Giovanni woke to the sensation of a small dragon trying to eat his ear.
"Mrph—what—Dratini."
The little serpent had apparently decided that Giovanni's earlobe was either a food source or a chew toy, and was gnawing on it with the gentle but persistent determination of a creature that had exactly one brain cell and had dedicated it entirely to the task at hand. Its tiny teeth—not sharp enough to break skin, but definitely sharp enough to be felt—worked at the cartilage with a rhythmic, almost meditative intensity.
Marcus—Giovanni—sat up, dislodging the Dratini from his ear. It made a sound of pure, undiluted indignation, as though it had been in the middle of something very important and he had rudely interrupted. Then it sneezed, sprayed a tiny, pathetic Dragon Rage that fizzled against the headboard and left a scorch mark the size of a quarter, and looked enormously pleased with itself.
"You're ridiculous," Marcus told it.
It chirped.
He swung his legs out of bed and stood, Giovanni's body moving with a kind of automatic, well-oiled efficiency that suggested the man had been waking up at the same time every day for decades. Muscle memory guided him through a morning routine—shower, shave, suit—that was so ingrained it required almost no conscious input, leaving Marcus's mind free to do what it had been doing for the past twelve hours: plan.
The list from last night was still fresh in his mind. Mega Stones. Z-Crystals. Dynamax. Legendaries. Team improvement. Organizational reform. It was a lot. It was, frankly, more than any one person should be trying to accomplish simultaneously, even if that person was the leader of a criminal empire with functionally unlimited resources.
But Marcus had something that the original Giovanni never had: priorities.
The original Giovanni had spread himself too thin. He'd been running the Viridian City Gym, overseeing Team Rocket's day-to-day operations, managing the Mewtwo project on Cinnabar Island, personally supervising the Silph Co. raid, and trying to deal with a rampaging child prodigy tearing through his organization like a chainsaw through butter—all at the same time. No wonder he'd lost. He'd been trying to do everything and had ended up doing nothing well.
Marcus was not going to make that mistake.
Today, he had three objectives, clearly defined and ranked by importance:
One: Gym duties. He was the Viridian City Gym Leader. He had responsibilities. Challengers to battle, paperwork to file, a public persona to maintain. This was non-negotiable—the gym was his cover, his legitimacy, the thing that kept the Pokémon League from looking too closely at his extracurricular activities.
Two: Cinnabar Island. He needed to check on the Mewtwo project. In the games, Mewtwo had escaped from the lab, destroyed the facility, and ended up sulking in Cerulean Cave like the world's most powerful emo teenager. If Marcus could prevent that—if he could ensure that Mewtwo's creation was handled properly, with safeguards and contingencies and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of basic empathy for the living creature they were creating—then he'd have the most powerful Pokémon in existence on his side instead of against him.
Three: Silph Co. This one was going to require a different approach than what the original Giovanni had planned. The original plan had been to raid Silph Co.—send in a small army of Rocket grunts, take the building by force, and steal the Master Ball prototype. Which was, from a strategic standpoint, monumentally stupid. You don't rob the company that makes the thing you want. You buy the company. You put everyone on your payroll. You fund their research, expand their operations, and get them to make you not one Master Ball but fifty. A hundred. As many as you want, whenever you want, because you own the factory.
Marcus had been a villain for approximately eighteen hours and he was already better at it than Giovanni had been in his entire career. It wasn't even close.
He finished dressing—the orange suit, immaculate as always, Giovanni's wardrobe apparently consisting entirely of variations on the same outfit like a cartoon character—and clipped his Poké Balls to his belt. Six balls for his main team, plus Dratini's ball, which he kept in his jacket pocket because the little dragon was still too young for serious combat and he liked having it close.
"Persian," he called. The office Persian—he'd decided to call it "Boss" to differentiate it from his battle Persian, which he was calling "Ace"—raised its head from its cushion and yawned. "Hold down the fort. I'll be back tonight. Maybe. Depends on how Cinnabar goes."
Boss mrrow'd and went back to sleep.
Marcus—Giovanni—the Boss—walked out of his quarters, down the corridor, and into the elevator that would take him to the ground floor of the headquarters building.
The elevator doors opened.
The ground floor was bustling. Team Rocket operatives moved through the space with the focused energy of people who had jobs to do and were, for the most part, doing them. Communications officers monitored banks of screens. Logistics coordinators shuffled paperwork. Field agents checked in and checked out, their Poké Balls clinking on their belts. The whole operation hummed with a professional efficiency that Marcus found genuinely impressive—whatever else you could say about the original Giovanni, the man had built a machine.
A machine staffed almost entirely by women who were, to a person, built like they'd been sculpted by a deity with very specific aesthetic preferences and absolutely zero concept of moderation.
Marcus had been in this world for less than twenty-four hours and he had already developed a coping mechanism for this phenomenon: aggressive, near-pathological tunnel vision. He looked at faces. He looked at clipboards. He looked at screens. He looked at the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the potted plant in the corner—anywhere and everywhere except the areas where the laws of physics appeared to be engaged in active negotiation with human anatomy.
It was working. Mostly. He was pretty sure it was working.
"Good morning, Boss!" A chorus of greetings followed him as he crossed the floor, a wave of voices ranging from professional to adoring to something that sounded suspiciously like the verbal equivalent of heart-eye emojis. He nodded, waved, maintained his pace, and absolutely did not notice that every single woman he passed either blushed, fidgeted, pressed her thighs together, or did that thing where they tucked a strand of hair behind their ear while looking at him through their eyelashes.
He reached the front entrance, pushed through the doors, and stepped out into the morning air of Viridian City.
Viridian City was quiet in the early morning. The kind of quiet that small towns specialized in—a comfortable, unhurried silence broken only by birdsong (Pidgey-song, technically), the distant hum of traffic on Route 1, and the occasional bark of a Growlithe from the residential district.
The Viridian City Gym sat at the southern edge of town, a imposing building of dark stone and heavy architecture that radiated exactly the kind of "this place means business" energy you'd expect from a Ground-type gym. Marcus had the keys—Giovanni's keys, a heavy ring of them that jangled with authority—and let himself in through the staff entrance.
The interior was dim, cool, and exactly as he remembered it from the games: a maze of teleportation tiles designed to confuse and frustrate challengers before they reached the Gym Leader. Marcus navigated through them with practiced ease—Giovanni's muscle memory, again—and arrived at the leader's platform at the back of the gym.
He sat in the chair. The big chair. The Gym Leader's chair, elevated above the battlefield on a raised platform, designed to make whoever sat in it look imposing and authoritative.
It was awesome.
He was a Gym Leader. An actual Gym Leader. He could battle trainers and give out badges and everything. The eight-year-old inside him—the one who had first picked up a Game Boy and dreamed of being a Pokémon trainer—was screaming with unbridled joy.
The twenty-seven-year-old inside him—the one who was also a crime lord—told the eight-year-old to settle down, they had work to do.
He pulled out his communicator and checked the gym's schedule. Three challengers booked for today. The first was in—he checked the time—twenty minutes. A trainer named Koji, badge count: seven. Coming for his eighth and final badge before challenging the Pokémon League.
Seven badges. That meant this trainer was experienced. Competent. Probably had a well-rounded team with good coverage. This wasn't going to be a cakewalk.
Good.
Marcus grinned. He'd been itching for a real battle since he'd arrived in this world. Training in the basement was one thing, but there was nothing—nothing—like the real thing. The electricity of a live battle, the split-second decisions, the roar of Pokémon clashing with everything they had. This was what Pokémon was about.
He released Ace—his battle Persian—from its ball. The cat materialized on the platform beside him, stretched, and immediately began grooming itself with the air of a creature that was completely unconcerned about the upcoming battle and would deal with it whenever it felt like it.
"Warm up," Marcus told it. "We've got a challenger coming."
Ace flicked its tail. I'm always warm, the gesture seemed to say. I'm perfect at all times. Your concern is noted and unnecessary.
Marcus spent the next fifteen minutes reviewing what he knew about his gym team's capabilities. As a Gym Leader, he wasn't supposed to use his full personal team—gym battles had rules, level caps, and badge-tier restrictions that kept things fair for challengers. For eighth-badge challengers, he was allowed to use his strongest gym team, which consisted of Rhyhorn, Dugtrio, Nidoqueen, Nidoking, and Rhydon.
Ground-types. All Ground-types.
The predictability bothered him. It had always bothered him, even when he was just playing the games. Gym Leaders were supposed to specialize, sure, but there was a difference between specializing in a type and being a one-trick pony. A good Ground-type specialist would have Pokémon that could handle their type's weaknesses—Grass, Water, and Ice coverage on their Ground-types to deal with the inevitable counter-picks. A bad Ground-type specialist would just line up five Ground-types and pray.
Giovanni had been a bad Ground-type specialist.
Marcus was going to be a good one.
He spent the remaining time before the challenger arrived teaching his Nidoking Thunderbolt via the TM he'd purchased yesterday. The process was fascinating—in the games, you just used the item and the Pokémon learned the move instantly. In reality, it was more like... uploading software. The TM disc went into a device on the Pokémon's Poké Ball, there was a brief flash of light, and the Pokémon underwent a visible shift—a moment of disorientation followed by a dawning awareness, like remembering something you'd always known but had forgotten. Nidoking flexed its claws, and tiny sparks of electricity danced between its fingers.
"How does that feel?" Marcus asked.
Nidoking rumbled appreciatively. It felt great, apparently.
Perfect. Now his Nidoking had Electric coverage. Any Water-type that came in expecting an easy matchup against a Ground-type gym was going to get a very unpleasant surprise.
The gym's front door chimed. The challenger had arrived.
Marcus straightened in his chair, composed his face into Giovanni's trademark expression of calm, commanding authority, and waited.
The battle was glorious.
Koji was good. Genuinely good. A seventeen-year-old from Saffron City with sharp eyes and a team built specifically to counter Ground-types—a Lapras, a Venusaur, a Starmie, a Jynx, a Poliwrath, and a Sandslash that was clearly his ace, battle-scarred and fierce and moving with the confidence of a Pokémon that had won many, many fights.
He opened with Lapras. Smart choice—Water/Ice, double super-effective against Ground, and bulky enough to take hits while dishing out damage. The original Giovanni would have led with Rhyhorn and gotten swept.
Marcus led with Nidoking.
"Thunderbolt," he said.
Koji's face went through a rapid series of expressions—confusion, realization, horror—as Nidoking, a Ground-type with no business knowing an Electric move, raised its claws and unleashed a crackling bolt of lightning that struck Lapras dead-center. The transport Pokémon bellowed in pain, its Water typing turning what should have been a neutral hit into a devastating super-effective strike.
"What—how does your Nidoking know Thunderbolt?!" Koji sputtered.
Marcus allowed himself a small, satisfied smile. "I'm the eighth Gym Leader," he said calmly. "Did you think I'd be predictable?"
The battle lasted forty-five minutes. Marcus lost Rhyhorn and Dugtrio—unavoidable, given the type matchup—but his Nidoking swept Lapras and Starmie with Thunderbolt, his Nidoqueen tanked everything Venusaur threw at her and responded with Ice Beam (another new TM), and his Rhydon closed out the match against Koji's Sandslash in a mirror match of pure Ground-type power that ended with a devastating Earthquake that cracked the gym floor.
Koji stood in the aftermath, his team fainted, his face a mixture of exhaustion and awe.
"That was..." He shook his head. "That was the hardest battle I've ever had."
Marcus descended from the platform, crossed the battlefield, and extended his hand. "You fought well. Your team is excellent. Your Sandslash especially—that thing is a beast."
Koji blinked, apparently not expecting the Viridian City Gym Leader to offer a handshake and a compliment. He took the hand, squeezed, and managed a tired grin.
"Thanks, sir. I'll come back stronger."
"I hope you do."
Marcus handed over the Earth Badge—a green, leaf-shaped pin that gleamed in the gym's overhead lights. Koji took it with trembling fingers, stared at it, and then looked up at Marcus with eyes that were suspiciously shiny.
"Eight badges," he whispered.
"Go challenge the League," Marcus told him. "You're ready."
Koji left the gym walking on air.
Marcus watched him go, feeling something warm and unexpected in his chest. He'd just had his first real Pokémon battle. Not a game. Not a simulation. A real, live battle with real Pokémon and real stakes and real emotions. The adrenaline was still singing in his blood, his heart was hammering, and his hands were shaking slightly with the aftereffects of combat-level focus.
It was the best thing he'd ever experienced.
He wanted to do it again. Immediately. Right now. He wanted to battle every trainer in Kanto, one after another, until his Pokémon were exhausted and his voice was hoarse and his body gave out.
But he had two more challengers today, and then he had places to be.
The second challenger was a fifteen-year-old girl from Cerulean City named Hana, who had clearly been told that the Viridian Gym was "easy" and had shown up with a team that was woefully underprepared. Marcus felt genuinely bad sweeping her with Rhydon alone—the rock-armored behemoth barely had to try—and afterward, he sat her down and spent twenty minutes going over her team composition, pointing out weaknesses, suggesting improvements, and recommending training routes.
This was not typical Giovanni behavior. The original Giovanni would have demolished her, handed over the badge (or not, depending on his mood), and moved on. Marcus couldn't do that. He was a Pokémon fan. He loved this. And watching a young trainer struggle with a badly built team triggered every instinct he had to help, to teach, to share the decades of knowledge crammed into his head.
Hana left the gym with her Earth Badge, a list of recommended TM moves, and the vaguely bewildered expression of someone who had expected a terrifying crime lord (the rumors about Giovanni circulated, even if nobody could prove anything) and had instead gotten a weirdly enthusiastic Pokémon professor in an orange suit.
The third challenger didn't show. Scheduled for 3 PM, never arrived. Marcus checked with the gym's receptionist—a woman named Yuki whose uniform was doing structural work that would have impressed a civil engineer, and whose reaction to Giovanni personally asking her a question involved turning approximately the same color as a Tamato Berry—and confirmed that the trainer had called to cancel.
Fine. That freed up his afternoon for objective two: Cinnabar Island.
But first, he had one more gym-related obligation.
The Viridian City Charity Gala was an annual event, organized by the city council and attended by local business owners, politicians, and notable figures. As the Gym Leader, Giovanni was expected to attend, smile for photographs, make a short speech about the importance of Pokémon training and community involvement, and generally pretend to be a pillar of the community rather than the head of an international criminal syndicate.
Marcus found the entire concept hilarious. And also kind of fun, in a "playing dress-up as a respectable member of society" way.
The gala was held in the Viridian City Community Center, a large, well-lit building decorated for the occasion with banners and streamers and an ice sculpture of a Pidgeot that was slowly melting into a puddle of abstract art. Tables were laden with food and drink. A string quartet played in the corner. Well-dressed citizens mingled, laughed, and pretended to enjoy small talk.
Marcus—Giovanni—worked the room with the ease of a man who had been doing this for years, because Giovanni had been doing this for years. Muscle memory carried him through handshakes and pleasantries, through conversations about property taxes and road maintenance and the upcoming Pokémon League tournament season, through photo ops and autograph requests and the inevitable "can my kid battle you for a badge" inquiries.
He was good at it. Giovanni was charming when he wanted to be—a fact that the games had never really explored but that made perfect sense for a man who ran both a legitimate gym and a criminal empire. You didn't get to the top of either world without knowing how to work a room.
What Marcus was not good at—what he was, in fact, catastrophically bad at—was noticing the effect he was having on the women in attendance.
Every woman at the gala—every single one—was staring at him.
Not subtly. Not discreetly. Staring. The way you stare at a sunset, or a masterpiece painting, or a particularly impressive dessert buffet. With hunger. With longing. With the kind of focused, unblinking intensity that, in any other context, would be classified as predatory.
And they were all—every last one of them—built like they'd been designed by a committee whose sole mandate was "more."
The mayor's wife, a statuesque blonde in a red dress that appeared to be losing a jurisdictional dispute with her chest over which of them was in charge of the front of her body. The dress said "elegant evening wear." Her chest said "I am a force of nature and this fabric is merely a suggestion." Each breast was a monument to abundance, straining against the dress's neckline with the quiet, inevitable pressure of tectonic plates, the cleavage between them deep enough to qualify as a geological formation. Below, the dress clung to hips that flared outward like the hull of a ship—broad, powerful, designed by nature to occupy space and dare the world to comment on it.
The chief of police, a dark-haired woman in a formal uniform that had clearly been tailored by someone who understood the concept of "accommodation" on a structural level. The uniform jacket was buttoned with military precision, but the buttons themselves were performing feats of engineering that would have earned them a place in a materials science textbook, holding firm against a bust that tested the tensile strength of every thread. Her waist nipped inward sharply before giving way to hips and thighs that the uniform pants could only dream of containing properly—the fabric stretched taut over curves that rolled and shifted with every step, every gesture, every breath.
The headmistress of the local school, a bespectacled woman in a conservative blouse and long skirt who somehow managed to make "conservative" look like a challenge she had issued to her own body and lost decisively. The blouse was buttoned to the neck, but the buttons over her chest were spaced so far apart by the sheer volume they were tasked with covering that small diamonds of skin were visible between each one, a Morse code of flesh that spelled out something Marcus's subconscious was stubbornly refusing to translate.
He noticed none of this.
He was thinking about Cinnabar Island.
"Mr. Giovanni!" The mayor—a portly, jovial man with a Rattata-shaped mustache—clapped him on the shoulder. "Wonderful to see you, as always! How's the gym? Heard you had some tough challengers today!"
"Three scheduled, two showed," Marcus said, accepting a glass of sparkling water from a passing server. "Good battles. The caliber of trainers this season is impressive."
"That's what we like to hear! You know, the city council has been discussing increasing the gym's budget for the next fiscal year. With the League tournament coming up, we want to make sure Viridian's gym is the best in Kanto."
"I appreciate that," Marcus said, and meant it. More budget meant better facilities, which meant better training, which meant a stronger gym team. "I've been thinking about renovating the battle arena. The current floor can't handle the higher-level battles—I cracked it today during an Earthquake."
"Oh my!" The mayor chuckled nervously. "Well, we'll certainly look into reinforced flooring. Can't have the gym collapsing, can we?"
They talked shop for another ten minutes before the mayor was pulled away by another conversation. Marcus took the opportunity to step back, find a quiet corner, and pull out his communicator.
He had calls to make.
The flight to Cinnabar Island took two hours by helicopter.
Team Rocket owned helicopters. Of course Team Rocket owned helicopters. They also owned submarines, trucks, a small fleet of boats, and what appeared to be a prototype stealth aircraft that was still in development. Giovanni's criminal empire had better logistics than most small countries.
Marcus sat in the passenger cabin of the helicopter, Dratini coiled in his lap, and watched the Kanto landscape scroll by beneath him. Viridian Forest, a dense green carpet of ancient trees. Pewter City, grey and solid, nestled against the mountains. Mount Moon, its peak shrouded in clouds. Cerulean City, sparkling blue against the river. Vermillion City, industrial and busy, its harbor full of ships. Lavender Town—he looked away from that one quickly. Celadon, Saffron, Fuchsia, the Seafoam Islands...
And then Cinnabar Island, rising from the ocean like a fist of black volcanic rock, its single town clustered on the southern shore, the rest of the island dominated by the dormant volcano that gave it its name.
And somewhere on that island, in a laboratory that existed in the space between legitimate research and criminal ambition, the most powerful Pokémon in the world was being created.
The helicopter landed on a private pad on the northern side of the island, away from the town, away from the gym, away from prying eyes. Marcus disembarked—Dratini clinging to his shoulder like a scaly parrot—and was immediately met by a Team Rocket scientist in a white lab coat.
"Sir! We weren't expecting you!" The scientist—a nervous, thin man with glasses and a clipboard—scrambled to attention. "I'll inform Dr. Fuji immediately—"
"Don't bother. I'll see him myself. Take me to the lab."
"Y-yes, sir!"
The laboratory was underground. Because of course it was underground. Criminal laboratories were always underground. It was practically a building code requirement for evil organizations.
The elevator descended for what felt like a very long time. When the doors opened, Marcus stepped out into a corridor of white tile and fluorescent lighting that hummed with the quiet, persistent buzz of serious science happening. Doors lined both sides of the hallway, each one labeled with technical designations that meant nothing to Marcus but presumably described various stages of the Mewtwo project.
Dr. Fuji was waiting at the end of the corridor, in front of a massive reinforced door marked PROJECT M - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He was exactly as Marcus had expected—an older man, grey-haired, kind-faced, with the haunted eyes of a scientist who had ventured too far into territory that science probably shouldn't have explored but was in too deep to turn back.
"Giovanni." Fuji's voice was carefully neutral. "This is unexpected."
"I want to see it," Marcus said.
Fuji hesitated for a fraction of a second—a hesitation that spoke volumes about the complicated relationship between the scientist and his patron—and then nodded, turning to input a code into the door's security panel.
The door opened.
The room beyond was vast—a cathedral of science, its ceiling lost in shadow, its walls lined with monitors and equipment and cables that snaked across the floor like mechanical vines. In the center, dominating the space with the quiet authority of something that knew it was important, was a tank.
A massive, cylindrical tank filled with a translucent amber fluid that glowed faintly from within, casting warm, honeyed light across the room. And floating in that fluid, suspended in a web of tubes and sensors and monitoring equipment, was—
Marcus's breath caught.
Mewtwo.
It was smaller than he'd expected. Not small—even in its current state, it was clearly going to be over six feet tall when fully grown—but somehow, he'd imagined something more imposing. What he saw instead was something that looked... fragile. Unfinished. A work in progress. Its body was curled in a fetal position, its long tail wrapped around its legs, its eyes closed. The proportions were right—the broad, powerful tail, the slender body, the oversized head—but the details were still filling in, like a sketch that was slowly being rendered into a finished painting.
It was alive. Unambiguously, undeniably alive. Marcus could see its chest moving—a slow, rhythmic expansion and contraction, breathing the oxygenated fluid that surrounded it. Tiny twitches ran through its limbs at irregular intervals. And even from here, even through the thick glass of the tank, he could feel... something. A pressure. A presence. Like standing too close to a generator, a thrumming, subsonic vibration that he felt in his teeth and his bones and the base of his skull.
Psychic energy. Raw, unrefined, leaking from the creature like heat from a furnace.
"How far along?" Marcus asked quietly.
"Approximately sixty percent of projected development," Fuji said, consulting a tablet. "Growth rates are consistent with our models. Neural development is... unprecedented. The psychic capacity readings are already off our measurement scales. We've had to recalibrate three times."
"Any signs of consciousness?"
Fuji glanced at him. "Not yet. Brain activity patterns suggest REM-equivalent states, which could indicate dreaming, but we haven't detected anything we'd classify as waking consciousness. That's projected to emerge in the final twenty percent of development."
"And when it does?"
Another hesitation. Longer this time. "That's... the phase we're least prepared for, sir. When Mewtwo wakes up, it will be the most powerful psychic entity on the planet. Possibly the most powerful psychic entity that has ever existed. Our containment systems are designed to hold a Pokémon of Alakazam-level psychic ability. Mewtwo will exceed that by several orders of magnitude."
"So your containment won't hold."
"...No, sir. It won't."
Marcus stared at the tank. At the small, curled, sleeping figure inside it. At the most powerful Pokémon in the world, growing quietly in amber fluid, unaware that it existed, unaware that it had been created, unaware that the people who had made it were already afraid of it.
In the games, this was where it all went wrong. Mewtwo woke up, realized it had been created as a weapon, destroyed the lab, escaped, and spent the rest of its existence consumed by rage and existential crisis. It was, objectively, one of the saddest stories in the Pokémon franchise—a creature born without consent, designed for a purpose it never chose, lashing out at a world that had made it and then discarded it.
Marcus was not going to let that happen.
"New orders," he said. "Effective immediately."
Fuji straightened.
"First: upgrade your containment systems. I don't care what it costs. Triple the budget if you have to. I want containment that can hold something ten times stronger than your current projections."
"Sir, the cost—"
"I said I don't care. Do it."
"...Yes, sir."
"Second: I want a behavioral psychology team brought in. Specialists in Pokémon cognition and emotional development. When Mewtwo wakes up, it's going to be confused, scared, and angry. It's going to be a newborn with the power of a god. If the first thing it experiences is cold scientists treating it like a lab specimen, it will lash out, and your containment will fail, and everyone in this facility will die. I want people who know how to handle that. People who can communicate with it, empathize with it, make it understand that it's not a weapon—it's a Pokémon."
Fuji was staring at him. Not with the careful neutrality of before, but with something that looked a lot like shock. And beneath the shock, something else—something fragile and hopeful, like a man who had been carrying a terrible weight and had just been told he didn't have to carry it alone.
"Sir... that's... that's very different from your previous directives."
"My previous directives were wrong," Marcus said flatly. "Mewtwo isn't a weapon. It's a living creature. If we treat it like a weapon, it will destroy us. If we treat it like what it is—a Pokémon, with needs and feelings and a right to exist on its own terms—then maybe, maybe, we can build something better than a bomb."
Silence. The hum of machines. The soft, rhythmic bubbling of the tank's life support system.
"I'll make the arrangements immediately," Fuji said softly. His voice cracked slightly on the last word.
Marcus nodded. "Good. I'll be back to check on progress. Weekly updates in the meantime. Send them directly to me, encrypted."
He took one last look at Mewtwo—small, sleeping, dreaming whatever it was that unborn gods dreamed about—and turned away.
The timeline was better than he'd feared. Mewtwo hadn't escaped yet. The project was still on track. And with the right adjustments—better containment, better handling, better everything—he might be able to prevent the catastrophe entirely. He might actually end up with a Mewtwo that was loyal. Or at least, not homicidal.
The thought made him giddy.
Dratini, sensing his mood, chirped happily from his shoulder.
"One down," Marcus murmured as the elevator carried them back to the surface. "Two to go."
The helicopter ride back from Cinnabar gave Marcus two hours of uninterrupted thinking time, which he used to make phone calls.
The first call was to Team Rocket's intelligence division.
"I need a research expedition assembled," he said, without preamble. "Destination: the Paldea region."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. A long pause. The kind of pause that communicated, very eloquently, "I'm sorry, did you just say Paldea?"
"Sir," the intelligence officer—a woman whose voice was professional and crisp and only slightly tinged with the "oh god, the boss is calling me personally" panic that seemed to affect every Rocket operative when Giovanni contacted them directly—said carefully, "the Paldea region is... quite distant. We don't have any established operations there. Our intelligence on the region is minimal."
"I know. That's why I'm sending a research team, not an invasion force. I need four to six operatives, all with scientific backgrounds. Geology, energy physics, Pokémon biology. I need them equipped with energy scanning equipment—the most sensitive we have. And I need them to be subtle. No uniforms. No logos. They go in as researchers, they do their work, they get out. Nobody knows Team Rocket was there."
"And their objective, sir?"
"There's a location in Paldea called Area Zero. It's a massive crater at the center of the region, sealed off from the outside world. I need them to find a way in—or as close to it as they can get—and scan the Pokémon and energy signatures they find. Specifically, I'm looking for temporal displacement energy. Energy that causes Pokémon to shift between ancient and futuristic forms."
Another pause. Longer this time. "Temporal displacement energy, sir?"
"Yes."
"Is that... a real thing, sir?"
"It will be. Just do it."
"...Yes, sir. I'll have a team assembled within the week."
Marcus ended the call and immediately made another one. This one was to Team Rocket's financial division.
"Get me everything we have on Silph Co.," he said. "Stock price, shareholder structure, board of directors, outstanding debts, everything. I want a complete financial profile on my desk by tomorrow morning."
"Yes, sir. May I ask the purpose?"
"I'm going to buy it."
The silence on the other end of the line was so profound that Marcus briefly wondered if the connection had dropped.
"Buy it, sir?"
"Buy it. Acquire it. Purchase it. Take ownership of it through legal financial means. The whole company."
"Sir, Silph Co. is the largest corporation in Kanto. Their market capitalization is in the billions. Even with Team Rocket's considerable resources—"
"I didn't say it would be cheap. I said I want the financial profile. Find me a way in. Leverage, debt, vulnerable shareholders, anything. I don't need to own fifty-one percent overnight. I need a strategy. A path to majority ownership over the next six months."
"I... yes, sir. I'll have the report ready."
Marcus leaned back in his seat and steepled his fingers. The finger-steepling was becoming a habit. He couldn't stop doing it. It was too satisfying. Giovanni's fingers were made for steepling—long, thick, powerful fingers that laced together like the vault door of a bank.
Buying Silph Co. was going to be the single smartest thing any Pokémon villain had ever done, and the sheer elegant simplicity of it made him want to laugh.
The original Giovanni's plan: send an army of grunts to invade Silph Co.'s headquarters in Saffron City, fight through security and any trainers who happened to be there, reach the president's office, and steal the Master Ball prototype. This plan involved hundreds of operatives, massive logistical overhead, significant risk of casualties, guaranteed attention from law enforcement, and the near-certainty that some plucky kid would show up and ruin everything. All for one Master Ball.
Marcus's plan: buy the company. Put the president and the board on his payroll. Fund their research. Expand their production capabilities. Get them to mass-produce Master Balls. Get access to all their other technology too—Poké Balls, healing machines, teleportation systems, everything. All legally. All quietly. No invasion required. No attention drawn. No plucky kid to worry about.
And the best part? Once he owned Silph Co., he could shut down the raid that the original Giovanni had planned. No raid meant no confrontation with Red in Silph Co. No confrontation with Red meant one fewer embarrassing loss on his record. Red would still come for him eventually—the kid was a force of nature, drawn to conflict like a moth to flame—but without the Silph Co. incident, their confrontation would happen on Marcus's terms, not the game's.
It was beautiful.
The helicopter touched down in Viridian City just as the sun was beginning to set. Marcus disembarked, Dratini on his shoulder, and walked back toward headquarters with the satisfied stride of a man who had accomplished two out of three objectives and was about to tackle the third with extreme prejudice.
He was thinking about Silph Co.'s shareholder structure—specifically, whether any of the major shareholders had debts or vulnerabilities that Team Rocket could exploit—when he turned a corner inside the headquarters building and collided with someone.
Not a gentle collision. Not a brush of shoulders or a bump of elbows. A full-speed, zero-visibility, catastrophic impact between an approximately two-hundred-and-twenty-pound crime lord walking at a brisk pace while looking at his communicator and a Team Rocket grunt coming the other direction carrying a stack of files that completely blocked her forward vision.
The files went everywhere. Pages exploded into the air like confetti at a parade. Dratini, startled, leaped off Marcus's shoulder and landed on the floor with an indignant squeak.
Marcus stumbled forward from the impact, his momentum carrying him directly into—
Into—
Into.
The word "into" was doing an extraordinary amount of work in this sentence, because what happened next defied not just the conventions of normal human collision but also several principles of spatial mechanics that Marcus had previously considered inviolable.
The grunt he had collided with was tall. Very tall. And she was built—there was no other way to describe this—on a scale that redefined the relationship between the human body and the surrounding environment. Her chest was not merely large. It was not merely huge. It was not merely enormous. It existed in a category of magnitude for which the English language had not yet developed adequate vocabulary, a category that existed somewhere beyond "colossal" and just short of "geological event."
And Marcus had walked directly into it. Face-first. At speed.
His entire upper body disappeared.
Not metaphorically. Not figuratively. Not "his face pressed against her chest" in the way that anime characters comedically stumble into women. His entire upper body—head, shoulders, most of his torso—was simply... engulfed. Swallowed. Consumed by a softness so vast, so encompassing, so fundamentally absolute that it was less like colliding with a person and more like walking into a room made of warm, yielding, impossibly soft flesh that closed around him from every direction simultaneously.
His face was buried. His ears were covered. His arms were pinned to his sides by the sheer compressive volume surrounding them. He could feel—with every square inch of his skin that was in contact with her—an warmth and a softness and a presence that was overwhelming in its totality, a sensory experience so intense that his brain simply threw up its hands and said "I don't know what to do with this information, you're on your own."
He couldn't see. He couldn't hear properly—all sound was muffled, reduced to a distant, thrumming vibration that he realized, after a moment, was her heartbeat. He was surrounded, completely and utterly surrounded, by a darkness that was warm and soft and smelled faintly of something floral—jasmine, maybe, or honeysuckle—and the only coherent thought his brain could produce was:
How is this physically possible?
He tried to pull back. His body moved approximately half an inch before stopping. Because she had wrapped her arms around him.
The grunt—the woman he had crashed into—instead of screaming, or pushing him away, or reacting in any of the ways that a normal person would react to having their boss's entire upper body suddenly embedded in their chest, had done the exact opposite. Her arms had come up, wrapped around his back, and pulled him closer.
Not gently. Not hesitantly. With the firm, decisive strength of a woman who had been presented with an opportunity she had been dreaming about for years and was absolutely not going to let it go.
"B-Boss," she breathed, her voice vibrating through the flesh surrounding him, reaching his muffled ears as a low, trembling whisper charged with so much emotion that it could have powered a small generator. "Oh my—Boss—I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking, I—"
She was apologizing. She was apologizing while actively holding him tighter. The contradiction did not appear to register with her.
"—I didn't mean to—oh, you're so warm—I mean—I'm sorry, sir, I—"
Marcus tried to speak. His mouth was full of softness. He turned his head slightly—a herculean effort given the compressive forces at play—and managed to find a tiny pocket of air near what he estimated was the junction of her chest and her shoulder.
"Mmmph," he said.
"Sir?"
"MMMPH."
"Oh! Oh, right, sorry!"
She released him.
Marcus emerged from the depths like a deep-sea diver breaking the surface after a particularly intense dive—gasping, disoriented, his hair wildly disheveled, his suit rumpled, his face flushed from a combination of oxygen deprivation and sheer, overwhelming sensory overload. He staggered backward two steps, caught his balance, and blinked rapidly until his vision cleared.
The grunt stood before him, and now that he could actually see her, the sheer, mind-obliterating scale of what he had just been submerged in hit him like a freight train.
She was enormous. Not fat—not even close. She was built like a statue carved by someone who believed that the female form was a canvas and moderation was a concept for lesser artists. She was easily six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and hips that flared out to a width that seemed to bend the space around them. Her legs were pillars—thick, powerful, shapely pillars that tapered to surprisingly delicate ankles, each thigh wider than Marcus's chest.
And her chest. The chest that he had just spent an indeterminate amount of time completely immersed in.
Each breast was—Marcus's brain, now forced to confront the reality it had been studiously avoiding since his arrival in this world, attempted to process the visual information and immediately threw a critical error. They were vast. Each one was easily larger than his head—possibly larger than two of his heads. They jutted forward from her torso with a proud, almost defiant disregard for gravity, contained (barely, heroically, desperately) by a Team Rocket uniform that was performing structural miracles on a level that would have earned it a Nobel Prize in materials science. The fabric stretched so tightly across their surface that it was practically transparent, every contour and curve visible beneath the strained black material, the red R logo distorted beyond recognition by the sheer topographical complexity of the landscape it was printed on.
Her face was bright red. Her eyes—large, dark, beautiful eyes—were wide and shining. Her lips were parted, her breathing rapid, her entire body trembling with an emotion that existed somewhere in the unmapped territory between mortification, elation, and arousal so intense it had its own weather system.
"I'm SO sorry, sir!" she squeaked—actually squeaked, her voice cracking into a register that should have been impossible for a woman of her size. "I wasn't watching where I was going, and the files were blocking my view, and I—"
"It's fine," Marcus said. His voice was remarkably steady for a man who had just undergone what could only be described as a full-body immersion baptism in the concept of femininity. "No harm done. What's your name?"
"L-Luna, sir! Agent Luna! I work in—in records and filing, sir!"
"Right. Luna. Good." He straightened his suit, ran his hand through his hair to restore some semblance of order, and cleared his throat. "Be more careful with those files."
"YES SIR!"
He walked away.
He walked away because that was what Giovanni would do. Giovanni would not stand there processing what had just happened. Giovanni would move on. Giovanni was a busy man with places to be and an empire to run and no time for—for whatever that had been.
Behind him, Luna stood in the corridor, files scattered at her feet, her hands pressed to her flaming cheeks, her chest heaving with breaths that were closer to hyperventilation than normal respiration. Her eyes were glazed. Her thighs were shaking. Her entire body was experiencing a symphony of sensations that she had previously only imagined in her most private, most carefully guarded fantasies, and now they were real, they had happened, the Boss's face had been right there, pressed against her, buried in her, surrounded by her, and he had been so warm, and she could still feel the phantom pressure of his face against her skin, and—
"Luna? Luna, are you okay? Your face is really red."
Another grunt—a petite woman with short blue hair, who was, relatively speaking, the least ridiculously proportioned person in the building, which was to say she was merely extraordinarily curvy rather than physics-defyingly so—had appeared at the end of the corridor.
"He was inside me," Luna whispered.
"...What?"
"His face. Was inside. My—" She gestured vaguely at her chest, a gesture that caused the objects in question to shift and sway with a momentum that took several seconds to fully resolve. "He ran into me and he—his whole upper body just—inside."
The blue-haired grunt's eyes went so wide they were in danger of falling out of her head. "Oh my god."
"And then I hugged him."
"You WHAT?"
"I couldn't help it! He was right there! He was warm and he smelled like expensive cologne and his face was in my boobs and my arms just—they moved on their own!"
"Luna. Luna, breathe. Breathe."
"I CAN'T BREATHE. I CAN NEVER BREATHE AGAIN. I HAVE PEAKED. THIS IS THE HIGHLIGHT OF MY LIFE. EVERYTHING AFTER THIS IS EPILOGUE."
"Luna—"
"DID I MENTION HE WAS WARM?"
Marcus, three corridors and an elevator ride away from the ongoing emotional catastrophe he had inadvertently caused, was sitting in his office, trying very hard to focus on work and not on the bizarre incident that had just occurred.
It was fine. It was totally fine. He had walked into someone. It happened. The collision had been unusual in its... specifics, but these things happened in a world where everyone was apparently built on a scale that defied conventional human proportions. It was a simple accident. Nothing more.
He was not going to think about how soft it had been.
He was absolutely not going to think about how it had smelled like honeysuckle.
He was going to think about Silph Co.
With a physical effort that was almost painful, Marcus wrenched his focus back to the task at hand. Silph Co. The acquisition. The Master Ball factory that he was going to own instead of rob.
He spread the preliminary financial documents across his desk—the intelligence division had been fast, pulling together a basic overview of Silph Co.'s public financial information within hours of his request. The full report would come tomorrow, but even the basics were illuminating.
Silph Co. was, as his financial officer had said, enormous. The largest corporation in Kanto, with operations spanning Poké Ball manufacture, pharmaceutical production (Potions, Revives, etc.), TM development, and advanced technology research. Their market cap was in the billions. Their stock was publicly traded on the Saffron City Exchange.
But they had weaknesses.
The first and most obvious: the Master Ball project. Silph Co. had sunk enormous resources into developing the Master Ball—a Poké Ball with a 100% capture rate, capable of catching any Pokémon without fail. The project was ambitious, expensive, and—crucially—not yet profitable. They had a single prototype. Mass production was years away, if it was possible at all. The R&D costs were bleeding the company, and shareholders were getting restless.
The second weakness: the president. Silph Co.'s president was, by all accounts, a good man—ethical, community-minded, committed to using technology for the benefit of trainers. Which meant he was also a terrible businessman, the kind of leader who prioritized doing the right thing over doing the profitable thing, which made his shareholders very nervous and his stock price very volatile.
The third weakness: Giovanni already had connections inside the company. Team Rocket had been infiltrating Silph Co. for years, planting operatives in various departments, gathering intelligence, preparing for the eventual raid. Those operatives could now be repurposed—instead of saboteurs, they could be allies. Board votes. Insider information. Leverage.
Marcus began drafting a plan.
Step one: use Team Rocket's existing financial resources to quietly purchase Silph Co. stock on the open market. Not enough to trigger regulatory alarms—just a steady, gradual accumulation of shares, spread across multiple shell companies and front organizations to obscure the true buyer's identity.
Step two: leverage the insider operatives to influence board decisions. Push for policies that would lower the stock price in the short term—accelerating the Master Ball project's spending, for example, which would spook shareholders and drive the stock down, making it cheaper for Marcus to buy more.
Step three: once he had enough shares to be a significant shareholder, approach the president directly. Not as Giovanni, crime lord. As Giovanni, businessman. The Viridian City Gym Leader, respected community figure, interested in investing in Kanto's technological future. Offer funding for the Master Ball project in exchange for board seats and production contracts.
Step four: gradually increase ownership until he had majority control. Bring the president on board—not through threats, but through a genuine partnership. Fund his research, support his vision, give him everything he needed to succeed. And in return, get access to everything Silph Co. produced. Including Master Balls.
It was clean. It was elegant. It was so much smarter than a raid that Marcus couldn't believe the original Giovanni hadn't thought of it.
Then again, the original Giovanni had been a criminal first and a businessman second. Marcus was a gamer who understood optimization and efficiency on a molecular level. In the original games, Giovanni was playing checkers. Marcus was playing twelve-dimensional chess while also running a spreadsheet analysis and a Monte Carlo simulation.
He spent the next two hours drafting the acquisition strategy, writing memos, and making calls. By the time he was done, the sun had long since set, the headquarters building had quieted to its nighttime hum of skeleton crew operations, and his Dratini had fallen asleep on the desk, curled around his coffee mug like a tiny, adorable insulation sleeve.
He picked up the sleeping dragon, cradled it against his chest, and headed for his quarters.
Tomorrow, he'd begin the Silph Co. play. He'd review the Area Zero expedition plans. He'd train his team. He'd—
He stopped.
He'd forgotten something. Something important. Something that had been nagging at the back of his mind all day, a loose thread that he hadn't pulled yet.
Persian.
Not Persian as in his Pokémon, but Persian as in—his Pokémon. Ace. His battle Persian. The one he'd used in the gym today.
Something had happened during the battle with Koji. Something that Marcus had noticed but hadn't had time to analyze. During the fight—specifically, during the moment when Koji's Sandslash had landed a critical-hit Slash on Ace and Marcus had felt a spike of genuine fear for his Pokémon's safety—something had shifted. The air around Ace had... shimmered. Not like a heat haze. Like a distortion. A subtle, momentary warping of the light, accompanied by a spike in Ace's speed and power that was way beyond what a Persian should have been capable of.
Ace had dodged the next three attacks with a fluidity that wasn't just fast—it was prescient. Like it knew where the attacks were going to land before they were launched. And its counter-attack—a Power Gem that had struck Sandslash with enough force to crater the gym floor—had hit approximately four times harder than Persian's stats should have allowed.
Marcus hadn't commented on it during the battle. He'd been too focused on winning. But now, in the quiet of the evening, with the adrenaline long faded, the memory nagged at him.
He went to the training room.
The facility was empty at this hour, lit by dim emergency lighting that cast long shadows across the reinforced walls. Marcus released Ace from her ball—he'd decided Ace was female, based on nothing more than the elegant way she moved and the imperious quality of her personality—and stood before her.
"Hey, girl. I want to try something."
Ace tilted her head. Her gem glinted in the low light.
Marcus reached for the feeling he'd had during the battle. The spike of fear, the surge of protective instinct, the desperate, burning need for his Pokémon to be okay. He tried to replicate it—not the fear itself, but the intensity of emotion behind it. The connection. The bond between trainer and Pokémon that, in the games, was just a friendship mechanic with numerical values, but here, in this world, might be something more.
He looked at Ace. Really looked at her. Not at her stats, not at her movepool, not at her role on the team. At her. At the creature she was. The intelligence in her eyes. The grace of her movements. The quiet, fierce loyalty that she carried like a banner, following Giovanni—following him—without question, without hesitation, because she trusted him, because she loved him, in the pure, uncomplicated way that Pokémon loved their trainers.
"You're amazing," he told her. "You know that? You're not just a Normal-type. You're not just a Persian. You're my Persian. And I will never, ever let anything hurt you."
Ace's eyes widened. Her gem began to glow.
Not the subtle, ambient glow of reflected light. A deep, pulsing, internal glow, as though the gem itself was generating light—warm, golden light that intensified with each passing second, spreading from the gem across her forehead, down her neck, along her spine, suffusing her entire body in a radiance that was—
Marcus's breath stopped.
The air shimmered. That same distortion from the battle, but more. Stronger. Visible. The light around Ace bent and warped, colors shifting, shadows dancing, and for a moment—just a moment—Marcus could have sworn he saw something else superimposed over her form. Something larger. Something more powerful. A shadow of what she could become, a ghost of potential that flickered in and out of existence like a flame in a draft.
And then it was gone. The glow faded. The distortion cleared. Ace stood before him, looking exactly as she always did—a Persian, cream-furred and red-gemmed and beautiful.
But her eyes were different. Brighter. Sharper. And the air around her still hummed with a faint, residual energy that made the hair on Marcus's arms stand up.
"What are you?" he whispered.
Ace purred. It was not a normal purr. It was a purr that resonated in his chest, in his bones, in his soul—a sound that carried with it an unmistakable message, communicated not in words but in pure, raw feeling:
I am yours. And I am more than you know.
Marcus stared at his Persian for a long, long time.
Then he pulled out his notebook, flipped to a blank page, and wrote:
PERSIAN - ANOMALOUS ENERGY SIGNATURE. INVESTIGATE. POSSIBLY CONNECTED TO BOND PHENOMENON? MEGA EVOLUTION WITHOUT STONE??? SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY???
He underlined the question marks three times each.
This world was full of surprises. The games had only scratched the surface. There were things here—powers, connections, mysteries—that Game Freak had never programmed, that no player had ever discovered, because they existed in the spaces between the mechanics, in the living, breathing reality that the games could only approximate.
Marcus was going to find them all.
He returned Ace to her ball, picked up Dratini from where it had been sleeping on a training mat (it could sleep anywhere; it was a gift), and headed for bed.
Tomorrow. More training. More planning. More discovery.
The game had only just begun.
The next morning brought three things: coffee, paperwork, and the Silph Co. financial report.
The coffee was excellent—Giovanni apparently had very specific tastes in coffee, and someone in the headquarters kitchen had been trained to prepare it exactly to his specifications. Dark roast, no sugar, just enough cream to take the edge off without diluting the flavor. Marcus drank it while reading the report and felt, for the first time since arriving in this world, a sense of normalcy. Coffee and paperwork. The universal constants of adult life, regardless of the universe.
The Silph Co. report was everything he'd asked for and more. His financial team—a group of frighteningly competent analysts who had probably been hired specifically for their ability to find financial vulnerabilities in large corporations—had produced a seventy-page document that detailed every aspect of Silph Co.'s financial position, shareholder structure, board composition, outstanding debts, ongoing projects, and strategic weaknesses.
It was, to put it bluntly, a roadmap for corporate takeover.
The key findings:
Silph Co.'s stock was trading at approximately 15% below its peak, dragged down by investor concerns about the Master Ball project's spiraling costs. Several major shareholders had been quietly selling their positions over the past six months, creating an opportunity for a well-funded buyer to accumulate a significant stake without driving the price up.
Three of the twelve board members had personal financial issues—debts, failing side businesses, expensive lifestyles—that made them vulnerable to offers of "investment assistance" in exchange for their cooperation.
The president, while personally incorruptible, was surrounded by people who were considerably more flexible in their ethics, and his position was ultimately dependent on board support, which meant that controlling the board meant controlling the company, regardless of what the president wanted.
And the Master Ball project itself was the key to everything. The technology was real, it was viable, and with proper funding, mass production was achievable within two years. The only thing holding it back was money—money that Team Rocket had in abundance.
Marcus drafted the acquisition plan, assigned it to his financial team with instructions to begin immediately, and moved on to the next item on his agenda.
The Paldea expedition.
His intelligence officer—a woman named Sable who ran Team Rocket's information network with the clinical precision of a surgeon and the paranoia of a spy novel protagonist—appeared in his office at exactly 10 AM, as requested.
She was, like every other woman in this organization, absolutely ridiculously built. Her intelligence officer's uniform—a modified version of the standard Rocket outfit, darker, sleeker, with additional pockets and holsters for various tools and devices—was engaged in a permanent, desperate struggle against a body that seemed specifically designed to make clothing irrelevant. Her waist was narrow enough that Marcus could probably have encircled it with his hands (he was not going to test this hypothesis), and below it, her hips exploded outward with a dramatic, aggressive curvature that made the word "hourglass" feel inadequate. Each hip was a masterwork of biological architecture, a sweeping, powerful curve that transitioned into thighs of such thickness and density that they generated their own gravitational field, visibly warping the fabric of her uniform pants with every step she took.
Above the waist, the situation was equally extreme. Her chest was—Marcus was looking at her face. He was looking at her face. Her face, which was sharp and intelligent and framed by short black hair cut in a severe, professional style that somehow only served to emphasize the femininity of her features rather than diminish it. Her eyes were dark, calculating, missing nothing.
"The Paldea team is assembled, sir," she said, her voice clipped and professional. "Six operatives, all with the qualifications you specified. Three Pokémon biologists, one energy physicist, one geologist, and one field operations specialist for security. They'll travel under cover as an independent research expedition funded by a shell company—no connection to Team Rocket."
"Good. What about Area Zero access?"
"That's the challenge, sir. Area Zero is reportedly sealed off by the Paldean authorities. Something about dangerous energy levels and unknown Pokémon. Our team may not be able to physically enter the crater."
"That's fine. I don't need them in Area Zero. I need them near it. Close enough to scan the energy signatures, catalog any unusual Pokémon in the surrounding area, and collect data on the temporal displacement phenomena."
Sable's eyebrow twitched slightly. "'Temporal displacement phenomena,' sir?"
"There are Pokémon in and around Area Zero that exist in temporally displaced states," Marcus said, keeping his voice casual, as though this were common knowledge rather than information from a video game that wouldn't be released for decades. "Ancient forms—prehistoric versions of modern Pokémon. And future forms—mechanical, advanced versions. The energy that causes these transformations is what I'm interested in. If we can scan it, analyze it, and eventually replicate it, we can build a device that does the same thing to our Pokémon."
Sable was quiet for a moment. Her eyes—those sharp, calculating eyes—studied him with an intensity that bordered on uncomfortable.
"Sir, if I may ask... how do you know about this?"
Marcus had prepared for this question. "I have sources in the Paldean academic community," he said smoothly. "Research papers, unpublished data, rumors from the right people. It's my job to know things before everyone else does, Sable. That's why I'm in this chair."
Sable held his gaze for another second, then nodded. If she didn't believe him, she was professional enough not to press the issue.
"The team will depart within the week, sir. Estimated travel time to Paldea is three weeks by sea. I'll have preliminary reports to you as soon as they begin operations."
"Good. Dismissed."
Sable saluted—the salute causing a cascade of motion across her chest that Marcus observed with the same attention he would give a moderately interesting piece of wallpaper—and left.
Marcus leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples. The Paldea expedition was a long shot. He knew that. Area Zero's energy might not be replicable. The temporal displacement effect might be unique to that specific location, tied to whatever cosmic weirdness was happening at the bottom of that crater. But if there was even a chance that he could build a device that turned his Pokémon into Paradox forms—ancient powerhouses or future war machines, depending on the setting...
It was worth the investment. A thousand times over.
He looked at his priority list, mentally checked off the items he'd addressed, and turned his attention to the ones remaining.
Mega Stones. Z-Crystals. Dynamax energy. Legendary Pokémon. Team training.
Too much for one day. But he could start.
He picked up his communicator and made one more call.
"Research division? This is Giovanni. I need you to start a new project. Codename: Evolution Beyond. I'm going to send you some theoretical frameworks and I need you to begin exploratory research. The subject is temporary evolution enhancement through external energy sources—specifically, mineral-based energy catalysts that enable a Pokémon to achieve a form beyond its natural evolutionary limit."
"Sir... could you be more specific?"
"I'm talking about stones. Special stones, found deep in the earth, that resonate with specific Pokémon and allow them to undergo a temporary transformation into a more powerful form during battle. I believe these stones exist but haven't been discovered yet. I want your team to start looking."
"Where should we look, sir?"
"Start with Kalos. The geological formations there are unique—lots of crystal caverns, unusual mineral deposits. I'll send you coordinates for areas of particular interest. Also check Hoenn—the geological activity there might have produced similar stones."
"Understood, sir. I'll put a team on it immediately."
Marcus ended the call, stood up, stretched, and cracked his knuckles.
It was barely noon. He'd checked on Mewtwo, launched the Silph Co. acquisition, deployed the Paldea expedition, and initiated the Mega Stone search. He'd done more in one morning than the original Giovanni had accomplished in the entire span of the games.
And now, for the rest of the afternoon, he was going to do the thing he'd been looking forward to all day.
He was going to train.
The basement training facility was empty again—Marcus had started scheduling his personal training sessions during off-hours to avoid an audience—and he filled it with his entire team, plus Dratini, for a comprehensive training session.
Today's focus: Ace.
The anomalous energy signature from last night had been on his mind constantly. The glow, the distortion, the impossible spike in power—something was happening with his Persian that went beyond normal Pokémon mechanics. And if he could figure out what it was, if he could learn to trigger it reliably...
He started with basic drills. Speed exercises, power exercises, the standard routine. Ace performed flawlessly, as always, moving with a fluid grace that made every motion look effortless. Her Power Gem was devastating, her Slash was precise, her Fake Out was lightning-quick. She was, by any reasonable measure, an excellent Pokémon.
But she wasn't extraordinary. Not yet. Not in the way that the anomaly had suggested she could be.
Marcus thought back to the moment when it had happened—both times. During the gym battle, when Koji's Sandslash had landed that critical hit and Marcus had felt that spike of fear. And last night, when he'd opened up to Ace, expressed his genuine feelings, and felt the connection between them deepen.
The common thread was emotion. Intense, genuine emotion. Fear for her safety. Love for who she was. Not the calculated, strategic mindset of a battler, but the raw, unfiltered heart of a trainer who cared.
He tried it again. He stood in front of Ace, knelt down, and reached out to pet her. She pressed into his hand, purring, her gem warm against his palm.
"I meant what I said last night," he told her softly. "You're not just a tool. You're not just a member of my team. You're my partner. My friend. I trust you with my life, and I want you to trust me with yours."
Ace's eyes met his. Deep, ruby-red, ancient and wise and full of an intelligence that went far beyond what a Persian should possess.
The gem began to glow.
This time, Marcus paid attention. Really paid attention. He watched the glow spread from the gem across Ace's body, watched the air shimmer and distort, watched the shadows deepen and the light bend, and he felt it—felt the connection between them like a physical thing, a thread of golden energy stretching from his chest to hers, vibrating with a frequency that resonated in his bones.
And Ace changed.
Not dramatically. Not explosively. Subtly. Gradually. Like a photograph coming into focus. Her fur seemed to shimmer, taking on a faint, pearlescent sheen. Her eyes blazed brighter. Her muscles tightened, coiled, ready. She looked like the same Persian, but more—more present, more powerful, more real, as though the normal version of her was a sketch and this was the finished painting.
"You're doing it," Marcus breathed. "Whatever this is—you're doing it."
Ace purred. The sound was deeper now, more resonant, vibrating with an undertone of power that made the floor tremble slightly.
"Move for me. Show me what you can do."
Ace moved.
She was fast. Not Persian-fast. Not even Jolteon-fast. She was fast in a way that Marcus's eyes couldn't track—one moment she was in front of him, the next she was across the room, the next she was on the ceiling, the next she was behind him, and the air was full of afterimages and the crack-crack-crack of displaced air as she moved at speeds that should have been physically impossible for any Pokémon her size.
She hit a training dummy with a Power Gem that didn't just damage it—it vaporized it. One moment the dummy was there, the next it was a cloud of atomized particles drifting in the air like dust motes.
She used Slash on a reinforced wall, and four parallel gouges appeared in the metal, each one six inches deep.
She used Fake Out—not on anything, just into the air—and the shockwave blew Marcus's hair back and sent Dratini tumbling across the floor like a tiny blue tumbleweed.
Marcus stared.
"What the fuck," he said, for the second time since arriving in this world, and with considerably more justification.
Ace padded back to him, the glow fading, the enhancement subsiding, returning to her normal state. She looked tired but pleased, the way a runner looks after a satisfying sprint. She headbutted his leg gently and purred.
Marcus sat down on the floor, right there in the middle of the training room, because his legs had decided they no longer wanted to support his weight and he couldn't blame them.
His Persian was overpowered.
His Normal-type Persian was overpowered.
Not through any game mechanic he recognized. Not through a Mega Stone or a Z-Crystal or Dynamax energy. Through something else. Something that existed outside the games' frameworks. Something connected to the bond between trainer and Pokémon, to the emotional connection, to the love that powered their relationship.
Was this what the anime called the "Bond Phenomenon"? The thing that Ash's Greninja could do—transforming through the sheer strength of its trainer's emotions? Was Ace doing the Pokémon equivalent of going Super Saiyan because Marcus genuinely, deeply, unironically loved her?
He didn't know. He couldn't know, not yet. But he was going to find out.
He pulled out his notebook and wrote, in letters large enough to fill an entire page:
PERSIAN IS CRACKED. BOND EVOLUTION??? RESEARCH IMMEDIATELY. THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.
Then he fed Ace three Full Restores, the most expensive Poké food he had, and an entire bag of treats, because she had earned it and because she was the best cat in any universe, fictional or otherwise.
The rest of the training session was more conventional but no less productive.
Dratini practiced Dragon Rage until it could fire a consistent, controlled blast rather than the tiny, sputtering hiccups it had been producing. The little dragon was growing fast—Marcus could swear it was longer today than it had been yesterday, its scales slightly more luminous, its horn slightly more prominent. Dragon-types grew quickly when properly trained, and Marcus was training this one with every ounce of knowledge and care he possessed.
Nidoking and Nidoqueen drilled their new TM moves—Thunderbolt and Ice Beam respectively—until the execution was smooth and natural. The type coverage made them exponentially more dangerous. A Nidoking that could hit Water-types with Thunderbolt and Flying-types with Ice Beam was a Nidoking that had almost no safe switch-ins. Beautiful.
Rhyhorn worked on evolving. Marcus could feel it getting close—there was a tension in Rhyhorn's body, a sense of imminent change, like a coiled spring ready to release. A few more intense training sessions and it would evolve into Rhydon, gaining access to better stats and a wider movepool.
Beedrill practiced speed drills until it was a blur of wings and stingers, its compound eyes tracking targets that were moving faster than the human eye could follow. Marcus had big plans for Beedrill. In the games, Mega Beedrill was one of the most terrifying glass cannons in existence—base 150 Attack, base 145 Speed, with Adaptability boosting its STAB moves to absurd levels. If he could find a Beedrillite, his Beedrill would become a weapon of mass destruction.
Kangaskhan worked on its Mega Punch technique, which was already powerful enough to punch through reinforced steel (as the heavy bag incident had proved) and was only getting more devastating with practice. Marcus also started working on Kangaskhan's parental instincts—the baby in its pouch was key to Mega Kangaskhan's fighting style, and he needed to understand how the two of them worked together in combat.
By the time he was done, four hours had passed, his team was exhausted but satisfied, and Marcus was drenched in sweat despite not having done any of the actual fighting. Training Pokémon at this level was intense—the mental focus required, the constant evaluation and adjustment, the emotional energy of maintaining the bonds with each individual team member. He understood now why most trainers only had six Pokémon. Managing more than that would be like trying to be a perfect parent to a dozen children simultaneously.
He returned everyone to their balls, took a long shower, changed into a fresh suit (he had approximately eighteen identical orange suits in his closet, confirming the cartoon character theory), and spent the evening in his office, reviewing reports and planning his next moves.
The financial team had already begun the Silph Co. stock accumulation. Three shell companies were buying shares on the Saffron City Exchange, their purchases small enough to avoid triggering any alerts.
The Paldea expedition team was assembling their equipment and would depart in four days.
The Mega Stone research team had begun preliminary geological surveys in Kalos, working under the cover of a legitimate mining company that Team Rocket owned.
The Mewtwo behavioral psychology team was being recruited—Dr. Fuji had, apparently, been enthusiastic about this directive, which suggested that the scientist had been harboring significant concerns about Mewtwo's eventual awakening and was relieved to finally have support in addressing them.
Everything was moving. Everything was on track. The machine was humming.
Marcus leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers (still incredible, still the best physical sensation available to the human body), and allowed himself a moment of satisfaction.
He was Giovanni. He was the boss. He was building something that would make the world tremble.
And somewhere out there, Red was probably fighting a Bug Catcher in Viridian Forest, blissfully unaware that the man he would eventually face was not the man the game had written.
Marcus grinned.
"Your move, kid," he murmured.
Persian—Boss, the office Persian—purred from its cushion.
Dratini chirped sleepily from its usual perch on his shoulder.
And outside the window, the stars wheeled slowly over Kanto, indifferent and beautiful, watching over a world that was about to change in ways that nobody—not the trainers, not the gym leaders, not the Elite Four, not the legendaries sleeping in their ancient sanctuaries—could possibly predict.
Giovanni was grinding.
And the grind was only just beginning.
END OF CHAPTER 2
Next Chapter: The Silph Co. acquisition accelerates, the Paldea team sends back their first report from the edge of Area Zero, Marcus discovers that training a Dratini is simultaneously the most rewarding and most frustrating experience of his life, and the women of Team Rocket form an unofficial fan club that Giovanni remains completely and utterly oblivious to.