The next morning, Lorelei knocked on Ash's door and walked in to find a woman tied securely to a chair.
"This person is..."
"Mars. One of Team Galactic's four executives and the one running their Orange Islands operation." Ash set several cups of hot milk on the table without looking up. "She told us the location of their branch and where Cynthia is being held."
The interrogation had taken most of the night. Getting the truth out of Mars had required some creativity, given that none of them were willing to do anything that would leave lasting damage. Physical pain, it turned out, wasn't necessary.
Mewtwo had held Mars completely still while psychically amplifying the nerve sensitivity in the soles of her feet. The tickling that followed had proven far more effective than anything more dramatic would have been.
Mars had tried lying first. She had probably prepared for the possibility of capture in advance and had a set of false information ready to feed them, a location that sounded credible and would lead Ash straight into a trap.
It was the same location where Cynthia had run into trouble. Sending Ash there with false confidence would have been a reasonable move.
It didn't work. Mewtwo was monitoring her heart rate, tone, and emotional state in real time. Every lie registered immediately, and Mars ran out of patience for the game before the night was half over.
The real location was Shamouti Island. Both the Team Galactic branch and Cynthia's holding location were there, which happened to align with where Ash had already been heading.
Team Galactic had learned about Lugia's connection to the island through channels that weren't hard to imagine. The information had been available to anyone who asked Nurse Joy the right questions. With their resources, obtaining it was trivial.
What had kept the League from finding them was simpler and stranger than anyone had considered. The base wasn't on the island. It was underwater.
Shamouti Island was notorious for its year-round storms and rough seas. Operating on the surface was difficult enough. The idea of placing a base on the seabed beneath those waters had apparently not occurred to anyone searching for them.
Team Galactic had built a device capable of submerging the entire base and moving it along the seabed, which was why months of searching had turned up nothing.
Cynthia had found out. She had sent a message with that information before moving toward the base, but Team Galactic had intercepted the transmission and the League never received it. They had been waiting for her.
The cage they had used to contain her had been constructed using Palkia's power, spatial energy strong enough to hold even Cynthia in place without any conventional means of breaking through it.
The one piece of genuinely good news was that Cynthia had apparently packed her spatial backpack with enough supplies to last considerably longer than anyone had anticipated. A month in and she was still in fighting shape.
Team Galactic had learned that the hard way when they briefly opened a small gap in the spatial barrier to check on her and she had immediately focused everything into a strike aimed at that single point. She had nearly shattered it entirely before they managed to close it again. After that, they had stopped checking on her altogether and decided to simply wait.
Lorelei let out a long, slow breath. The tension that had been sitting in her expression since she arrived eased slightly. "Cynthia is alive. Good." She straightened up. "Then we leave for Shamouti Island now. Every hour we wait is an hour we don't get back."
"Already ahead of you." Ash tossed two Poké Balls toward the clearing outside. Charizard and Pidgeot materialized side by side. "Pidgeot just came in from Professor Oak this morning. You and Serena take Pidgeot. Misty rides with me on Charizard."
Lapras had been fine for a leisurely route, but they had a destination now and no reason to be slow about reaching it.
Lorelei glanced at Mars. "And her?"
Getting into the underwater base without someone who knew the access points was going to be a significant problem. Mars was currently their map.
"Rope her to Pidgeot and bring her along. Pidgeot can handle the extra weight."
Mars's head came up immediately. "Excuse me? You're going to tie me to a bird? I'm a prisoner, not luggage! I'm the one showing you the way in case you've forgotten!"
The issue wasn't whether Pidgeot could carry her. The issue was that she wasn't going to be riding. She was going to be tied up and dangled through the air like a piece of luggage. That was prisoner abuse by any reasonable standard.
Was this what righteous people looked like?
"You did bad things. Bad things come with consequences." Misty had her hands on her hips and no sympathy whatsoever in her voice.
The night before had frightened both her and Serena badly enough, only for Mewtwo's projected images to reveal that Mars had never actually been a threat to Ash.
The fear had been real even if the danger hadn't, and that didn't make either of them inclined toward generosity. Dangling Mars through the air on the way to Shamouti Island was already more considerate than skimming low over the ocean and letting the waves do the work.
Ash and Lorelei, for their part, had already stopped listening. They were running through the plan quietly between themselves, dividing responsibilities, working out how they would handle the entry into the base.
Giving Mars attention right now would only encourage her. They needed her cooperation later. The best way to ensure that was to make her understand her current situation clearly, and nothing communicated that faster than being thoroughly ignored.
Mars's mouth pressed into a thin line. She knew the protest wasn't going anywhere. She filed her anger away and waited.
Back on Orange Island, the training battles were still running in full swing. Nobody had noticed the group leave. Ash had asked Mewtwo to cover their departure with a psychic veil, erasing any trace of their exit.
As far as anyone on the island knew, Ash and Lorelei were still somewhere around, possibly watching a battle or resting at the guesthouse. That impression needed to hold long enough to give them a clean approach to the base.
The Team Galactic branch in the Orange Islands had two people running it. Mars was one. The other was a man named Charon.
The name carried weight, but the reality of Charon was different from what the name suggested. He wasn't a fighter. He had no exceptional Pokémon strength to speak of, and the gap between his battle ability and Mars's was significant.
What had earned him his position among Team Galactic's four executives was something else entirely: he was a scientist, and a genuinely frightening one.
Professor Oak had deep knowledge and broad expertise, but Oak was a researcher and an academic. Charon was something different. The gap between a scholar and a scientist capable of actually building things wasn't always visible until you saw the results.
Fusing Yveltal's power into Lugia Jr. without killing her in the process, constructing a spatial cage using Palkia's residual energy that even Cynthia couldn't break out of, these were Charon's results. They spoke for themselves.
According to Mars, she had been taking direction from Charon for most of the operation. The Lugia plan, the trap set for Cynthia, even the performance she had put on at Ash's door, all of it had come from Charon.
The man thought several steps ahead of everyone around him, and he was careful about it. If the target had been anyone other than Ash, a Champion could have walked into his setup without seeing it coming.
Charon was the real problem waiting for them at Shamouti Island.
The waters around the island were punishing at the best of times. At night they were something else. The waves were enormous, the wind was constant and howling, and lightning cut through the sky in irregular intervals.
Even Water-type Pokémon stayed well below the surface to avoid being thrown around by the churning water above. Nothing flew through the sky around Shamouti Island voluntarily.
Two exceptions pushed through the storm anyway. An orange-red shape and a brown-white shape wove through the wind and rain, transparent barriers wrapped around both of them, reducing the worst of the weather to something manageable.
Mewtwo's voice settled into Ash's thoughts the moment they crossed into Shamouti Island's range.
"This storm isn't natural. Something divine is influencing the weather out here."
"Lugia?"
"Unlikely. There are two Divine presences mixed into it. Both are roughly on par with my own strength."
Ash turned that over quietly. Divine level, two of them, in the waters around an island already associated with the God of the Sea. Lugia's strength by reputation sat above that tier. Whatever was driving the weather wasn't her.
He set the question aside. Cynthia came first. Everything else could wait.
"Mars said the base is somewhere down there." Lorelei was looking at the churning black water below them. "Can Mewtwo find it?"
Less than a second passed. "It's there. A hundred meters down, shaped like a submarine. There's a aura inside it."
Mars had told the truth. The base was exactly where she said it would be, and the energy Mewtwo was reading from inside it matched what a spatial cage built from Palkia's power would feel like.
Cynthia was in there.