the market is merely reflecting that.”

“But… for those who can’t catch them, those who are too old or who aren’t trainers…”

“Believe me, Mr. Verres, when I say I share your sorrow that not everyone who has a want can yet have it fulfilled.” Put like that, Red feels a little silly, but Silph seems serious. “I am, after all, doing my part to help alleviate that problem. But that we have yet to reach utopia is no individual’s fault, let alone the fault of simple supply and demand. You would not blame physics for failing to accommodate our every whim, would you?”

“Well, no, but that’s different, isn’t it? People could choose to sell something for less than others…” Red trails off, because he of course didn’t make that choice for most of the pokemon he’d bought. Why would he, when those he sold to could just resell the pokemon for higher themselves? Not that everyone would, some might really want an abra or natu themselves, but he’d have no way of knowing that himself… maybe if some law was passed to keep people from reselling pokemon for a time after purchase… but wait, that would have stopped him from making any money off his discovery at all.

Red feels the guilt churning in his stomach again as he considers that maybe he shouldn’t have made money off it, and is interrupted by President Silph lightly tapping him on the nose with the handle of his spoon.

Silph meets his startled look with a level one. “I know the expression that was on your face just now, and it is a tragic thing on anyone, let alone those as bright and enterprising as yourself. While it would be no less proper for the price to rise due to scarcity, it would at least be regrettable. What you are failing to understand is that you have caused the price to go up because the knowledge you uncovered, the technique you developed, created value, and that is what the market is reflecting by the higher price.”

Red feels himself frowning, though the sick feeling in his stomach is starting to fade as he slowly realizes what the old man is saying. “But… what if people are wrong about how valuable something is?”

President Silph sprinkles some more nuts on his ice cream, and Red decides to try some himself. “Are you asking because you don’t know, or because you’re worried about your personal situation?”

“You’re right, I know the price will go down once people realize it’s not as valuable as they think.” Theoretically, at least. It might take a while. “And yeah, you’re right about the personal bit too. I guess I’m still not used to changing things on such a large scale…”

“And so you’re prepared to feel bad no matter which way things go.”

That’s not… quite right? Red takes a breath, finding the felt-sense in his chest and focusing on it as he speaks. “It’s more that… none of this feels real? No, none of it feels solid. In science there’s no certainty, but there’s at least knowledge that can be tested. There’s no right or wrong, morally, there’s just the pursuit of truth. I don’t have to worry about what it means for others if I succeed, because succeeding in science is always good for everyone…”

He trails off as he feels a painful twist in his chest as he says the words, but before he can focus on it he gets distracted by President Silph’s wry snort. “While business must always be zero-sum?”

“No, not always,” Red acknowledges. “Or at least, I get that on an intellectual level. But… well, now that I think about it, I guess all this is just an extension of what I was worried about before, with Miracle Eye’s effect on dark people. Overall the world will probably be better having it, but some people’s lives will individually be worse, and… that sucks.”

Red expects President Silph to scoff, but the older man stares into his ice cream bowl, spoon stirring it slightly as he slowly nods. “Yes. It does ‘suck,’ indeed, and it’s good to remind ourselves of that, once in a while.” The older man smiles slightly. “When my nephew was young, he said that I sound as though I worship the ‘invisible hand of the market’ that I was no doubt boring him with my repeated lectures on. I, a tad less jokingly, replied that I knew of nothing else as worthy of venerating, save perhaps for human ingenuity. But in truth, my god is as cold and impersonal as any other. I assume you have no faith?”

Red shakes his head as he sprinkle some of the nuts on his vanilla ice cream and takes a small bite. It is, of course, delicious, silky and sweet, and the nuts provide a grounding crunch. “Never saw a convincing reason to.”

“I’ll switch back to the scientific analogy, then. I made the comparison to laws of physics for good reason; there is fundamentally no difference between a man building his house on a faultline and his business unsuited to the market, save that it is easier for us to identify the outcomes of the first. It was not always so, and perhaps one day we will know better than to rail against the market for our failures to predict it, the same way we once couldn’t predict earthquakes.” Silph shrugs. “In either case, it is tragic that people may lose to forces beyond their ken or control. But to blame reality is childish. When one business creates a better product than another, it may put many out of a job. We can sympathize with them, hope that they find another, even collectively help via social safety nets. But as a society we’re improved by them losing that job, because they are no longer doing redundant, less valuable work, and we have the better service or product.”

“You support social safety nets?”

Silph smiles. “It surprises many people, but I do, within reason. They can encourage people to take professional risks that might benefit us all.”

Red’s not sure if it’s the ice cream or the words, but he is starting to feel better. He wants to take his journal out to make notes of why so he can check the reasoning later, run it past some others. Instead it strikes him again just how valuable this time is, and decides to jump to another question. “I’ve also been having trouble learning how to… spend money? I know that sounds silly, but it still feels like a rare resource, to me. On the ship you said to spend every dollar as deliberately as my first, and I feel like I’ve always done that, but now that I’m still doing it even with lots of money it feels particularly wasteful.”

Mr. Silph’s brow is raised. “Fear of wasting money is understandable, but ‘deliberately’ needn’t mean perfectly.”

Well, when he puts it like that… “Does that mean you sometimes regret purchases you make?”

“No.”

Now it’s Red’s turn to raise his brow. “Really?”

“Really,” Silph deadpans, then shrugs. “I used to, until I realized I was orienting to it incorrectly. I have goals, and I want those goals to be achieved, and so it feels bad if there are any wastes of time and resources that delay that. But if by regret you mean some sense of internal suffering, or self-flagellation, I have no time for such. It is much more productive to learn from failure and move on.”

Easier said than done, Red almost says, but the frame is familiar. “So if I treat every purchase as an experiment, something I learn from, whether I get what I want or not…”

“Precisely. Thus, ‘deliberately,’ but without dithering, and without frustration.”

Red smiles as he feels the new mental frame settling into place. “I’ll have to try that out next time, but I already think it’ll help. Thank you.”

“Of course, though I suspect it’s only half of the issue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most people either are not used to earning regularly, or are on a fixed salary. This leads to—”

Red’s phone pings, and he checks it to see a message from James. “My lawyer says the waiver looks good.” He feels a strange mix of relief and disappointment, and knows the latter to be something uncomfortably close to cowardice.

“Excellent. Does that mean we can count on your help?”

Red tries to mentally shift gears back to considering what brought him here. He’d been enjoying the conversation, enjoying learning and having good ice cream, and he doesn’t want it to stop, doesn’t want to go around the building meeting strangers just to command a Miracle Eye on them over and over…

…but he doesn’t want renegades to steal the Master Ball either.

Assuming they really are renegades…

“Commissioner Burrell said he can’t reveal why you think there are renegades here. He looked at you when he said it, so if you’re the reason he can’t… I think I’d need to know, first.” He almost apologizes for adding yet another condition, but it feels appropriate.

Silph has finished his ice cream, and instead pours a small spoonful of nuts from the serving spoon into his personal one and eats that directly. “I am not the reason he ‘can’t,’ but rather, he is the reason I have not. There are ongoing investigations from the lab that held the stolen Silph Scope technology, and we’ve been keeping the details close. I suggested you be told, given your involvement in that incident, but Burrell disliked the idea. I could ignore his preference, but that would feel like defecting. Still, if it’s what you need, perhaps he would change his mind.”

“No,” Red says after a moment. “I mean, I’d like to be told, but there’s no actual reason for me to be, so long as I know there is good reason. No mental shield is perfect, and if it’s sensitive information…”

Silph is smiling at him again. “You continue to impress me, Mr. Verres. And so?”

“And so… yes, I’ll help.” Red tries not to let the compliment warm him too much, but he supposes it doesn’t matter if he does or not, now that he’s decided to go ahead.

“Excellent.” Silph lets out a breath as he picks up his phone. “I’ll let Burrell know. Thank you, Mr. Verres.”

Red just nods and eats more of his half-melted ice cream. Now that he has decided to go ahead, he feels lighter, though part of him still dreads the work itself. But at the end of the day, whatever the Master Ball is or isn’t, whatever people think of him for doing this, if there are renegades in the building and they get away, or worse, steal something that would let them capture a legendary… it would be partially on him. He can wish it were otherwise, but he can’t actually ignore what he knows about the world. There are older, stronger, smarter people than him doing their best to keep things together, but they’re not enough, and that he was asked for help means he can help.

And he won’t even be risking his life to do it. The more he thinks about it, the less it feels like a real dilemma at all.

“We have another ten minutes, and Burrell will be joining us with Sicong, my head of security.” Silph pours himself and Red some more tea. “Feel free to relax here meanwhile, and finish your ice cream.”

“Alright. Um, you were saying, about wealth?”

“Ah yes! Wealth…” He sips his tea, then pours the last of his melted ice cream into it and stirs. “Most people treat it as a fixed number, either saved in the bank or on a refreshing budget. What you must internalize is that you have something even more valuable than a large amount of money: what you have is earning potential. Many wealthy people do feel free to spend money because they simply have an enormous amount, but that is still the thought on the surface; the true secret is having an abundance mindset. To put it simply, your ability to spend money is a function of your ability to make it.”

Red suddenly remembers a thought he had while bored and scrolling headlines, about some superstar who had gotten millions into debt. It made him wonder, at the time, how anyone could spend that much money without realizing they were out of it… and how anyone could be allowed to spend that much money without having any.

But he was given tons of money just based on the confidence people had that he’d be able to make good returns, and in his mind there’s now a concept of wealth not as a fixed point, or even a trendline, but a range on an axis. “I think I get it, yeah. I was trying to internalize this earlier today, but I was just doing it from feelings of abundance and relief and success. The idea that I’m reliably able to pull off things like this more than once might take a while to update on, but… yeah, I see how that would help me feel less bad about spending money.”

“I’m glad, though I have to say, it is a bit odd that you felt confident enough to borrow money on speculation, but not to spend it. I suppose you felt it as enough of a ‘sure thing?'”

“Yeah, normally I think I’d be way too risk averse.” Red wonders if he should stop eating to let his stomach settle, then decides more nuts might be okay. “I guess I could also try to focus on the things I’m buying as ‘sure things’ too… just in a different way than I’m used to thinking of purchases.”

“Knowledge of a thing’s quality, knowledge of your tastes, unique experiences… there are many things we’re assured of, when we buy something, even if we dislike it.”

Red lets the thought and ice cream digest for a moment, sipping his tea and blowing on it. He feels like he should be preparing himself more deliberately, but he was told to relax, so he tries to relax, and finds himself still thinking of the financial questions that were dominating his thoughts before he came here.

“One last question?” Silph asks, watching him over his tea cup with a small smile.

“Yeah, actually. I was going to ask what you’d do with the money I have, but I guess that’s a silly question.”

“Silly how?”

“Because I assume you’re already doing everything you want with money? And we have different goals, so…”

The older man chuckles. “Another motto of mine, to add to our growing list: a man poor in fortune or spirits will only purchase that which already exists, while a man abundant in either will spend it to purchase what has yet to exist. Most of my wealth is being used to bring ideas into existence, whether material or systemic or conceptual. So what I would do with your money is, essentially, more of the same of what I’m already doing. You’re welcome to check my company’s site for the full list and explanations for which technologies we invest in and political causes we champion, but if you don’t find those particular arguments convincing, the important question is to ask what you would like to see done in the world, and spend money on that.”

Red thinks over all the many notes he’s taken throughout his journey about inventions he wished existed, or different policies or protocols that he wished were different. “What if I don’t know anyone working on those problems already?” He thinks of the CoRRNet incident report system, and how it doesn’t use Bayesian reasoning to determine what Tier a threat might be.

For the first time, Silph’s reaction makes Red feel like he asked a stupid question. “Then you pay them to do it.”

“Oh, sure, but… just like that? Even if they’re working on other things already?”

“Of course. What do you think money is, but a way to reallocate labor in a way you’d prefer?”

He’d never thought of it in quite those terms, but… “And if no one still wants to?”

“Then you didn’t offer enough.” President Silph shrugs. “I won’t pretend there aren’t other factors. Some work is so risky or unpleasant that virtually no one will do it, no matter how much you offer… though that is quite rare. The more difficult problem is finding people who are passionate about the thing you want them to work on, as they will, by and large, be much more competent and productive than those doing it just because of the money.” Something on his desk buzzes. “That is why talent searching is so important and valued.” He presses the button. “Yes?”

“Burrell and Sicong are here.”

“We’ll be right out.” He takes one last sip of tea, then stands, and Red gets up too. “There’s a PC here, if you need to summon your Miracle Eye pokemon.”

“I’ve got him on me.” Red’s fingers brush the balls along his belt until he gets to Kadabra’s. “I’m ready.”

Red watches the numbers in his bank account tick up every few refreshes and tries to really internalize what it means to have over six million dollars of personal wealth.

At first pass, it simply feels… impossible. When he tries focusing, the felt-senses that come up are a lightness in his chest and a numbness around his head that, when prodded, come up with phrases like “unreal” and “undeserved.” He wonders how much of it is due to the speed and the method of his riches, and how much is just a carryover from spending so much time worrying about money.

Red’s research managed to earn him almost as much as he spent after his abra sales, which meant he had roughly $150,000 to buy up pokemon that could learn Miracle Eye… of his own money, that is. It wasn’t hard, with his name recognition, to get some sizeable loans; in fact, when one of the bankers remembered why Red first got famous, he offered to double the amount Red asked for.

“So which pokemon is it this time?” the man asked as he filled out the paperwork, clearly joking but also clearly eager for some hint.

“What makes you think it’s a pokemon?” Red responded with a smile, and made sure to highlight that part of his request in his future applications.

By the end of it all he had nearly a million dollars in loans, which felt surreal on its own, and somewhat panic inducing. He had to keep reminding himself that this wasn’t a scheme that might or might not work; the price of abra and natu and male meowstic would go up, the only question would be how much. Even if he could only resell them at double the price he got them, even if he could only sell one per month, that would more than cover the interest, and those were some pessimistic estimates indeed.

So he borrowed more money, from Bill and Professor Oak and Dr. Madi and his mom and Leaf (whom he offered much higher returns to, as apology for not being able to let her in on the secret), and then asked Leaf if she’d agree to take out loans that he’d cover, which she did.

By the end of that round of funding he managed to have nearly three million dollars, and the issue he faced was one of supply. Buying up the entire market would have been hard even if he wasn’t competing with Blue and Satori, but they made a game of it to keep things from getting too cutthroat.

Timing things so that others wouldn’t notice what was happening was also important, and they first reached out to the breeding farms to secure as many backorders as they could, which got expensive quickly. There was some debate about buying up other psychic types too, as the discovery would doubtless encourage a ton of research into finding others who could learn it, but they recognized this as more speculative, even if all psychic pokemon rise in price a little. Blue decided to dabble in some of that, which left more of the sure bet for Red and Satori to buy up.

Occasionally Red felt guilty about what they were doing. He spoke with his mother about it first this time, and she agreed that as it was their direct discovery, it was a different situation than the one with the clefairy. But he could also sense that she still found it… distasteful, maybe? Just a year ago he was struggling to decide what to spend his limited funds on, and once he imagined some new trainer eagerly saving up their money for one of the pokemon that are about to skyrocket in price, it was hard not to keep thinking about how many people just wouldn’t be able to afford these pokemon after their announcement.

They ended up doing a similar deal for Rangers and Gyms, which soothed the guilt somewhat, particularly since the decision was reached before they devised their selling strategy, which began with some talks with a couple experts that were well worth their consulting fees. As he looks over the amount of money he still ended up with, the guilt starts to creep back in… along with the fear that he’s wasting it by not spending enough of it for good purpose.

It might not make sense to increase his spending proportionally, he’s not sure he can actually get good value out of ten times the spending he was doing before, let alone thirty times. But he should at least be spending twice as much as he was before he got it, realistically closer to five times as much. At the very least he could be funding more research by others.

He could also buy a female dratini under the same reasoning he used with his ivysaur and wartortle; getting a pokemon with high potential power that could also be rented out to recoup its cost in the future. Or he could just invest it directly into the stock market. He doesn’t plan to save for retirement, but if he’s not going to be spending it anyway…

And yet instead he just keeps staring at the numbers, on some level worried they’ll disappear, on another worried about wasting them.

He thinks over the mental tools at his disposal, including some of the more recent ones he practiced with Dr. Seward, and decides to try holding both emotions at once.

First he summons the memory of what it felt like to be limited by money; the worry about not having enough to buy what he needs, the longing of wanting something that was out of financial reach… then he summons the feelings of abundance he gets while looking at the numbers on the screen. More than that, he summons the feelings of… triumph, and confidence, that came from watching each step work out, one after the other, from his ideas, of watching the numbers go up over time.

Then he switches back to the worry he felt, the sense of scarcity and limitation… and now the sense of overflowing possibility. He lets himself sit with each feeling for a handful of slow breaths, sinking deep into each set of memories and emotions until he can start swapping between them more easily.

Then he holds both feelings together, side by side, as best he can, and when he finally starts to feel like the edge has been taken off of the financial worries, he takes one last deep breath and slowly lets it out.

When he opens his eyes and looks at the numbers on the screen again, the worry about spending it is still there, but not nearly as strong. He looks up the cost of a female dratini, winces, then decides to start with something smaller, but still a larger purchase than he’s made before. A few minutes later he finishes signing up for and prepurchasing one of Game Freak’s headset prototypes. The one on the site looks more advanced than the one showcased on the cruise, and he wonders how closely the final product will match it.

He feels a small stab of pain and regret upon clicking the Complete Payment button, but also some relief and excitement. He expects that it’ll get easier, and takes another breath before closing his computer and getting dressed.

Blue’s return to Saffron is by the traditional methods, which for him means riding in on Soul. Red has to admit that the scarred arcanine continues to make his friend look impressive, but if Blue had a teleport point set to the city he likely would have saved himself the time; he did, of course, fly most of the way before riding the last bit so that word of his arrival would spread by observation.

The reality of dark teleportation is that it still requires a dark trainer to create enough of a bond with their pokemon that it will understand who they are, and Blue is still working on creating one with his second abra so that it will be able to teleport with him. Meanwhile he said he plans to keep Tops’s teleport point in Fuchsia.

Blue swings down off his saddle, and Red steps up beside him to help unstrap Soul. Sunlight makes the arcanine’s fur glow in ripples along its side as it breathes in and out, and Red enjoys the warmth radiating off the large dog while Blue feeds and waters it. “None of the others came with you?”

“Some are staying for the long haul, the others are waiting behind until they get their badges. It would have been nice to get them in clusters again, but unless I can convince Blaine or Giovanni to do scenarios too, that might just stay a Vermilion-only thing.”

“No chance Janine changes her mind?”

“They’re okay with them continuing, so maybe. But she still seemed pretty against it becoming a way to do challenges when I left.” Blue returns Soul to his ball, then sighs as he takes his helmet off and runs a hand through sweaty hair, then waves at a couple onlookers across the street. “I need a wash. Mind if I use your shower before I head to the TH?”

“Sure.” They head inside and up the stairs. “So what’s the plan for Sabrina?”

Red thought his voice was casual, but Blue grins. “Itching to get back to the drawing board, huh?”

“Maybe, yeah.” Red smiles. “Planning battles out is almost as fun as doing them myself now.”

Blue laughs as their steps echo through the stairwell. “You know, on the list of things I never thought I’d hear you say, that’s pretty high up.”

“I wouldn’t have predicted it either.” He wouldn’t have predicted a lot of the ways he’s changed since leaving Pallet Town, but the way he enjoys battling is particularly surprising to him given how he’s been surrounded by it his whole life. “It’s also surprising to me how battling wild pokemon isn’t nearly the same.”

“Huh, really? It’s pretty similar for me, even more intense in some ways.”

“In… good ways?”

“Sure. It’s less predictable.”

Red wonders if they’re just misunderstanding each other. “What about the danger?”

“Oh, well that’s different. Normally I feel totally in control in battles, up until something really dangerous happens.”

“Wait, the ‘Battle Calm’ from Elaine’s game? That’s real?”

Blue turns to him with a frown as they step onto Red’s floor and head down the hall. “When did you—”

“She’s been sending us all drafts to get feedback. Each is a different copy so we can’t see each others’.” Red pats Blue’s shoulder, enjoying his friend’s rare bit of self-consciousness. “I particularly liked your Dueler’s Attitude.”

Blue tries to flick Red’s ear, but he dodges. “I asked her to tone that down, but she disagreed. ‘Artistic license,’ she said.”

They enter Red’s room, and Blue summons his eevee, then does a double take when Red does the same. “When did you buy—”

“Oh, I didn’t. Remember that work I did for the Celadon police? While we were going through buildings, we found an eevee in a ball just sitting in a room that’s been empty for years.” Red shrugs, a little self-conscious himself now. “It was really random. Thankfully it was in a plugged in charger, but there was a huge layer of dust over everything. They’ve been trying to track down its owner for the past few months, but none of the contact info reached anyone. Apparently they finally got hold of a family friend who said they passed away and had no benefactors, so the CPD decided to give it to me.”

“That’s… bizarre. Lucky for you, though.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s a little funny, because I could actually afford an eevee pretty comfortably now.”

“Okay, so it’s not too lucky. I’m so sorry for your gain.” Now it’s Blue’s turn to dodge Red’s flick. “Been going on a lot of daylight walks?”

“Yep, and made a nest of sunstones, which to be fair I would have hesitated to buy before.” They’re still not sure what exactly causes each eevee evolution, but there are some patterns that are less noisy than others. Red examines Blue’s while the two fluffy pokemon sniff at each other. “She’s gotten big.”

“Yeah, reckon she’ll be ready before I face Sabrina.”

Red’s thoughts go back to the pre-Challenge planning they did for Koga, and what that might look like for Sabrina… “So is the ‘Battle Calm’ based on something you really feel?”

“That one’s… more or less right, yeah.”

Red tries imagining what battling is like for him. The best he can come up with is his own many-mirrors-and-a-dim-room, which feels like it would be too detached to have the proper motivation or carefulness for a battle. “How do you stay motivated while not feeling things?” The two eevee’s minds feel less curiosity toward each other now, and are searching for stimulation, so Red takes out a pair of stringed wands with bright charms on the end and hands one to Blue.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure, actually.” Red considers his own surprise, following the confusion it leads him to. “I think I had a subconscious model that, without emotion, we’d just be following some logical process to decide what to do moment to moment. And maybe emotions are, like, a shortcut for that? We don’t need to reason out why we should eat if we just feel hungry.”

“That’s an instinct, not an emotion. Or… a sensation, I guess?”

“I don’t know how distinct those things are.” He bounces the charm up and down for his eevee, who just sits and watches for a pattern rather than pouncing right away. He’s not as cuddly as Red expected, and Red sometimes wonders if that’s part of why the original owner left him behind, assuming it was intentional. “We don’t need to spend time and energy reasoning out why something is bad for us if we just get scared or angry and run away or hit it, and that saved time is probably really valuable.”

“Sure, I get that. But you’re saying now that emotions are more than a shortcut, right?”

“Maybe? The more I remember what it was like to block out most of my feelings in the abra field, the more I remember how hard it was to decide to do anything. I was able to reason things out, but it was hard to care about the conclusions. I almost just… stood there and didn’t do anything.” Red sits silently with that for a moment. “What if ‘feelings’ are just another word for ‘motivation?’ What if they’re how we decide everything we do?”

“Huh. Wouldn’t have expected you to say that.”

Red knows Blue’s teasing him, but he nods. “I know, it doesn’t seem right.”

“Doesn’t seem right up here?” Blue points to his head with his free hand, then his stomach. “Or down here?”

Well, now that he pointed that out… “I mean… logically, it seems wrong. People go against their emotions all the time.”

“Nah, they just go with a different emotion.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not like we feel just one thing. You can care about someone and be angry at them at the same time, and sometimes one wins out and sometimes the other does.” Blue shrugs. “Same with things like fear and courage.”

A familiar pit forms in his stomach, mixing anger and sadness and despair, and Red almost argues that it’s not that simple… but after a moment he closes his mouth, realizing that his friend might not even be thinking of that night.

Huh. Was that a counter example right then? “Just now I was about to say something, because of a strong feeling I had. And then I stopped myself, and I don’t think I had a feeling associated with that.” Though maybe he did… caution? But it “felt” like the thought came first…

Blue gives him a look, but stays silent for a moment before saying, “I just did it too. Was going to say something, then another emotion got bigger and stopped me.”

“Got bigger?”

“Yeah, like it… rose up? Took up more space or something.”

Red also chooses not to dig into what that emotion was. Instead he reflects again on what he felt, and what stopped him. Red’s eevee finally pounces, but Red felt the intention rising a moment beforehand and bounced the charm up just before it could be grabbed. “I guess… there was an emotion there, but… if so it was really subtle?”

“Worry?”

“No. Caution, maybe. But it felt like it came from the… the top down, rather than the bottom up.”

“Huh.” They’re both silent for a moment as Blue’s Eevee continues to leap around while Red’s sits and stares again, gaze flicking around to track the movements of the colorful feathers. “So maybe thoughts can stop you from doing things, but not get you to do them. Which means you’ve wasted how much time on all that rational stuff, exactly?”

Red rolls his eyes. “I’m not saying we don’t use reason to make decisions.” He thinks back to the decision he made on the cruise, when he was shifting back and forth between becoming Sabrina’s student or staying with Leaf and Blue. “But maybe reason only works because it changes how we feel? And how we feel is… well, it’s not always explicitly rational. People have biases and bad epistemics and blindspots. But we do update, eventually, if we’re given the right data or arguments or explanations…” He trails off, less sure as he realizes he doesn’t know how that works, exactly.

“Seems like you’re trying to have it both ways. What comes first, the pidgey or the egg?”

“Well we developed emotions first, obviously. And that analogy is terrible by the way, it’s just about how you label things, eggs definitely existed for longer than—”

“So what you’re saying is there’s an obvious answer to both, which means it’s a great analogy.”

Red opens his mouth, then closes it and rubs his eyes. “My point is, if reason developed after emotion, which is a pretty safe bet… then what caused it to stick around and grow as an adaptive strategy is probably the way it allowed humans to decide things other than just following emotion? Maybe? Or like, a way to explicitly alter emotions… so how much reason influences what decisions we make could just depend on how strong the emotions involved are?”

“Hang on, I’m pulling in Leaf.” Blue takes out his phone and starts tapping. “She’s spent more time trying to convince people of things than either of us, at this point.”

Red smiles as a light fluttering enters his stomach. “Right, good idea.” He’d been wondering what she would say about all this, but didn’t want to be the first person to suggest it.

“Meanwhile, I’m going to get cleaned up.” Blue hands Red the toy wand and opens a container ball to take out some extra clothes and a towel. Red plays with both eevee while Blue closes the washroom door behind him, and there’s silence for a moment before his muffled voice comes through the door. “Hey, what’s the latest research on trading pokemon to evolve them?”

Red raises a brow. “You’re thinking of trading Tops?”

“Of course not! Just wondering if I can game it somehow.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that ever since we proved Koichi’s methods work. I still think the trading thing is mostly a superstition, there’s even more noise in the data there than with eevee evolutions. But Professor Rowan’s got some interesting papers on pokemon like kadabra and machoke, so it might have a stronger effect in different species? Still, if the mechanism is that some trauma involved in losing a trainer and getting a new one causes pokemon to grow faster, it’s not obvious what actually triggers it.” Red senses his eevee about to pounce again, but it’s quicker than he is this time, and manages to snatch one of the feathers in its teeth. He lets it gnaw for a bit while he plays with Blue’s. “People have tried to exploit it a dozen different ways. Trading back and forth, trading to people in different regions, faking their own death while the pokemon watches… nothing reliably leads to measurable changes in growth.”

“But it does work sometimes?” The shower starts running, and Blue raises his voice. “No one’s figured out why?”

“Not that I’ve seen! The data is inconsistent, and no one has a good enough explanation to try something new!”

“You should work on that next, then! It would be huge!”

Red doesn’t respond, partially because he doesn’t want to keep yelling over the water, partially because he’s not sure how he feels about it. The truth is, as fascinating as Koichi’s training method and the Miracle Eye were, they’re not the main thing he wants to be studying.

He still hasn’t had the unown dream, and he’s increasingly becoming the only psychic on the islands who hasn’t, along with everyone else in the city. The omission is becoming large enough that people are starting to notice and wonder why, and Red has to keep his partition up more and more often to not leak that Sabrina’s ex-student or friend or whatever is actually the one going around warning people about the end of the world.

And he hasn’t fully grappled with that whole thing either, of course, because it’s scary and also because he has no idea what he could do about it. And also maybe because if he takes it seriously he’ll have to stop working on figuring out where pokemon come from.

But since both might be related to unown in some way, he could feasibly still end up working on both, if he can just find an inroad. Lulie’s idea of tracking unown flight paths caught on, and the What Comes Next forums have a whole section now to show pidove tracking charts, but there hasn’t been much time to set up a formal investigation team, and the regions are still bickering over what does and doesn’t count as pokemon creation research and how illegal it should be.

So maybe figuring out how trades might cause pokemon to grow faster would be a good thing to do, but it would also just be another side project that has more to do with battling than anything. And as much as he’s been enjoying trainer battles lately, and as useful as it might be for people to be able to grow their pokemon faster, he’s still not intrinsically as excited to do that sort of research. Maybe whatever he learns will have applications and insights that go beyond it, but…

His phone chimes with his personal assistant’s tone, and he puts both toys in one hand to check the message:

Call from President Silph, as in, the President himself(!) not a sec. Says you’ve met before? and he’d “like to speak with you.” Asked what it was concerning, he just said it wasn’t what you might think(?) and that it’s “somewhat urgent”(!?) so gonna call in a minute if you don’t respond. Gave his direct number…

“Red?”

“Yeah?!” His heart is pounding in his chest, thumb poised to start calling, then realizes he doesn’t know who he’s calling. The president, or his mom first, or maybe Leaf…? “Sorry, I got a message!”

“Alright!”

Silph said it wouldn’t be about what he’s thinking of, which means it’s probably not related to his mom’s investigations, assuming Silph would assume she’d tell him about that. Which he must have, if he said it’s not what he’d think… or maybe that meant…

Leaf first, definitely. She’d know if something happened with the informant, though if the President knows anything about their collaboration…

Red buys himself more time by typing a message to his assistant to thank him, and confirm for future reference that he did speak with the President in the past. It’s common practice, apparently, for people to report a connection to get through screened calls where there is none, but Red’s a little flattered by the idea that his assistant thinks President Silph might pull that sort of trick. He leaves the rest of the question marks unanswered, then calls Leaf.

“Hey Red, I was just messaging Blue to say I won’t be free until—”

“President Silph wants to talk and says it’s about something I can’t predict and he’s right.”

“What.” Leaf is silent for a moment. “Meta-honestly, I’m not hiding anything, I actually have no idea what he wants. Call your mom?”

“Yep, gonna do that now.” He still hesitates, enjoying the excuse to talk to her, however briefly. They’ve both been busier than usual lately, and he hasn’t even had time to come by the ranch to help out. It’s not as much of a problem now that more exposure therapy groups and friends of Blue are coming by to help more regularly, but… he misses her.

He almost says that, but instead just goes with, “How are you?”

“Good!” There’s a pause. “I’m good. Busy, you know.”

“Sorry, I can go—”

“No, that’s okay! How are you?”

“Yeah, good! Busy too. Got another few offers.”

“Anywhere tempting?”

“Kalos, actually, but only because of the things I’ve been hearing about the weird ways pokemon are acting there.”

“Oh yeah, there was something about a clefairy doing something odd, right? But they do unpredictable things more often than most pokemon.”

“A jigglypuff too, and there are reports of a granbull single-handedly taking down a wild machamp.”

“Huh.” He can practically see her brow creasing as she looks up and to the side… “That seems really unlikely, unless it was a really strong granbull.”

“Right? So that was tempting, but free-T makes a lot of things tempting.”

“I’ll bet. Still haven’t gotten around to visiting home, but I’ve been thinking about it more since I’ll have one fewer teleport spot soon.”

“The Safari?”

“Yep, it’s moved pretty far beyond me now, and I can conference call in. If it wasn’t for my new friend I’d hardly travel to Fuchsia at all.”

“Right.” There’s a moment of silence, and he tries to think of something else to say to continue the conversation…

“Should you be—”

“Yeah, gotta go, later!” He hangs up, then winces at how abrupt he was. His thumb hovers over redial for a moment before he closes his eyes and bonks his head against the top of the phone and calls his mom instead.

“President Silph wants to talk and says it’s about something I can’t predict,” he repeats. “Help?”

“That fucking—sorry, Hon, one second.” The background noise disappears, and he shifts his weight as he waits for his mother to finish cursing, or going somewhere private. Maybe he should have messaged her first.

She still sounds angry when she unmutes and says, “Did he reach out to you directly?”

“Yeah.”

“Then it’s something he doesn’t want others to know about. Record the conversation, don’t sign anything, make sure you choose the place you’re meeting, and bring someone else with you. Not me, obviously, but maybe Blue or Leaf… no, she’s not dark or psychic…”

Red hesitates. “Some of that makes sense, but… I don’t know, it seems a little antagonistic?”

“Antagon—Red, he sicced the police on me!”

“Right, yeah, I know that, sorry, I’m not… I get that he has a lot of power, and he might be involved in some shady things, but… what if this invitation is on the level? I don’t want to set things off on a combative foot. ” He was nice to me. It’s a naive thing to say, especially given that he had plenty of reason to have ulterior motives, but on the whole Red didn’t feel like Silph did anything bad to him.

He was angry on his mom’s behalf when he heard what happened, of course, furious even. But over time it became more clear that, from President Silph’s perspective, knowing that there was in fact someone stealing information from his company and (allegedly?) attacking his employees… well, even if he wasn’t doing anything illegal himself, alerting the police that someone may be working with them just seemed like the reasonable thing to do? Losing the Silph Scope technology didn’t just affect their ability to sell as many, their stock took a dive as confidence in the company went down. Red would expect a different CEO who was totally clean to also take the same actions.

“That’s not the point, Red.” He hears her audibly take and release a deep breath. “Even if it is, you have to protect yourself.”

“But if protecting myself signals that I don’t trust him, he might not trust me either! I don’t want to defect first when all he’s done is cooperate.”

“Defect on what?” She sounds alarmed. “Did you make any agreements with him?”

“No no, sorry, it’s a game theory term.” He realizes the eevee have been gnawing on the toys for a few minutes now, and tugs up to start waving them around again. “There isn’t a specific thing that I’d be defecting on, but… let’s say he has a value of treating people neutrally until they’ve done something that hurts his company first. That might not transfer between you and me, so I might still be off-limits to any unfriendly actions.”

“Those are far too many assumptions for dealing with someone as powerful as him, particularly since they all rely on Silph sharing your values at all! I know you’ve spent a lot of time around famous people, but he’s not a Professor, or a Gym Leader. He’s a businessman, and you’re playing with fire by assuming he has the same goals you do, or will draw the same lines.”

Red bites his lower lip, thinking of a blog post he read at one point that compared two opposing theories for social conflict that people tend to ascribe to. Mistake Theory said that people who are fighting for different goals than you just have different facts or the wrong reasoning, and if you talk things out, you might educate each other and reach some consensus. Conflict Theory, on the other hand, said that people in conflict largely just have different values or are too focused on competing for resources, and no amount of rational exchange of ideas would change that.

The article talked about this in a way that made it clear that the majority of people acted as though Conflict Theory was true by default, which often led to painting their political enemies as not just stupid, but malicious. He doesn’t think his mother views everyone that way, but because of her career she’s had a lot of exposure to bad people, and it makes sense to him that she’d be predisposed to think of anyone with different goals from her that way.

He’s not so naive to think he could convince Mr. Silph to drastically change his actions, particularly if he’s actually doing things like coercing researchers into working on secret projects, or hiring renegades to steal fossils. But there are already people working to stop him adversarially… it feels like Red has a better chance of changing things by pulling the rope sideways than joining one side in a tug-of-war, especially since he doesn’t have a lot to offer in direct confrontation or espionage.

Red winces as he realizes that’s not strictly true. He could become one of the best spies in history, if he decided to use his powers that way. But he doesn’t want to, and it would require revealing the secret to others, not to mention give perfect cause for people to distrust psychics all the more.

“I get that I need to be careful,” he finally says. “But I still want to keep my options open, and some of those things feel like they close things, or limit me, or something.”

His mom sighs. “Alright, Red. Let me think for a moment.”

“Sure. And thanks.” Red is worried about too much time passing before he calls the President… the message did say “urgent,” after all.

Not so urgent that I didn’t take an extra minute to chat with Leaf, of course…

He tries to focus on playing with the eevee again, and as his pokemon pounces for the third time, the sound of the shower cuts off. Red tosses the eevee some treats and steps outside so he can take the call in the hallway.

After a couple minutes, his mom sighs again. “Okay, so the things I said before about recording and not signing anything still apply. You don’t have to choose the meeting place, and you don’t have to bring anyone. I know he’s not going to do anything to you, and if you bring someone for moral support or to be a witness… that would change the dynamic, yeah. Still, don’t let him control the pace or feel of the conversation. If you’re in his office, then he might do little things to make you feel rushed, or like he’s busy and you’re bothering him with questions, even though he’s the one that reached out to you.”

Red almost asks why she’s assuming he’ll want to meet in person, then remembers her point about it likely being a private conversation. “Right.” He remembers what Leaf said about how talking to Giovanni while he was on his phone made her feel less confident in herself, and harder to push back on things or speak what came to mind.

“Also, don’t forget how subtle status effects can be. You’ll be in his place of power, and that’s going to manifest in a hundred minor ways. Be deliberate with every question you answer and any information you give. Even the smallest feeling of ‘well, I’m not sure if I should…’ is a sign that you shouldn’t, at least not without careful consideration for whether you’re seeking his approval or trying to avoid his disapproval.”

“Okay.” He thinks he can do that, particularly since he’ll be able to look out for his partitioned self… “Is that it?”

“All the other things I was going to say would set the tone ‘antagonistically,’ as you said. You can shield from psychics, so that’s not a worry, and you’ve already told relevant people… did you talk to Leaf?”

“Yeah, she has no idea what this could be about.”

“Honestly I’d suggest you not talk to him today. Something might have happened, there could be some information he has that it would be good to know going in. But the same is true in reverse… not that he’d tell you anything he’d be worried about me hearing… Red, I have to say I just don’t think you should talk to him at all, even later.”

Red hesitates, trying to take this idea as seriously as it deserves given that it’s his mom saying it. “But if I don’t…”

“I know. Can you blame me for caring more about your wellbeing than… all this?”

“No. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, Hon. Call me right after.”

“I will.”

Red hangs up, then downloads a call recording app, takes a breath, then another, and calls the number President Silph left for him. He doesn’t even get through the second ring.

“Hello, Mr. Verres.” The old man’s voice is as he remembers it, papery in some hard to define way, but also strong and sure. “Thank you for returning my call so promptly.”

Right. It felt like forever, but actually barely ten minutes have passed since he got the message. “Of course. I never got the chance to thank you for your advice on the cruise. It’s been very helpful to me.”

“I can tell by your accomplishments. All things considered, it was a very productive lunch. I was hoping we could have another.”

“I’d be happy to.” Independent of all the stuff that may or may not be going on, he actually would. Unless their conversation goes worse than he expects, lunching with the president was surprisingly impactful for him despite how short it was, and he’s interested in hearing more about the man’s beliefs and ideas to see if they’re as useful. “So what was the urgent matter I could help you with?”

“That’s what I was hoping to discuss over lunch, if you’re free.”

“Ah.” He assumes he’s not about to be asked to taste-test things, but this does seem to confirm that he wants the conversation to be private. “I am.”

“I’m glad. I can have a car waiting at your teleport point in Saffron, which I presume is Sabrina’s school?”

Red wonders if he should be more worried or less that Silph is taking for granted that he’d be okay with meeting at his office, and tries to think of where he can suggest that’s more neutral. The school itself is a building full of psychics…

But no, even saying he doesn’t want to meet at Silph HQ would be acknowledging things that Red thinks would set a certain tone that he doesn’t want to set. In fact, going could actually be a useful show of good faith.

“I think I can make that work… give me twenty minutes?”

“Of course. I’ll see you soon.”

“See you.” Red hangs up, then taps his phone against his leg for a moment before stepping back into his room.

Blue is dressed in fresh clothing and playing with the eevees, his silver one bouncing around in an energetic blur. “Important call?”

“Yeah. Sorry, but I have to hold off on our plans, unless you want to come with me to Silph HQ?”

Blue raises a brow. “Woah. Why?”

“Dunno, but the President said it’s ‘urgent.’ Figure he’ll want to talk privately, but if you don’t want to wait in the lobby I can always meet you after.”

“Nah, I want to know what’s going on as soon as possible.” Blue smirks. “Unless you’re going to lecture him about meta-honesty and miss out on whatever juicy gossip he wants to share?”

Red grimaces. “Yeah, I’ll probably have to. Might be a short meeting.”

“Well, all the more reason to come along then.” Blue looks him up and down. “You should change your clothes.”

“Really? It’s just lunch…”

“With one of the most powerful men in Indigo. You want to impress him, and you also don’t want to feel too inferior. Trust me, it matters.”

This is similar enough to what his mom said that Red decides not to argue further. He changes into a black button-up and takes off his hat, then combs his hair and puts on the dress shoes he bought for the press conference. After that they spend a few more minutes playing with their eevee, then go downstairs to wait for the ride.

“I’m nervous,” Red admits as they stand on the curb. “I’ve never talked to someone who might actually want to hurt people before. Maybe even my mom.” The thought of something happening to her makes a surge of blackness pour through his mind, a heavy ekans curling in his stomach, but he takes a deep breath and lets the anxiety and fear out as best he can. “What if I fuck it up?”

“Just treat it like a pokemon battle,” Blue says, hands in his pockets as he scans the road. “It’s no more life threatening than those.”

“But I know the rules in those.” Red wipes his palms on his pants, wondering if it’ll be easier with his partition up… or maybe if he tries to dim just the negative emotions… No, now’s not the time to experiment with that. The thought reminds him of his earlier question, however, which suddenly seems more relevant. “How does it work, the battle calm? I mean, if you don’t feel anything, how do you still decide things?”

Blue shrugs. “Didn’t say I don’t feel anything. I still care about winning. That’s basically all I care about, in those moments. And that guides everything I do.”

“Huh.” A truly uncomplicated, singular purpose… That would be incredible to experience in chaotic or dangerous situations. He wonders how similar it is to the “flow state” he sometimes enters while researching or exercising…

And then he realizes there’s actually a way for him to find out.

Red spends a couple minutes thinking about whether it’s a good idea to bring up, then another couple minutes deciding how. Eventually a Silph car arrives, and they get in the back seat. Red scans his ID, confirms the destination, and they’re off.

“Look,” he says as the car turns toward the highway. “This is… I know this is a big ask, alright? And I know I messed up the last time I asked something like this. But I hope I’ve grown since then, and our friendship has, and… I hope that I can ask this, now, and you’d trust that you can say no without me getting upset. But also, I know it might upset you if I ask at all, so… it feels a little risky for me to ask in the first place, so I want to know if it’s okay to?”

Blue is giving him a wary look. “You know this is that thing again, where I can’t promise not to react a certain way, right?”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“Okay. And I get that you know you’re about to say something that might be fucked up.”

“That’s… not a bad takeaway, really.” Red runs a hand through his hair, then stops himself and tries to pat it back into place. “Okay, so the thing that came to mind is… I might be able to actually copy your battle calm, if I use Miracle Eye on you and merge while you’re doing it. Like, permanently, I can save the mental state then use it in battle.”

Blue is silent for a long time, staring out the window. Red’s nervousness grows, and he almost apologizes and says to forget the whole thing, but Blue doesn’t look angry, from what Red can tell. Just distantly thoughtful.

“You know, if another battle trainer asked, it would be really hard to say yes,” his friend says at last. “Bad enough to let someone else in my head, but to copy one of my greatest strengths… it feels unfair, that someone else would get to do that.” Blue shakes his head. “But it might save their life, too. That’s what matters, right? That’s why we’re all doing this. And if I say no, if I don’t let you in my head and let you copy what’s in there… if you ever die in a wild battle I’ll never be able to live with myself.”

“Blue, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Shut up, I’m still talking.”

Red swallows and does so. Blue still doesn’t seem mad, however, and he actually smiles at Red.

“I’m not complaining. Not really. You helped give me something I never thought I’d have. That no dark person in history has had. And I meant what I said, before. I trust you. But it’s still hard to say yes. So what does that say about me?”

Red doesn’t answer, just meets his friend’s gaze until Blue looks away.

“I’ll think about it. And I’ll probably say yes. But either way, I’m not mad at you for asking. Well, part of me is, but I’ll get over it.”

Red swallows, and whispers, “Thanks.”

They ride the rest of the way in silence, until the car reaches the Silph office park. They drive through an automatic gate, then toward the main building… then past the front doors, and around the side between it and the walls surrounding the campus.

“Huh.” Blue sits up. “Ominous.”

Red feels his nervousness growing again, and one hand drops to Kadabra’s ball in case he has to get out of the car and teleport… but no, that would be leaving Blue behind.

The car finally stops once they reach a back door, where someone is waiting outside. Red takes a breath and brings his partition up…

…and steps out of the car on the same side as Blue, who’s also got a hand on his belt.

“Mr. Verres,” the man says, and frowns at Blue. “Mr. Oak. I wasn’t informed that you would be coming too.”

“I was planning to stay in the lobby.” Blue says before Red can speak up. His friend casts a disdainful looks around at the dumpsters and company car lot around them. “I guess I can hang out here instead, if this is what passes for hospitality at Silph.”

The man is frowning harder now, but says, “I’ll find somewhere suitable once I’ve led Mr. Verres to his destination.”

“Appreciated.”

The man opens the door, then leads the two inside and through some of the most opulent corridors Red has ever walked through. There are security cameras at every corner, and they pass through a scanner before reaching what looks like an exclusive elevator. It’s a short walk, but even still, Red notices that they don’t see anyone else the whole time.

“This will take you to the President’s Office,” the man says to Red, then turns deliberately to Blue. “I can lead you to a nearby break room, Mr. Oak.”

Blue gives the man an exasperated look, then turns to Red. “Call if you need me.”

“I will.” Red bumps fists with him, then watches them walk away before he takes a moment to calm himself and enters the elevator.

The penthouse is twelve stories up, but the elevator is quick, and Red barely has time to go over how he’s going to greet Mr. Silph before he finds the doors opening to let him out into a reception area with carved milotic fountains along the walls and live plant pokemon resting in pots around the couches. The receptionist is watching him, and Red approaches her quickly, shoes squeaking on the marble floor,

“He’ll be ready for you in a minute, Mr. Verres.”

“Alright.” There’s no nametag on her desk, and he realizes he never learned the name of whoever was waiting for them. Is that normal for corporate cultures like this? He realizes he has no idea, and wishes suddenly that he had a frame of reference.

Rather than sit on one of the incredibly comfortable and expensive looking couches (though part of Red realizes, with a start, that he can probably afford to have an office like this himself, now), Red wanders around the lobby examining the pokemon and registers with only mild shock that the tangela, ivysaur, cherrim, and sunflora are all shinies.

Okay, so maybe he can’t afford an office exactly like this. Not without losing a good chunk of his wealth, at least.

“You can enter, Mr. Verres.”

“Thanks.” Red goes for the door, making sure his shoulders are straight and his strides are confident, and then he’s inside the President’s office.

It’s nice.

Not as lavish as Red was expecting, but clearly expensive while still being muted about it. Thick, complex rugs, heavy, richly colored drapes, a large and solid looking dark wooden desk. There are paintings on the walls, along with a large monitor, while one of them is all glass. Without that part it would have reminded him of someone else’s office, but he can’t think of whose at the moment.

His attention is taken not by the man behind the desk, but the one standing beside him wearing a police uniform. A commissioner’s uniform, if it’s at all similar to Celadon’s.

“Thank you again for coming on such short notice, Mr. Verres.”

Red turns to President Silph, who has a pair of bamboo bento boxes in front of him, then slowly approaches, heart pounding so hard he’s sure it must be audible. Is he about to get arrested? He can’t imagine what the charge would be… so why is he so nervous? “I figured it must be important.”

“Very much so.” The President’s voice is casual, but his face is serious. “As promised, I have had lunch prepared for us. And then I and Commissioner Burrell are going to humbly ask for your help in finding a renegade, possibly more than one, that I believe is hiding in this building, under my very nose.”

Red stares at the branching tree of possibilities on the projected screen, a dizzying web of red and green and white lines that crisscross from and through various pokemon names, most of which pivot from a single node. “So you think you basically just have to beat the haunter?”

“I think it’s his best chance. It’s not as fast or strong as kadabra, but it’s faster than anything else he’s got.”

“Even his venomoth?”

“Yep, by just a bit. With enough training it could outspeed a kadabra, particularly a younger one… but Tops in particular is a beast. I doubt Koga’s got a top tier pokemon on his five badge team.”

Red looks over the rest of Koga’s team, thinking over everything he’s been learning from Blue about the competitive meta. “And it’s immune to your Ground attacks, and both will be Super Effective against each other, so whoever strikes first might just take it.”

“Now you’re getting it. If he does something to slow Tops down—”

“Or has something to set up a Light Screen—”

“—right, he might get just the lucky hit that he needs.”

“Bob can handle him, though, right?”

They turn to look at Blue’s snorlax, who’s idly scratching its stomach as it lazes beside Glen’s. “Probably, if he can catch him.”

“He’s getting big.”

“They all are. I think Maturin’s about ready to evolve.”

“You’re not going to wait for that before you challenge?”

“Nah, might not even use her, and it’ll still take a couple weeks I think. Unless you want to…”

“No.”

“It would just take a little—”

“No, Blue.”

“Hang on, hear me out. Winning this is more important than just the badge.”

“I know, you want to improve the gym culture to the one you’ve been pushing—”

“No, not that.” Blue gives Red a meaningful look. “There were some people who wanted to share something secret with me—”

Red rolls his eyes.

“—but after I told them about metahonesty, they said they’d have to spend some time thinking about it, and I think we should have warned people that explaining metahonesty may make them miss out on juicy secrets.”

Red gives him his best flat stare, which Blue seems impervious to. “You know it’s not meant to work like that, and also you gave away enough information that I can now guess who has the secrets. Doesn’t do much to inspire confidence in your ability to keep other people’s secrets, my own included.”

“Hey, they didn’t say I couldn’t share things they told me.”

Red almost asks if he’s referring to a plural they or a singular one, but reminds himself not to dig. “In any case, it sounds like winning was the precondition, but now it’s not. Of course they might not share it with you once you tell them you might share it with others, that’s the point.”

“It still sucks,” Blue grumbles as he looks over his chart. “Sometimes it feels like every time I get stronger I’m also being told to fight with another limb tied behind my back.”

Red eyes his friend, wondering if he’s talking about the conversation they had that night before he and Leaf left for the cruise. “Do you regret letting Koga know about Miracle Eye?”

“Nah. It was the right call. I’m seeing it more and more, what you said about the power in sharing my secrets and then winning anyway. It keeps surprising me that despite all your blind spots around social stuff, you saw the value in that before I did.” Blue’s smile is warm, but brief. “But there’s only so much optimizing I can do while also worrying about how people are going to see me.”

“Don’t people celebrate it when a battle trainer takes unusual paths, though?” Red asks. “Like that guy who won the world tournament with the pachirisu… there were parades and stuff back in his home region, weren’t there?” Little as Red paid attention to the competitive battling scene back then, even he heard of that.

“Se-jun Park. Yeah, he got lots of attention for that, but it’s not like it was his favorite pokemon. He picked it strategically, and it only worked because of some very specific things he knew about his opponents and meta of the time.” Blue shrugs. “I can bring a pokemon I bought, like Rive, but I still have to be careful with which ones and how often.”

“Koga is hamstrung too,” Red points out. “It’s not like he can just have his weezing self-destruct to take your kadabra out, because if he could that’s the obvious right play.”

Blue frowns. “That’s different, we both have to care about safety. If I went all out I’d also have more options.”

“But he’s holding himself to an even higher standard. Is there a way you can exploit that?”

Blue raises a brow, but he looks impressed. “Wouldn’t have expected that kind of thinking from you.”

Red shrugs. “I figure you have to take every advantage you can get. Have you ever tried to do something like that?”

“It’s tricky. You can get a bad reputation, though I think what I did with Brock’s arena was borderline and I basically got away with it…” Blue is frowning at the team projection. “Now that I think about it more, he might use a haunter just in case it’s faster, but it may be too luck-based to be his real pivot…”

Blue creates another hypothetical Koga team and runs some simulations to see which of his pokemon might be best to match it, while Red keeps staring at the earlier one and trying to think through the various surprises the Leader might have in store.

Red finds himself getting more and more fascinated with competitive battles each time he engages with novel problems they introduce. He remembered being surprisingly good at them back in Vermilion, but he’d mostly forgotten how fun they were… maybe because afterward, all his time in Vermilion felt tainted by how it ended. His experience with psychic pokemon makes him an extra valuable tutor for the group as they prepare for their challenges, and what started with simply demonstrating techniques and battle strategies with his own kadabra and hypno became full competitive battles where he did his best to model what psychics could do with the right training.

With research into the unown frustratingly stalled, he’s even found himself spending a few spare hours now and then looking over past competitive matches to try and find clues to what might be coming from Koga’s challenge.

His thoughts drift back to Blue’s suggestion to use the psychic projection training again. Since they’re not yet ready to fully reveal the technique, Red asked Professor Oak whether there would be any particular negative effects to pokemon only being in battles where they feel their life is at risk. The Professor recommended he talk with a few pokemon psychologists who specialize in battle trauma. One was even psychic, so they brought Tops to her to get evaluated.

The woman only took a few moments of merging with Tops to conclude that he should “probably spend a week out of the ball in relaxing situations” before going into battle again. Blue was disappointed, as that meant no more training before his battle with Koga, but dutifully spent every hour Red has seen him since in a place his kadabra could relax and recover a little from the ordeal they put him through; it wouldn’t be a week for the challenge match to happen, but Blue decided one match is probably fine, and Red only argued with him long enough to draw the line at using Tops or the technique again until they have more comprehensive studies on whether it will have any permanent effects.

Once Red found the right mental state to project, Tops’s growth was, in fact, measurably rapid, both in combat metrics, and in size. Red made sure they registered it in the pokedex throughout the process, plotting numbers against the average curve until it became more and more clear. Tops doubled in size within a day, and evolved into kadabra the next, going through enough food for a week.

By that point Red no longer needed the unique mental mode to get Tops to fight while fearing for his life, but it became more and more clear how powerful the technique was, powerful beyond even what Koichi must have experienced, since he would have to spend at least some of the time during training getting his pokemon to the edge… unless he had it get brutally hurt as soon as possible, of course.

Which is another reason Red is uncertain of how and when they should reveal this information. There aren’t enough psychics like Red for the discovery to change the world—which is a bit of a relief, given how many of those there already are—but the non-psychic version of the methods would still likely spread, which could mean a lot of trainers with stronger pokemon, faster… but also a lot of competitive trainers who are so eager to get the power boost that they end up actually debilitating their pokemon, either mentally or physically.

Red is mildly terrified that Leaf is going to hate him forever if that happens.

He’s also mildly terrified that it leads to less trainers having pokemon available to deal with incidents when they come up, but if he’s being honest with himself it’s Leaf hating him that feels more immediately relevant.

So when Blue explains why they might not want to share this secret training technique, Red doesn’t need much convincing. What’s one more secret? And it’s not like it’s relevant to the main thing they’ll be announcing…

It takes another minute before Satori joins them, and Red’s attention immediately catches on how different she seems than any time he’s seen her before. There’s a lightness to her movements, a calm that makes him feel more relaxed just by watching her walk straight over to Blue and pull him into a deep hug.

Blue looks as surprised as Red feels, and a little more alarmed than he would have expected. His friend awkwardly pats her back, and Red realizes Blue didn’t pick up on what he did, and is unsure whether she’s upset or not. “Uh… did it… were you able to…?”

“Thank you.”

The words are muffled by Blue’s shoulder, and he looks at Red again before awkwardly patting her back. “It… worked, then?”

“Yes.” Satori takes a step back, face filled with wonder. “It worked. My sister and I are truly connected, now. I can feel her emotions, merge our minds. It’s… strange, and wonderful, and everything I hoped for.”

Red grins. “That’s great, Satori! I’m really happy for you both.”

Satori gives him a long hug too, then turns back to Blue and straightens her dress. “I am eager to return to her, but first… are you ready to become the first dark teleporter in history?”

The first dark human, of course. They tested all sorts of psychic techniques on Dark pokemon before Satori built up to using Miracle Eye on her sister, and as far as they could tell nothing caused harm that didn’t intend to; the dark pokemon didn’t even seem to experience discomfort at losing their “darkness,” and though they do regain it swiftly after teleportation, mergers can last for minutes at a time before the psychic pokemon can’t maintain it anymore.

Besides the spirit of scientific curiosity, they also want to make sure they have as many answers ready for their press conference as possible. While dark people would likely have mixed feelings about the loss of immunity from psychic mergers, Red smiles every time he thinks of how life-changing teleportation would be for them. It’s nice to make discoveries that will unambiguously help people again, for a change… Though it required them to code Miracle Eye as a non-attack, a loophole in the programming allowed by psychic pokemon being unable to attack dark humans mentally in any case… until now, at least. He’s not even sure how to report the loophole given the lack of context, but he worked with Satori to write up the report, which would be sent as soon as the media interview starts.

It takes them just a few minutes for them to go outside so Blue can set up his teleportation point, then command Tops to use Miracle Eye on him, then rerun the training programs of himself as the kadabra’s trainer. Red merges with Tops as he reappears, and can feel the pokemon’s confusion as he looks at Blue, who he now recognizes visually and has a memory of a merger with…

“Wait,” Red says, holding a hand up, and Blue stops himself from commanding the Miracle Eye. Instead they all watch and wait, and just as Blue is about to speak again, Red feels the kadabra twist his perspective, a sort of shoving motion using limbs Red can’t quite feel, and suddenly another mind appears in the room.

Though part of him is terribly curious to know what Blue’s mind feels like, Red quickly tightens his senses until all he can sense is the vague cluster of thoughts and feelings. “He did it!”

“On his own?” Blue frowns. “That doesn’t seem good.”

“It’s natural,” Satori says. “Having the sort of bond the training programs create would make it hard for any psychic not to desire a merger when possible.”

Like she felt for her sister. But Blue is still frowning. “But I’m vulnerable as long as he does it, right? It’s not just from him.”

“Correct. Any psychic will be able to detect and attack you.”

“Will he still have protection against ghost attacks?” Red asks.

“I don’t… believe… that should be affected?” Satori shrugs. “Perhaps Jason will have a better sense for this, once he learns of it.”

“Still, not sure how I feel about this.” Blue glances at Tops. “Is he still doing it?”

“Yes,” Red and Satori say together.

“You guys aren’t reading my thoughts, right?”

“No,” Red says, while Satori shakes her head. “Do you want to withdraw him?”

Blue looks oddly hesitant, and Red realizes that despite Blue’s initial excitement at being able to teleport, he must have underestimated how used to having his psychic immunity he’s been.

Satori steps forward and lightly touches Blue’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid. You are no more vulnerable than anyone else in the world, including your grandfather, who lived his whole life, and achieved all that he did, without your darkness.”

Blue takes a breath and nods. “Right. There might be situations where I want to summon Tops and not lose it, though.”

“We’ll have to see how strong this impulse is in him,” Red says. “Whether he can be trained out of it. Want to hold off until we do that?”

“No, no. I’m okay.” He smiles at Satori, and she returns it before stepping back. “Alright, let’s do this.”

It’s not dramatic at all; he just puts his hand on Tops, says “Teleport,” and disappears.

Red positioned himself so he could see the arrival zone without turning, and lets out a woop as Blue and Tops reappear. A knot of tension releases in Red’s stomach as some inexplicit part of him, convinced that Blue was going to disappear forever or reappear a hundred years older or something, relaxes.

Blue himself drops onto his rear and hangs his head over his knees, and Red feels a spike of alarm that quickly fades as Blue lets out a rush of air and says in a small voice, “Holy fuck am I glad that worked.”

“Congratulations, Blue,” Satori says. “Also, your darkness has returned.”

“Really? Sweet.”

Red watches as Tops looks around before noticing his trainer. “Aaand it’s gone again.”

Blue falls onto his back. “Okay, we’ll deal with that tomorrow. For now, let’s just focus on what comes next.”

“Yes, the significance of this on society will need to be evaluated most thoroughly—”

“Nah, not that. I mean, not yet, I’ll let the community talk that to death before I wade in.” Blue grins and sits up. “I’m talking about something more fun.”

“Ah.” She looks between them, brow raised. “Your battle with Koga, then?”

“No,” Red says with a grin of his own. “Buying as many abra and natu as we can afford.”

---

The stands around the arena are full enough that it’s hard to find a seat, but even with his newfound appreciation for competitive battling Red still doesn’t see much reason for being up close to the battles. The screens often provide clearer view of the action than a direct line of sight would, and even let you see things from the trainers’ perspectives, which Red finds particularly immersive.

He and the rest of Blue’s friends shuffle along the rows together until they find a space big enough for all of them, then Red plops down at the end of one beside Maria. Red feels a mental prod to give her an encouraging smile for reasons he’s not sure he fully understands, and she returns it looking faintly grateful, so he supposes his unpartitioned self knows something he doesn’t and lets the thought go with long practice.

Koga walks out into the arena first, and the gym members among the audience rise as one, then bow, which cues the rest of the spectators to do the same. Red cranes his head up to watch as Blue enters the arena a moment later, and Koga takes a moment to bow to both sides of the audience before bowing to Blue, who does the same. Once the gym members sit, Red and the rest of the guests do the same, and then the pre-battle speeches begin.

“Been waiting for this,” someone in the row behind Red mutters, and Red ignores the urge to turn and shush them.

“We are all tools,” Leader Koga says. “Tools for survival, tools for progress, tools for happiness, even. But tools nonetheless. So I believed, once, and so some part of me still believes, despite wanting something more for myself. For my daughter. For my region. And for all mankind.

“But if we must be tools, we must remember we are also our own maker, sharpener, and wielder. That is the only way we can ever become something more than what the brutal necessity of the world requires us to be, and since arriving at this gym, Blue Oak has proven himself to understand this, both as a guiding principle for himself, and an aspiration for those around him. In addition, he has shown us all his vision for another path… knowing that we must decide whether we wish to take it.

“Now the time has come to see what we’ve taught him in return. Blue Oak, what is your Challenge?”

“I challenge for Mastery.”

“Fuchsia Gym accepts. Our battle will be six against six, to the faint.”

Red thinks back to the battle maps Blue was studying, picturing the nodes that represented the most likely paths to victory for Koga; haunter, golbat, and venomoth seem the most likely, but he’s also likely to include at least one Dark pokemon, and they can’t guess which, but the heuristic that makes the most sense is fast versus bulky. Since kadabra are too frail to take hits, particularly physical ones, Koga’s best bet is to hit first or take at least one hit and hit back.

Koga’s problem is that kadabra hit hard in exchange for their frailty. It’s the quintessential glass dragon; even otherwise tough Poison pokemon like muk can be taken down in one hit if the kadabra is powerful enough, and Blue’s is one of the strongest on record. If he can’t take advantage of Miracle Eye’s setup, it’s too big a risk.

Koga’s other problem is that Kadabra are fast. Drapion are too, but kadabra still has them beat, and while something like a crobat could outspeed it, they’re too powerful for a 5th badge challenge, and golbat wouldn’t be enough.

One potential solution is the indirect, and obvious, route: poison…

“Go, Weezing!”

“Go, Pals!”

“Sal!” A shimmering Light Screen appears between the pokemon, though it does nothing to stop the toxic spikes that Koga’s weezing suddenly spits out. It also doesn’t stop the electricity that snaps through the air in the weezing’s direction as Blue follows up with a “Bat!”

“Toxic Spikes!” Koga yells again, and Red grins as the poisonous spikes on Blue’s side of the arena grow more dense. As he predicted, Koga’s hoping to poison Tops badly enough that it won’t be able to Recover past the building toxicity. What he could only have guessed is that it’s a kadabra whose recovery powers are strong enough that it has the rare ability to passively negate any chip damage, including poison.

It was worth a try, but the bet might cost him a pokemon. Only two rounds and Blue is already ahead, even if others may not recognize why.

“Bat!”

“Flamethrower!”

The weezing tanks the second Thunderbolt, clearly trained for toughness, but Blue’s magneton struggles against the stream of fire despite the attack only partially penetrating its Light Screen. Red judges Pals can get off one more attack before it gets taken down, but if the Weezing can survive another Thunderbolt…

“Return! Go, Ivysaur!”

Looks like Koga isn’t willing to take the risk, though Red wonders what an Ivysaur is supposed to do against a magneton. They hadn’t expected him to use one in most of their projections, and Red immediately feels models of the match falling away, leaving the possible worlds they’re in more narrowed…

Leech Seed and Synthesis.

The thought seems to come without him even thinking about it, and sure enough a moment later the seeds are flying out to cover Pals as the ivysaur takes the thunderbolt about as well as the weezing did, then starts to visibly heal itself of the damage even as the vines start to stretch around the magneton.

“Return!” Blue shouts. “Go, Nin!”

The golbat appears above the toxic spikes, and Red leans forward. Now they’d find out if Koga brought a toxtricity… a risky move given it would just be another easy target for Tops and stacks ineffectiveness and vulnerability to any Ground types…

Instead Koga replaces his ivysaur with a Galarian slowbro, which shrugs off the free hit Nin had already been commanded to give before Blue’s followup whistle brings it back to be replaced by Aegis.

Stealth Rock, Flamethrower, Rapid Spin?

There’s a clear sense of uncertainty attached to that last thought, and Red realizes what’s happening. His partitioned self is thinking ahead, less distracted by what’s happening in front of him, and able to predict—

“Ras!”

“Flamethrower!”

“Sar!”

And just like that the first pokemon is down, having accomplished little beyond setting out the Stealth Rock trap and clearing the toxic spikes. Red knows from their preplanning that this is all within Blue’s path to victory; his forretress didn’t even need to Rapid Spin, but Blue did it to make Koga think he’s concerned about avoiding the spikes.

The audience doesn’t know that, however, and there’s a tangible increase in tension as Blue appears to shift to the backfoot. He sends Rive out to deal with the slowbro—

—swap to Ivysaur, Flamethrower—

And so it goes, Koga’s misplay re-doubling the crowd’s excitement. Red has to pull his senses in around himself, and he notes Maria shifting beside him.

“Is it always like this?” she murmurs.

“Dunno,” he whispers back, cognizant of the potential retaliation he might get from the person he hushed. “First time as a real psychic.” It’s impressive that she’s picked up on anything, and a testament to Jason’s tutelage. Red’s attention shifts back to the battle as Koga orders a Mega Drain, which Blue swaps Nin back in to take on, which causes Koga to return his slowbro, which brings back Blue’s magneton…

Red can see the threads of potential futures collapsing as it becomes clear who has what, and both trainers are able to judge their swaps to only take resisted damage, which will nevertheless add up in Koga’s favor if Blue can’t manage to take out that slowbro. But if he risks using Rive to do it, he might not be strong enough after to actually check whatever’s waiting in the wings.

Blue’s golbat checks the ivysaur, which checks his rhydon and magneton, which means…

Pals tanks the psychic attack and re-establishes the Light Screen, and then—

Soul.

“Go, Soul!’

Blue’s arcanine brings a cheer from part of the crowd, who no doubt still remembers the part it played in his victory in Celadon. Its roar clearly intimidates the slowbro, and combined with the lightscreen none of Koga’s attacks hit quite as hard as they normally would.

What follows is a brutal exchange that leaves the combatants covered in burns and sagging from poison, until both are returned together, and then it’s 2-1, and Koga brings his weezing back out to reset the toxic spikes.

Rive, meanwhile, starts chucking stones at it, which miss, giving Koga the time to swap his ivysaur back in, which returns Nin, which brings out—

The Alolan muk shimmers like an oil slick, rainbow highlights playing over its sludge-formed body as it rushes forward to meet the golbat.

“Return!”

Trap, it will have Giga Drain

“Go, Pals!”

The prediction saves Blue’s rhydon, but magneton is already weak, and even the resisted attack visibly takes something out of it. A thunder wave is its last gasp, and then it’s taken down, bringing the score 3-1.

The audience is stirring and murmuring again, starting to believe they might just witness the end of Blue’s win streak.

And Red just smiles, because none of it matters until Tops comes out. Which should happen right about…

“Go, Tops!”

The arena goes silent, confusion and shock disorienting Red for a moment before he pulls his senses back into himself again, fingers gripping his armrests as the kadabra appears on the spike-littered ground.

This is it.

Koga doesn’t waste the lesson he learned from Janine, and sends his pokemon convulsing forward with a “Crunch!” as Blue yells “Eam!”

Without the paralysis, things might have gone different. But the muk is still struggling against the Magneton’s shock, and so is only halfway across the arena when Blue says, “Pa.”

The muk’s whole body vibrates, goo flaring out and then contracting, and the battle is done before the audience even understands what happened.

Koga withdraws his muk rather than risk it being killed by another hit, and sends out a haunter.

Many in the audience visibly flinch and look away, but Red’s gaze just stays fixed on Blue’s side of the arena, where he simply repeats, “Pa.”

And the haunter goes down, just a bit too slow to get its own attack off, followed by a venomoth that faces the same fate, and that’s the match. What would follow is a single syllable, two more times, and the sweep would be complete, unless the kadabra goes down to its poisoning… which it’s showing no signs of being affected by. Something Koga no doubt would be noticing, now.

So instead of sending his last two pokemon out to be instantly felled, Koga simply lowers his hands after withdrawing his venomoth, and smiles as he bows. “Well fought, Challenger. I concede.”

The audience is still silent, still grappling with what they saw, as Blue withdraws his pokemon and bows. “And you, Leader.”

“Wait,” the person behind Red says. “What the f—”

“Shhh!”

“You’ve not just earned your badge, but your place in history by redefining what is possible. Thanks to your gracious decision to share your discovery of a way for psychic attacks to affect Dark pokemon before our match, I did my best to prepare a fifth badge challenge that still might win against such a unique strength, and still failed. To luck, some might say… but you prepared the stage to create that opportunity, and it’s more than fair given what would have happened if I hadn’t known what to expect. Of the many changes in the days ahead, the world will have to prepare, now, not just for dark trainers who can use psychic pokemon more skillfully, but also psychic pokemon who can pose some threat to dark ones.”

“Thank you, Leader. It was Satori Komeiji and Red Verres who took my idea and turned it into reality, and they were gracious enough to hold their press conference after my challenge. The world will have plenty of questions, but I’ll leave answering them to those most equipped to.”

Many in the audience around him have turned to stare, and Red manages to withstand the attention until some of the cameras start displaying his face. He catches himself raising his hand to lower the brim of his hat…

No, we deserve this recognition.

…and instead tips it up, smiling as he lets himself lean into the feelings of excitement he’s felt around the discovery.

“I see that you’ve inspired more than the new culture in this gym, then, but also your friends. What will you do now?”

“I’ve thought long and hard about what my team and I have accomplished at this gym,” Blue says. “And while many of my friends have decided to stay and continue our work, I’ve decided to return to Saffron and claim its badge as well now that Sabrina has invited me to return for my Challenge.”

As always, Red wonders how often claims like that are cleared ahead of time with whoever is being referenced. The wording itself, even, implies things that are definitely intentional on Blue’s end, but that Sabrina might object to… unless she has a good enough relationship with Blue to not find it worth quibbling over in public. Which, from what Red has seen, is probably true.

His heartbeat is still higher than normal, the ambient energy of the crowd and atmosphere adding an expectation that anything can happen, even with the battle over. Or at least, the physical battle. Red still doesn’t know how much exactly is planned out and how much is improvised; Blue said it was always a bit of both, though denied having ever coordinated with a Leader other than Erika. But the audience doesn’t know even that much, and many are leaning forward with bated breath.

“And will you return, once you’ve claimed her badge?”

“I will, and even before. With this discovery, we also paved the way for Dark humans like myself to teleport.” The audience begins to murmur, but Blue’s amplified voice still cuts through the noise, and people immediately quiet. “I feel I’ve made bonds here at least as strong as those in Vermilion and Celadon, and with so many of my friends remaining to continue our work, I intend to keep a close eye on how the culture of the gym evolves.”

The implicit, ongoing challenge to Janine is obvious, but Red knows that it’s only the badge victory that makes this, in any way, not a failure… or at least, a retreat. Blue said he ended things close to ideally with Koga and Janine, but only in private; the public would see it as Janine’s win, which, even Red understands, is part of how his relationship with Janine is better than it otherwise would have been. It seems a fair trade, but if it slows his plans for group battles spreading through gyms…

“I trust that whatever direction the gym chooses to grow in, our culture will help us rise above the competition. We’ve built our strength in part on pushing the forefront of the Poison Type, and though part of our institutional knowledge is going to rapidly become obsolete, that means Poison, along with any Dark, Fighting, and of course Psychic gyms, are on the forefront of new strategies and tactics that will define the coming meta. Whatever the future holds, Fuchsia will prepare our region for it.”

The audience applauds, somehow both measured and disciplined while also showing fierce pride, but Red finds himself frowning. It’s not like wild pokemon are going to suddenly start using Miracle Eye; insofar as its discovery requires a change in strategies or tactics, it will be mostly for competitive trainers.

Red reminds himself he could be jumping to conclusions. This isn’t his field, after all, and he could be underestimating what new offensive tricks trainers would be able to utilize against wild Dark types. But if not, all this is a further reminder of why part of him feels so uncomfortable with the idea of being a competitive trainer, even if trainer battles are one of the most exciting things he’s experienced.

He’ll have to ask Blue about this. In any case, Koga and Blue have bowed to each other again, and the audience, so Red gets up, limbs still trembling with adrenaline, and starts shuffling past everyone to get out ahead of the still-stunned crowd.

He’s got a press conference to prepare for.

---

The Saffron Gym isn’t just aesthetically standard compared to places like Vermilion or Fuchsia, it’s also fairly plain, as utilitarian as Pewter without even the thematically appropriate stone structures. But the conference and press rooms are far fancier than any Red has been in, and as soon as he enters he’s glad Blue convinced him to dress up for this.

Satori is already waiting inside, and smiles as he joins her on the raised platform at the front of the room. “You look good.”

“Thanks,” Red says, and wipes his sweaty palms in his pockets as he looks out over the cameras pointed at them. Not recording yet, he hopes. “Is that your sister?” He can see the resemblance, though she has green hair instead of violet.

“Yes.” Satori waves, and the other girl cheerfully waves back. “She made you and Blue a gift.”

“Oh.” Some of Red’s nervousness fades at the warmth in his chest. “That’s very nice of her, but she didn’t have to—”

Satori turns to him, gaze level above her smile. “It was her quest as well, Red. She pursued it in her own way, and in far less valued a manner than my own studies.” She turns back to her sister and sighs. “Now we both have more time for other things.”

Red slowly nods, watching his friend and taking in her continued transformation from the solemn girl he’s known ever since he arrived at Saffron. It’s been a week, and yet she’s continued to exude the relaxed, happy energy each time he’s seen her… which hasn’t been as much as before. It’s understandable that she spend less time in Saffron now that she’s completed the main goal of her studies, particularly if she’s using the extra time to enjoy the fruits of her labor, but Red’s curious if it will end at some point, or if she’ll just keep drifting away until she finds something else more meaningful to do with her life.

That said, even after she got what she wanted out of Miracle Eye, she continued exploring its limits with enthusiasm, if not as frequently as before. In this case that just meant she’s actually been getting enough sleep.

More than he has, at least. After they told Sabrina about Miracle Eye yesterday to prepare her for the press conference, the Gym Leader entered what Red could only describe as a manic mode, trying to learn it herself since she could see psychic colors. Red did his best to help her, but she’s nearly as good as he is at mirroring mental states now, and mostly joins in the practice to be a sounding board and share in the discovery process, frustrating as it can sometimes be.

Red enjoys being treated as an equal by Sabrina. There’s something nostalgic in the way it reminds him of being a research assistant at Pallet Lab, where he was obviously there mostly to learn and do simple tasks, but where Dr. Madi and others would talk to him about their ideas and listen to his thoughts on them. He’s more aware now of how precious and unique a position he’s been in, both then and now.

But after that day when he believes he tripped over her secret, he’s been more and more restrictive with his partitions around Sabrina. He thought about having a conversation with her about meta-honesty, but realized that, of all people, he can’t do it with her in a way that doesn’t imply he knows, or thinks he knows, she has a secret she’s been keeping, and from there it wouldn’t be too hard for her to guess which. Not after all the ways they’ve already been honest with each other, and not unless there’s some broader context that lets him do it in a way that doesn’t single her out.

Of course, he did post his meta-honesty rules online, as did most people who were at their meeting. But he can’t exactly ask her if she’s read it without the same problem, and if she has, she’s given no indication.

He puts all that out of his mind as she enters the room, dressed in her usual public red and black finery. Satori is dressed in more formal psychic robes, and Red adjusts his lab coat to make sure it’s even. Blue insisted he start crafting his professional public image, but allowed that it needn’t be fancy, so Red went with the standard white coat over his usual black undershirt. Leaf insisted he add a splash of red, both for the obvious association and to build on the black-white-red trend of his usual outfit, so he bought a red vest, then a black one and a red shirt, then spent an hour debating with himself over which to wear until he gave up and called his mom, who advised him to go with black shirt with red vest.

Everyone vetoed his hat.

The leader raises a hand to those assembled as she makes her way onto the stage. “Hello Red, Satori. Are you ready?”

“Yes, Leader.”

“I think so.” He can see she’s wearing makeup to cover her lack of sleep, and almost asks how her night was before thinking better of it. “I think I’m getting used to these.”

Sabrina smiles and turns to survey the room. “I did my best to keep things manageable.” The crowd is fairly small, mostly some reporters and a few of the higher ranked gym members. Satori’s sister and parents are there, as are Red’s friends and mom, along with Professors Oak and Elm.

As none of the island’s regions have a Dark gym, Elite Karen is also present, presumably to say something about the effects of the discovery on her signature type, or just ask questions. He’s not sure what sort of emotions he’d expect her to be having, but she seems very relaxed, leaning against one of the walls beside Professor Elm’s lanky figure and teasing him about his new glasses.

Red returns his friends’ encouraging waves and thumbs up as they see him look over, and is tempted to go speak with them a little, but Sabrina has already stepped up to the podium, and so Red goes to stand beside Satori. After a nod to them both, the Leader turns forward.

It’s only then that Red realizes he doesn’t see someone.

“Where’s Rowan?” he murmurs.

“I don’t see him either,” Satori whispers back. “Is he sick?”

“Maybe.” The gym’s oldest psychic student has been nearly as absent as Satori lately, but Red just assumed he was being his usual reclusive self. Missing something like this, however, is even more unusual.

Lights start to blink on from the cameras set at various angles, and once they all do Sabrina places her hands on either side of the podium. “When I became Leader of Saffron Gym, I had one objective: to ensure the city’s defense and trainer culture were in capable hands. I became a Leader because I felt a duty, and a proud one. But a part of me also wanted more; in my heart, I’ve always been fascinated by the study of psychic phenomena, and that curiosity burned within me throughout my journey. Once I had the responsibility of Saffron in my hands, I knew I couldn’t devote myself entirely to that curiosity… but I also knew there would be others like me out there, Gifted from all schools and philosophies who would want to collaborate and grow their knowledge. So I began a school, and invited the most talented and dedicated to come learn from each other, and teach psychics throughout our region.”

Sabrina gestures to the crowd, and a few of the cameras swivel to pick Daniel, Jason, and Tatsumaki out of it. “Along with the natural collaboration of those who came to train at our gym, Saffron has become one of the leading hubs for original psychic research in the world… and while I expected most of our discoveries to be esoteric to our craft, I knew that eventually the right combination of talent would gather to change the world.”

Sabrina’s smile is warm, and it makes her look younger. “We watched in shock as Blue Oak used the new ‘Miracle Eye’ to secure his victory over Leader Koga… and by ‘we,’ I am in fact including myself. While my students and I often collaborate on projects, my duties frequently keep me busy, particularly lately. I can claim no credit for this latest discovery, and am happy to cede the spotlight to those who made it.”

Red takes a breath and steps forward with Satori to answer the flurry of questions that come. Most are predictable, and the two of them confirm that this does mean dark humans can have their minds read and teleport. Red recites the assuredly incomplete list of pokemon they’re currently aware of that can learn Miracle Eye and explains the concept of psychic colors, and how some pokemon can see them, while Satori describes the subtle differences between psychic and ghost senses.

Most questions come from the experts in the room, while a few are by the (surprisingly well-informed) reporters. Whenever one asks something related to social or political consequences, however, Sabrina steps in to simply say that she plans to hold a separate press conference on that once she’s had the chance to confer with various regional bodies.

The third time this happens Elite Karen snaps, “What are you implying, that they should have kept this secret?” The reporter looks abashed, and the questions stay on the scientific aspects going forward, but some part of Red feels uncomfortable, and he wishes he could reassure people… but the truth is, there probably are dark people out there with secrets they don’t want revealed, and they might well be pressured to submit to mind reading in the months ahead, now that they can be. It still would have been wrong to conceal a secret this big, of course, but Red still finds his thoughts distracted…

“Okay, that’s enough for now,” Sabrina says an hour after the questioning begins. “I trust the interested parties can meet in their own time and disseminate information as they see fit. Before we end, however, Satori had one last thing she wanted to share.”

The young woman steps forward again, and takes a breath. Her gaze finds her sister, and she smiles before turning back to the cameras. “I have lived my whole life in Kanto, and love many things about our culture, and that of our sister regions along the islands. Our history, our music, our food, our spirit. But one thing I have never been able to love is our still-lingering superstitions around those of us who are a little different.

“My sister was born of another mother, but we are both of one soul. I had no doubt of this from a young age, even when my powers began to manifest and I couldn’t sense her thoughts or feelings. I knew she had them, the same way a blind man can know their brother by the shape of his face. And yet I had a stark reminder of how this difference between us, so inconsequential in so many ways, led to such differences in the way we were treated by society.

“As soon as I was known to be ‘gifted,’ I felt admiration and deference from those around me. As soon as she was known to be ‘dark,’ she suffered suspicion and aloofness. A pattern I’ve seen, to some degree, repeated throughout Indigo and beyond.”

Satori’s voice shakes a little, but she takes another breath and sweeps the cameras with her gaze. “I have finally sensed her mind. I have felt her emotions. And I tell you now what I have known all along, and what the rest of society must surely learn: she is no different from any other person. None of those born dark are. And it’s up to each of us to find any part of our systems, our culture, and our own souls that might treat them as lesser in any way, and let those beliefs melt away to the past where they belong.”

There’s a pause as she lets her breath out, then simply says, “Thank you,” and steps back, freezing as many in the room burst into applause, Red included. His gaze finds Blue, whose expression is still vulnerable and uncertain, and then Sabrina, who for reasons he can’t understand, mirrors his friend’s.

“Sabrina seems tired.”

Red glances at Rei, who sits casually in the carseat beside him with her gaze out the window, then looks back at his notebook and finishes writing out his thought before closing it with a sigh and a nod. “I haven’t seen her this exhausted since after the Hoenn incident.”

He’s still not sure what his relationship with Sabrina’s ex-student is these days. “Co-conspirator” seems the best one that fits; they’re not exactly friends, not exactly peers, and not exactly coworkers, but once in a while Giovanni or Sabrina want something done that requires a psychic, and both seem happy to offer their employee/student to the other if the job requires more than one, or if the other is busy. It’s often a great learning opportunity, and many of the tasks involve putting Red in new situations, facing new challenges for his growing abilities. He’s helped test young psychics in Viridian to see if they had the Gift and get a sense of their abilities, and once even helped diagnose someone who was hit with a mental attack. It felt strange handing someone the same form Psychic Narud gave him a year ago.

Today they’re interviewing psychics who have had The Dream.

It’s hard not to think of the words in capital letters after they’ve shown up in the media that way for weeks, and some part of Red insists this is totally normal given how momentous it all is.

He barely paid attention to it all until it started hitting entire cities, and then Agatha’s interview made it impossible to ignore as the “new central narrative of their time,” to quote some pundit or the other… and if he’s being honest, he’s getting a little sick of living through so many of those, even if this one is relevant to his interests.

Maybe he just wants some breathing room before the next massive and/or mysterious potential calamity rears its head.

Last week was the anniversary of the start of his journey, and the three of them all went back to Pallet to have a small but warm celebration with his mom, Daisy, and the Professor… as well as a surprise visit from Leaf’s mother and grandfather, who were fun to finally meet. Once he (more or less) finished peppering them with questions and answered a number of theirs (it was mildly shocking, despite everything, to hear that both Professors had read not just his papers but the loose collection of writing that passed for his blog), the conversation turned to what’s been going on in Kanto and throughout the island chain, which the Junipers of course followed on two different levels.

Eventually Leaf asked if it’s always been like this and she only just started noticing once she started her journey, and Daisy complained that her journey only had one world-changing discovery during it, while Professor Oak admitted that his own coincided with a fair few, but not so close together, which Cedric agreed with. Leaf’s mother said hers had basically none, which in retrospect she’s rather happy about.

None of course were anything like the Hoenn incident. It’s hard to know how much of what’s happened since can be truly traced back to it, and whether the incident itself was the result of some other series of events set in motion long ago, but Red wonders how much of his life is going to end up shaped by it.

“It set her back a lot,” Red says. “And then there was the ditto thing.”

“So you think it’s just been catch-up?” Rei says.

“She’s finally finished her Challenger backlog.” Red remembers mentioning her shift in focus to Blue a few weeks ago, who just smiled and implied it was part of some deal he’d struck with her. “It’s kept her busy on top of everything else.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

He turns to see her eyes on him now, and lowers his shields enough for a tentative probe that senses her curiosity, layered over a deep worry. “I don’t think she’s had it yet, if that’s what you mean. Not unless she’s sleeping in other cities, or she got it without the rest of us.”

“She could have been one of the initial ones, when it was just going to powerful psychics.”

Red smiles. “You don’t really believe that.”

“Believe what?”

“That it was just going to ‘powerful’ psychics at first, because you consider yourself one and you didn’t get it either.”

Rei smiles back in acknowledgement. “The only alternative that makes sense is fame, and yet we’re supposed to believe one of the most famous psychics in Kanto didn’t get it?”

“Why would she lie?”

“To you, you mean?”

“To anyone, at this point.” Red doesn’t ask why she’s so curious, given that her days of obsessing over Sabrina are supposed to be behind her; he’s been curious too.

“What if she got a different dream than everyone else?”

“Has that happened to anyone?”

“Would we know if it had?”

“Wild speculation, then.”

“If you have a better hypothesis…”

The car slows to a stop, and they step out in front of a small house with a white picket fence and a well kept lawn. Cerulean South is just as Red remembers it, mostly suburbs that stretch out in every direction, and he feels a quick squeeze in his chest as he sees the road he, Blue and Leaf traveled down to the bike store where they met Aiko.

But just a quick one, and then he’s breathing again as they walk up to the house and ring the bell.

It takes a minute for the young man to answer, and when he does it’s with a furtive look through the chain link lock before he opens it more fully.

“Hello,” Rei says. She always does the talking at first; she’s older and looks more professional, which makes sense to older folk, and she’s also not famous, which means those people who know Red by sight (mostly younger psychics) are less likely to ask him questions about himself if he’s not the one who starts talking. Instead he just focuses on his notebook unless he has a question to ask. “Mr. Garcia? I’m Rei, we spoke on the phone.”

“Yes, come in, please…”

They enter the man’s home and sit on his couch. Red accepts tea, mostly because it seems like the sort of thing that would calm their host’s obvious nerves. His features are drawn, his gaze constantly either a million miles away or darting nervously around, and he twitches occasionally, head tilting in an almost desperate attempt to hear something, or convince himself he can’t hear anything.

Red’s seen it all before, but not this bad. The Dream can often have that effect on people, but usually it’s temporary, particularly since a lot of psychics just amnesia themselves of it; there’s been a rush on lessons for that and other lessons in Saffron as laypsychics who’ve only marginally explored their powers are suddenly much more interested in ensuring it’s not used against them again.

“So,” Rei says after declining her own offer of tea. “Tell us what you hoped Leader Sabrina could do for you.”

“Well, I’m ah, not sure. I’m a sensitive, like I said, not a full psychic… I ah, wish I could just… forget, you know? If it’s possible at all… I heard it’s possible… I thought surely, she could…”

The pleading in his tone makes Red’s stomach clench. He still remembers what Narud said about one psychic giving another amnesia; like surgery done with fingers, or similar. Whatever Mr. Garcia heard, it’s clearly not as deterring… or maybe his experience is just that bad.

“It’s possible,” Rei says, tone neither flat nor sympathetic, merely delivering logistical information. Red asked her once, way back when they were trying to crack “perfect lying” together, why she doesn’t try being more friendly, and she gave him an assessing look and said that she forgets how young he is sometimes, and he decided not to ask for clarification until he could figure out whether he said something insulting or if she did. “But it would be a risky procedure that most psychics would not wish to attempt, even skilled ones. We will, however, ensure Sabrina knows of your suffering.”

“Thank you.”

“Meanwhile, we would like to learn what we can about your experience in more detail.”

“Yes, yes of course. Well, to start it’s been… ah, like I said, the first dream, in Goldenrod… it was bad, but not, you know. Wrecked my concentration for the rest of the week, but the important business was already done… drank a bit more after the meetings to help me sleep, and by the time I came home, it was… easier. To put it behind me.”

Garcia swallows, then drinks some tea, swallows again. “The second time was like… it was… it’s like, because I tried so hard to forget before, I got punished. And now it’s etched in there.” He taps his temple. “To make sure I don’t, this time.”

“But the dream itself was the same?” Rei asks as Red makes a note to point out whether recognizing that a whole city got it clearly points to bad luck rather than any evidence of fault. “Please think over your answer, and don’t hesitate to voice uncertainty; you’re the only person we know of so far who has experienced it twice, and even the slightest difference may be useful to us.”

“It… I’m sorry, I’ll take a moment…” He closes his eyes, mouth set in a firm frown as Red finishes making another note about how they should put out a general call for psychics to record themselves while sleeping in case they talk in their sleep during the dream.

As the silence stretches out, Red can’t help but send out a tentative, instinctual psychic feeler that picks up on something like… pain.

Red almost pulls back, but Garcia doesn’t shift to any of the exercises he mentioned knowing to reduce unwanted psychic contact, so he feels the way Garcia is struggling against strongly aversive thoughts.

Not painful the way an embarrassing memory or recollection of grief is painful… more the pain of dread, of a potential hopelessness that’s only held at bay by a lack of close examination. Once he understands it, Red quickly pulls his thoughts away as Garcia starts to speak again. “I think so, it’s… hard to tell, but the second time was… more forceful. It was like… things were clearer, but… maybe that’s just because I—”

“Remember, no filter, no second guessing. Just share whatever notions come up. Yes or no: was it more forceful?”

“Y-yes.”

“Was it more desperate?”

“Y…no. I’m not—” He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “If I have to choose, no. Not more desperate. I’m not sure how that fits with it being more forceful, but…”

“It’s alright. Remember, it doesn’t have to make sense.”

“Did it feel like the same projector?” Red asks, writing the question out as he says it. “I know that’s hard to tell from just two samples, but again as best you can tell—”

“Yes, same projector. Their thoughts were… distinct. Strong. It really was like hearing words, not just getting ideas and impressions. I’m more sure than I would be with just anyone.”

Red frowns as he makes a quick note, then flips to another page and crosses out one of his hypotheses before returning to his current one. “And… was the order of the dream the same? Like did it all happen in the same sequence of words, impressions, feelings, whatever?”

“Oh. No?” Garcia considers another moment, then shakes his head. “N-no. It was subtle, and… some things stayed in the same order, but I have… two versions in my head, for the sequence of both.”

“But nothing was added to the second one, or obviously missing?”

“No.”

He’s getting more confident, which is heartening to see, but thinking about the dream does seem to still cause discomfort. Rei probably sensed it too, one way or the other, because she gives him a sympathetic smile before saying, “We have one last request, if you’re feeling willing. We’d like to experience this dream ourselves as best we can, despite not having had it.”

Garcia understands immediately, knuckles turning white as he clenches his hands around each other. “Oh… I…”

“Preferably twice each, so that Red and I are not merged at once and influencing each other’s impressions.”

“I… I think I…”

Red feels a tightening in his chest as the man’s stutter gets worse, and with rising alarm realizes the older man is on the verge of tears. “Hey, uh, I think it’s okay actually. From what you’ve described it doesn’t seem like it was different enough to be really necessary.”

Garcia’s whole body sags, and he takes a deep breath. “A-alright, then.”

Rei’s irritation is only evident mentally, but all she says is, “I believe that’s all, then. Thank you for your time.”

“One more thing,” Red quickly adds. “Uh, I mean I’m not claiming to know anything here that you don’t, but if you’re thinking that any of this is, like, a punishment or something…” Red remembers, suddenly, the young man in Vermilion City during the storm, who felt Zapdos’s pressure as divine punishment for something he was guilty about and grieving over. “Since entire cities got it both times you did, I think it’s probably just bad luck?”

“Luck,” Garcia sighs. “Right.” He sounds… tired, rather than relieved.

Before Red can decide to add something else or not Rei gets to her feet, and he quickly finishes his tea before joining her while Garcia pushes himself up as well, seeming a little surprised that it’s actually over so quickly. After unlocking the door he pauses and turns to them, seeming to build up his courage. “You will… tell Sabrina? Or… others, about my…”

“Yes, of course.”

“Th-thank you. I’ve been getting… desperate, lately. Had th-thoughts of… of training a drowzee, to… to—”

A shot of alarm races through Red as he realizes what’s being confessed, thoughts scrambling for something to keep the man from admitting he’s thinking of breaking a renegade law, until to his relief Rei puts a hand on Garcia’s shoulder, gently squeezing. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Sir. We’ll do our best to figure something else out.”

It’s the most compassionate thing Red’s ever seen her do, and the man looks ready to cry again as he bobs his head, then whispers, “Thank you.”

Rei gives his shoulder a light pat before pulling her arm back, and he opens the door for them. Red gives one last small wave, and then they step out of the house and start walking in a random direction together, simply seeking privacy to discuss what they learned before each teleports back to their respective cities.

“Thoughts?” Rei asks after a minute.

“I’m becoming more and more convinced Agatha was right with her first guess,” Red says. “When I look at the evidence, the best explanation that fits is that an individual is doing all this.”

“Go on.”

Red reviews his notes, ticking each point off on a finger. “It’s never repeated in a city, and it’s never hit the same place twice once it stopped targeting individuals. Why do that? The second dream wasn’t exactly like the first in minor details but not major ones—”

“Allegedly.”

He frowns at her. “Come on, in that state could we really have trusted what he re-experienced?”

“Perhaps not, but it still might have been valuable.”

Red thinks through all the previous times he experienced the memories of someone’s dream through merger and shrugs. “I can’t imagine how, given the way it all fades into a background blur of impressions for me anyway.” Which, after seeing Mr. Garcia, he suddenly feels thankful for. He doesn’t feel like he particularly needs another traumatic experience in his life right now, curious as he is to know what having the Dream himself would be like.

“Mm. Well, you’re right that trauma responses are hard to predict. I’m sorry, I interrupted you as you were saying…”

Red checks his notes again. “Right, there’s also the ramp up from individuals. It’s like someone hoped that just telling some important people would be enough, at first.”

“There’s nothing stopping a hypothetical spirit or god from being mistaken about something, or poor at planning.”

“Sure, but what actual value does that explanation add, then? It’s meant to answer the question of how someone can know what the dream insists is true, and how they can transmit it like this. But if it seems like it’s making errors similar to what a human would anyway, then we shouldn’t be as impressed. Whatever sent the dreams either didn’t realize they would be hitting the same person twice in Cerulean, or they didn’t care, or they didn’t have the ability not to and still cover the city.”

“Your focus is on the wrong part of the explanation. There’s no actual reason why a non-human entity should be expected to not fall into any of those categories.” Rei shrugs. “Your models implicitly assume any non-human entity is infinitely more benevolent or capable along some dimension, rather than more capable along one or two, and that seems irrational to me.”

Red scratches his neck as he tries to fit the concept of it into his brain. It feels wrong somehow, but he can’t really think of why, and has to admit it might just be expectation. “Alright, yeah, that might be fair. I still say it’s more likely to be a human with a uniquely powerful projection though.”

“Which you believe they’re hiding because it would mark their circumstances more similar to yours.”

Red shrugs, not bothering to deny it. It’s hard not to sympathize with someone who has a unique psychic talent that others might fear, even if they weren’t putting themselves at risk to spread some vital truth… or rather, something they believe is a vital truth. He doesn’t know how they became aware of the Dream’s threat themselves, but it must have been convincing enough to have them risk their own anonymity, which is an extra weight on how persuasive the threat is.

“Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems far more reasonable to me that a human wouldn’t want people to know who they are than a spirit or whatever. If anything knowing it’s not a person would make the message more convincing, so if they understand anything about human psychology—”

“Which they might not.”

“—sure, which they might not, but then how did they know to target the most famous psychics first? Even putting aside the projector’s city-wide power, some people just don’t like the spotlight, which yes I personally relate to, but it’s still true.”

“Mm. Isn’t there a movie being made about you?”

“Hey, that was Blue and Leaf’s idea. I can feel uncomfortable about it and still agree it’s a good idea.”

“But surely the rational thing to do would be to become comfortable with it once you recognize it’s a good idea?”

“No, I can have different parts that each have a valuable perspective on something, and I can feel a certain way and still recognize—oh you’re messing with me aren’t you.”

“Just a little.” Rei slows to a stop and unclips a pokeball, and Red matches her. “I’m off to Viridian. Do let me know if Sabrina has anything interesting to add.”

“Same to you with Giovanni.” He wonders if she actually would, given he’s her boss rather than her teacher, but if she does he’s happy to reciprocate, assuming it’s nothing he thinks Sabrina would mind being shared. “Until next time.”

A few minutes later he’s knocking on Sabrina’s office door, then entering as she calls out to come in. The Leader does look tired, and more than a little distracted… but there’s something else, too. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s almost like she has more drive than she used to. He’d be worried she’s entering a manic phase if she wasn’t still so clearly in control of herself.

“So?” she says as he sits and accepts his second tea cup of the hour. “Is it bad?”

“Very, Sensei. I know it shouldn’t be done lightly, but if you saw him yourself I think you’d agree that he needs help.”

She sighs. “I’d rather wait at least a week to see if he starts to recover on his own, particularly if he can find a psychic therapist, but after that… I’ll see what I can do. Any new insights into the dreams themselves?”

“I can send you my notes—”

“Your takeaway is good enough for now.”

Red nods. “Nothing really meaningful. He says it’s more urgent now, but… that could just be from having had it before.”

“Of course. Well, it was worth a try—”

“Actually, Sensei, there is something else, but it’s not directly from Mr. Garcia.” She raises a brow and gestures for him to continue. “I’ve been thinking about this since Agatha’s interview, and after talking to Rei about it I’m pretty convinced that this doesn’t seem to be a supernatural source.” He quickly summarizes his points from before, then adds, “I didn’t mention this to her, but if it is a psychic with a unique ability, or a semi-unique one, like we talked about… well, would you have any guess for who it could be?”

Sabrina’s gaze shifted away from him at some point while he was talking, and she’s still looking into the distance, hands steepled on the desk. Red waits, though he does send out a psychic feeler to confirm that her shield is fully solid.

What’s unsettling Red at this point isn’t how long it’s taking to answer, but why she didn’t just lie.

She should have, if she’s protecting someone’s identity. Spending this much time thinking over her answer, however, would make it hard to believe if she said no now, even if she claimed to just have been searching her memory; she doubtless has had this thought already before he brought it up.

And she should know this, and yet she’s still seemingly paralyzed by some thought or emotion or decision.

“Sensei,” Red says after a moment of mustering his courage. “Why do you think you didn’t get the dream?” It’s the closest he can come to asking if Rei was right about Sabrina lying about it.

The Leader’s eyes flick to his, then away again, then back, and this time they hold. “I don’t know. But I suspect it’s because the one sending the dreams is… one of my ex-students.”

Even expecting it, the confirmation halts Red’s breath for a moment, then sends his pulse racing as new questions start to crowd his thoughts. “Have you… mentioned them before?”

“Yes, though I didn’t mention they had this ability. Because they didn’t, at the time. But it still seems likely to be them.”

“Who are they?”

“Not someone you would know.”

Something suddenly clicks, and Red asks, “The one who disappeared after Hoenn?”

Sabrina stares at him for a moment, then another, again too long. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t…” It takes him a moment to piece together the intuition. “You’ve been a certain way, ever since then. Half grieving, I think.” He recognized it well enough, good as she was at controlling it. “But you’re not anymore. I thought it was just because of the new mystery of the dreams, but… how do you… why do you suspect it’s them?”

“The best evidence I have is that I didn’t get the dream, and that Saffron hasn’t either.”

Red blinks. “You think they’re avoiding you? Does that mean they were never really lost?”

“It’s… hard to say. I thought we were on good terms. But given all this… how much trust could there really have been?”

Red doesn’t know what to say to that, besides, “At least they’re alive.”

“Maybe. And I could be wrong, of course. It could be a coincidence. I’ve been trying to sleep all night, just in case it’s Saffron’s turn next, but it’s hard to fall asleep when I’m anticipating what might happen if I do.” She shrugs. “I can amnesia the expectation to help me fall asleep, of course, but I want to experience it knowing what it is, wake from it with my full memories intact.”

Red tries to decide whether he should be tactful or inquisitive at the moment, but he’s still not sure what might be comforting rather than presumptuous; he doesn’t know enough about the situation, or their relationship, and asking might be digging. “Blue and I were, you know, on the outs for a while. Maybe there’s still a chance of mending bridges? Especially if you don’t know why they’re upset with you…”

“I can guess.” Sabrina smiles. “I appreciate it, Red, but the situation is rather complicated, and I’m not really in the mood to discuss it. Ask what you want to ask.”

Red smiles back, a bit self-conscious but also grateful. “Do you know what they want? Why they’re doing this?”

“If you’re asking whether I think we can trust the dream, it’s hard to tell without having the dream myself, but… yes. I think so. Whatever they learned, it was enough to make them put themself at serious risk.”

Red leans forward. “I was right then? It’s someone like me?”

For some reason that makes her laugh, brief but with a startled quality that makes it warmer. “Not like you, no. But not entirely unlike, in terms of secrets.”

“Maybe I can reach out to them, let them know what we’ve been planning!”

Again Sabrina pauses, expression sobering before she sighs. “If you can find a way to contact them, I wish you luck. But they might avoid you out of principle given that you know me. And no, I can’t tell you any more about why that is. I’m sorry, Red, I don’t mean to be mysterious, but some things are private.”

“I understand.” Mostly. “Still, if they have any other friends that you haven’t checked with recently…?”

Sabrina shakes her head. “They’ve lived a fairly isolated life. Most of their interactions with others came from their psychic abilities, which were quite powerful. Since they weren’t taught not to invade people’s privacy, they had many acquaintances that they knew quite well, but never got particularly close to any of them.”

“Sounds lonely.” Something about this description is tickling the back of Red’s mind, and after a moment he gives a wan smile. “Reminds me a bit of the story Leaf’s been writing, actually.”

“She writes fiction too?”

“Yeah, been publishing it online. I don’t know where she finds time, but it’s about a half-human psychic pokemon who’s sapient and gets raised in a lab—”

The next few moments can be measured in heartbeats, but feel eternal.

Sabrina’s eyes went wide at the words half-human psychic pokemon, wider than he’s ever seen them, wider than when he told her his secrets, and she sucked in a sharp breath at raised in a lab, mouth going slack.

It lasts just a second before her lips close, her features smooth, and her posture shifts back toward relaxed attentiveness, all so smoothly he would have missed it if he blinked.

“—that learns… about people through…” Whatever Red was going to say next has been blown out of his mind by the shock of seeing Sabrina react so strongly, and the suspicion of what she’s just done.

Red, you are the worst liar!

It’s barely even a decision, in the end.

And then…

“…through those working in the lab around it.”

“Interesting,” Sabrina says, and sips her tea. “That does sound lonely, yes.” Sabrina’s gaze is distant again, and after a moment she frowns and shifts. “I’m sorry, Red, I’ve just remembered a call I need to make. Thank you for the debrief.”

“Oh, sure.” He’s still curious about her student, but whether there’s really a call or not, he knows a dismissal when he hears one and heads to his room for a shower.

He’s just taken his shoes off when the partition drops, along with the amnesia’d memory of Sabrina’s reaction.

“Oh shit,” Red breathes as he drops onto his bed. “Holy shit. Holy fuck.”

Sabrina’s student was a lab experiment.

There are labs studying psychics, probably helping develop unusual psychic powers.

Because of course there are.

And of course Sabrina would know about them maybe she even comes from one that’s why she can see psychic colors sometimes and she amnesia’d herself mid-conversation because she was reacting too much so it must be super secret, way more secret than what they’ve already told each other, and holy fucking shit what is he going to do with this information?

Who did she suddenly remember she had to call?

What would she do if she knew Red knows?

Suspects. I don’t know anything.

Her reaction replays in his memory, and he feels something twisting in his gut. He could be wrong, but… he doesn’t think Sabrina would have reacted like that to just an unusual or interesting story idea. Maybe he’s wrong about a lot of it, maybe it’s not ongoing and just somewhere she and her friend were raised together or something. Hell, Sabrina might have helped shut it down.

But the idea of a psychic going around secretly projecting a warning instead of outing himself makes even more sense, with this explanation.

He’s halfway through taking out his journal when he realizes it might be a terrible idea to write any of this out, then remembers that there’s someone else he should be talking to and pulls out his phone.

“Hey Leaf, are you free? Yeah I’m fine, just want to talk. In person. Yeah, been a while since we hung out at the ranch, right? Exactly. Great, see you soon!”

A minute later he’s on the roof, and a few seconds after that he’s at the ranch. He looks around, then starts pacing as he waits, then summons Charmeleon and practices some battle maneuvers. After two months of fairly frequent battles with wild pokemon, his starter now stands as tall as his shoulders, tail long enough to curl around its body. It’s a little disconcerting, sometimes, to be able to meet that fierce blue gaze so easily now.

“Been a while since I could keep berries out of your reach, huh boy?” He feeds Charmeleon some poffins, other hand rubbing the base of his pokemon’s crest bone. “Not that I ever really could, with your climbing powers.”

Charmeleon gives a crooning-growl as he licks Red’s palm clean, and then there’s a distant pop as Leaf arrives nearby.

“Hey, Red!” She withdraws her abra and walks over with a worried smile and furrowed brow. “I’m assuming I interpreted that call right and this isn’t just a hang out?”

“Yeah.” It’s always good to see her, and while the circumstances don’t allow him to take much time enjoying her company, he can’t help but just smile for a moment, happy to see her and be near her. She also looks tired, and he knows that along with all her other work, she’s been helping with local incidents too. It makes him worry about her, but he knows she can take care of herself. So he sends her that mental impression, and she returns his smile.

Over the past few months they’ve had a few more moments like the one at his mom’s apartment after the tower, moments where he felt like he could say something, or should say something, about how he feels. But instead he’s just projected parts of it, careful to use his partitions to keep from sending the whole thing at once. It feels easier not to break his promise and check how she feels as long as he can be open about his own, now and then. She’s also seemed to appreciate it, so the idea of doing anything more explicit feels… scary. “Sorry, were you busy? Because—”

“I can chat for a bit,” she says as she unclips a pokeball. “Though I have to get back soon for a meeting.”

“How soon? This might be important.”

Leaf bites her lower lip. “I can probably make it there so long as I leave within about twenty minutes? I can’t really risk more, since it’s with my Fuchsia friend…”

Ah, Mom’s informant. “And you can’t really call and tell them you’ll be late, yeah… well, that should be enough for covering the basics at least. It’s about your story.”

Leaf’s hand pauses from where it’s moving from her belt to an outstretched position. It’s only for a moment, but he was watching it, and her voice is carefully controlled when she says, “Go, Raff!” and then “What about the story?”

It’s a struggle not to send his senses out, to sample her mood at least. He and Sabrina’s other students have taught Leaf what they could for completely non-psychic defenses, and she’s good at them, so a full merger might not be particularly helpful anyway if she’s actively trying to keep him out.

Still, he’s curious enough to almost try before reminding himself that he promised not to. The thought that Leaf might lie to him feels like a stone in his gut, probably all the heavier because of how many things he’s been keeping from her.

He watches her take out a training tool (and toy), basically an elastic and tough cord that pokemon can play tug-of-war with. It’s mostly meant for fighting pokemon, but they’ve found that others enjoy it too; both starters are already looking at it with anticipation, and a quick command from their trainers has them gripping the ends in their mouths and pulling.

Normally they’d be cheering their pokemon on, but there’s an awkward silence between them now, and after another moment Red decides to just be straightforward. “Alright, so I’m not really sure how else to say this, and I get that there might be some things you can’t tell me. But… uh… is your story inspired by something you’ve been looking into?”

Leaf raises a brow. “When you say ‘looking into,’ what exactly do you…”

She trails off, and, before Red can say anything, sighs and rubs her eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do this part well with friends. It feels gross.”

“I know what you mean,” Red says, maybe a bit too earnestly. “I’m sorry too, I don’t know how else to ask, but I think it’s important. When you started it you said it was just something you were experimenting with to help people empathize with pokemon better, and I’m not saying that’s like, a lie or anything, but if, uh, if there really were like, secret labs training psychics—”

“Oh!” Leaf bursts into laughter, and for a moment Red feels sweeping, glorious relief… until her laughter cuts off, and her eyes widen as she stares at him. “Oh… Swords of Justice, there are secret psychic labs—”

“No no, that’s double counting!” Red holds his palms out, one still slick with Charmeleon’s saliva. “I have no evidence that there are, if you just made it up then it’s probably nothing, it’s just… uh, maybe I shouldn’t say—”

“Red this is important!”

“I know, but—wait, is it important because you do know something, or—”

She tries once again to keep her face blank, but Leaf is no Sabrina, and after a moment she mutters “Fuck!” and covers her face with both hands. “We never tell anyone about this.”

“Agreed. Definitely not going in the second movie.”

She starts giggling, and then they’re both laughing as Charmeleon and Raff continue to tug at the rope, jaws occasionally gnawing for better purchase.

“This… is why society needs… meta norms around secrets,” Red says between breaths.

“Oh yeah,” Leaf gasps, arm across her belly.  “Or else just asking what someone’s meta-honesty-norms are would give information away!”

That sets them laughing again, and once it finally tapers off, they stare at each other for a moment until Red gives a helpless shrug. “So who goes first?”

“The one who has the least risky secret, I think.” She gives a wry grin. “Should we use a number scale?”

“You know what, sure, why not. What’s a 1?”

“A 1 is like, your friend will be exasperated at you for being a gossip. And a 10 is… something that will destroy the world if it gets out, I guess?”

Red’s smile slips, then fades entirely. “Right. And a 5 would be something that… brings about a region’s downfall?”

“That sounds more like, uh, an 8?”

“I think that would be all regions, if a 9 is… what, all life is at stake, but the planet will probably be fine?”

“I guess that sounds right. So a 7 is one region’s downfall, and a 6 is… multiple cities?” Leaf frowns. “If we keep doing this it’s going to make the number itself a metadata leak.”

“We could give the numbers to someone who doesn’t know what they represent, then just have them tell us whose was higher? They might get curious though, then we have to lie to them—”

She snorts. “Blue would probably roll his eyes but not ask questions. Also it would be easy to just write a script that would do it for us.”

“Right—wait, I’m an idiot, I can just amnesia myself after you tell me something if it doesn’t relate to what I thought!”

“Permanently?”

“Uh… not really…”

Charmeleon growls and falls onto all fours as Raff, feet digging into the ground and leaves rustling, starts to pull the rope harder. The flame on Charmeleon’s tail flares, and Red is alarmed enough to merge with his pokemon to check if he’s still in a playful mood. “Uh, not sure why but he’s maybe getting a bit too riled up for this.”

“They do get more competitive the closer they are to evolving. You should find some other charmeleon for him to play with.”

Close to evolving. He knows his pokemon just has a couple of feet of growth left before that becomes possible, but hearing it put that way makes it seem right around the corner. “Yeah, will do. Meanwhile…” He unclips two balls and holds one up as he sends a calming wave through his merger until his pokemon relaxes and lets the rope drop from his jaws, “Charmeleon, return! Go, Ivysaur! And before you say it, yeah, I still haven’t named him, sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize to me.” Her teasing expression fades as she checks her phone. “I really do have to go soon. Look, you’re right, your powers make telling you first the obvious right choice. But if you do decide not to tell me afterward, it’s going to be hard to justify why I shared the info with someone, and I won’t be able to lie about that either. Do you understand?”

“You’re saying it might draw more people into it.” And that whoever she wouldn’t be able to lie to, it would be someone as close to her as he is. While he’d like to think that’s not actually true, he knows there are plenty of others she would probably feel just as bad lying to, like Blue or his mom.

Red lets out a breath, rubbing his face. “Yeah, I get it. I’m actually still processing some stuff that I did actually learn and I’m not sure what the full scope of everything is. Maybe it’s better to actually just… both forget this for now?”

“That… might be the responsible thing to do, yeah.”

They both stand silently for a moment, staring at each other, and he doesn’t need to merge to guess her thoughts: “Responsibility sucks sometimes.”

“It sucks so much!”

“But we can both keep looking into it right?”

“Oh, totally! And if we find something out that wouldn’t be breaking someone’s confidence—”

“We could share that,” Red finishes, and smiles. “I wasn’t exactly looking for another project, but maybe my mom can h—really?”

“I’m leaving!” Leaf declares, withdrawing Raff and summoning her abra while turning her back on him. “Goodbye Mr. Verres!”

“Wait, at least tell me—”

“Fuchsia!”

“—aaand she’s gone.” He turns to his ivysaur, who just unceremoniously lost his play partner, and picks up the other end of the chord. “Well boy, now we just have to decide if we should ask the Professor. If you win, I won’t.” Ivysaur cocks his head, then braces his feet against the ground… only to drop his end of the rope as soon as Red pulls.

He stares at the slack rope for a second and shrugs. “Well, guess that settles it. Just need to figure out some meta norms around secrets first… and hopefully not get any new ones to hold onto meanwhile.”

---

“I want to help.”

Blue blinks sleepily at the violet-haired girl standing outside his door. “Help with… Satori, right? Help with what?” It’s barely seven in the morning, and he went to bed around midnight after a strategy debate on how to better protect Fuchsia’s northern and southern tips went long past dinner, followed by a long walk and training session with Eevee beneath the full moon.

Satori doesn’t look like she got much sleep either. “Your project.” Her torracat is sniffing in the direction of his room, and takes a step inside before suddenly stopping and stepping back, probably from some mental nudge.

He rubs some sleep from his eyes. “I have a few of th—oh! My abra?”

“Yes. Red said you’re trying to do something like a reverse of my own goal, and suggested collaborating with Jason. He showed me your email about searching for psychic pokemon that have adapted defenses against Dark pokemon, and I began experimenting. I believe your abra would make a good test subject, first to—”

Blue’s sleepiness is rapidly fading as he tries to keep up with the exposition dump, and by the end he’s grinning. “Yeah, got it, one minute!” He slides the paper door closed and takes a step toward his dresser, then turns back and opens it again. “You’re free now, right? That’s why you came in person?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, one sec.” He closes the door and hurries through his morning routine, sending a message to his friends with one hand as he brushes his teeth with the other. Once he checks his schedule and confirms that he doesn’t have anything for a couple hours, he steps out while buckling his pokebelt on. “Let’s head to the training rooms. And start at the beginning for how you got involved.”

“Very well,” she says, and falls into step beside him as he strides toward the stairwell, being careful not to go down them too loud given how many others are probably still sleeping. Living in the gym’s trainer compound is nice in some ways and annoying in others. “But I don’t know what constitutes the beginning, for you.”

“By reversing your goal you mean you’re trying to keep your bond when your torracat evolves into a Dark type, right?” Blue vaguely remembers hearing about this and thinking this would be great for psychics but unlikely to help Dark people. “How does this help with that?”

“As I said, your email to Red was thought provoking, along with his and Jason’s investigations into how ghost and psychic phenomena are related. I began merging with a wider range of psychic pokemon specifically to see if any have unique defense mechanisms against Dark types that haven’t yet been exploited in light of the… how did you put it? ‘The self-perpetuating blindspot of not using Psychic types against Dark opponents?'”

He’s not sure he’s ever used the phrase ‘self-perpetuating,’ but… “Close enough. You found one?”

“Xatu was the first lead. Did you know they have natural anti-Ghost defenses?”

“I know wild ones can have Ghost attacks, sure. But it doesn’t really help them against Dark pokemon, since they shrug off most Ghost attacks anyway.”

“From a battle trainer’s perspective, this may be true. But it means you would focus on their Flying attacks instead, if you had to fight against one, yes?”

“Well, yeah. And I’d have to be pretty desperate to use a xatu to fight anything that would resist even that.”

“As you say.” They step into the bright morning air and start to make their way across the gym compound, where a few other early risers are already doing various chores or training their pokemon. “But Jason and Red have been making strides in delineating the boundary between psychic and medium abilities, without consideration of combat utility, and it’s become more clear how the ability to use Ghost attacks at all is a sign of some difference between one psychic and another.”

“Like a ‘ghost sense’ instead of just a psychic one? Wait, this is one of the first things Red researched with the spinarak, right?” He only remembers it because it came up in the notes Red sent to the production company making the movie about their journey. “He didn’t realize there’s not just one type of psychic particle at the time.”

“Only tangentially related; it would not have been evident through that alone, or his later research with the abra. But after a conversation with Sensei he became convinced that this sense is more broad, and may be visual.”

“Visual?” Blue frowns, hopes sinking. “I don’t get how that would be better than just using their eyes, if they have them? My abra knows I exist by now, or at least knows something like me exists even if it can’t sense my thoughts. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? For both of us.”

“Meowstic were the key; despite the similarities, both genders have different natural capabilities, complemented by expanded sensorium. Extended mergers with females showed broader electromagnetic range, as well as what we’re now calling spiritual sense. This does in fact help them detect dark pokemon from a distance, though it is hard to interpret this reliably, and they still can’t use their psychic abilities on them; only attacks of other kinds.”

“Got it, so if we figure out what female meowstic do, and someone creates a TM that imitates it—”

“This morning I managed, through my male meowstic, to see a dark aura.”

Blue stops cold on the threshold to the front door, then turns to look at her. “What the hell is a ‘dark aura?'”

She holds a hand out and waves it vaguely around him. “An energy field that I believe you and Dark pokemon ambiently have, which presumably keeps you from being affected by psychic abilities. What some Dark pokemon can project from themselves in attacks.”

“How do you even… wait, does Red know about this?”

“I left him a message. He should see it when he wakes, but I was too impatient to wait.”

He almost comments about how her impatience didn’t keep her from waking him up, but he’s glad she did. After a moment he steps aside so she can leave the building as well, then starts walking again. “How has this not been figured out before?”

“Gifted do not generally look through our pokemon’s vision.” She sounds mildly apologetic, almost embarrassed. “It is… disorienting, to see through multiple eyes, more so than other senses being expanded. On occasion it can be valuable for brief periods, but our preference is to keep our senses separate while linking our thoughts for communicating impulses and notions. If we link to psychic pokemon, of course, then their psychic senses are where we focus our attention, as they are as useful to them as vision is for us. It also feels more like a natural expansion rather than taking more focus the way paying attention to another set of eyes or ears does.”

The second half of this doesn’t mean much to Blue, and he tries to reorient to the bottom line. “So… okay so, you were saying meowstic can see dark auras, but psychics don’t use their eyes so they don’t know that?”

“Not ambiently, or else of course someone would have noticed by now. It takes intense concentration. Xatu can as well; as I said, they were the first lead, but we were unsure what they were reacting to due to their spiritual sense, and they do not naturally hunt dark pokemon.”

“But the spiritual sense isn’t necessary?”

“No, male meowstic demonstrated it’s not, as only females have it. And if it’s not for them—”

“It might not be for abra.” They’re almost to the training rooms, and Blue is already running his fingers over Tops’s ball. “What do I need to do?”

“First I’m going to get used to merging with your abra. But I suspect your abra will actually need to evolve to learn this.”

Blue stops for the second time in two minutes, frowning, then pulls his phone out. “Then evolving him just became a priority.”

“Who are you calling?”

“Red. Trust me, he’s going to want to be awake for this… and there’s something I think he can uniquely help with.” Sorry buddy. He’d hoped to protect his friend from the potential fallout of Koichi’s training philosophy, if it turns out to be true, but…

If he’s honest, he’s been starting to lose confidence in his ability to beat Janine. Sure, he might get the battle with Koga anyway, since he’s fulfilling his end of the bargain… but if he doesn’t leave Fuchsia a stronger gym than he found it, if his ideas aren’t at least somewhat adopted… he’s going to feel like a failure.

We’ll figure this stuff out together.

+WorldNews, +UnovaNews, +KantoNews, -Celebrity, -Civic, -League

00h 27m 58.7k – New tangela evolution discovered in Sinnoh; Rowan claims “pattern” found

01h 44m 108k – Tier 2 declared in Vermilion, Surge calls for aid

00h 55m 73.3k – “Less ditto found every day” claims Cinnabar ranger

13h 32m 319k – Nacrene city on high alert after string of unown spotted

05h 13m 49.2k – Suspected renegade activity in Castelia, seven dead

17h 53m 101k – Fifth psychic reports shared dream of unown danger, joins warning against research…

---

Kazue Silph has three rules he never breaks.

The first is never to go into business with family or friends. At many points along his journey, from a small business owner to a major chain to the predominant market in the Indigo regions, he’s had friends, relations, and friends of relations reach out to present him with job applications, joint business proposals, and investment opportunities. He turned them all down without consideration, though he was happy to pass along those that seemed promising to other companies. He’s given away millions of dollars over his lifetime, but always with no strings attached and no expectation of return or service.

A successful business, he learned early on, must always be about efficiency, first and foremost. It can, within limits, have values, but personal sentiment or favoritism will act as a rot, and even deep family bonds can be ruined over the smallest, most impersonal business decisions. He’s spent considerable energy and time ensuring nepotism is as difficult as possible within his corporate culture, but he believes the policies have paid for themselves.

The second rule is to always work toward what the market needs, not what it wants. There have been plenty of enticing opportunities to expand his business into other areas beyond trainer supplies, but to do so would have risked redirecting money from a sure bet to an area other competitors were already crowding, and likely with a much wider talent pool available. At best the company would make more money; at worst they would chase fads and lose not just money, but time and focus, which are much more valuable to him.

Society would always need trainers to survive, and trainers would always need supplies. Everything else he shifts production or resources to would reduce their availability and quality, and cause more trainers or their pokemon to die. Money is just a byproduct of the real value business can create for society, but the resources and power to change the world requires focus.

The third rule is the most important: never make a business decision while angry.

“Send him in,” President Silph says, and a few moments later the door opens to admit Lance, the Champion of Indigo.

Kazue still had a full head of hair, if a bit thin on top, when Lance began his Johto journey. While the businessman’s trainer days were long behind him, it seemed obvious that a child of the famous Dragon Clan, descendents of one of the region’s oldest warlords, with a dratini as his starter, would go far. So he paid little attention to Lance showing up on the news throughout the years, thinking that fame pointed cameras in the young dragon trainer’s direction as much as merit… until he and his journeymates deflected a Beast on their own with a clever, and risky, use of a controlled landslide.

After that it was less surprise than it otherwise might have been when Lance reached Victory Road just a couple years after starting his journey. The reigning Champion has shown the same mix of daring and careful calculation in office that first made him catch Kazue’s attention.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Lance says as he comes to stand in front of the President’s desk and bows, then places his hands on the back of a seat rather than taking it. “Neither of us has much time to waste, so I’ll get to the point.”

Kazue puts on an expression of polite curiosity. “I appreciate that, Champion. What can I do for you?” The fact that the meeting was requested to be in-person makes it fairly clear what this is about, but he still can’t admit that without giving out information; he’s not positive which piece of technology, exactly, has leaked to the Champion, though given the recent news, he’s fairly confident he knows.

The thought makes his pulse quicken, and he takes a deep breath to calm himself. At the end of the day, this is just a business meeting like any other.

“I’m sure by now you’ve heard that other regions are allowing pokemon genesis research. I have been struggling against those who would have Indigo follow their example, but I cannot deny that we would be at a distinct disadvantage if their efforts bear fruit, especially given some private information I’ve been made aware of. I’ve begun negotiations with the other island regions to potentially coordinate some limited, focused, and safe efforts by the various Leagues. Cynthia is currently the only holdout, but I am confident that she will change her mind in time.”

“I applaud your ability to adjust to new circumstances,” Kazue says. “Though if your goal is to stay abreast of other regions, you know my thoughts on regulation and innovation. It is one thing to win a race begun late, another to win it while hobbled.”

“I won’t deny the practical effects of your philosophy, especially given your many accomplishments. But our goal is not explicitly to be the first to create new pokemon, and if we learn how to by unleashing another event like the ditto outbreak, the cost could well exceed the reward if we don’t manage to contain it. Other regions may gamble with their people’s wellbeing, but Indigo will not.”

Lance punctuates the media-perfect speech with a sharp smile, yellow eyes gleaming with something predatory. “And of course, we are not incapable of learning from others’ mistakes.”

Kazue returns his smile, reassured to see the glimpse of the Champion’s ruthlessness applied to matters beyond pokemon battles. “Or benefiting from them more directly.”

“Which is why I knew you would understand when I heard you’ve been developing a pokeball that could catch the Stormbringers. Perhaps even Rayquaza, should it ever attack.” Lance’s shoulders straighten. “I want you to make it available for the League, and only the League.”

President Silph taps his fingers against his desk as he meets that fierce yellow gaze for a moment, then says, “No.”

To his credit, the Champion is an adept negotiator for one who has never worked in the world of business, and doesn’t even blink. “We’re prepared to help negotiate and support some reasonable changes to regulatory laws and taxes, as long as they’re not preferential to your company.”

“Tempting as that would normally be, it isn’t enough. Those laws should be changed for the good of the region, while you’re asking me to give up what I expect to be the most powerful technological achievement of the past decade. Do you even know how much it’s valued at?”

Lance only hesitates for a moment. “Potentially, priceless.”

“Correct. But potential is hard to put a number on, so I’ll reveal that our estimates put the final auction for the first masterball to end, at least, in the hundreds of millions.”

The Champion pauses a moment to absorb that, and Kazue lets him. They both know the League couldn’t afford more than a few at that price, not without drastic cuts in trainer assistance programs… that or a dozen other smaller initiatives and regulating bodies fit under the umbrella.

“You would truly sell such a powerful tool, and potential weapon, to the highest bidder? With no consideration of whether they will be able to even properly utilize it?”

Kazue does not often waste time lecturing people on basic economics anymore, but for those as powerful as a region champion, he’s willing to make an exception on the off chance Lance will be persuaded. “That is what the market is for, Champion. The masterball is worth far less in the hands of a mediocre trainer than it is in a skilled one, and thus those who are skilled, or those willing to patron a skilled trainer, will be willing to pay more for it.”

“And what of their character or goals? Money doesn’t distinguish a Leader from a Renegade.”

Kazue spreads his hands. “Money doesn’t, but you’re suggesting we distribute it by trust, and money can often be a way to quantify trust. Stock investment, providing grants, even the basic act of hiring are all ways of using money to show confidence and trust.”

“An untrusted person may gain access to a lot of money through deceit or antisocial deals.”

“They would have to be deceitfully trustworthy first, for the financier to believe in them, which can be said of those considered altruistic as well.” Kazue shrugs. “We can debate philosophy if you wish, Champion, but my answer is still no. I will not make yet another product, designed and built by some of the greatest scientists and engineers of our era, into an object of charity, limiting the return both for them and our investors.”

Lance frowns slightly. “You’re thinking of the goggles. I understand if you’re frustrated—”

“Frustrated? Perhaps.” Kazue flicks a hand to the side as if drying it of water. “There, I have set it aside. What else do you believe I am, Champion?”

Rather than walk into the trap, Lance remains silent, wariness transmuted by status and dignity into a patient, puzzled frown. But it cannot save him; he is the one who needs something from Kazue, and so all his attempt to save face can do is waste their time.

Lance is a skilled negotiator, but even Kazue’s clerks would be able to smell the need on him; to the President’s experienced eye, this goes even beyond that. Lance isn’t just in need, he seems desperate in some carefully controlled way, and Kazue wants to know why. Knowledge is valuable, and if Lance is actually afraid of something, he likely has good reason to be.

A company can have values, after all, and still survive. If Indigo is in danger, it is more than fiduciary duty that would compel Kazue to act; with major operations in every city of Kanto and Johto, Indigo is Silph, and Silph is Indigo.

“I believe you are standing on principles,” the Dragon Master says at last, “that I may be blind to. But there must be some arrangement we can reach—”

“I understand that you came yourself as a sign of respect.” Kazue keeps his voice firm, but not angry. Never make a business decision angry. “But you are wasting both of our very valuable time. Delegate this task to someone better suited to negotiation, or else drop the charade that you are here to barter as an equal.”

That upsets the Dragon Master, and Kazue holds up an apologetic hand to soften the blow; just as he doesn’t want to make a decision angry, he doesn’t want those he negotiates with to either. True positive-sum trades cannot be those regretted once emotions cool, and anger often drives people to justify negative-sum interactions. “I mean this only in our current situation, and perhaps in our projected, ongoing interactions. Time and again, regions have treated corporations like mine as little more than pokemon; useful tools to be trained into providing valuable goods and services for them. Our ability to trade freely is limited, as if our method is completely unrelated to our outcomes, and when we lobby to attain more freedoms from regulations that would allow us to be more efficient, we are called corrupt, or treated as though we are attempting to corrupt.”

“Your grievances—”

“No, Champion. Not grievances, not frustrations. Principles was closest. You came into this room and asked me to limit the profit we could earn by our invention, as if profit is a choice, as if it comes from coercion that I might refrain from. Our plan is an open auction, which makes every dollar we might gain the result of free, individual choices. You object to this?”

“I do.”

“Then you show the common belief, on some level, that profit itself is an unjust pursuit, simply because the excess value a seller accrues can be counted, while the value a customer gains cannot. Have you considered whether we plan to simply use masterballs ourselves rather than sell it? Hire the best trainer we can find as an employee, and then sell the captured legendary? Until you understand why that is not our plan, you will not understand why your approach today has been wrong from the start.”

To his credit, Lance takes a moment to absorb all this, and Kazue lets him. If he didn’t hold some respect for the Champion he wouldn’t have bothered with the lecture, and it seems that Lance recognizes this himself before he stirs and takes a breath.

“As you said, our time is valuable,” he finally says. “If there is truly nothing that would convince you to do this, then I will accept it. If there is something you want, and it’s within my power and mandate, I can at least try.”

“As a first step, tell me what has you so concerned. Not the vague reasons, the specific predictions or warnings you have reason to believe are true.”

Lance sighs, but to Kazue’s satisfaction seems to have taken his words to heart by simply saying “The psychic dreams that have been reported in the media. There are more, and by trusted sources.”

Meaning by those among the League, probably. “I confess to not having considered the articles worth reading.”

“I don’t blame you, but the simple version is that there is a threat that appears bigger than any other we’ve yet faced, coming at an unknown amount of time.”

“One that will need legendary pokemon in the hands of trainers to defeat,” Kazue guesses. It should be terrifying, but all he feels is tired… and frustrated. For a moment he thought Lance might have learned of whatever experiments Giovanni has been working on, thus freeing Kazue to act on that knowledge without breaking their agreement.

Instead it seems yet another threat is on the horizon, and he finds he is unsure how to internalize an even bigger threat than the Hoenn titans represented. The company suffered massive losses as a result of the incident and aftermath, though they were lucky enough to be able to weather the storm better than others. Of course they were asked to provide humanitarian aid afterward, and of course they did… which just further limited the scope of new, expensive projects they had planned to start developing as the Silph Scope and masterball entered their last stages.

He told marketing to create an ad about that, perhaps earn the company some understanding of what the losses would result in in terms the public would understand, even be dismayed by. But the death count was high enough that he was convinced it would be taken poorly. Still, he feels it like a rock in his boot to think of all the potential lives that might be lost just because they end up developing such powerful technologies any later.

Sakaki understood, of course. Commiserating with him after the Hoenn incident was one of the few times lately that Silph felt they were genuinely allied again in years.

But that hasn’t changed the arc of their partnership, and for that Silph does feel regret. There are far too few equals for those in their position, and further fewer in such different areas of influence that candid conversation is possible.

“It seems likely, yes.” Lance is quiet for a beat. “I know enough about negotiation to understand that I’ve just made my position worse.”

“True enough. If other regions know this, my expectation of how much others will be willing to bid is even higher than expected. I do appreciate the candor, but it only highlights how—”

“There’s more. But it hasn’t been made public.”

“Neither has what you just told me.”

“This is different.”

Kazue’s hands come together as he considers the Champion for a moment. “You want a concession first. Because it has potential business applications?” Not that the previous revelation didn’t, but they would be relatively invisible compared to, say, a secret that would lead to Silph pivoting more visibly in anticipation to some new technology or threat.

“I’m not a businessman, but I know that all knowledge has value… and if I trust you to do one thing, it’s to make use of such information to generate more for your company.”

It’s a compliment, but a backhanded one given the way the Champion once again frames this as a bad thing. Or maybe he’s just worried about favoritism.

Kazue closes his eyes for a moment and breathes in and out until the anger fades to sullen coals. “And if corporations like mine do have the opportunity to use this information to create new products, or refine those we have, don’t you think this would benefit the region as well?”

“Of course. But I must consider how others would react as well.”

“I can have an NDA on my desk and signed within three minutes. I understand wanting a stronger negotiating position, but—”

“No, you don’t.” Lance’s whole body language has shifted, lost something, gained something. The Champion is back in control, somehow, and Kazue feels his first trickle of apprehension; he’s made a mistake somehow, underestimated something… “I don’t fully understand your perspective and values, or the wisdom of them. But nor do you mine, and so I must ask; is there anything that would change your mind? Have you spent even five minutes considering it?”

Kazue’s hands clench, then unclench as he takes another breath. “I thought I made myself clear—”

“You did, and so I’ll skip to the bottom line. We cannot allow these ‘masterballs’ to be sold to another region. Any bidding must be limited to Indigo.”

Calm, he must remain calm. “This meeting is ov—”

“In what world,” Lance says, and his voice is calm, deep and solid as the earth. “Did you think the League would not treat another region gaining a Legendary pokemon as an existential risk?”

“Another region, Champion?” He hates the quaver in his voice, the barely contained fury sounding like weakness. “Or another trainer? There are only a handful of organizations in Indigo who could outbid the League, and who below you would you trust with it?”

“If the League wins the bids, the masterballs will belong to the League. Someone else may prove themselves the strongest trainer by then.”

The words are stated without hubris or irony, and for a moment the absurdity almost makes Kazue laugh. “You’re only the strongest battle trainer. An experienced hunter—”

“Would have no experience fighting Legendary pokemon.”

Calm, calm, calm. “You can’t do this. The charter—”

“Your lawyers are the best money can buy, so I’m sure they were right to inform you that the courts would decide in your favor given what you knew at the time. I’m also just as sure that will change once the new information is revealed.”

Kazue chokes back the wild threats that come to mind, knuckles white around the arms of his chair. Before he can regain control of himself, come up with something else to say, the Champion has released the back of the seat and straightened.

“I’ll send a more skilled negotiator to discuss what we can do for you in return, in thanks for this great service to Indigo’s safety. In light of what you’ve shared about the true cost this limitation will have, I’ll be sure it’s not our most skilled negotiator.” Lance’s smile is warm, the bow of his head respectful, and then he leaves, cape just barely clearing the door before it closes.

Kazue sits frozen for a minute, part of him still in shock at what the Champion had said, another part disbelieving that he had let it happen, and another racing through things he should have said, things he could do to deny the enemy their prize, to protect against such flagrant abuse in the future. Threats to shut down the masterball research, to suspend operations of any kind, would have to be a last resort so long as he can’t trust the information not to be stolen or leaked the way the goggles schematics were.

After five minutes have passed his alarm chimes to indicate his next appointment, and his hand moves automatically to alert his assistant to reschedule his afternoon. He almost makes the call to Sakaki then, but decides to go to his private spa for a soak and massage first.

Never make a business decision angry.

---

Divxddd: yo

Divxddd: what i miss

Jigglethesepuffs: these sad fools still have hope

Divxddd: lol

Passifist: Hey they can turn it around

Ioutrankyou: assuming Tal wakes the fuck up and GUARDS

Ioutrankyou: THE

Ioutrankyou: HOOP GODDAMN U TAL JUST INTERRUPT ONCE IN UR LIFE

Divxddd: looooooooooooooooool

Jigglethesepuffs: that was a nice juke tho

Divxddd: true

Ioutrankyou: GOD

Divxddd: hey wheres kit doesn’t he have money riding on this one

Ioutrankyou: DAMN

Ioutrankyou: aojaifhasldqkjajkalfagbqiasklsadj

Passifist: Kit’s napping said to wake him before the last match ends

Jigglethesepuffs: Think this is it

Jigglethesepuffs: unless they pull off a miracle

Passifist: ya

Passifist: i’ll call him

Ioutrankyou: its absurd that Tal still has a contract

Ioutrankyou: absolutely absurd

Ioutrankyou: this guy’s worse than half the pugs I run into

Divxddd: Half the pugs you run into aren’t playing against pros

Ioutrankyou: doesn’t matter

Ioutrankyou: garbage excuse to not do basic shit

Ioutrankyou: even you could have guarded that

Divxddd: lol thanks I think

Passifist: Well that was weird

Jigglethesepuffs: ?

Passifist: Kit’s up but he’s freaking

Divxddd: lol must have bet a lot

Jigglethesepuffs: freaking about what?

Passifist: no not about the game not sure tbh was saying something about a dream

Passifist: nightmare i guess

Divxddd: bout what?

Passifist: think he’s been reading too many creepypastas

Passifist: something about unown are going to merge into a supermon or something

Divxddd: you know given how this year’s going that’d fit

Jigglethesepuffs: wait I think I read that one

Ioutrankyou: guys

Ioutrankyou: guys i think its happening

Ioutrankyou: holy shit did you SEE THAT

Ioutrankyou: HELL YEAH

Divxddd: woah

Ioutrankyou: HELL

Ioutrankyou: YEAH

Passifist: replaying, I missed it

Jigglethesepuffs: same

Ioutrankyou: fuck you Liquidforce

Ioutrankyou: cheap ass surf spamming scrub

Ioutrankyou: tried to hide in the grass as blastoise lol get rekt

Jigglethesepuffs: Alright that was solid

Divxddd: ya

Divxddd: gonna take a few more of those to even odds though

Passifist: So I just looked it up, cuz it sounded familiar to me too

Passifist: Its not a creepy, i mean there are tons about unown but this is different, there’s been dozens of psychics all over the island who are saying they had a dream like this

Divxddd: like what

Passifist: unown creating or summoning some mega mythic pokemon that wipes us all out

Divxddd: Kit should make sure he pees before bed

Divxddd: been doing it for years, never get nightmares anymore

Ioutrankyou: he should get the fuck on is what he should do

Ioutrankyou: missing all the good shit

Jigglethesepuffs: isn’t Kit psychic?

Divxddd: wait, really? is he?

Passifist: Ya he is

Divxddd: woah

Ioutrankyou: so what?

Divxddd: bit of a coincidence

Ioutrankyou: no it’s not

Ioutrankyou: i mean yeah, that’s all it is

Ioutrankyou: bet plenty of non-psy had that nightmare too after hearing psychs being drama queens about it

Ioutrankyou: unown are creepy af

Ioutrankyou: dreams don’t mean shit

Divxddd: our dreams don’t, but psychics might

Ioutrankyou: ffs

Passifist: looks like it wasn’t just random psychics to start with, it’s been big names

Passifist: some wrote out what they dreamed without comparing notes

Ioutrankyou: again, so what

Ioutrankyou: some similar phrases and all the differences will get ignored

Ioutrankyou: come on people this is basic shit

Jigglethesepuffs: funny you mention that

Jigglethesepuffs: there is actually one thing in particular that they all seemed to remember, including the ones that wrote their dreams down

Divxddd: ?

Kitandpals: “it is coming”

Ioutrankyou: fucking finally

Divxddd: yooo that’s creepy as fuck

Ioutrankyou: hey log on, we can get a queue going in case the match ends soon

Jigglethesepuffs: you okay Kit?

Kitandpals: no

Kitandpals: i don’t know

Kitandpals: it was so vivid, i’m still shaking

Ioutrankyou: well log on anyway you’re still better than a pug would be

Passifist: dude stfu a sec

Passifist: you didnt hear him

Passifist: do you want to do voice Kit?

Ioutrankyou: u stfu

Kitandpals: I dot know

Kitandpals: *don’t

Ioutrankyou: all acting like fucking babies over a goddamn dream

Ioutrankyou: and TAL IS NOT BLOCKING

Ioutrankyou:THE GODDAMN

Ioutrankyou: HOOP

Jigglethesepuffs: what else do you remember?

Ioutrankyou: AGAIN

Jigglethesepuffs: if it’s okay to ask

Ioutrankyou: FFS

Divxddd: its over

Ioutrankyou: yeah fuck it

Ioutrankyou: gonna hop in a game

Ioutrankyou: you guys coming or what

Kitandpals: Not sure. Confusing, shifting sights

Kitandpals: unown

Kitandpals: a whole world of them

Ioutrankyou: sigh

Kitandpals: and there was amin there

Kitandpals: *a mind

Ioutrankyou: there’s no use dwelling on it, play a match and take your mind off it instead

Kitandpals: crazy thoughts, hungry thoughts

Kitandpals: wanted what it saw to be more like it

Divxddd: what it saw?

Kitandpals: our world

Jigglethesepuffs: damn

Passifist: What’s “it?” How do you know it’s coming?

Kitandpals: dont now

Kitandpals: *don’t know

Ioutrankyou: alright I’m in queue and hopping channels you guys join me when you’re done w/ group therapy or wtvr

Jigglethesepuffs: Ignore him Kit

Divxddd: Imma join queue too but staying here this is fascinating

Kitandpals: I don’t know. It was like big capital letter words n my head

Kitandpals: It was all really clear its not fading but the words are most clear like someone said them outloud and woke me up but there was no one in my room and it didn’t sound like a voice it was just the words

Kitandpals: I don’t know what to do or feel right now I’m fucking scared guys

Kitandpals: It still feels so real

Jigglethesepuffs: You’ll be okay, there are others who had the same dream

Kitandpals: I know but

Jigglethesepuffs: they seem okay

Kitandpals: that makes it worse

Kitandpals: that makes it so much worse

---

The streetlights make Saffron look like a series of washed-out photos through the drizzle, every color faded and every corner shadowed. Masaki Terasoma (codename: Looker) walks from one snapshot to the next, hands on pokeballs beneath his damp coat and eyes wandering restlessly. Lea keeps her nose in the air, the mightyena’s dark coat making her nearly invisible in the gloom as she sniffs for any alarming scents, while his toxicroak slinks through the void between streetlights like the smudged thumbprint of some sloppy darkroom attendant. Above them Sever flies in nearly silent loops as the crobat listens for anything and everything that might come for them.

Some might say having three pokemon as bodyguards in the middle of Saffron City is paranoid. If it wasn’t three in the morning, he would probably be getting plenty of odd or concerned looks from fellow pedestrians. But there aren’t any of those, because late night meetings reduce foot traffic, which makes it easier to spot if someone’s following or preparing an ambush.

Paranoid was left behind months ago; Looker has been in Kanto for nearly four months and there have already been three attempts on his life. Or at least, it’s safest to assume there have been.

It’s hard to tell, exactly, what counts and doesn’t. Whoever picked the locks on his hotel room (scrape marks along the doorframe around the latch, likely caused in frustration when the door still refused to open) may have just been trying to rob him, or even just rob the room without knowing who was in it. The fearow flock that swarmed him midflight to Saffron may have been a coincidental attack by wilds (ratio of fearow to spearow matched average records of local flocks). And the peanuts might have ended up in his food by accident; the chef seemed genuinely apologetic and embarrassed (and background check showed nothing of interest).

And yet, safe as he may be, part of him clings to the notion that he’s being targeted. Illogical as it is, he wants evidence, ethereal as it would be, that he’s on the right track. That he’s finally found something important.

Which is why he was suspicious when he got the message asking for a private meeting a few weeks ago. It was relayed from a relatively trustworthy local source, but sources could be compromised. It didn’t tell him to come alone, but did specify that he only bring along someone he completely trusts, which could have been a clever psyop meant to lower his guard, since he doesn’t trust anyone completely.

But there was an obvious choice. Agent Touta Matsuda (codename: Notebook) has only been with Interpol for a few years, but he has an impressive record stamping out corruption in Indigo before then; if he’s compromised, Looker could only hope it’s in directions other than the ones that would impact their mission here.

Of course, if he participated in a generations-spanning interregional renegade network, “sponsoring” detectives like Touta is exactly the sort of thing he’d do to get someone trustworthy on the inside of investigations. But he knew the investigation would require some risk, and if he couldn’t depend on his local partner then he’d likely be dead already anyway.

That meeting was more fruitful than he dared hope at the time. This second may be even more so.

“Building looks clear,” Notebook says in Looker’s earpiece once he’s about a block away from his destination, and he mutters acknowledgement before walking past it, then around, then back, until he can do a full circuit of the warehouse himself.

Only then does he send his mightyena in, and a moment later he hears two barks, followed by three, followed by another three.

“One person. Female. Two pokemon. Going in.” Looker turns off his mic and sends a whistle to Sever to circle the building before entering with his toxicroak.

Laura Verres is standing with her back to a wall, arms folded across her stomach. He can tell she’s nervous from across the room, but it’s the normal amount of nervous, the expected amount, and so he only gives the warehouse the usual sweep before approaching her and her tangela. Her primeape is lurking on the stacked boxes above, the quiet snort of its breaths punctuating the echo of his steps.

“Good to see you again, Detective.” Her voice is soft as the rain on the pavement outside, and he notes with approval that she’s also keeping both hands on the pokeballs at her belt. “Wasn’t expecting a response so soon.”

Looker shrugs. “Your lead was better than you had any reason to expect. Fuji’s story doesn’t add up.”

Her face remains calm, but he sees something in her eyes. Triumph? Hurt? Maybe something else too. He doesn’t know her well enough to tell for sure, but he knew during their first meeting that part of her hoped she was wrong about the old scientist; he respected the fact that she went through so much trouble to check anyway.

“Tell me.”

He considered not, of course, unsure what she would do with the information. But an investigator is only as good as their sources, and given what she’s managed to piece together on her own, Laura Verres could turn out to be quite a valuable source indeed.

Still, the same things that tend to make sources valuable can often make them volatile.

“I will, once I get some assurances.”

“I won’t report it, if that’s what you mean.” She seems more exasperated than offended. “So far as he’s concerned, I’ll act as I normally would, and continue helping him spread his ideas. But there are others I’ve gotten involved, or have considered getting involved, and if he’s dangerous in some way, or being around him is, I need to know.”

“You mean Leaf Juniper. Possibly your son as well?”

“Just Leaf.”

“That story she’s putting out online, is that involved in all this somehow?”

Verres raises her brow. “You’re reading webserials now?”

“I like to be thorough.” Her brow is still raised, and he shrugs. “Alright I skimmed it. If it’s some kind of code, I can’t make heads or tails of how.”

“Me neither. He’s been pretty worked up about it though, so it may just be something he really believes in. So, is he dangerous?”

“If he is, you’ll leave this entirely in our hands?”

“Of course not. But so far as acting on your information goes, it’s your info, and I’ll respect that… assuming you’ll try to do the same in return.”

“You know I can’t promise that.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it if you tried. I’m not looking for a promise, just a sense that you care.”

Looker nods. He similarly wouldn’t have believed her if she claimed to be willing to subordinate herself entirely to Interpol; he’s starting to believe she’s one of the rare breed of true investigative reporters, willing to put their career and safety on the line to uncover the truth, and they don’t tend to trust police, no matter how separated from the source of potential corruption they’re investigating. “I looked into some financial records that are far more extensive than your source managed to take. Fuji’s been off the grid for nearly fifteen years, but he’s only been on Silph’s ‘payroll’ for about half of that.”

“You could have missed it, if they changed up how they paid for everything.”

“Could have, yeah. But that’s also around the time he started dropping those breadcrumbs that Professor Oak picked up. So my two main guesses are, either he suddenly had a change of heart about working for Silph around the time Silph changed how they were managing him, which could make sense depending on how and why. Or, that’s actually the point when he started working for Silph at all.”

“Which would mean he did what for the years before that? Vacation?”

His smile is as wry as her tone. “Maybe. But this pattern isn’t new.”

It takes her a moment, eyes darting between his, then to the side, then back. “The renegades under the casino.”

“And others, in other regions. Sometimes it’s easy to make up job histories, particularly for random civilians. Gets harder for those who have been in the public eye—”

“—or with a specific set of skills that only a handful of organizations would hire for. The researchers there?”

“Right. Most are from other regions, but of all the people hired to work on secretive projects, some seem to be less ‘hired’ and more…” He shrugs. “Kidnapped? Recruited? Traded?”

“It’s nothing illegal though, is it?”

He grimaces “No. We’ve stretched the laws in Celadon because of the Renegade involvement, but those paper trails all lead to other regions, some of which are less cooperative with interpol and others which are, frankly, too corrupt for me to trust.”

Laura shakes her head. “Whoever was involved in that can’t be involved with Silph if it was stealing from them. How sure are you that it’s connected to what’s happening with Fuji? It feels like you’re making some leaps.”

He crosses his arms. “There’s no reason the strategy would be limited by one particular organization, or even type of org. If an even moderately competent person or group could be doing something without risk that would be an advantage to them, it’s best to assume they are doing it until there’s reason to believe they’re not. But,” he says to forestall a predictable rebuttal, “That’s part of why I need your help. You’re in the best position to learn something more about Fuji’s history and situation, maybe get him to guess about some of the other missing scientists. I don’t believe he’s been as silo’d as he says, and anything you can tell me might shed light on the others, even if they worked for a different organization. If so I’ll let you know.”

“I don’t know how much longer I have. Silph may not have any proof that Fuji’s broken NDAs, and I don’t know if they have any more legal screws to turn that they haven’t already, but they could just move him to another location, or order him to stop talking to others.”

“Why would he listen? Didn’t his whole rebellion start in the first place because he doesn’t want to keep helping them? And with Oak involved now, they must know it wouldn’t go well for them if they try to do anything public.”

“He seems to think it’s important that he stay on the project.” She gives a helpless shrug. “Says he has to be involved, even if he doesn’t think it’s right… that anyone else ‘might get it wrong,’ which I guess he sees as even worse somehow?”

Looker considers that, then gives a begrudging nod. “I can see it. Alright, then do what you can and we’ll try to find out more on our end.”

“I tried looking it up, but couldn’t find a straight answer; what’ll happen to Fuji, if he’s worked with renegades and hasn’t told anyone?”

Looker snorts. “Indigo’s twisted itself around and around on this one. Short answer is, as long as he hasn’t seen renegade activity with his own eyes or heard a direct confession or report of it, he’s clear. If he has and hasn’t reported it, it’s aiding and abetting.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“Nothing personal against Fuji, I have no idea what he’s done or seen yet, just think it gives people too much wiggle room. But there are worse problems with the whole system.”

“Such as?”

It still amazes him that so few people see it, even those like Ms. Verres, who has no history with the gyms, and is skeptical of those in power by trade. “That as long as someone has seen something and reported it, they’re totally clear.”

Laura frowns. “There would be records, an investigation…?”

Looker thinks back to the cool, assessing gaze of Leader Erika when she stared him down in the police department, pushed him to limit his efforts even after learning that her city had renegades hidden in it. “That assumes the leader or ranger starts one.” He sees the realization hit, and his grin is hard. “Hell of a loophole, isn’t it? All anyone has to do is find one corrupt leader or ranger, and a whole city could take turns telling them when they see any renegade activity and be totally safe from the law.”

---

“Joining us tonight is Elite Agatha, one of the foremost experts on mental and spiritual phenomena. We’re honored to have you on the show, Elite, and grateful for any light you can shed on this growing mystery.”

“By that you mean you want some reassurance, right?”

“Well… If possible, I think a lot of our listeners would appreciate that, yes. With everything that’s been happening over the past few months…”

“Of course. This is just one more thing to worry about in a year where every season seems to bring a new one. But I’m worried that for most people, it’ll be one too many.”

“One too many…?”

“One too many worries. It’ll bounce off, slide into ‘someone else’s problem.’ Even if there weren’t so many other major changes to adapt to, this is nothing tangible, nothing they can do anything about. Just a vague worry that some people they’ve never met are having bad dreams. Unfortunately, since it may well be the most important thing to worry about, I’m not sure I’d want to reassure people even if I could, which I can’t, so it’s all moot anyway.”

“To be clear, you’re saying that you believe these dreams are more of a threat than Rayquaza, the renegades, ditto—”

“And everything else happening in other regions, yes. And that’s because it’s unknown, utterly unknown. We have no idea why it’s happening, if it’s pointing to something real, or if we should trust it even if it is.”

“I see.”

“Do you, really? Because you’re not gibbering in the corner, so I have doubts. Maybe you will once the interview’s over and you can take your professional mask off, eh?”

“I… suppose I should say instead that I think I see. Maybe you could explain that last part, about trusting it?”

“I don’t think it’s sunk in for everyone that this is the most public and obvious sign in living memory that humans are not alone in the universe. Whether it’s a spirit, a god, or even beings from another world or dimension, this message is coming from something other.”

“You really believe that?”

“At first, no. I thought it was just some particularly powerful projector, a psychic good at projecting that is, creeping around outside the houses of famous psychics while they slept. Simplest explanation to fit the evidence, at the time… but now? No psychic in recorded history could send a dream to an entire town at once. Could be this is the first. I’m sure that’s what Oak would say. But then, why would they? I think it’s something else, and that something else is sending us a warning.”

“I see.”

“Now you do, yes, or are starting to. Looking a little pale. Need some water?”

“I’ll be alright, Elite, thank you… I suppose the next obvious question is, whether it’s a person or something else, why would the dreams lie? In either case, actually. What do you think the dream projector wants?”

“If their intentions are honest, it’s clear to me they’re sending us a warning about the unown. Whether they want us to kill them or capture them or stop experimenting with them, I can’t say. It may be possible they don’t know themselves. Or perhaps it’s a test.”

“And if not honest?”

“Then we should do the opposite of the thing they want us to do, of course. But there’s a third possibility that’s more likely, and less clear; they may just be too alien for an idea like honest or dishonest intentions to be relevant questions. Their message may itself not reflect something real or meaningful to us.”

“I s… I think I see. Why just the islands?”

“Maybe the threat is focused here. Maybe we’re the only ones that can stop it.”

“Have you had the dream yet, Elite?”

“Oh yes, weeks ago. Kept quiet, figured saying anything would play into the hands of whoever did it, but now it seems moot.”

“And you feel convinced of its authenticity?”

“Assuming they’re not deceitful, I’m convinced the projector believed what they projected, if that’s what you mean. Spirit or alien or god, they could still be wrong, or mad.”

“Doesn’t seem like a particularly good option either.”

“No, but I’d take a few sleepless nights for the world’s gifted over getting eaten by the thing it’s afraid of.”

---

Cyrus stands above the Ruins of Alph, eyes roaming in a steady pattern in the skies above for unown that might appear. Being so close to Violet City, Alph has been more active than most unown ruins, practically crawling with mystics and researchers, thrill seekers and protestors, so catching any that appear closer to the ground is difficult. Many seem convinced they’ll be the ones to figure out the secret of the unown, but it’s clear that no one knows what they really are, and without that knowledge they’re flailing in the dark.

Unlike Cyrus, who has never seen more clearly.

It was the dream that showed him the way, as he knew it would. There’s been no apparent rhyme or reason to when and where they would appear, but once he realized it wasn’t repeating at a location he came to Violet City, a major metropolis where resident psychics haven’t reported experiencing it yet. He visited the ruins by day, capturing unown with a steadily improving success rate, and going to bed early each night to ensure he slept through as much of it as possible.

He only had to wait eleven days before it came to him, and every other psychic in the city. And what he saw filled him with a deep existential terror… until he woke to reflect, and felt only awe.

Unlike the rest of the world, whose hysteria has only continued to increase. It wasn’t so bad when news articles popped up speculating about what it meant for a handful of famous psychics around the islands to get the same nightmare; a curiosity to be talked about over lunch with friends, and grist for the conspiratorial corners of the internet.

Then whole towns and cities of psychics began to get it, and the net went wild with speculation, fueled in no small part by the more pedestrian psychics themselves, who lacked the restraint and uncertainty of their betters.

But with Elite Agatha’s interview, even governments have started taking it seriously… in opposite directions. Some are calling for a complete ban on not just pokemon genesis, but unown research altogether, while others are pushing for more research to counter the hypothetical threat.

Even worse, there’s no rhyme or reason to who falls on which side of the battle lines; there are researchers and Professors on both, as are Leaders and Elites within the same region trying (for the most part) and often failing to dance around the issue. Meanwhile politicians are shuffling further and further toward the edges as they try to keep up with a public that, despite Agatha’s prediction, has turned out to be quite worried about a supernatural existential threat that they can neither see nor hear.

But all of that pales in relation to what it’s done to psychics, who have been drawn forcefully into the center of the cultural crossfire. Each one he knows has been peppered with questions about the dreams by everyone else, whether they’ve had them or not. No one seems to be blaming psychics themselves yet, but he’d almost prefer that over the desperate fear that’s allowed a few unscrupulous “mystics” to cash in on the phenomenon.

He resisted at first from pitting his voice against the chorus. But seeing so many wallowing in fear and skepticism was unbearable when he knew he could offer them something else.

Hope.

All his life he’s known something was wrong with the world. With the people in it. With the way society has managed, against all odds, to survive…through the pain and suffering of children they send into the thresher’s maw of nature, itself an indiscriminate charnel house of pain and grief.

Cyrus’s older brother was full of hope and will and an unstoppable drive to see the world. He was dead just a few months into his journey, shattering their parents so thoroughly his grandfather had to put the pieces back together, leaving Cyrus to handle his own shock and grief. Therapy was no help, insisting that he express his feelings while also pushing the idea that it was something to be accepted, what their family was going through. Like it was okay, as long as it was normal.

It wasn’t okay. None of it was. But no one understood that; they thought they did, thought they were all grieving for the same reasons, but Cyrus’s grief wasn’t sufficient. Only action would stop the pain, and not just his.

But his parents never truly recovered, turning into weeping and hollow versions of themselves, fearfully hypercritical of anything he tried to do to prepare for his own journey. When his psychic powers developed he realized that no amount of knowledge or preparation would convince them that he would not fail as his brother did… and yet he was still young enough to think that if he could be good enough, be happy enough despite his own grief, he could remind them they still had a son left. That life could still be good. He would try projecting his joys to them, his hope and desire for things to get better.

It was never enough.

His hair began to gray as a teenager, and few enough things in life gave him any joy that he stopped trying for his parents’ sake. Still, he thought perhaps he could do it for others; where his powers had failed, perhaps other methods would succeed. He joined organizations dedicated to helping those recovering from grief and injury, made connections among different professions and organizations, began forming interdisciplinary teams to identify what would keep people from having as much trauma after crises, or help them recover faster.

Sometimes it seemed he could do some good, here and there. They identified people’s needs that added resilience, things like robust social networks and economic safety, and did their best to facilitate and reinforce them where they could. But most regions had their own unique traumas, whether seasonal or unpredictable, citywide or erratic in destructive scope, and every tragedy would undo much of their work.

It took him years to realize that no matter how much good someone experiences, sometimes a single bad enough day can ruin their lives. For those not sufficiently chained by the biological drive to live, bad enough events can end them.

And still he tried, will flickering and fading, until he read a book by the author Terry Pratchett, in which a character said:

“I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother floatzel with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I’m sure you’ll agree. And even as I watched, the mother dived into the water and came up with a plump magikarp, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby buizel, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

For the first time in his life, it was like someone else was speaking to him. Showing that he wasn’t alone in recognizing how broken the world was, and how flawed whatever powers or forces brought it into existence this way.

Because there’s so much that could be better, if just a single thing were different. And he despaired, not at the duty to become the creator’s moral superior, but to ever having the ability to change what it had wrought.

He thought insufficient knowledge was the answer, at first, then insufficient will to move on, then an overabundance of emotion; that people felt their pains too deeply. He considered trying to become the most powerful trainer in the world, or a politician able to unite every region under his rule, or starting a religion that could inflame the hearts and minds of all humanity… but still it seemed there was nothing that could possibly change the fundamental problems in the world.

The flame inside him, still driving him to find a way to fix the crack in his family, began at last to gutter and die.

Until the Hoenn titans arose, and changed his conception of what was possible.

Each had the power to change the world in an extreme way. Each showed a lack of ability to regulate, a lack of intelligent deliberate purpose. Humanity panicked because they thought their world came close to ending, but no one seems to have understood the potential for what almost happened.

A new world’s beginning.

A worse one, perhaps, with so much water or sunlight that more suffering became the baseline. But any society born or acclimated to such a world would surely also consider it the norm, and take for granted that its ending would be tragic.

None would have traded their world for this one, better though it is. Perhaps they would, for a world without flaws.

Many regions have myths of ancient and powerful gods and spirits, masters of some (occasionally competing) domains of reality. But few carry the deep implications of Sinnoh’s. He grew up on stories of Dialga and Palkia creating Time and Space, of Uxie, Mesprit and Azelf gifting humanity knowledge, emotion, and willpower, of Arceus creating all of reality itself with a thousand arms.

Like most others, he believed them myths, or legends gone from their world. Hoenn’s myths turned out not just to be real, but still present, and even stronger than the stories indicated.

What new reality could Sinnoh’s create, if guided by a human mind?

The secret, he’s sure, lies with the unown. It wasn’t widely spread how the Hoenn incident ended; people assumed Rayquaza saved them by chance, or out of benevolence, and that the registeel, regirock, and regice there were released by the earthquakes. All of which may be partially true.

But Cyrus was hired to help those in Hoenn after the incident, where he met and counseled a boy named Wally. The boy’s shields were extraordinary for his age, but they meant nothing once his feelings of guilt overcame him.

Cyrus assured the boy that he did nothing wrong, and meant every word. The glimpses of genius that allowed Wally to influence the living myths were hard to understand, but it was enough, combined with the dreams to know what he had to do.

There’s another pop, and then that entrancing sound from somewhere distant, almost too faint for him to hear… but not for his golbat.

Wing Attack.

His pokemon darts away, faster than those of any competing unown hunters in the area. He runs by them as he chases his pokemon, vaulting low walls and weaving between pillars as the others are still looking around for the unown. It’s remarkable how few thought to train their pokemon specifically to find the sound they make, and of those who did, how few chose pokemon well known for speed and hearing.

He passes by a researcher who’s using a loudred to orient to the unown’s noise, but by the time she sends her pidgeot after it there’s already a small black figure falling in the distance. His golbat follows it down, occasionally batting at it with his wings to keep it from recovering and flying away, and Cyrus expands a ball as he gets close.

He thought it would take weeks, maybe months, to shake off the decade of rust on his trainer skills. In the years since his younger self trained daily, determined to prove himself to his parents, the only pokeball he held was the one with his teleporter in it.

But the fire in him now is stronger than that ever was, and weeks of retraining his body were almost a formality; the skills of throwing and catching, of split second evaluation and decision, were all there waiting for him, and the two balls expanding in his palms feel like they never left.

The pidgeot and his golbat almost collide as they both attempt to batter the unown down. The researcher behind him is still catching up to him, and he sends a mental command ahead for his golbat to Supersonic it. As the bird veers away, one wing flapping so hard it nearly flips over and crashes into the ground, he reaches the unown and points the lenses forward, nudging his golbat to keep it in range until he hears the two pings and throws.

By the time the researcher arrives he’s already leaving with his new C unown. It’s his third one, but that’s alright; what Wally did required one of each, but he has greater plans.

Plans that will birth a new world.

Once Red and Artem shared their ideas with the other unown researchers in the What Comes Next network, and consensus arose on how paired researchers and psychics weren’t even necessary given how many people would be at the ruins in general, the next question became which ruins they should visit. Kanto has so few that they debated going to Johto instead, but Red’s free teleportation would make the most remote trip the most valuable for return visits, so he decides to go for the most isolated while Artem hops on a train heading westward.

Which is how Red ends up once again on a boat to the Sevii Islands, this time a small skiff rather than a luxurious cruise ship. The sky is gray with pockets of blue where the sun occasionally shines through, and he expects rain at some point, but all he really has to do today is make it to the island and set a teleport spot, so he didn’t let the weather deter him.

The Tanoby Ruins are hard to spot from a distance, but as they round the southern bend of Quest Island the ship’s captain helpfully points to the tiny islets the ruins are nestled on from east to west.

“Monean, Liptoo, Weepth, Dilford, Scufib, Rixy, and Viapois. Most of the buildings have fallen apart to time or pokemon or some storm or another, but each has at least one main chamber that’s underground or built into a cavern.”

“And that’s where the unown spawn?”

“Sure, but not just there, they’ll pop up all around here. ‘Specially lately; used to be I’d get just one or two jobs per month to bring people to the ruins instead of a dozen, and the rest of the trips were for trainers heading to the battle tower.”

Red turns to where it sticks up from the northern end of Quest Island. “That’s one of those places for underground pokemon battles, right? I mean, figuratively.” He remembers Blue talking about it once or twice; most regions have one, usually far from any major cities where the leagues have less direct influence.

“Well, it’s a bit too obvious for even that, eh? But they’re not ‘sanctioned,’ true enough. With just enough land here to build a small town, but no one interested in living near unown ruins, it made the perfect spot for it.”

“Right. I guess it would be unsettling to have one pop into your room one night.” After hearing the sounds they make firsthand, and spending a few hours listening to recordings of all kinds just in case he discerned some hidden pattern, he’s not sure cheap land would entice him much either, even with the ability to teleport offsetting the isolation.

As if summoned by the topic, Red sees Pikachu’s ears twitch, and follows his pokemon’s gaze to the sky, where a distant black shape floats by. It’s too far for him to make out its noise or even what letter it is, let alone do a mental merge, but he can at least track the direction it seems to be going in, and takes his pokedex out to add the trajectory to the WCN app, where thousands of thin lines show other projected routes for observed unown, including how many and what letters. Once he’s done he slides the timescale back, first a few days, then a few weeks, and finally to when the app was created a few months ago, watching lines vanish and reappear.

Still no pattern that he can make out. But hopefully getting a better understanding of where they’re going beyond the regions’ borders will help. After he floated the idea around, others have already tested and confirmed that most freshly appearing unown have a few moments of lingering memory of where they were before, making it clear that they’re teleporting in from somewhere else rather than being “born” that very moment.

He’s still playing with the map as the captain cuts the boat’s speed and starts to aim it toward the docks at the base of the nearest islet. Red does one last mental sweep to make sure there aren’t any dangerous pokemon around, then calls Wartortle back to the boat and returns him to his ball. “Thanks for the ride.” Red steps onto the dock, then resummons Wartortle so he can rest before bringing Kadabra out too. Pikachu finally jumps onto the dock beside him, sniffing around before dashing off to explore the rocky path that leads up to the rest of the tiny island.

“Sure you don’t want me to stick around? Know you said you can teleport back, but if you want to visit the other islands…”

“My pokemon can take me, just didn’t want to risk the long swim over.”

“Alright then, good luck to you.”

Red waves as the captain puts the boat in reverse and eases it away from the dock, then focuses on his kadabra, who’s doing a mental sweep of its surroundings. Unlike its younger form, Kadabra isn’t inclined to flee at the first sign of danger, his mood more of a careful wariness. Red lets his pokemon finish getting used to their surroundings, then deepens the merger and connects all the information from his own senses together with his current emotional state.

Firm stone beneath his feet, the strong scent of the ocean, the sound of the waves, sun on his skin, the feeling of excitement from being here, so far from the mainland and ready to explore the ancient mystery of the ruins… all of it merges into a unique memory that he can recall and use to return at will.

Once he feels like he has the memory down in sufficient detail, and enough time has passed that it feels like a memory and not his current experience, he walks a few steps off the dock with Kadabra, then puts a hand on his pokemon’s shoulder, focuses, and teleports back to the dock.

Satisfied, he checks on Wartortle, gives him some extra treats and water, then leads the two up the path, where Pikachu is still scouting ahead. A path has been cut into the side of the islet to ensure it’s not too steep a climb, but he’s still breathing hard by the time he makes it to the top and takes in the ruins for the first time.

Brown, mossy stones jut out of the ground in various places, some seemingly at random, others clearly the remains of some building’s foundations. A few structures are still standing, but even those have holes in the walls, and none have roofs. He can faintly make out the ancient etchings in some of the stones, thin unown shapes of all kinds forming words that can no longer be understood.

Sitting on one of the worn stone walls is a girl dressed in a purple shirt and beige cargo pants, attention on the sketchpad in her lap. She looks a few years older than Red, and beside her sits a houndoom on one side and a jolteon on the other, while a sandslash rests half-submerged behind her.

There’s also a kabutops walking around them all, maybe on patrol for threats. It’s a rare enough sight that Red stops and stares back as it gives him and his pokemon a measuring look, until the girl says, “Relax, Tops.”

Despite her pokemon all being natives, her accent is distinctly Galarian. Her kabutops (seemingly grudgingly) returns to its patrol, while the rest of her pokemon stay relaxed, with just the houndoom raising a head to glance at Kadabra before lowering it onto its paws again.

The girl smiles, and he’s just starting to wonder why she looks familiar when there’s a pop sound, and an O unown appears between them, a few meters off the ground and to Red’s left.

They both react together, Red rushing forward while the girl leaps off the crumbling wall, pulling a ball off her belt (wait, what?) as he expands two from his pouch. Their pokemon startle as well, though with no clear threat the two trainers swiftly leave them behind; Red almost sends a mental command for Kadabra to use Confusion if the unown starts to fly away, but the unown is simply doing a slow rotation midair, giving them both time to reach it from nearly opposite ends.

“Don’t catch it!” she yells.

“You can go first!” Red yells back as he runs under it to cut off a potential escape route. “I just need to merge with it!”

“Okay, just don’t do anything to scare it off!” She braces her arm. “Go, Pidove!”

The gray bird appears in front of her, and she quickly kneels to tie something to its feet. Red decides to save his confusion for later and just focuses on the unown’s thoughts, hoping he can pick up some traces of memory of where it was before…

The now-familiar “window” opens in Red’s mind, showing him a second visual field of what the unown sees… which, as usual, he can barely process.

Inside what looks like their single large pupil are in fact multiple, all crowded together to give a uniquely kaleidoscopic vision where multiple different perspectives, with varying range and color sensitivity, are crowded together. It also doesn’t help that the unown’s circular body keeps spinning in circles even as the eye rolls.

Still, even all that isn’t enough on its own to really give Red difficulty; what does is the sucking sensation that the other creature’s “mind” seems to constantly experience, a drain that Red’s unpartitioned self recognizes as somehow similar to what it’s like to partition memories. Except the unown’s memories aren’t going behind partitions, so far as he and other psychics can tell; just fading.

This has always been taken as the experiential side-effect of not having much memory capacity. Still, Red expected it to feel more passive, or like the fragmenting of a dream, or simply vanishing from one moment to the next. Instead the impression of his thoughts being pulled is distinct, attention not just collapsing but compressing to fit his sensorium into the unown’s limited body. He quickly releases most of the merger so that his mind settles almost entirely back in his own senses, then begins regulating the merger the way he’s practiced with his own unown, purposefully degrading the “window” of its vision until it’s a flat, low resolution monochrome.

He’s just in time to catch the last of the unown’s pre-current memories before they’re gone, but what he sees is an unrecognizable blur that vaguely looks like… the top of a forest?

And then he hears a quick musical trill, and turns to see the girl playing a blue ocarina. Her pidove flies up toward the unown, whose circular body spins away midair, and the chase is on.

But the pidove doesn’t attack, instead just following its slower prey as the unown loops around in erratic arcs above their heads, until finally its wanderings take it too far for Red to maintain the merger.

The eerie noise it emitted takes another moment to fully fade, or maybe that’s just in Red’s head. He stares after the two pokemon for a moment, wondering if the girl is going to call her pidove back… but instead she’s tucking her ocarina away, and miniaturizes its ball to put in her pocket instead of her belt (which seems to have customized pokeballs for the other five, tops alternating purple and yellow). “Thanks for not catching it.”

“Uh, no problem.” Red thinks back to that glimpse he got of the unown’s memory, trying to remember some detail that would help discern where the forest was. But there were no mountains, no lakes, no coastlines, no landmarks at all. A total bust. “I figured you’ve probably been here waiting for a while anyway, but… what about your pidove? What was that command you played?”

“Just something I’ve been working on to track the unown.” She walks back to where she was sitting by her pokemon and Red follows, watching as she picks her notepad up and brushes dirt off the pages. “Aw, shinx. It smudged.”

He catches a glimpse of a color pencil sketch and turns toward where she was facing to confirm that she’s been drawing the chain of tiny islets to the west, sunbeams peeking through the clouds to highlight the ruins on each. She must have been sitting here since morning to catch them all as they occurred, maybe multiple days. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault.” She smiles at him and holds a hand out. “Nice to finally meet you, Red. I’m Lulie.”

Red shakes it, mind automatically jumping to make the connection with her Galarian accent. “ReasonisFun? What are you doing in Kanto?” She has a sizeable following online, but in fairly different circles than Red, who only met her once she got involved in What Comes Next.

“Why wouldn’t I be, it’s where all the fun stuff is happening!” She considers a moment. “Tragic and dangerous too, of course, but you’re not about to leave, are you?”

“No,” he admits. He’s still going to most nearby incidents to help out while Cinnabar continues to stabilize, and though it often messes with his schedules and sleep, he hasn’t considered stopping. “But that’s because all my friends are here.”

“That’s fair. But I’ve got friends here too, from back when I first visited.” She takes a new pokeball, also the default red, out of her bag and clips onto the empty space on her belt where her pidove was. “Besides the pokemon, I mean, though I think they’re happy to be back home.”

Red looks at her pokemon again, then back at her. “You’re not psychic, are you?”

“Nah, I’m just good at reading vibes.”

He can’t tell if she’s joking or not, but now he’s curious about her pokeballs. If she’s color coding, he’d expect the houndoom to be in a red ball, but the only one on her belt is the one that she just put there. “Purple are for your houndoom and kabutops, yellow are for sandslash, jolteon, and…?”

“Two out of four. Yellow are Jolteon, Houndoom, and Agarment, while purple are Slashy and Tops.”

It takes him a moment to realize Agarment breaks the nicknamed/non-nicknamed pattern rather than being a pokemon he’s never heard of. “What’s Agarment?”

“Abra.”

Her deadpan delivery is betrayed by a slight twinkle in her eyes and curve to her lip that makes him replay everything, and then he laughs. “That’s terrible, and also Leaf is going to love it. Just to make sure, Slashy is the sandslash?”

“Yep, and Tops the kabutops.”

“My friend Blue has an abra named Tops.”

“Huh. Weird name for abra.”

Red snorts and decides not to tell her about how long all his abra spent named after their teleportation sites just yet. He almost asks her how she got a kabutops, especially if she’s only been here as a visitor, then remembers there’s still one unaccounted for. “So what’s in the regular ball?”

“Another pidove. Your post back in April about how to herd or follow unown on mounts got me thinking a few steps ahead; what if we can just figure out where they go instead, and find them there? There are plenty of pidove in my hometown, and they’re excellent long distance fliers with incredible memories. So I caught a bunch, trained them to follow unown, and bought a bunch of trackers.” She takes her pokedex out (also purple, with yellow trim around the screen and buttons) and taps a few times before showing him…

A personalized version of the WCN map, thick colored lines indicating where her pokemon have tracked the various unown she’s sent them after. Three of them are still being drawn in real time, blinking every second as the fronts stretches further out, often in loops or bends. “Woah. How far will it go?”

“The weakest I caught was still able to fly over a thousand kilometers in a day.”

“This is great! If there’s a pattern, we might even be able to follow it and get a confirmed sighting of them creating pokemon!”

“Sure, that too.” Lulie starts picking her colored pencils back up from where they rolled around. Her jolteon stretches its neck out to pick one up that rolled near it, then holds it up for her, and she smiles as she rubs its head and takes it.

Red helps her pick up the rest, then sits next to her as he continues studying the flight paths. “By ‘that too,’ you mean there’s something else you’re doing it for?”

“To better understand their behavior in general. I’m not sure what getting a confirmed sighting of a pokemon appearing near an unown would actually do at this point.”

“Well I know the evidence seems really convincing, but it would still be important to get observed confirmation!”

“Why?”

Red blinks. “Why… is observation necessary for confirming a hypothesis?”

“Would seeing the pokemon appear near an unown do that?”

Her tone is light and curious, and it makes him smile as he remembers all the times her curiosity online has led to people, himself included, stepping back from their reflexive responses to think things through more carefully. “Ah, no. It wouldn’t ‘prove’ anything, because we can’t prove things like that by observation. But it would lend confidence to the idea, and make our predictions stronger.”

“How?”

“We’d have at least one confirmed example that pokemon can be created by… no, that they could appear near where unown are.”

She grins at the correction. “Sure, but again, what would that change?”

“Hmm. Well right now we don’t know for sure if that can happen. Once we see it, we would.”

“Pokemon probably appear all the time near rocks, and we don’t think rocks have anything to do with it unless it’s a Rock type. I get that unown are much rarer than rocks, so it feels less coincidental if an unown is near a pokemon that appears, but ‘pokemon could appear near unown’ isn’t a useful scientific theory.”

“I think I get what you’re saying; we can’t prove stuff, black swannas can exist, and all it would take is one pokemon appearing nowhere near an unown to invalidate the idea. But until that happens…”

“You believe it would increase the odds of it being true. But induction isn’t how science is done.”

The sudden confidence is a sharp contrast to the earlier curiosity, and his skepticism blooms in response. “What makes you say that?”

She gestures at the ruins. “Why are you here?”

It takes him a moment to realize she’s not changing the subject. “To study the unown.”

“You can do that through books.”

“Right, I want to learn something new about them. Make new observations.”

“Keep going. Did someone tell you to learn something new about them? Is someone paying you?”

“No, I… want to know because I’m curious.”

“Huh.” Lulie looks up briefly, hand absently rubbing her houndoom’s back. “I feel like my curiosity always comes from somewhere, but I’m not sure if that’s actually true… it also sometimes feels like it’s just there, as a passive thing that doesn’t require a specific trigger. But as an emotion, it’s variable; sometimes I feel mild curiosity, sometimes strong curiosity. Is it different for you?”

“No, that sounds about right. Sometimes I see or hear things that make me notice a mild curiosity, but the strongest emotional response always comes from things that might be related to specific topics, like psychic phenomenon or the origin of species.”

“So why are you here, specifically, studying the unown in particular? The way you’re framing things is that you want to know something, right?” He nods. “But science is never going to give you proof that you’re right. So what is it you’re actually trying to do here?”

Red frowns. “Science may not be able to prove a specific model right, but it can prove which are false so we know which are less wrong.”

“Exactly!” she exclaims with a wide grin, and he’s not the only one who startles. “Woops, sorry boy.” She strokes the houndoom’s head, then turns back to Red. “So according to Popper, science—”

“Wait, according to who?”

“Karl Popper. He was a philosopher who wrote about the problem of induction, and why falsifiability is what distinguishes science from non-science. What makes science so powerful is its ability to falsify some set of competing theories, which means you first need at least two competing explanations to do science. If the explanation you have fits all the observations, then more evidence won’t make it any more true, so there’s no value in any further confirming evidence.”

“I know falsification is important, of course, but… he was against any retesting at all? What about peer review?”

“When someone runs an experiment to falsify something it can be important for others to check their work, of course. But if the theory properly explains the phenomenon, what’s the point of doing another test? You’d only do that if it doesn’t match some observation, which again means there’s a problem. That’s what motivates all scientific advances: solving problems. Sometimes practical, like how to build a better pokeball, sometimes theoretical, like where pokemon come from.” She smiles. “So what explanation are you here to test?”

He sits beside her to think about it, and she lets him, going back to her sketching. Red pulls a tin spoon out of his pocket and tosses it toward Kadabra to play with, watching for a while as his pokemon catches it midair and begin to levitate and bend it around. Red watches him for a bit as he spends a few moments appreciating how nice it is to meet someone else willing to launch into conversations and debates like this. He knows Blue would hate it, and remembers the way others have reacted when he did similar, but he’s already really glad he came to this island in particular.

Once Kadabra is regularly cycling through its mental exercises, Red starts to consider his potential explanations for pokemon genesis, then discard them one by one.

Unown create pokemon around them by accident, no other factors are important.

Unown create pokemon around them given certain other conditions.

Only groups of unown create pokemon around them… only certain amount of unown…

“Ugh,” he says after a minute. “Everything I come up with can’t be falsified by observation. I could come up with some more deliberately rigid explanations, but I have no reason to believe they’re true yet.”

“Noticing that is an important first step! There’s no time to test or critique every hypothesis or argument, which is why coming up with good potential explanations, ones that would actually help us discard it or competing theories, is such an important part of the process. That’s why all the greatest scientists are celebrated for their creativity in coming up with good explanations to test, or clever experiments to isolate the false variations of similar ones.”

Red considers this a moment, and realizes she’s right. It also gives him a new lens through which to view his own fumbling experiments, and how lacking a meaningful explanation for the potential experimental outcomes in his “psychic particle” experiments limited the value of what he was actually testing against. By contrast, his most recent discovery of indoor teleportation was accidental, but forming a gears-level explanation from the ground up was so useful that it not only could help reproduce the effect, it also helped Tatsumaki use kinesis through walls.

“I think I get it. So what are the explanations that you’re hoping to test against, if you can?”

She turns to another page in her notebook, then shows it to him so he can read:

1) The knowledge of pokemon biology is contained in meteorites that carry their genetic material from other worlds.

2) Unown are a conduit for knowledge from another world. That knowledge is what creates the new pokemon, which already exist in that other world.

3) Unown contain the knowledge to create new pokemon themselves, and different combinations of letters combine with different surrounding objects to spontaneously create life.

4) Living pokemon genetics contain the knowledge of ancestral pokemon, and some environments or circumstances trigger a reversion.

5) Pokemon genetic knowledge did not evolve anywhere, created by unimaginably intelligent designer—but then where did designer originate?

Red blinks, then blinks again, trying to decide where to start before picking, “You believe in parallel worlds?”

“Well sure, it’s the best explanation for what happens to single photons in the double slit experiment.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of that. Something to do with quantum mechanics, right?” He almost asks why it’s the best explanation, then decides he doesn’t care as much right now and can look it up later. “So if pokemon come from other worlds, what does it mean that unown contain the ‘knowledge’ to create them? I’ve been inside their heads, so to speak, and they’re even dumber than magikarp.”

“I know you know what memes are from that lecture you gave everyone about Pokemon types–”

“–it wasn’t a lecture, I was just saying–”

“–it was totally a lecture, Red, it was like ten thousand words, but I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I actually enjoyed it! But the comparison of memes to genes is more apt than I think even Dawkins knew; he wanted to describe ideas the way we understand genes, but really it’s genes that are the embodiment of memes. When I say ‘knowledge,’ I don’t mean just memorized facts. Real knowledge is any information that preserves and replicates itself.”

“Because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be able to be learned,” Red murmurs, trying to think of what this has to do with pokemon… “Ah, that’s what you meant by the comparison to genes. They contain ‘knowledge’ about biology. How many bones to grow, where, how thick, what shape, it’s all in the genes, along with skin, muscle tissue, metabolism, everything. If it doesn’t survive the environment it’s in and outcompete others, the genes die, and the knowledge of how to turn atoms into those particular biological containers, die with them.”

“You’re quick,” Lulie says with a smile. “I thought you would be. See, a good explanation doesn’t have adjustable parts. If pokemon appear around an unown, one explanation is that the unown ‘created’ it, but that’s no different than saying that pokemon are naturally occurring around the unown, or that Arceus created them and unown are just its eyes in our world, or that all the unown are parts of a different god who did it and Arceus had nothing to do with it. Until you have a way to test specific explanations with observations that will leave better ones standing, the observations themselves aren’t guaranteed to create any new or real understanding.”

Red slowly nods, watching Pikachu walk over to Jolteon for some mutual sniffs. “So the actual process is to first notice there’s a problem, which can be as simple as when two things you think you know, or see, contradict. But instead of following that with observations to make hypotheses, I should first come up with explanations.”

“You do come up with explanations first. All observations, all learning, is theory laden. We form explanations for things constantly, consciously or subconsciously, and what we think we know affects how we interpret information and make sense of it.”

“Right. That’s why two people can hear the same facts about something that happened, but come up with totally different explanations for why it happened, and their models might actually update in opposite directions.” That always annoyed him; it just seems wrong for two people to get the same information and not move closer to agreement rather than farther.

“There are other factors too. Sometimes two people will observe the same exact thing happen in front of them, but their attention is on different things.”

“And they’ll remember different things, which will also lead to different expectations going forward, which in turn might lead to biases.”

“You mean like confirmation bias?”

“Worse. If someone only sees or reads things that reinforce a certain belief, that might make it harder to accept something that seems to disagree with all they already believe. But taking awareness into account too… what if they don’t even register the counterevidence as counterevidence at all? That would be pretty rare though, like the starting perspectives would have to have diverged drastically, or the information about something they’ve developed a lot of attentional blind spots around.”

“Ugh. Sounds like what happens in politics a lot.” She sighs. “But yeah, this is why it’s important to think not just of what models people have of reality, but also where their awareness naturally goes. Every expectation we have is the result of an explanation our mind is using to predict what will happen next.”

“Yeah, that’s what predictive processing–” A distant pop makes them both leap up again, this time without spilling Lulie’s notebook.

“I don’t see it,” she says, spinning around to look in every direction as she unclips her red pokeball and takes another tracker out of her pocket. “You?”

Red’s senses are already stretched outward, and he starts running around the ruins in case it’s inside one of the buildings. By the time he senses it behind one of the crumbling houses it’s already flying up and away, not giving him time to glimpse its memories.

The ocarina sounds behind him, and Lulie’s second pidove launches into the air after the already-distant black speck.

Red jogs back over to her as she minimizes the ball and swaps it for another full one from her bag. “How many of those things have you got?”

“Just eight left. Never was able to send more than seven out in a day, but so long as it doesn’t rain I’m hoping I get lucky.”

“Will the pidove come back here, or do you go to them?”

“Depends; the ones that follow unown out over the ocean will turn back when they’re near their halfway flight time and rest on the roof of the battle tower until I pick them up. The ones that end up going more north or west will make their way to Cinnabar, Pallet, or Fuchsia.”

“Nice. Have you posted about this yet?”

“Just started, now that I can show how effective it is.”

Red grins. “With your following, this’ll take off big.” He should probably buy some pidove… not that they’re anywhere near as rare or hard to catch as abra, but they’re also not native to any of the island regions. “So which of your hypotheses are you expecting to invalidate by tracking them?”

“Oh, I’d be surprised if any of them would. Personally I think it’s too early to falsify any by observation until we have a better understanding of all sorts of things. Whether unown are somehow a carrier for the genetic knowledge pokemon contain or not, I’m also interested in the unown themselves for their own sake. Why they act the way they do, the unique properties they have, what sort of environment, if any, they evolved in. Exploratory research is useful to create new theories or decide which to test.”

“I totally get that, it’s why part of me is so frustrated by the research ban.”

Lulie shrugs. “Only matters if I intend to do that sort of research in a region that’s banned it. There are others that are just going ahead, you know.”

Red worries his lower lip. “Yeah, but… what if it really is dangerous?”

“Then that’s just another problem we’ll have to solve.”

Her words resonate within him, stirring the part that had been mostly, if uncomfortably, appeased by his talk with Giovanni. He wants it to be true. Would have probably agreed a year ago, and he knows it’s the sort of thing Blue would say.

But…

“I feel like that’s the sort of thing Archie and Matsubusa believed.” Salvage teams still haven’t found the stolen submarine to confirm Archie’s death, and neither renegade leader or any of their people have been seen or heard from, despite being Interpol’s most wanted criminals for months. “That they could figure out how to revive Groudon and Kyogre, and if there were any problems controlling them they’d figure that out later.”

“Yeah.” Lulie’s smile has faded, and she looks pensively up at the sky as her hand reaches back to stroke Slashy’s snout. “To be clear, I’m not saying all knowledge should be spread to everyone. All problems are solvable, but that doesn’t mean we’ll figure the solutions out on time. Still, the research should be done. If someone besides those two had learned what they did, maybe they could have stopped them or the legendaries even sooner.”

The parallel to the other regions already continuing with unown research goes without saying. “So, we should be trying to research whatever we can, and if something dangerous is discovered, then we shouldn’t share the knowledge until we can reasonably ensure it’s safe?”

“That seems nearly impossible. I’d say that it’s more about who you trust to tell than anything.”

Well, he can hardly argue with that given what he’s already decided, twice. Still, Red sits silent, thoughts turning to what they’re doing here as he uses psychic commands to train his pokemon in agile movement around the ruins. What’s more potentially dangerous, her tracking, or his memory searches? He has no idea. Red told Artem he’s not trying to sneak around the ban, but while what he’s doing isn’t technically research into pokemon genesis, they don’t know that it won’t contribute to it.

What would he do, if he discovered something important here? He couldn’t tell Sabrina or Giovanni, and even Professor Oak might feel compelled to obey their Champion, despite disagreeing. And he can’t just rely on himself to know what others might do with his research, since any piece of knowledge might be the key to another’s discovery.

But that’s true of any research, really… as he already learned, the hard way. Hell, even Tatsumaki’s discovery might just be another thing that people get scared of psychics about. The list is getting rather long, all things considered, and after a certain point it may just be a choice between stop doing anything he finds important or risk discovering something that might lead to bad stuff happening.

“Still bothered?”

Red turns to see Lulie watching him, and despite her not being psychic the words weren’t a question. Good at reading vibes, huh? He lets his senses withdraw from Kadabra’s and throws a treat out for his pokemon. “I guess I’m just trying to come to terms with the risks of all this. It’s been on my mind a lot lately, actually; figuring out what ways any of my research might lead to bad outcomes.”

“Well, I understand why, but while you’re at it, why not also figure out what ways any of your actions might lead to bad outcomes?”

“What, all of them?”

“Sure. Is there any reason to only care about research in particular?”

Her tone makes it clear she’s suggesting something intentionally impractical to make a point, but Red just gives her a wan smile. “Let’s just say I have good evidence that my research is more likely than not to cause problems, compared to all my non-research actions.”

Lulie’s eyes widen slightly, and this time she’s the one that stays silent, drawing pad forgotten as her eyes turn upward. Red merges with his pokemon one at a time, sending them through the ruins, treating it as an obstacle course, until finally she looks back at him and says, “I feel like you just admitted something rather personal, and important, and you believe it enough that I don’t feel inclined to doubt it. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, I think.” Really he shouldn’t have said it at all, if he’s being as cautious as he should be, but somehow he trusts her not to gossip. Some of his own “vibe” reading, maybe.

“I’ll admit to being curious, but understand if that’s all you want to say. Meanwhile, I should remind you of the good you’ve done too.” She pats the yellow ball at the back of her belt. “I was only able to afford Agarment here because of you.”

“I had some help. But… yeah, I think I did need that reminder.” He tries to let that sink in, and once it does he feels himself breathe a little easier, his worries about being a walking infohazard for psychics fading a bit. Much as it might feel lately like all he’s done is discover dangerous things, he knows he’s done more than that. “Thanks.”

“Anytime. So what’s your plan to figure out where pokemon come from?”

Red smiles. “Finding ways to test your ideas seems good, actually. The fourth one reminded me of ditto.” Part of him still stubbornly insists that metamon is the better name, but there’s no denying the tide has turned in the past few weeks. “There are stories of clefairy coming from the moon and ghosts from the afterlife, but as far as we know, minior are the only pokemon that aren’t really from our planet at all, right? Or at least, they form in the stratosphere before falling to earth. Has anyone tested whether ditto can transform into them?”

“You’re thinking, what, that because they’re not from the planet, they’re a completely different genetic branch from whatever ditto can imitate? Hmm.” She checks her pokedex, brings up the page on ditto, and starts to scroll. “Nope, they haven’t gotten around to testing that one yet.”

“Then it’s time I write up some competing theories of my own.”

Lulie grins. “And meanwhile, what’s your plan with the unown?”

“Well, I know you’re against knowledge by induction, but I still think it can be valuable. Let’s say unown really are important, in some way, to new pokemon appearing. If we want to get a sense of the range in which new pokemon might be spawned, then obviously just one observation wouldn’t do much; we wouldn’t have any sense of how relatively close or far it is from the potential maximums, or minimums for that matter. But with a hundred observations, unless there’s absolutely no trend at all, we could get a frequency curve that could be very useful.”

Lulie just stares at him a moment. “You want to make a hundred observations of pokemon genesis, when no one’s even managed one yet?!”

It starts to drizzle as they argue, and Lulie withdraws her houndoom as they find shelter beneath some trees, chatting late into the day and building up their knowledge together, one data point at a time. When Red finally says goodbye and teleports home, it’s with new conviction.

He wouldn’t experiment in any way that might create pokemon… but he would continue trying to learn where they come from, and decide what to do with that information later if he has to.

---

The division within Fuchsia gym starts slowly, and without any deliberate effort on Blue’s part.

For one thing, he and his friends are famous enough to naturally attract aspiring trainers wherever they go, to the point where he finds himself having trouble actually keeping track of everyone these days. It takes effort to spend “personal time” with others beyond Glen, Elaine, Lizzy, and Maria; he feels the most comfortable being himself around them. But he pushes himself to do it anyway, remembering how important it was to befriend each of them on a more equal level. He wonders where he’d be now if he hadn’t gone to the Saffron dojo that day; maybe worried to even attend classes.

Novelty also likely plays some factor in how popular their group becomes; after finally having the blessing from a gym leader to do what he wants, Blue can at last continue what they started in Vermilion. While he starts iterating on the Objection system, Glen and Elaine work together to develop a set of group training scenarios; Search and Rescue, Hold the Line, and Titan Takedown.

(That last one is the most unique, and soon draws the most sign-ups. Since they don’t have actual legendaries to practice on, the scenario features an asymmetric battle between one trainer using their most powerful pokemon and three to five using weak ones. Though it comes with an added risk to the pokemon involved, people seem as genuinely excited to try to work together taking down the “Legendary” as they do to play the villain; much debate was had over whether they should be able to ‘catch’ it, and in the end Blue decided that since no legendary has been caught yet, they would battle as though taking them down is the only option.)

And then of course there was Koga’s speech, and the way he occasionally visits to observe the “unofficial” classes they run with anyone that wants to try the scenarios. It’s hard to compress all the things they learned in Vermilion into a few lectures and practical tests, but the scenarios are different enough from regular battle matches, and the experience of those at the gym so wildly varying, that they make safety the priority and let the participants learn most of the rest live.

But still, all of that could be seen as auxiliary gym activities… until a couple weeks after starting, Janine began to post notices of private, one-on-one battle training. Not just with her; most of the veteran members of the gym also make themselves available, and far beyond what’s normally available in most gyms. Not only do they double their available times for single matches and coaching, they also post their training times, and stage them in public places where anyone who wants to observe can do so… always coincidentally at the same times that the group scenarios or lessons are scheduled.

It feels like years ago, now, but Blue still remembers what Red told him just before leaving for the cruise convention… along with the burning conviction that’s so rare to see in his friend.

“This is your chance to do something really different… prove that you can win, reveal your secrets, and then win again anyway.“

The memory has nudged him, now and then, to say more rather than less, to show his secrets not just to those in his inner circle, but to the world, in the hopes that it strengthens every trainer without costing him his dream. It still feels like a gamble, every time, but one that on net he’s glad he takes.

But he hasn’t tried to preach something similar, knowing it would bring a lot of backlash from other battle trainers; for all that he’s accomplished, he’s still young, and the more experienced trainers would believe he’s just trying to get others to show him their secrets in exchange for his own paltry few.

And yet without really intending to, it seems he’s managed to push the Fuchsia gym culture onto a path that might normalize that mentality. Janine knows she can’t beat him in offering more than what gyms traditionally do, but she can double down on that tradition, with added perks.

Which is why, while some trainers are attending both, there’s been a definite drop-off since Janine’s lessons started, to the point where they’re actually having trouble forming teams for each scenario with the smaller pool of skill and pokemon available.

All told, despite Janine beating him twice more since their first match, Koga’s plan is working out wonderfully, and the Leader is sure to allow him to Challenge soon.

“So why do I feel like I’m losing?” Blue complains to Elaine as they make their way to the training rooms to practice with their psychic pokemon. Blue hasn’t given up on getting Tops into fighting shape, and doesn’t plan to, but he has to admit that a kadabra alone wouldn’t bridge the gap between him and Janine. “And I don’t just mean because I am, obviously.”

“Let me guess,” Elaine says. “At this point even getting the badge and leaving would feel like failure?”

He grunts acknowledgement. And for multiple reasons too, not least of which is that he’s losing hope that the starting animosity from Janine will turn into a more friendly rivalry over time. For reasons he can’t quite understand, if anything the Leader’s daughter seems to actually hate him more now, despite his attempts to apologize for their rough start and befriend her. “The worst part is, her training will actually help people become stronger than ours. Not in every situation, but in their ability to win trainer battles and gym challenges. And that means the scenarios will die out as soon as we leave.”

“Makes sense to me. How many people get a gym’s badge in a year, a few dozen at most? Meanwhile, you’re the first person to change the culture of a gym without being its Leader. Of course you want to keep stacking that story.”

Blue sighs as they enter the elevator and start heading down. “I only want to because I’m right though. The Indigo League’s been around for nearly a century, if focusing on individual trainer strength was enough to keep the region safe then someone would have taken a Stormbringer down by now.”

“Preaching to the choir,” Elaine gently reminds him. “But however wrong it may be to focus on individual trainer strength alone, we can’t deny that her training will help with both trainer battles and wild battles.”

“Well, no, but ours helps against trainer battles too!”

“Mmm. If I were to think up numbers for it, which I have, I’d say her training boosts Battle Power against trainers by 10, and ours against wilds by 10. But while ours boosts power against trainers by 2, maybe 3, hers boosts power against wilds by at least 5.”

Blue frowns. “Are you pulling those from a game?”

“Nope.”

“Alright, well—”

“I’m describing how it’ll be reflected in my game.”

“You’re making a game? I’m in it?”

“Of course!”

“Wait, if it’s your game why not give my training a boost?”

“I can’t do that, silly, it has to be realistic. There are modifiers for the two of you, but I think they come out about equal, and then she’s got a Second and Third on her side.”

Which has certainly tempted Blue to go to the lessons himself, as a sort of “we’re not so proud that we don’t think we can learn from you too” (not to mention the help it would be in his own battles against them), but they’re still working out the schedule rotation and he needs to be present for most. “I still think our scenarios should boost trainer battles by more. They’re not even battling wild pokemon!”

“Neither are we, just pretending they’re wild.” She pats his shoulder as they pick a training room and close the door behind them. “It’s okay, Blue, you have plenty of other perks.”

“I do?”

“Yep! First off, you have Showman, which gives you advantage when speaking in front of a crowd, which gives you a higher chance at earning bonus reputation. You also have Battle Calm, which—”

“Wait, how did you…?”

Elaine blinks. “How did I what?”

Blue feels the back of his neck burning. “Uh, nothing. Just something I’ve heard before, I think?”

“Maybe! I thought I made it up, but you’re always super chill when you fight, so I gave you immunity to reaction penalties from stress.”

“Is that… good?”

“Yeah, it’s one of your strongest perks! That and the Legendary Reflexes and Heroic Name—”

“Okay, okay, I’ve got a lot of perks. I’m satisfied.” He smiles and unclips Tops’s ball. “Thanks. Where are you finding the time to even make a sim, anyway?”

“It’s not digital, it’s a tabletop RPG! You know, pencil and paper, character sheets, stuff like that. It’s what I’ve been working on with Marcus.”

“Oh. I thought you guys were, you know. Dating or whatever.” He half expected that’s why Marcus was so quick to join up with them in Saffron, but he couldn’t exactly call the older boy out on it, especially since he’s actually a good trainer.

“Ah. No.” Her cheeks are pink as she unclips a pokeball too, and Blue is about to summon Tops when she says, “I’ve, um, got my sights set on someone else.”

Shit. Blue still remembers that kiss on the cheek during the storm, now and then, and hoped it was nothing meaningful. That didn’t stop him worrying about it off and on for months, of course, and yet he still has no idea what to say. “Um.”

“But I’m pretty sure he just sees me as a friend.”

“Right.” He doesn’t dare be too relieved, yet, and sure enough…

“Maybe because he’s still focused on another girl. I know it’s stupid to keep hoping, and I’m not rooting against them, exactly…”

“Wait. Another girl?” Does she think he and Leaf…? Or maybe—

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“It is?” Blue asks, feeling a little faint. He’s been talking to Maria a lot lately to get extra help training their psychic pokemon, but—

“Well, I thought it was. He talks like Bretta is going to ask him out any day now, or else he will.”

“Oh!” The relief is short-lived as Elaine gives him a quizzical look, and now it’s his turn to blush. “Right,” he quickly adds, hoping it’s a more normal response. And then, for good measure, “Yeah.”

“You think Glen’s still focused on her too, then?”

He should just lie. It would be so easy. But what if he’s wrong? In this case he wouldn’t just look foolish, he’d be misleading his friend.

“I actually have no idea,” he admits after a moment, very badly wanting to summon his pokemon and start the training. Instead he starts tossing the ball back and forth. “And it doesn’t seem like my business.”

“Right.” She starts to play with her ball too. “I just thought you were at least keeping track of things like that. For, you know. Drama-avoidance reasons.”

Blue grimaces, but says nothing. He’s read about the way romance among journeymates could lead to problems between them (despite the incomprehensible insistence of basically every movie to shoehorn it in, which is one of the many reasons he prefers films about trainers his own age) but the whys and hows have always been a mystery to him, and he’s never really wanted them not to be. As far as he can tell, romance just makes people go crazy in fairly random and uninteresting ways.

Sometimes heroic ones, too, but those would always be more interesting without the romantic motivation, to him, and observing the ups and downs of Daisy’s romantic life so far has convinced him further that the whole thing is more trouble than it’s worth, even if things seem to be going well with her current girlfriend so far.

She’s still looking at him, though, and finally he says, “I’m just trying to focus on what would make everyone a better trainer. So long as it’s not causing a problem, meddling with people’s personal lives would just be a distraction, for me and others.”

“I get that. And I do appreciate it. But you’ve earned the right to nudge, now and then, you know? If you think it’s getting to be more of a distraction than saying something would.”

Is she asking him to tell her to stop thinking about Glen? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing someone would be able to do, at least according to movies, but then they’re not reliable in all sorts of other ways. “I’m younger than everyone else in the group. Why would I have any more to say on this than you all?”

“It’s not that you would, exactly. I mean, I don’t think people are going to ask you for dating advice. But if it’s affecting our training, I expect you to notice, and… well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint you.” She shrugs. “I guess I should just speak for myself, but if you think I’ve been slipping behind because I keep trying to make sure Glen is keeping up…”

She’s right, he has noticed that. He just didn’t say anything because he figured she’s doing it out of friendship. “Would you do the same for others in the group?”

“I’m not sure. Lizzy and Maria, probably? Maybe not the newcomers, if I’m being honest. I like Marcus and Alex, but I didn’t spend that much time at the dojo, so I’m still getting to know them.”

Blue nods. “You are, a bit. Falling behind I mean. But you’ve been improving in other ways too, and… there are more important things than pokemon training sometimes.” He sighs. “Honestly, it’s been a bit of a relief. I’d probably be doing it more myself if you weren’t.”

She lets out a breath, then nods. “Well. That does make me feel better. But I’m actually worried this is all just my past debt coming due for all the motivation I got after meeting him.”

“What do you mean?”

Elaine gives him a faint smile. “You probably didn’t realize, because we all met at around the same time, and… you didn’t know me too well at the start. But a big part of why I was always so eager to work hard and do more was… I wanted to impress Glen. I mean, I wanted to be impressive so that he’d notice me. Not to say I didn’t care what you thought too, or about getting a badge, or being a good trainer. All of that mattered to me. But I never felt so… energized, and cheerful, and focused.”

“You were pretty energetic back then, but you still are, too, most of the time. I just figured, you know… the things we’ve been through, they haven’t really left any of us unchanged.”

“Sure, that’s been part of it too. After what happened to Glen beneath the Casino… I could barely think straight until he woke up. But I’ve also been feeling some heartache, and occasional jealousy, and… trying not to let that get in the way of things has been hard.”

Blue frowns, staring at his abra’s pokeball. How did he miss that? “Sorry. Not just because that sounds like it sucks. I had no idea.”

“Don’t be, I wanted to keep it hidden. I might have just confessed to Glen if I wasn’t so worried about making things awkward and ruining things for the group. But I’ve been wondering… what if I stop trying to help Glen and still can’t keep up? It’s harder to motivate myself to train these days than it is to work on a game about training. Doesn’t that mean I’ve lost it?”

Blue’s stomach clenches at the thought that Elaine might quit, after everything she’s been through. Everything they’ve been through. But… “Elaine, if you’re worried I’m going to be upset—”

“Of course I am, but it’s not just that. When I think of how badly Aiko wanted to be a trainer, and how much good we’ve done, it makes me feel like… I have to keep going, for her sake. And if I could stop others from dying like that, but instead I just spend my days in Pewter making games…”

Blue knows he’s supposed to say something here, something like she wouldn’t want you to be a trainer for reasons like that. But he’s still shaken by the idea that he missed something so big in Elaine’s journey, and it threatens to throw everything he thinks he knows about her and even the others in his journey into doubt.

Or maybe that’s just an excuse to keep her with him.

More alarming is the thought of what else his friends might be going through that he might be totally blind to. Maybe he’s too young to understand the romance stuff, but while he still wishes it weren’t something he had to think about, at least now that he knows how blind he’s been he can ask Daisy for help. But if he’s mishandling the situation with Janine, which it seems he is, it could be for another reason that’s totally invisible to him.

How would he even know how to find out?

Pull yourself together. His friend is still standing silent in front of him, and he can worry about his own problems later. There are a few things he doesn’t feel or relate to that he’s managed to at least accept are real for others, and he reaches for some of that borrowed wisdom now.

“Maybe you just need a break,” Blue says at last. “We’ve been going pretty hard for months, and all the recent wild battles are wearing a lot of people down.”

“Not you.”

Blue snorts. “You said it yourself, a while back; I “double specialized” in pokemon battles, or something like that, right?”

But Elaine just gives him a sad smile. “I know you, Blue. You want equals with you, on your way to the top. If I spend a few months at home just fooling around, is there really going to be a place for me on your journey again? I don’t mean you’ll tell me to go away, but in your heart, will I still be an equal?”

“No one is,” he says, the words coming out before he can think. “I’m sorry, that’s not—”

“No, it’s okay.” She reclips her pokeball and walks over to the wall, pressing her back against it and sliding down, then patting the floor beside him. “Tell me.”

Blue suddenly wishes they were talking about romance again, but… she trusted him with her deep fear. He can’t do less.

He goes to sit beside her, rolling Tops’ pokeball between his hands. “I don’t know why I said that. I was trying to make you feel better, but it came out… bitter.”

“It’s okay to notice you’re not like others, Blue. In a few ways, at least. I’m just worried that’s going to keep you from finding real companionship.” She sighs. “But I guess it would, if those few things are important enough to you.”

Some leader he is; now she’s the one comforting him. But this isn’t even a loss, and… it’s Elaine. She’s been with him as long as anyone besides Red and Leaf, and through even more together.

“I know it might not be actually true,” Blue says. “I mean, there are probably a few trainers out there as good as me. Glen might actually be one of them, if not for…” He swallows down the ball of bitterness and sadness.

Elaine is looking at him in something like pity, but also worry. “Give him more time, Blue, he’s trying so hard, and—”

“I know. That’s part of why I admire him so much. But even people who are as good as I am at battles don’t have the same ambition, and without that it feels… different. I’ve met so many people I respect and admire and have learned from, including you, by the way, people with skills I don’t have, and insights, and all that good stuff. But for what matters most… it feels like sooner or later I’m going to walk a different path, or they will.” He smiles at her. “So don’t feel bad about going home for a bit, Elaine. You’re special to me, but not that special.”

She hugs him, and he returns the gesture, unsure if he’s made things better or worse until she says, “Just… don’t count us out yet. When you get to the top, and put out the call… we’ll be there, even if we couldn’t walk the whole way with you.”

“What if that just gets you killed?” Blue whispers, again without meaning to.

Elaine pulls back to meet his gaze. “Is that why it bothers you so much? When people can’t keep up, or fall behind?”

Blue shrugs, looking away. “I knew a long time ago that I’d be leading friends into danger they might not survive. Everything up until now, it’s… not weeding people out, exactly? Not consciously, at least. But I know that I don’t want people to come just because they like me, or are afraid of disappointing me. I want them to come because they believe as much as I do that taking the Stormbringers down is more important than anything, and are strong enough to actually make a difference rather than dying for nothing.”

For a second he thinks she’s going to hug him again, but then she just punches his arm and stands up. “Don’t borrow so much guilt ahead of time, Blue. It’s very noble of you, but it’s patronizing as hell.” She walks back to the arena. “Go, Ekans!”

Her pokemon appears and coils around, tongue flicking out. Blue gets to his feet as well, wondering if he should say something else, but then just goes to stand across from her and summon Tops. The purple snake goes absolutely still except for its tail, which rattles, and Blue watches his abra’s ears twitch, its body trembling with the effort not to teleport away despite its type advantage.

“You’re stronger than you think,” he mutters, wishing for the thousandth time that he was psychic. “I’ve just got to show you.”

“You talking to me, your abra, or yourself?”

“All of the above.” He takes the two sound emitters out of his pocket and holds them out to the sides, letting Tops orient to his position before beginning to tap out an attack. “And the rest of the world, too.”