Day forty-four, and Giovanni had a full schedule.
This was not unusual. Giovanni always had a full schedule. The man—the crime lord, the gym leader, the corporate board member, the secret collector of legendary Pokémon, the trainer of a newly evolved Dragonair, the unwitting president of a fan club he didn't know existed—had not had a single unscheduled hour since Marcus Chen's consciousness had taken up residence in his skull six weeks ago.
Today's agenda, scrawled in Giovanni's precise handwriting on a notepad that Dragonair had only tried to eat twice:
6:00 AM - Training (Dragonair focus, Resonance drills with Ace)
9:00 AM - Gym opens. Four challengers scheduled.
1:00 PM - Helicopter to Indigo Plateau. Gym Leader conference, Pokemon League HQ.
5:00 PM (estimated) - Conference ends. Helicopter to Johto.
7:00 PM (estimated) - Lake of Rage. Catch the red Gyarados.
10:00 PM (estimated) - Return to Viridian. Review Paldea report.
11:00 PM - Sleep (optional)
He looked at the schedule, nodded with satisfaction, and drank his coffee.
The coffee was perfect. It was always perfect. Somewhere in the depths of Team Rocket headquarters, there was a person whose sole job was to prepare Giovanni's morning coffee, and that person was either a genius or had been threatened with consequences severe enough to produce genius-level results. Marcus didn't know which, and he wasn't going to ask, because the coffee was perfect and some mysteries were better left unsolved.
"Alright," he said, setting down the cup. "Training."
The morning training session was focused on two things: getting Dragonair acclimated to its new body, and pushing Ace's Resonance to its limits.
Dragonair was—there was no other way to put it—magnificent.
The evolution from Dratini had not just changed its size and appearance. It had fundamentally altered the way the dragon moved, fought, and interacted with the world. Where Dratini had been clumsy and enthusiastic, Dragonair was fluid. Its thirteen-foot body moved through the air—and it did move through the air, hovering several inches off the ground at all times, propelled by some combination of the crystalline orbs on its body and what Marcus could only describe as "dragon magic"—with a grace that made every other Pokémon look like it was moving through mud by comparison.
Its power had increased dramatically. Dragon Rage, once a sputtering hiccup, was now a concentrated beam of violet energy that could punch through the training room's reinforced walls if Marcus didn't stop it in time (he'd learned this the hard way on Day 39, when Dragonair had gotten excited during target practice and blown a hole through two walls and a supply closet). Twister had evolved from a scattered, imprecise mess into a focused tornado of draconic wind that could be aimed with pinpoint accuracy. Thunder Wave was crisp and reliable. And Dragonair was learning new moves at an accelerated rate—Dragon Pulse, Aqua Tail, and the beginnings of Ice Beam, which would give it devastating coverage.
But the most impressive thing about Dragonair wasn't its attacks. It was its control.
Dragonair could manipulate the weather.
Not in the dramatic, world-altering way that Kyogre or Groudon could. In a subtler, more localized way—a passive ability that the Pokédex described as the power to "change the weather at will" but which, in practice, manifested as an ambient influence on atmospheric conditions within a radius of about fifty meters. When Dragonair was happy, the air warmed and the sky cleared. When it was agitated, clouds formed and winds picked up. When it was focused in battle, the temperature dropped and the air crackled with static electricity.
Marcus was training it to use this ability deliberately rather than passively. If Dragonair could summon rain on command, it could boost Water-type moves and weaken Fire-type attacks. If it could summon sun, it could power up Solar Beam. If it could create a sandstorm or hail—which it couldn't yet, but might be able to learn—the strategic applications were enormous.
"Rain," Marcus said. "Light rain. Just in this room."
Dragonair's orbs pulsed. The air thickened with moisture. Droplets began to form on the ceiling, growing heavier, falling—
A torrential downpour erupted inside the training room, drenching everything—Marcus, his notes, the training equipment, Ace (who hissed with feline outrage and retreated to the highest shelf she could find), and Beedrill (who buzzed its wings in furious protest, its compound eyes conveying the distinct impression that it was plotting revenge against the dragon responsible for its current dampness).
"LIGHT rain!" Marcus sputtered, water streaming down Giovanni's face, his suit—his perfectly tailored, probably-costs-more-than-a-car orange suit—plastered to his body like wet tissue paper. "LIGHT! That is not light! That is a MONSOON!"
Dragonair looked at him with an expression of pure, crystalline innocence—the same expression Dratini used to make when it sneezed Dragon Rage into his coffee, except now it was on a thirteen-foot-long serpent that was hovering four feet off the ground and not even slightly wet because the rain was literally avoiding it.
"You're doing that on purpose," Marcus accused.
Dragonair's orbs pulsed again. The rain stopped instantly. The air dried. The water on the floor began to evaporate at an unnaturally rapid rate.
Dragonair chirped—a deeper, more musical version of Dratini's chirp, resonant with overtones that vibrated pleasantly in Marcus's chest.
"You think you're cute."
Chirp.
"You're not cute. You're a menace. You're a weather-controlling menace and I refuse to find you adorable."
Chirp chirp.
"Stop being adorable."
Dragonair nuzzled his chest. Its scales were cool and smooth and smelled faintly of rain and ozone and something indescribably draconic—a scent that was ancient and clean and wild.
Marcus petted its head. Because he was a crime lord who loved his Pokémon and saw absolutely no contradiction in simultaneously planning extortion rackets and giving belly rubs. These were not mutually exclusive activities. A man could contain multitudes.
Resonance training with Ace went better.
Marcus had been working on triggering the bond-evolution more quickly and sustainably. The initial activations had required extreme emotional states—fear, love, desperation—that were difficult to reproduce on demand and exhausting to maintain. But over the past weeks, he'd been refining the process, learning to tap into the bond without needing to be on the verge of an emotional breakdown.
The key, he'd discovered, was not the intensity of the emotion but its authenticity. He didn't need to be overwhelmed with love or consumed by fear. He just needed to be genuine. To look at Ace and feel, without pretense or calculation, the real, honest affection he had for her.
Which was easy, because Ace was the best cat in any universe and Marcus would fight God for her. Again. He'd already caught two gods; what was one more?
"Ready?" he asked.
Ace sat on the training room floor, her tail wrapped around her paws, her gem glinting. She purred—the low, resonant purr that said I am always ready. I was born ready. Readiness is my default state.
Marcus reached for the bond. Not with desperation, not with frenzy. With calm, steady certainty. The knowledge that Ace was his partner, his friend, his companion. The warmth of years—well, weeks, but they felt like years—of shared experience. The trust.
The Old Fire.
Ace's gem blazed gold.
The transformation was faster now. The light spread across her body in under a second—fur shimmering, eyes blazing, muscles coiling with power that belonged to something much larger and much more dangerous than a Normal-type house cat. The air around her distorted, afterimages flickering in and out of existence, and that presence emerged—the shadow of something greater superimposed over her form, a ghost of potential that was becoming more defined with each activation.
Resonance Ace moved. She didn't run—she displaced, appearing across the room as if the space between her starting position and her destination had simply ceased to exist. She hit a training dummy with Power Gem and the dummy didn't just break—it disintegrated, reduced to its component atoms by an attack that was operating at a level of energy output that should have been impossible for any non-legendary Pokémon.
Marcus checked the timer on his communicator. Resonance had been active for forty-seven seconds. Previous record was thirty-two.
"Good. Hold it. Keep going."
Ace streaked around the room, a blur of cream and gold, hitting targets with surgical precision. One minute. One minute fifteen. One minute thirty—
At one minute forty-two seconds, the glow faded and Ace staggered, catching herself with the ingrained dignity of a cat that would rather die than be seen stumbling. She sat down, began grooming herself as if nothing had happened, and pointedly ignored the fact that she was breathing harder than usual.
One minute forty-two seconds of Resonance. Nearly three times the initial duration. And the power output was still increasing with each activation.
Marcus made notes. The data was clear: Resonance was getting stronger, more sustainable, and more controllable. Given enough time and training, he might be able to maintain it indefinitely. And when he figured out what the "shadow form" was—that ghost image that appeared over Ace during Resonance, growing more defined each time—things would get very interesting.
He checked the time. 8:45 AM. Gym opened in fifteen minutes.
He returned his Pokémon, changed into a dry suit (number seven of eighteen identical orange suits), and headed upstairs.
The first three gym challengers of the day were unremarkable.
Not bad trainers—Marcus had stopped getting genuinely bad trainers after word spread that the Viridian Gym Leader was no longer the predictable Ground-type pushover he'd been in previous seasons. The new challengers came prepared. They brought coverage. They had strategies. They expected Thunderbolt on Nidoking and Ice Beam on Nidoqueen and planned accordingly.
Marcus demolished them anyway, but he had to work for it, which he appreciated. Easy battles were boring. Boring battles were useless for training. And training was the only thing that made gym duty worth the time investment when he could be catching gods or buying corporations.
The fourth challenger, however, was different.
Her name was Kira. She was twenty-three, from Pewter City, and she had the bearing of a trainer who had been doing this for a long time and had gotten very, very good at it. Her team was meticulously constructed—not just type-coverage good, but synergy good, each Pokémon complementing the others in ways that suggested she'd spent serious time thinking about how battles actually worked rather than just throwing six strong Pokémon together and hoping for the best.
She led with Alakazam.
Marcus raised an eyebrow. Psychic-type lead against a Ground-type gym. Bold. Alakazam was fast—one of the fastest non-legendary Pokémon in existence—and hit like a truck with special attacks, but it was physically frail enough that a stiff breeze might knock it over. The play was obvious: outspeed everything, hit hard, sweep before the opponent could respond.
The obvious play was rarely the actual play when the trainer was this experienced.
"Nidoqueen," Marcus said, sending out his tank. Ground/Poison. Resistant to Fighting, Poison, and Bug. Weak to Psychic, Ground, Water, and Ice. Against Alakazam, the type matchup was unfavorable—Psychic crushed Poison. But Nidoqueen wasn't here to win the matchup. She was here to survive it.
"Alakazam—Psychic!" Kira commanded.
Alakazam raised its spoons. The air between the Psychic-type and Nidoqueen bent—visibly, physically bent, light refracting through a lens of concentrated telekinetic force that distorted the gym floor and made the walls groan. The Psychic attack hit Nidoqueen like an invisible hammer, slamming into her broad, armored body with enough force to drive her back three feet, her clawed feet carving furrows in the gym floor.
Nidoqueen grunted. It hurt—Marcus could see it in the tensing of her jaw, the flare of her nostrils—but she held. Her special defense was solid, her HP pool was deep, and one Psychic from an Alakazam wasn't going to bring her down.
"Crunch," Marcus said.
The unexpected move. Ground-type gym. Poison-type Pokémon. And he was calling a Dark-type attack—the one type that was super-effective against Psychic and that no sane person would expect on a Nidoqueen.
Nidoqueen surged forward. For a Pokémon her size—nearly five feet tall and built like a biological tank—she moved with surprising speed, closing the distance to Alakazam in two thundering strides. Her jaws opened wide, dark energy coalescing around her teeth like liquid shadow, and she bit down on Alakazam's midsection with a force that made the sound painful to hear.
Kira's eyes went wide. "How does your Nidoqueen know Crunch?!"
"TMs are wonderful things," Marcus replied.
Alakazam screamed—a high, piercing psychic wail that was as much telepathic as auditory, resonating in Marcus's skull like a tuning fork struck against his frontal lobe. The Dark-type energy coursing through Nidoqueen's bite was doing exactly what Dark-type energy did to Psychic-types: shutting them down. Alakazam's psychic field flickered, destabilized, collapsed. Its spoons clattered to the ground. Its eyes, normally blazing with psychic power, went dim.
It fainted in Nidoqueen's jaws.
Kira recalled it, her expression shifting from shock to calculation. She was adapting. Good trainers adapted.
"Gyarados."
Oh. Oh. That was a serious Pokémon. Water/Flying. Immune to Ground (the type Marcus's gym supposedly specialized in), resistant to Fighting, Bug, and Steel, and packing enough raw physical power to crack mountains. Gyarados was one of those Pokémon that made experienced trainers nervous regardless of preparation, because when a Gyarados decided to be angry—and Gyarados was always angry—the results were catastrophic.
This one was big. Easily twenty feet long, its serpentine body coiled in the air above the gym floor, scales gleaming deep blue, mouth full of fangs that were each the size of Marcus's hand. It roared—a sound that was less a vocalization and more a declaration of war, a bass-heavy, bone-vibrating announcement that this creature was here, it was furious, and it was going to express that fury through extreme violence.
"Nidoqueen—Thunderbolt."
The move that no Ground-type gym should have. Nidoqueen's horn crackled with electrical energy, arcs of lightning dancing between the tip and the ceiling, building, building, building—
"Gyarados—Earthquake!"
Marcus's stomach dropped.
Gyarados knew Earthquake. Of course Gyarados knew Earthquake. Gyarados could learn Earthquake through TM, and any trainer smart enough to bring a Gyarados to a Ground-type gym was smart enough to teach it a Ground-type move for coverage.
The dragon slammed its tail into the gym floor with a force that registered on seismographs three cities away. The floor didn't crack—it ruptured, a shockwave of kinetic energy radiating outward from the impact point in concentric rings of destruction that tore up the battle surface like paper and sent chunks of concrete flying in every direction.
Nidoqueen was hit before she could finish charging the Thunderbolt. The Earthquake caught her mid-attack, the ground beneath her feet erupting upward and slamming into her body with the accumulated force of a tectonic event compressed into a single, devastating instant. She bellowed—a raw, agonized roar that shook the gym's rafters—and was thrown sideways, crashing into the arena wall hard enough to leave a Queen-shaped crater in the reinforced concrete.
She didn't get up.
Marcus recalled her. "Good work," he murmured to the ball. She'd done her job—taken down Alakazam, absorbed a hit, and forced Kira to reveal Gyarados's moveset. That was the role of a tank. You didn't need to win. You needed to survive long enough to matter.
"Nidoking."
His mixed attacker materialized, purple scales gleaming, horn lowered, ready. Nidoking and Nidoqueen were partners in every sense—they trained together, fought together, and covered each other's weaknesses with the seamless coordination of a married couple who had been finishing each other's sentences for decades.
Nidoking had watched Nidoqueen go down. Nidoking was angry.
"Thunderbolt. Now."
No charge time. No hesitation. Nidoking's horn blazed with electrical fury—not the controlled, precise Thunderbolt of a trained move, but the raw, unfiltered rage of a Pokémon that had just watched its partner get slammed into a wall. The bolt erupted from the horn in a jagged, blinding arc that crossed the arena in a fraction of a second and struck Gyarados directly in the chest.
The Water/Flying type's double weakness to Electric made the impact catastrophic. Gyarados convulsed, its entire twenty-foot body seizing as thousands of volts coursed through scales that were essentially organic lightning rods. Its roar became a shriek—high, piercing, pained—and it collapsed, crashing to the gym floor with an impact that created its own miniature earthquake.
Down. In one hit.
Kira stared. Her Gyarados—her massive, terrifying, Earthquake-wielding Gyarados—had been one-shotted by a Ground-type Pokémon using an Electric move. The math didn't compute. The reality didn't compute. She was standing in a Ground-type gym watching Ground-type Pokémon use Electric attacks and Dark attacks and probably whatever other impossible coverage moves this insane Gym Leader had taught them.
"What are you?" Kira whispered.
Marcus allowed himself a thin smile. "I'm the eighth Gym Leader. The last badge. Did you think it would be easy?"
The battle continued. Kira was good—genuinely good, better than anyone Marcus had faced except Red—and she pushed him harder than he'd been pushed in weeks. Her Starmie gave Nidoking fits with Rapid Spin and Recover, healing off damage faster than Nidoking could dish it out. Her Exeggutor landed a devastating Leaf Storm that knocked out Dugtrio in a single hit. Her Machamp used No Guard Dynamic Punch to confuse Rhydon, leaving the armored behemoth stumbling around the arena punching at hallucinations.
But Marcus adapted. He switched. He predicted. He read Kira's patterns—the slight shift in her stance before she called an aggressive move, the way her eyes flicked to a specific Poké Ball when she was planning a switch—and he exploited every tell.
The battle ended with Nidoking versus Kira's last Pokémon, an Arcanine that had been held in reserve. Fire versus Ground/Poison. Arcanine was fast, powerful, and had Extreme Speed—a priority move that let it strike first regardless of the speed matchup.
"Extreme Speed!" Kira shouted.
Arcanine became a blur—a streak of orange and cream fur moving so fast it left afterimages, crossing the arena in the time it took Marcus to blink.
"Earth Power."
Nidoking stomped.
The gym floor—already damaged from multiple Earthquakes and impacts—erupted beneath Arcanine's feet. Not from where Arcanine was, but from where it was going to be. Marcus had read the trajectory of Extreme Speed, predicted the path, and placed the Earth Power ahead of the charging Fire-type.
Arcanine ran directly into a geyser of superheated earth energy that erupted from the floor like a volcanic vent. The Fire-type yelped, its momentum carrying it through the eruption, emerging on the other side singed, battered, and significantly slower.
"Thunderbolt."
No mercy. No hesitation. Nidoking's horn blazed and Arcanine went down, its magnificent mane crackling with residual static as it collapsed onto the ruined gym floor.
Silence. Then applause—from the gallery, where a handful of spectators had gathered to watch the battle. Marcus hadn't even noticed them.
Kira recalled her Arcanine, looked at the Earth Badge in Marcus's extended hand, and laughed. Not the bitter laugh of a sore loser, but the genuine, slightly manic laugh of someone who had just experienced something extraordinary.
"That was the best battle of my life," she said, taking the badge. "I lost and it was the best battle of my life. Is that normal?"
"Against this gym? Yes."
She left grinning. Marcus watched her go, then surveyed the damage to his arena. Cracked floor. Cratered walls. Scorch marks. Water damage from Starmie's Hydro Pump. A fine coating of dust over everything.
He was going to need a bigger renovation budget.
The helicopter to Indigo Plateau departed at 1 PM sharp.
The Pokémon League headquarters sat atop the Indigo Plateau—a dramatic mesa of pale stone rising from the mountains north of Viridian City, accessible only by air or by Victory Road, the brutal gauntlet of caves and cliffs that served as the final test for trainers seeking to challenge the Elite Four. The League building itself was an impressive structure of white marble and glass, designed to convey authority, tradition, and the kind of institutional gravitas that said "we are the governing body of professional Pokémon battling and we take this very seriously."
Marcus had been here before—Giovanni had been here many times, as the Viridian Gym Leader, for conferences, meetings, and the annual League season planning sessions. But this was the first time Marcus had been here, and he felt a childlike thrill of excitement that he was careful to keep off Giovanni's face.
This was the Pokémon League. The actual Pokémon League. The place where Champions were crowned and legends were made.
The conference room was on the top floor—a large, circular chamber with a table shaped like a Poké Ball (because of course it was), surrounded by chairs for each of Kanto's eight Gym Leaders, the Elite Four, and the Champion. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered a panoramic view of the Kanto countryside, and the afternoon sun filled the room with warm, golden light.
Marcus arrived early. He always arrived early. Giovanni was the kind of man who arrived early to assert dominance over the space, and Marcus was the kind of man who arrived early because being late was disrespectful and also because it gave him time to assess the room.
The other Gym Leaders filtered in over the next twenty minutes.
Brock arrived first—Pewter City's Rock-type specialist, young, serious, with narrow eyes that missed nothing and a quiet competence that belied his age. He nodded to Marcus with respectful professionalism.
Misty followed—Cerulean City's Water-type leader, redheaded and fiery-tempered, carrying herself with the aggressive confidence of someone who had grown up surrounded by siblings she constantly had to prove herself against. She gave Marcus a curt nod and took her seat.
Lt. Surge came in like a thunderstorm in human form—Vermilion City's Electric-type leader, massive, blond, loud, and American, because apparently this world also had America or at least whatever the Pokémon equivalent was. He clapped Marcus on the shoulder with a hand the size of a dinner plate and said "GIOVANNI! Looking good, you old bastard!" at a volume that made the windows vibrate.
Erika drifted in with the serene composure of a woman who had never been in a hurry in her life and saw no reason to start now. Celadon City's Grass-type specialist, she was elegant, soft-spoken, and possessed of a quiet strength that people consistently underestimated until her Vileplume put them to sleep and her Victreebel ate them. Figuratively. Mostly figuratively.
Koga appeared from the shadows, because Koga was a ninja and appearing from shadows was how ninjas entered rooms. Fuchsia City's Poison-type master was lean, sharp-eyed, and perpetually coiled with the potential energy of a man who could kill you seventeen different ways with a shuriken and was constantly evaluating which way would be most efficient.
Blaine arrived from Cinnabar Island, his bald head gleaming, his eyes bright behind his round sunglasses, his mouth already forming the first of approximately forty-seven riddles he would attempt to tell during the meeting. Marcus liked Blaine—the man was a genius, a skilled trainer, and an invaluable asset given his proximity to the Mewtwo project—but the riddles were insufferable.
And then Sabrina walked in.
Marcus looked up from his notes.
His brain crashed.
Not the gentle, gradual buffer-overflow crash he'd been experiencing with every other woman in this world. This was a hard crash. A blue-screen-of-death crash. A "the operating system has encountered a fatal error and needs to restart" crash that left his consciousness staring at a blank internal screen for approximately 2.7 seconds while his visual cortex tried to process what it was seeing and his rational mind tried to find somewhere—anywhere—safe to look.
Sabrina, the Gym Leader of Saffron City, was—
She was—
The word "thicc" had been invented for the women of this world. Marcus had accepted this. He had developed coping mechanisms. He had trained himself to focus on faces, on words, on the fascinating texture of whatever wall or ceiling happened to be nearby. He had survived encounters with Aria, with Luna, with Domino, with Mira, with dozens of impossibly proportioned women whose bodies seemed to exist in a state of permanent, aggressive defiance of anatomical possibility.
None of them had prepared him for Sabrina.
Sabrina made every other woman he'd encountered look restrained.
She was tall—nearly six feet, with the straight-backed, regal posture of a woman who could crush your mind with a thought and wanted you to know it. Her hair was long, dark, and straight, falling past her waist in a curtain of obsidian silk that framed her face and drew the eye downward in a path that was—Marcus was not going to follow that path. He was going to stay on her face. Her face was safe. Her face was—
Her face was beautiful. Classically, devastatingly beautiful, with high cheekbones and full lips and eyes that were a deep, luminous violet—the color of psychic energy, which made sense for a Psychic-type specialist, but which also made sustained eye contact feel like having your neural pathways gently but firmly rearranged.
Okay. Face. Good. He was looking at her face. Maintaining eye contact. Being professional. Everything was—
She blinked. The motion caused a slight movement in her posture that drew Marcus's gaze downward by approximately two inches before his willpower slammed the brakes.
Two inches was enough.
Two inches was catastrophic.
Sabrina was wearing a red top. A simple, fitted red top that, on a normal human being, would have been perfectly appropriate professional attire. On Sabrina, it was performing feats of structural engineering that would have earned it a PhD in materials science and a medal of honor for valor in the face of impossible odds.
Her chest was not large. Her chest was not huge. Her chest was not even enormous, which was the word Marcus had been using for the other women he'd encountered and which now felt laughably, pathetically, insultingly inadequate.
Sabrina's chest existed in a category that required the invention of new vocabulary. It was a category that existed beyond superlatives, beyond metaphor, beyond the capacity of the human language to adequately describe. Each breast was—and Marcus's brain, in its desperate attempt to quantify what it was seeing before shutting down entirely, latched onto the only reference frame available—each breast was approximately the size of Dragonair's head. Not Dratini's head. Dragonair's head. The head of a thirteen-foot-long dragon. That was the scale they were operating on.
They jutted forward from her torso with a proud, physics-obliterating defiance that suggested gravity was a concept they had heard of, considered briefly, and rejected as beneath their dignity. The red fabric of her top was stretched so taut across their surface that Marcus could see the weave of the material—individual threads straining at the molecular level to contain a volume that the textile industry had never anticipated and could never have prepared for. The neckline of the top—originally designed, presumably, to sit at a modest, professional height—had been dragged downward by sheer topographical necessity, creating a window of exposed skin that began at her collarbones and descended into a cleavage so deep, so dark, so fundamentally cavernous that light entered it and did not return.
And below the chest—below the narrow, dramatically cinched waist that existed primarily as a structural intermission between two acts of biological excess—were hips.
Hips.
Marcus's brain had encountered many hips in this world. It had developed protocols for handling hips. It had coping mechanisms, avoidance strategies, emergency shutdown procedures. None of them were sufficient for Sabrina's hips.
They were wide. Wide in the way that horizons were wide. Wide in the way that the concept of "width" itself was wide, as if the universe had looked at the Platonic ideal of width and said "yes, that, but more." They flared outward from her waist in a dramatic, sweeping curve that added approximately eighteen inches to either side of her frame, creating a silhouette that was less "hourglass" and more "two planets connected by a suspension bridge." Her skirt—a modest, knee-length garment that was trying so hard—clung to the outward swell of her hips like a mountaineer clinging to a cliff face, stretched to its absolute limit, every seam a fault line waiting to rupture.
And her thighs. Her thighs. Each one was—Marcus's brain refused to complete this thought. It threw up a firewall, deployed countermeasures, activated emergency protocols. It was not going to process Sabrina's thighs. It was not equipped. It would never be equipped. No human brain was equipped for Sabrina's thighs.
Marcus looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling was nice. Good ceiling. Excellent craftsmanship. Really top-notch ceiling work.
"Giovanni."
Sabrina's voice was low, smooth, and carried the faintest undertone of psychic resonance—a subtle vibration that normal people wouldn't consciously notice but that Marcus, attuned to psychic phenomena through his work with the Mewtwo project, could feel tickling the edges of his awareness like fingers running through his hair.
"Sabrina," he replied, still looking at the ceiling. "Good to see you."
"You're looking at the ceiling."
"Yes. Excellent ceiling. Have you noticed the ceiling? Very well-constructed."
"Giovanni."
He looked at her face. Her face. Eyes. Violet eyes. Safe. Mostly safe. As long as he didn't look at the way her lips curved slightly upward at the corners, or the way her hair fell across her cheek, or the way her eyelashes—
She was looking at him.
Not the professional, colleague-to-colleague way the other Gym Leaders looked at him. Not the respectful, slightly-wary way that Brock and Misty and Koga regarded the Viridian Gym Leader. Sabrina was looking at him with an expression that Marcus, in his previous life, would have immediately identified as "interested" and which, in this life, his brain was aggressively misclassifying as "probably just how Psychic-type specialists look at people."
It was not how Psychic-type specialists looked at people.
It was how someone looked at a person they found fascinating. The slight parting of her lips. The subtle dilation of her pupils. The way her body—that impossible body—angled toward him almost imperceptibly, her weight shifting onto one hip (which caused a cascade of motion through her figure that Marcus's peripheral vision detected and his conscious mind violently quarantined), her posture opening up in a way that body language experts would describe as "receptive" and Marcus was describing as "I need to sit down and look at my notes immediately."
"Your psychic signature has changed," Sabrina said.
Marcus froze. "Excuse me?"
"Your psychic signature. The ambient psychic energy that every living thing emits. Yours has changed significantly since the last time I saw you." Her violet eyes narrowed slightly—not with suspicion, but with curiosity. Intense, focused, almost hungry curiosity. "You're... brighter. More complex. There are layers that weren't there before. And there's something else—something deep, very deep, that feels like—" She tilted her head. "—like fire."
The Old Fire. Groudon's words. The bond that connected Marcus to his Pokémon, the Resonance that powered Ace's transformation. Sabrina could sense it.
Of course she could. She was the most powerful human psychic in Kanto. If anyone was going to notice that Marcus's soul was different from the original Giovanni's, it would be her.
This was dangerous. If Sabrina looked too closely, dug too deep, she might realize that the mind behind Giovanni's eyes wasn't Giovanni's mind at all. She might sense the knowledge of the future, the plans within plans, the secrets that would unravel everything.
Marcus needed to deflect. And he needed to do it without Sabrina's psychic senses detecting deception.
"I've been training differently," he said, which was true. "Deepening my bond with my Pokémon. Pushing the connection further than I have before." Also true. "It's changed me." Extremely true.
Sabrina studied him. Her psychic attention was a physical sensation—not painful, not intrusive, but present, like standing in sunlight. She was reading him. Scanning his surface emotions, his body language, the psychic signature he was projecting.
He let her see what he wanted her to see: calm confidence, professional warmth, mild curiosity about her observation. He kept the deeper layers—Team Rocket, the orbs, the gods, the master plan—buried beneath layers of mundane thought and genuine emotion.
It worked. Sabrina's expression softened from analytical to something warmer.
"I'd like to learn more," she said. "About your training methods. The way your psychic signature has changed suggests a breakthrough in trainer-Pokémon bonding that could have significant implications for—"
"Maybe we can discuss it after the meeting," Marcus said, because the other Gym Leaders were taking their seats and he needed this conversation to end before Sabrina decided to psychically probe him more deeply and found the metaphorical closet full of skeletons.
Sabrina nodded. The motion caused her hair to shift, which caused a shadow to play across her collarbone, which drew Marcus's eye downward by approximately half an inch, which was enough to remind his visual cortex that the rest of Sabrina existed below her face and trigger another emergency shutdown.
He sat down. Very quickly. And opened his briefing folder. And stared at it with the intensity of a man who had never found quarterly attendance statistics more fascinating in his entire life.
Sabrina took the seat next to him.
Next to him.
The chair creaked softly as she settled into it, her weight—distributed across a frame that had no business existing in a reality governed by known physical laws—testing the engineering tolerances of Pokémon League furniture. Her thigh—her thigh, that vast, smooth, skirt-straining monument to biological excess—was approximately four inches from Marcus's thigh.
Four inches.
Marcus could feel the warmth radiating from her body across those four inches of empty space. Could detect, at the absolute periphery of his olfactory awareness, a scent that was floral and subtle and devastating.
He was going to survive this meeting. He was a crime lord. He had caught gods. He had stared down Groudon in a volcanic caldera. He could handle sitting next to a woman for two hours.
His hand trembled slightly as he turned the page of his briefing folder.
The ceiling really was very well-constructed.
The meeting lasted three hours.
The League season planning conference was, like most organizational meetings, approximately 20% useful content and 80% bureaucratic procedure. The useful parts included: scheduling for the upcoming tournament season, standardized rule changes for gym battles (a new clause about arena damage liability that Marcus was fairly certain had been inspired by his gym specifically), and a presentation from the League's analytics division about trainer demographics and badge acquisition rates.
The bureaucratic parts included: budget discussions, insurance paperwork, a forty-five minute debate about whether Gym Leaders should be required to attend community events (yes, they should, this was settled three years ago, why were they debating it again), and Blaine attempting to lighten the mood with riddles until Koga threatened to poison his coffee.
Marcus sat through all of it with the patient endurance of a man who understood that boring meetings were the price of institutional legitimacy. His gym leader persona was impeccable—attentive, professional, contributing thoughtful comments when appropriate, deferring to more experienced colleagues when strategic.
But beneath the surface, his mind was working on something else entirely.
Lance.
The Champion of the Pokémon League. The Dragon Master. The most powerful official trainer in Kanto and Johto. The man who sat at the head of the Poké Ball-shaped table and presided over the meeting with the quiet authority of someone who had earned his position by being better at Pokémon battling than everyone else in the room combined.
Lance was—Marcus had to admit—impressive. Tall, lean, with red hair that defied gravity and a cape that he wore indoors with the unselfconscious confidence of a man who could back up the fashion statement with the kind of devastating combat power that made fashion critics keep their opinions to themselves. His team was legendary: Dragonite (three of them, because apparently one wasn't enough), Gyarados, Aerodactyl, Charizard. All powerhouses. All trained to a razor's edge.
In the games, Lance was the Champion that players fought at the end of their journey. The final boss. The ultimate test.
Marcus had no intention of challenging Lance for the Championship. That would be stupid. Becoming Champion meant public scrutiny. Media attention. Official responsibilities. A spotlight so bright that every aspect of his life would be examined, analyzed, and questioned. The Champion couldn't run a criminal empire—the position was too visible, too accountable, too exposed.
But the Champion could be influenced.
Marcus studied Lance throughout the meeting, noting patterns. Lance was strong but not strategic—he relied on raw power and type advantage rather than complex tactics. He was honorable to a fault—the kind of man who believed in fair play and justice and all the noble ideals that made someone easy to predict. He was also politically naive—a warrior, not a politician, more comfortable in a battle arena than a boardroom.
In short, Lance was exactly the kind of person who could be managed.
Not through manipulation in the traditional sense—Lance was too strong and too principled to be bribed or blackmailed. But through positioning. Through being the knowledgeable, helpful, experienced Gym Leader who always seemed to have the right information at the right time. The trusted advisor. The wise counselor. The man behind the throne who shaped policy without holding the crown.
Marcus began laying groundwork during the meeting itself. Small contributions. Insightful comments about League policy that made Lance nod thoughtfully. Practical suggestions for improving trainer safety that demonstrated concern for the community. A well-timed observation about the Rising threat of criminal organizations in the region—Teams Aqua and Magma, specifically—that positioned Giovanni as someone who was aware of the dangers and concerned about addressing them.
"We need better intelligence," Marcus said, during the security discussion portion of the meeting. "The League's current threat assessment protocols are reactive—we wait for criminal organizations to do something and then respond. By then, the damage is done. We need to be proactive. We need to identify threats before they materialize and neutralize them before they become crises."
Lance leaned forward, interested. "What are you suggesting, Giovanni?"
"A dedicated intelligence division within the League structure. Analysts who monitor criminal activity, track known threats, and provide actionable intelligence to Gym Leaders and the Elite Four. I have some experience in this area—my position in Viridian City puts me close to several known smuggling routes, and I've developed sources over the years. I'd be willing to share what I know and help establish the framework."
The irony of a crime lord proposing that the Pokémon League create an intelligence division—which he would then infiltrate and control from the inside, effectively giving himself advance warning of any League action against Team Rocket—was so thick that Marcus was surprised Sabrina didn't choke on it.
Sabrina, for her part, was looking at him again. With that look. The one that made his peripheral vision panic and his conscious mind retreat behind a wall of quarterly statistics.
Lance nodded slowly. "That's a solid proposal, Giovanni. I'll bring it to the League Council for approval. Would you be willing to lead the initiative?"
Would he be willing. The wolf being asked to guard the henhouse. The fox being invited to design the chicken coop's security system. Marcus kept his expression serious, concerned, humble.
"If the League believes I'm the right person for the role, I'd be honored."
Brock and Misty exchanged a look. Koga's eyes narrowed fractionally. But nobody objected, because Giovanni's proposal was, on its face, entirely reasonable, and his reputation as a dedicated Gym Leader was unimpeachable.
Marcus was going to control the League's intelligence division. He was going to know about every investigation, every operation, every move the League made against criminal activity in Kanto, before it happened. He was going to be the shadow behind the throne, the whisper in the Champion's ear, the invisible hand that guided the most powerful institution in the region.
And all it had taken was a well-timed suggestion at a boring meeting.
This is too easy, he thought, and then immediately corrected himself. It wasn't easy. It was prepared. Every move he'd made over the past six weeks—the gym battles, the public appearances, the charity events, the Silph Co. acquisition—had been building toward this moment. Building a reputation. Building credibility. Building the persona of Giovanni, the Gym Leader who cared, who contributed, who was trustworthy.
The most dangerous lies were the ones built on foundations of truth. And Giovanni's foundation was solid as bedrock.
The meeting concluded at 4:30 PM. Gym Leaders shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and began dispersing. Marcus was heading for the elevator when—
"Giovanni."
Sabrina's voice. Behind him. Close behind him. Very close behind him.
He turned.
She was standing approximately two feet away. Two feet. Close enough that he could count the individual eyelashes framing those violet eyes. Close enough that the scent he'd detected earlier—floral, subtle, devastating—was now a full sensory experience that made his hindbrain sit up and pay very confused attention. Close enough that—
He was not going to look down. He was NOT going to look down.
"The conversation about your training methods," Sabrina said. "I'm still interested."
"Of course," Marcus said, maintaining eye contact with the desperate intensity of a man clinging to a life raft in a storm. "Perhaps we could arrange a meeting at your gym. I'd like to see your training facilities."
Sabrina smiled.
It was a small smile. Subtle. The barest upward curve of lips that were full and dark and shaped in a way that—
Marcus was looking at her eyes. Her EYES. Purple. Violet. The color of psychic energy. Very nice eyes. Professional eyes.
"I'd like that," Sabrina said. Her voice had dropped half a register, settling into a range that was warmer, softer, more intimate than anything Marcus had heard from the normally stoic Psychic-type specialist. "Very much."
She turned and walked away.
Marcus did not watch her walk away.
He did NOT watch her walk away.
He watched her walk away for exactly 0.3 seconds before his survival instincts screamed at him to stop and he wrenched his gaze to the nearest inanimate object, which happened to be a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall.
The fire extinguisher did not have hips. The fire extinguisher did not have thighs. The fire extinguisher was a perfectly safe, non-threatening object that existed in three dimensions without challenging any of them.
Marcus stared at the fire extinguisher for an amount of time that, had anyone been watching, would have been deeply concerning.
Then he went to catch a Gyarados.
The Lake of Rage was in Johto.
Specifically, it was north of Mahogany Town, a large, placid body of fresh water surrounded by dense forest and the kind of picturesque rural scenery that would have been perfect for a postcard if not for the fact that, at this particular moment in history, the lake contained a monster.
Marcus knew about the Red Gyarados because every Pokémon fan knew about the Red Gyarados. It was one of the most iconic encounters in the franchise—a shiny Gyarados, its scales a vivid, unmistakable crimson instead of the species' standard blue, rampaging in the Lake of Rage as a result of Team Rocket's forced evolution experiments using radio waves broadcast from the nearby Team Rocket base.
In the original timeline, the Red Gyarados was encountered by the player character of Gold/Silver/Crystal, who caught it and used it as a party member. The forced evolution experiment was shut down, the base was raided, and Team Rocket's Johto operations collapsed.
Marcus was going to skip a few steps.
The helicopter set down in a clearing on the lake's western shore. Marcus disembarked into the Johto twilight—the sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of amber and rose that reflected off the lake's surface like a mirror made of fire.
It was beautiful. And in the center of that beauty, approximately three hundred meters from shore, the water was churning.
The Red Gyarados was there. Marcus could see it—or rather, he could see the disturbance it was causing, a localized maelstrom of thrashing water and spray that indicated something very large and very angry was swimming in tight, agitated circles just below the surface. Occasionally, a flash of red scales broke through the foam—vivid, almost neon red, the color of fresh blood, unmistakable even at this distance.
Marcus assessed the situation with the clinical eye of a man who had caught two gods today and was feeling relatively confident about his ability to handle one angry fish.
The Red Gyarados was powerful—enhanced by the forced evolution, its energy levels significantly above a standard Gyarados—but it wasn't a legendary. It wasn't a god. It was a Pokémon in distress, lashing out because it had been subjected to a process that was painful and unnatural. It was angry. It was confused. It was hurting.
And Marcus was going to catch it.
Not with an enhanced Poké Ball—those were reserved for legendaries. A standard Ultra Ball would do. But first, he needed to weaken it, and for that, he needed the right Pokémon.
He considered his options. Dragonair? Too new to its evolved form, still learning control. Ace? Powerful under Resonance, but Normal-type versus Water-type was a bad matchup. Nidoking or Nidoqueen? They had Thunderbolt, which would be devastating, but the battle was over water—if the Gyarados pulled them in, Ground-types in deep water was a death sentence.
Rhydon? Same problem, but worse.
Kangaskhan? Pure physical power, but no type advantage.
Beedrill? Glass cannon against a Pokémon that could literally eat it in one bite.
He looked at his belt. Six Poké Balls for his main team. Dragonair's ball. And two others—heavy, warm, pulsing with power that made the air around them shimmer.
No. Not Kyogre. Not Groudon. Using either of them for a gym-level encounter would be like using a nuclear weapon to open a jar. And more practically, if anyone saw him deploy a legendary Pokémon, his cover would be blown in approximately 0.3 seconds.
He went with Nidoking. Type advantage (Thunderbolt), ranged attacks (no need to enter the water), and enough bulk to absorb a hit if the Gyarados got close. He'd just need to keep the battle on the shore.
"Nidoking. We're fishing."
Nidoking materialized on the lakeshore, took one look at the churning water, and rumbled with anticipation. The purple monarch loved a challenge, and a rampaging Gyarados definitely qualified.
"Thunderbolt. Into the water. Draw it out."
Nidoking's horn crackled. The bolt arced across the beach and struck the lake's surface, electricity dispersing through the water in a web of crackling energy that illuminated the murky depths like a strobe light.
The effect on the Red Gyarados was immediate.
The churning stopped. The water went still—unnaturally, ominously still, the surface glass-smooth except for the residual ripples from the Thunderbolt. For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then the lake erupted.
The Red Gyarados launched itself from the water like a ballistic missile made of scales and fury. It was—Marcus had fought Gyarados before, in his gym, Kira's Gyarados just this morning—but this was different. This Gyarados was wrong. Wrong in a way that was immediately, viscerally apparent.
It was bigger. Twenty-five feet at least, maybe thirty, its body thicker and more muscular than a standard Gyarados, its scales the vivid, violent red of arterial blood. Its eyes were wild—not the focused aggression of a trained battle Pokémon but the unfocused, all-consuming rage of a creature in pain, lashing out at everything because everything was the enemy, because the pain came from everywhere and the only response it knew was violence.
It roared.
The sound hit Marcus like a physical force. Not just loud—painful, a bass-heavy, bone-rattling bellow that carried the full emotional weight of a Pokémon that had been tortured into existence by radio waves and electromagnetic manipulation. The trees on the shore bent away from the sound. The water rippled outward in concentric rings. Nidoking planted its feet and lowered its head, bracing against the shockwave.
"Easy," Marcus murmured—not to Nidoking, to the Gyarados. "I know you're hurting. I know you're angry. But I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to help."
The Gyarados responded by opening its mouth and launching a Hydro Pump directly at Marcus's face.
Nidoking moved. The Ground/Poison type threw itself between Marcus and the incoming attack—a column of pressurized water traveling at approximately two hundred miles per hour, focused into a beam no wider than a dinner plate, carrying enough kinetic energy to punch through concrete.
It hit Nidoking's crossed arms with an impact that drove the Pokémon backward three feet, its claws digging furrows in the muddy lakeshore. Water exploded outward from the point of contact, drenching everything within twenty feet. Nidoking roared—part pain, part defiance—and held its ground.
"Thunderbolt! Full power!"
Nidoking's horn blazed. The electricity that erupted from it was not the controlled, precise Thunderbolt of gym battle—it was raw, unrestrained, a full-power discharge that turned the air between Nidoking and the Gyarados into a corridor of crackling, blinding, screaming electrical fury.
The bolt hit the Red Gyarados mid-body. The Water/Flying type's quadruple weakness to Electric—no, not quadruple, double, but the forced evolution had destabilized its biological defenses, making it more vulnerable than a standard specimen—made the impact devastating. The Gyarados shrieked—a sound that was nothing like its earlier roar, higher, thinner, agonized—and its body convulsed, muscles locking, jaws snapping shut, tail whipping sideways with enough force to send a geyser of water fifty feet into the air.
It crashed back into the lake, sending waves rolling toward shore that lapped at Marcus's shoes.
"Again! Before it recovers!"
Nidoking fired another Thunderbolt. This one hit the Gyarados as it was trying to submerge, the electricity finding its half-submerged body and coursing through the water around it, turning the lake into a temporary electric field. The Gyarados thrashed, trying to dive, trying to escape, but the electricity was everywhere, conducted by the very water it was trying to hide in.
It surfaced again, gasping, its red scales dimmer, its movements sluggish. The forced evolution had made it powerful but unstable—its body was burning through energy at a rate that it couldn't sustain, the artificial enhancement a double-edged sword that cut the wielder as deeply as the enemy.
Marcus recognized the moment. The tipping point between "still fighting" and "ready to capture." He'd seen it in the games a thousand times—the moment when a wild Pokémon's health dropped into the yellow zone, when its movements slowed, when the fight went out of its eyes.
"Nidoking, hold."
Nidoking stopped, electricity still dancing across its horn, ready to fire again at a word. It rumbled—the low, questioning rumble that meant "are you sure?"—and Marcus nodded.
"I'm sure. We've done enough."
He pulled an Ultra Ball from his belt. Black and gold. Standard issue. No enhancements, no modifications. Just a ball, a throw, and a prayer.
The Red Gyarados floated on the surface, its massive body half-submerged, its breathing ragged and labored. Its eyes—those wild, pain-filled eyes—found Marcus on the shore.
For a moment, they looked at each other. Man and monster. Crime lord and tortured beast.
"I know what they did to you," Marcus said quietly. "The radio waves. The forced evolution. It hurt. I know."
He didn't mention that "they" were technically his own organization. Team Rocket's Johto operations—which Marcus hadn't yet had time to restructure—were running the forced evolution experiment that had created this Gyarados. It was his people, his technology, his responsibility.
He was going to fix it. He was going to shut down the Mahogany Town operation, recall the operatives, and destroy the equipment. Not because he felt guilty—guilt was a luxury that crime lords couldn't afford—but because the operation was sloppy. It drew attention. It created problems. It turned the lake into a crime scene that any competent trainer or law enforcement officer could trace back to Team Rocket.
And it was cruel. Marcus didn't do cruel. He did efficient, ruthless, strategic, and occasionally terrifying. But he didn't do cruel. Cruelty was wasteful. It created enemies. It made people fight harder against you. It was the tool of idiots who confused power with sadism.
"Come with me," he told the Gyarados. "I can't undo what was done to you. But I can make sure it never happens again. And I can give you a place where your strength is valued, not exploited."
The Gyarados stared at him. Its jaw worked—not aggressively, but as if it was trying to process what it was hearing, trying to reconcile the calm words with the pain that had defined its entire short existence.
Marcus threw the Ultra Ball.
It arced over the water, spinning, its black-and-gold surface catching the last light of sunset. It struck the Gyarados on the forehead—gently, almost tenderly—and the great red serpent dissolved into crimson light, drawn into the ball's containment field.
The ball splashed into the water. Floated.
Shake. The lake rippled.
Shake. A wave rolled toward shore.
Shake. Marcus held his breath.
Click.
The lake went still.
Marcus waded into the shallows, retrieved the Ultra Ball, and clipped it to his belt. Through the ball's shell, he could feel the Gyarados—exhausted, confused, but no longer raging. The capture process had interrupted the pain cycle that the forced evolution had locked it into. For the first time since its creation, the Red Gyarados was not in pain.
It was sleeping.
"Welcome to the team," Marcus murmured.
Then he turned to the helicopter, pulled out his communicator, and called the Team Rocket operative in charge of the Mahogany Town base.
"This is Giovanni. Shut down the radio tower experiment. Immediately. Pack everything up. I want the base stripped and abandoned within forty-eight hours."
"Sir? But the experiment is producing results—the forced evolution—"
"I said shut it down. The experiment is sloppy, it's attracting attention, and it's producing Pokémon that are unstable and uncontrollable. It's a liability. Shut it down, pack it up, and reassign the personnel. Do I need to repeat myself?"
"...No, sir. Shutting down immediately."
Marcus ended the call. Not guilt. Efficiency. There was a difference.
He kept telling himself that as he climbed into the helicopter, the Red Gyarados's ball warm against his hip, and headed back to Kanto.
It was past midnight when Marcus finally sat down at his desk to read the Paldea expedition report.
He was exhausted. The day had included gym battles, a three-hour political conference, catching a Gyarados, and flying across two regions in a helicopter. Giovanni's body was tough—decades of training and an apparently superhuman constitution—but even it had limits, and Marcus was bumping up against them.
He poured himself a whiskey from the bottle in Giovanni's desk drawer (the man had good taste—this was a twenty-year single malt that cost more than most people's monthly rent), took a long, burning sip, and opened the encrypted file on his computer.
PALDEA EXPEDITION - COMPREHENSIVE STATUS REPORT
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA
FROM: Agent Sable, Intelligence Division
TO: Giovanni, Director
Sir,
The Paldea expedition has progressed significantly since our last report. I must preface the operational details with a series of observations about the Paldea region itself, which are... relevant to understanding the challenges and opportunities our team has encountered.
I will be direct: Paldea is the strangest place any of our operatives have ever been deployed.
Marcus raised an eyebrow. Sable was not a woman given to editorializing. If she described something as "strange," it was probably eldritch.
REGIONAL OBSERVATIONS:
1. TERRAIN AND GEOGRAPHY
The Paldea region is, geographically, unremarkable. It consists of standard biomes—grasslands, mountains, deserts, coastal areas, forests—arranged in a pattern that suggests normal geological processes. The terrain between settlements is generally flat, open, and featureless.
Extremely featureless.
Unsettlingly featureless.
Our operatives report traveling for hours between towns through landscapes that contain almost nothing. No significant landmarks. No interesting geological formations. No hidden locations or points of interest. Just... land. Flat, empty, occasionally grassy land that stretches from horizon to horizon without offering the traveler any reason to stop, investigate, or deviate from a straight-line path to their destination.
Agent Maki described it as "a world that was designed by someone who understood the concept of 'open space' but not the concept of 'things to put in it.'" Agent Hiro compared it to "a restaurant that has a very large dining room and no furniture." Agent Yua simply said "it's creepy" and requested a transfer.
The outdoor Pokémon Centers that dot the landscape are particularly baffling. They are fully functional healing stations, staffed and operational, sitting in the middle of absolutely nothing. No town. No settlement. No reason for a Pokémon Center to exist in that location other than the apparent assumption that trainers would need healing after walking through so much emptiness that their Pokémon died of boredom.
Marcus snorted whiskey through his nose.
He coughed, wiped his face, and kept reading with the grin of a man who was hearing his own complaints about Scarlet and Violet validated by real-world operatives experiencing the same problems firsthand.
2. POPULATION AND BEHAVIOR
The civilian population of Paldea is, by all measurable metrics, normal. People go about their daily lives, run businesses, train Pokémon, and engage in the usual activities of a functioning society.
However.
Our operatives have reported a phenomenon that is, to put it mildly, deeply unsettling.
A significant percentage of the civilian population appears to be... frozen.
Not physically frozen. They move. They blink. They breathe. But they do not do anything. They stand in fixed positions—on street corners, in parks, in front of buildings—and remain there indefinitely. They do not eat. They do not sleep. They do not leave their positions. They simply stand, staring forward with expressions that our operatives have consistently described as "glazed."
When approached, these individuals respond to conversation. But their responses are limited and repetitive. Each individual appears to have a single statement or short set of statements that they deliver when spoken to, after which they return to their default state of blank, forward-facing immobility.
Agent Maki approached one such individual—a woman standing outside a bakery in Mesagoza—on three separate occasions over a period of two days. Each time, the woman said the exact same thing: "The bread here is wonderful! I come every day!" She said this at 9 AM, at 3 PM, and at 11 PM. She had not moved between visits. She was not holding any bread.
Agent Hiro reported a similar experience with a man standing near the Mesagoza fountain. The man's statement was: "This fountain is beautiful, don't you think?" He said this in sunshine, in rain, and at midnight. He had been standing in the same spot for at least forty-eight hours.
Our team has catalogued over three hundred individuals exhibiting this behavior. They are distributed evenly across the region's population centers. They do not appear to be ill, injured, or under any form of external control. They simply... exist. In place. Repeating themselves.
It is, and I cannot stress this enough, extremely creepy.
Marcus set down the whiskey and laughed. Not a chuckle—a full, deep, long laugh that startled Boss the Persian awake and caused Dragonair to lift its head from its coil on the office floor and chirp with concern.
NPCs. They were describing NPCs. The non-player characters from Scarlet and Violet—the background characters who stood in fixed positions and delivered one or two lines of dialogue when interacted with and otherwise did absolutely nothing. In the game, they were just set dressing. In reality, they were apparently real people who had been reduced to a single behavioral loop.
That was—Marcus stopped laughing. That was actually horrifying, when you thought about it. Real people, standing in place, repeating the same phrases, their lives reduced to a single function. What had happened to them? Were they always like this? Was it an effect of Area Zero's energy? A natural phenomenon of this world? A glitch in the fundamental fabric of reality?
He filed it under "things to investigate later" and kept reading.
3. GYMS AND COMPETITIVE BATTLING
Our operatives, as part of their cover as traveling researchers, have observed several gym battles in the Paldea region. Their assessment of the region's competitive battling scene is... unfavorable.
The Gym Leaders of Paldea are, without exception, significantly weaker than their Kanto counterparts. Their teams are small (typically three to four Pokémon), their strategies are basic, and their battle awareness is poor. Agent Maki, who has a competitive battling background, described the Paldea Gym Leaders as "what you'd get if you took a reasonably talented thirteen-year-old and gave them a Gym Leader badge and told them to figure it out."
The Champion of Paldea—a woman named Geeta—was observed in a public exhibition match. Our operatives were not impressed. Her team, while composed of individually strong Pokémon, displayed no strategic cohesion. Her battle commands were slow and reactive. Her switching was predictable. Agent Hiro's assessment: "She would lose to Giovanni's gym team in under ten minutes."
Marcus felt a warm glow of pride that he immediately recognized as petty and didn't care.
4. TEAM STAR
Our operatives have made contact with a local organization called "Team Star." Initial intelligence suggested a potential criminal enterprise or resistance movement. Further investigation revealed that Team Star is, in fact, a group of schoolchildren.
Their origin story, as relayed to our operatives by local sources, is as follows: a group of students at the Paldea region's Pokémon academy were subjected to "bullying" by their peers. In response, they formed Team Star, adopted criminal-aesthetic uniforms and vehicle-themed bases, and declared themselves an independent force operating outside the academy's authority.
Our operatives investigated the nature of the "bullying" that precipitated Team Star's formation. Based on interviews with current students, former students, and academy faculty, the "bullying" consisted primarily of:
- Teasing about fashion choices
- Being excluded from social groups
- Mean comments on social media
- One instance of someone hiding a student's backpack
This is not bullying. This is being a teenager.
Our operatives, several of whom grew up in actual difficult circumstances—poverty, crime, genuine persecution—have expressed a range of reactions to Team Star, from bemusement to outright contempt. Agent Yua, who grew up on the streets of Saffron City, described Team Star as "what happens when kids who have never experienced a real problem in their lives encounter a minor inconvenience and decide it's the apocalypse."
Team Star's "bases" are open-air compounds scattered across the region's landscape, staffed by students wearing color-coordinated outfits and driving modified cars. They are, by any operational standard, not a threat. Their Pokémon are weak, their security is nonexistent, and their leadership—a group of students called "bosses" who each command a single type—would be swept by any competent Rocket grunt.
We have not engaged with Team Star, as they are irrelevant to our mission objectives. However, several operatives have expressed a desire to "teach these kids what actual hardship looks like," which I have denied as it falls outside our operational parameters.
Marcus made a note: Do NOT let the grunts bully the children. We're criminals, not monsters. Also, it would draw attention.
5. RECRUITMENT AND BASE ESTABLISHMENT
Despite the region's numerous... peculiarities, the Paldea expedition has achieved its operational objectives.
Recruitment has been surprisingly easy. The Paldea region has a large population of skilled trainers and researchers who are, frankly, underemployed. The competitive scene is weak, the academic institutions are understaffed, and there are limited opportunities for ambitious individuals to advance. Our operatives, posing as representatives of a private research firm, have recruited fourteen new operatives with backgrounds in Pokémon biology, energy physics, and field operations.
Base locations have been established in three locations across the region. Per your instructions, we have placed them in the flat, featureless areas between towns. This was, we assumed, intended as a joke. Upon arrival in Paldea, we discovered that it was not a joke—there are vast stretches of completely empty, unmonitored, unused land between every settlement in the region, and nobody appears to notice or care what happens in these areas. We could have built a full-scale military installation and the nearest town would not have reacted.
Our three bases are fully operational, equipped with scanning equipment, living quarters, and communication systems. They are disguised as agricultural research stations, which nobody has questioned because nobody has visited.
The flat, featureless land of Paldea is, we have concluded, the single greatest asset the region offers to a clandestine organization. You could hide anything here. Anything at all. Nobody would ever find it because nobody would ever look.
Marcus finished the report, drained his whiskey, and sat in the warm glow of a day that had been, by any standard, extraordinary.
He'd caught two gods and a shiny Gyarados. He'd won four gym battles. He'd secured a position as the power behind the Pokémon League's intelligence operations. He'd received confirmation that his Paldea operations were expanding successfully. And he'd managed to sit next to Sabrina for three hours without his brain permanently shutting down.
A good day. A very good day.
He released Dragonair from its ball. The dragon materialized in the office, filling the space with its serpentine body, its orbs casting soft blue light across the walls. It chirped—that deep, musical chirp—and nuzzled his chest.
"We're winning," Marcus told it. "Every day, we're winning a little more."
Dragonair purred.
Boss Persian, from the couch, purred in harmony.
The Red Gyarados's ball pulsed warmly on his belt—the Water-type sleeping peacefully for the first time in its tortured existence.
Kyogre's ball pulsed with the cold, vast rhythm of ocean currents.
Groudon's ball pulsed with the hot, steady beat of the earth's heart.
Somewhere in the building, forty-seven women—possibly more by now—were meeting to discuss their collective admiration for a man who would never, ever, ever notice.
Somewhere in Kanto, Red was hunting Team Aqua and Team Magma, fighting the wrong battles for the right reasons.
Somewhere in Paldea, NPC-people stood on street corners and repeated themselves in the empty spaces between half-finished towns.
Somewhere on Cinnabar Island, in a tank full of amber fluid, a god was dreaming, its brain forming neuron by impossible neuron, its awakening drawing closer.
And here, in Viridian City, the most dangerous man in the Pokémon world was petting his dragon, drinking whiskey, and planning his next move.
The grind continued.
END OF CHAPTER 6
Next Chapter: The genetic potential pills are ready and work terrifyingly well on Marcus's team, Mewtwo's awakening draws near and Marcus prepares for the most important moment of his new life, the Mega Stone search finally bears fruit in Kalos, and Sabrina invites Giovanni to her gym for that "training discussion" which Giovanni approaches with the energy of a man who genuinely believes this is a professional meeting about Pokémon training and not what it obviously is to literally everyone else in the universe.