Chapter 216: Mammon, Who's Your Girlfriend?
"Inexplicable windstorms?"
Mammon turned the information over thoughtfully. He had a fairly good idea what he was dealing with.
"That's right. The weather forecast never predicts them. And apparently, when one hit a few weeks ago, someone said they saw something in the sky — a creature of some kind."
The shopkeeper delivered this with the gravity of a local eyewitness account.
"A creature? That's almost certainly a Pokémon." Caitlin found the "monster" framing a little uncharitable. This was a world where unusual weather phenomena had documented causes, and almost all of them traced back to Pokémon activity.
"That's what we think too. We just can't figure out which one."
"Didn't anyone contact the League?" Elesa asked. An event disruptive enough to affect an entire town for over a month — the Unova League shouldn't have been ignoring that.
"We did. But even Looker's people haven't found the source yet." The shopkeeper sighed. "And you can see why — when the wind is this bad, nobody can get out to investigate. Today is actually a mild one."
"There are worse?"
"Oh, much worse. Sometimes the sound alone is enough to keep people inside all night."
Mammon was now fairly certain he knew exactly what this was.
The list of wild Pokémon capable of sustaining windstorms at this scale over a populated area for more than a month was very short. And "very short" essentially meant one answer.
One of the Forces of Nature — the Incarnate Pokémon. Tornadus, specifically.
"The person who saw it — did they describe what it looked like?" Mammon asked the shopkeeper.
"Was it a Pokémon with clouds where its lower body should be?" Elesa added, following the same line of reasoning. She was from Nimbasa — she'd grown up with Unova's legends.
"You mean Tornadus?" The shopkeeper shook her head.
Elesa blinked. She'd assumed the woman wouldn't know the name.
Tornadus and Thundurus were both legendaries with notoriously bad temperaments — they went wherever they liked and left storm damage in their wake. If any Pokémon fit this description, it was one of them.
"But it wasn't. Someone in town had specifically looked into Tornadus, and Tornadus has a human-like upper body on a cloud base. The person who spotted it said what they saw looked like a large green bird."
"Ah," said Elesa.
Green bird?
Mammon, however, was more certain than ever.
The Forces of Nature — the Incarnate Pokémon — had two distinct forms. The Incarnate Forme was what most people were familiar with: the half-human appearance, the cloud-body silhouette. That was the disguise. The true body was the Therian Forme — animalistic, feral, the form they were born into.
The "large green bird" was Tornadus in its Therian Forme.
Which raised an interesting question. Switching between Formes required a Reveal Glass. Without one, the Forces of Nature were stuck in whichever form they'd activated. So either this Tornadus had one, or it had somehow reverted naturally — neither of which was typical.
Interesting.
Mammon let the thought settle. The Forces of Nature were, among non-legendary Pokémon, genuinely impressive — Tornadus and Thundurus both had Prankster in their Incarnate Formes, Landorus had Intimidate in Therian Forme, and all four had exclusive moves. An unexpected find.
He'd come to Eindoak specifically for Victini. Victini still hadn't appeared. But Tornadus being nearby was a pleasant bonus.
The storm ran about forty minutes before it cleared.
When the three of them stepped back outside, the main street looked like someone had reorganized it using a catapult. Debris everywhere, a few awnings down, produce scattered across the cobblestones. The townspeople were already cleaning up with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this many times before.
"Interesting."
Mammon's mouth curved slowly.
He genuinely liked Pokémon that operated on their own terms — powerful, self-directed, completely unconcerned with what anyone else thought. A legendary that had been terrorizing a town for a month and a half out of pure inclination. Appropriately, that kind of Pokémon ought to belong to Team Rocket.
And this technically counted as a public service. Removing the source of the problem and all.
"Elesa."
"Yes?" Elesa turned.
"Go ask around. Where does the storm seem to come from — or where did the person spot it? Anyone with a consistent location."
"Understood." She read the subtext immediately — Mammon wanted the Pokémon, and the direction of approach mattered.
And if he caught it, the town's month-and-a-half nightmare ended. Not a bad deal for anyone involved.
She went.
"Huh? Mammon?"
A voice from behind them — surprised, genuinely pleased.
Mammon turned. A girl with two buns on top of her head was waving at him from across the road, wearing black tights and an expression of delight.
"Nora. Small world."
She jogged over, slightly breathless, her buns bouncing with each step.
"Right?! I nearly did a double take when I saw you. Of all places to run into someone."
"Touko not with you?"
"Nope! We're rivals, Mammon — we can't exactly travel together." Nora said it cheerfully, without a trace of awkwardness. "I mean, we're best friends too, obviously. But we're both multi-type trainers, same kind of path, so practically speaking it just doesn't work."
She had a point. Two trainers pursuing the same style of development couldn't share a route cleanly — whenever a desirable Pokémon appeared, neither could take it without the other feeling shortchanged. Single-type specialists could travel with generalists. Coordinators and breeders could travel with anyone. But two generalist trainers on the same arc were better off covering separate ground.
"Makes sense."
"So what brings you to Eindoak, Mammon?"
Nora was genuinely curious. Her opinion of Mammon was — complicated, honestly. Intimidating power, surprisingly easy to talk to, chosen by Reshiram, and the person who had beat her Hydreigon without visible effort. The combination was difficult to categorize.
"Just passing through. You?"
"I got my eighth badge, so I've been exploring places I haven't been yet. Training on the side." She blinked brightly. "Oh! You two were in the storm too, right? I've been asking around — that storm is almost certainly coming from a specific Pokémon! Did you know?!"
"I have a theory," Mammon agreed.
"I already tracked down where it's coming from!" Nora's energy went up another notch. "Do you want to come look? I should warn you though — I'm going to try to catch it. I've been thinking about this one since the storm hit us."
She paused and added, honestly: "If I can't, you can have a go."
"All right. I'm curious what you find." Mammon nodded.
Nora's chances against Tornadus in Therian Forme were not excellent — the scale of the storms suggested Champion-tier strength, which put it above where Nora currently was. She'd grown fast, but catching up to that gap in one afternoon was asking a lot.
The Kanto legendary birds were a different matter. The ones Team Rocket had caught from the Kanto bird flocks had been Elite-Four-tier at best — those had populations, with individual power varying considerably. The Forces of Nature were singular entities. One each.
She'll probably get to learn something useful, at least.
Elesa came back at a quick walk.
"Oh, Gym Leader Elesa is here too!"
Nora looked genuinely startled, taking in the tall woman's outfit — denim shorts, legs that were doing an unreasonable amount of work, posture of someone who had adapted to unusual circumstances and was managing it with professionalism.
The denim shorts were particularly successful.
Nora stared for a second, then caught herself and looked away.
How does a person just — have legs like that—
"Elesa got kidnapped," Mammon said pleasantly. "She's my maid now."
Elesa's eye twitched slightly.
"Ha?" Nora looked at him with the expression of someone who had heard this and declined to process it at face value.
"You could just hire me as your maid, Mammon. I'm very capable. You'd just have to pay me an actual salary."
She said this with complete sincerity, giving her chest a confident pat.
"That won't work. Your talent would be completely wasted in that role." Mammon shook his head. "You could be Champion."
"Ahh~ Mammon, you really do have an eye for people!"
Nora's smile was wide and genuine, and her face went a little pink. She liked Mammon more every time she talked to him. He was — ridiculously good-looking, absurdly strong, said exactly the right things, and somehow easy to be around despite all of it.
Who in the world is currently dating this man?
She glanced at Caitlin and Elesa. Elesa was almost certainly not the girlfriend — the "kidnapped maid" thing was clearly at least partially factual, based on tone. But the elegant woman who always seemed to be nearby didn't quite read as girlfriend either, though something in how she was watching this conversation suggested feelings of some specific intensity.
"Mammon, can I ask you something personal?"
The four of them had started walking, heading toward Nora's lead.
"Sure."
Mammon held a small biscuit up toward the shoulder where Jirachi was perched. The small legendary had been dozing — eyes shut, head nodding — but caught the scent before Mammon finished extending his arm. Its mouth opened on pure instinct.
"Do you have a girlfriend?"
The question landed, and Caitlin's eyes sharpened slightly with the automatic precision of a targeting system acquiring its subject.
Elesa looked at Mammon sideways, quietly curious herself. From her position of — unwilling observer of his domestic arrangements — she had formed some opinions about his situation. "Complicated" felt accurate. "Active" also felt accurate. But girlfriend, specifically, was a category she hadn't fully mapped.
"Yes. I've had the same girlfriend the whole time."
Mammon thought of Mitsuki, and smiled without quite realizing it.
"No!!"
Nora let out a small sound of genuine disappointment.
"Someone got there already! Unbelievable!"
Elesa blinked, processing this new data point. He had a girlfriend. He had actually had a girlfriend this whole time. She hadn't known.
She looked reflexively at Caitlin.
Caitlin's expression had undergone a small, carefully managed adjustment. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't nothing.
She held it together again, Elesa thought, with something approaching respect.
"Mammon, who is she?" Elesa asked, because now she needed to know.
She was not being self-deprecating — she was well aware that by most conventional measures, she was doing fine. World-famous model, Gym Leader, widely considered one of the more striking people in Unova. Those weren't nothing.
But she also understood, clearly, that she was not in a position to compete for whatever Mammon's primary attention was. She could feel that she registered positively to him — she wasn't oblivious. But positively and girlfriend were different categories.
The question she genuinely couldn't answer was: what kind of person had actually gotten there first? What did someone have to be to get Mammon — who was apparently conducting a life of considerable variety — to look at one person and say yes, that's the one?
And how was someone out there having that effect on the same person who had Caitlin, in all her composed brilliance, standing nearby without official status?
That girl, whoever she was, had something exceptional going on.
(End of Chapter)
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