The screen at the front of the Hoenn League's regional conference room had two names on it, surrounded by the available intelligence on Sea Mauville and a summary of the Team Aqua activity reported on-site.
The vice chairman looked at the names, looked at the room, and decided to start with the obvious question.
"Why are these two at Sea Mauville?"
Most of the attention in the room had already shifted to Wattson, which was unavoidable. Sea Mauville's operational history was connected to him in ways that were public knowledge, and the recent situation involving Raikou had left him with a specific kind of displeasure toward League internal politics that he had not been working particularly hard to hide.
He met the collective attention with a cold expression, said nothing, stood up, and walked out.
The door closed.
"Charming as always," someone said quietly, and three or four people chose not to respond to that.
The vice chairman tapped the table. "Right. Surround the island immediately. Seal every access point into and out of Sea Mauville; no Team Aqua operative leaves. That's the operational priority."
He was in the middle of the next sentence when the interruption came, which was technically three interruptions at once.
"Can we please send a rescue team instead of standing here discussing it?"
Three different voices, arriving with enough overlap that it was briefly unclear who had spoken. The room sorted itself: the Gym Leader from the Citrus Gym, the Joy family's representative, and from somewhere near the corner of the room, Phoebe of the Elite Four, currently perched on the back of her chair rather than sitting in it properly.
The first two made a certain kind of sense. Both had documented connections to the boy on the screen. The Elite Four member was harder to account for.
"Phoebe," someone said carefully. "Is the trainer, Sieg, one of your students?"
Phoebe's expression was the one she usually wore to official functions, which was the expression of someone who had decided several years ago that taking official functions seriously was optional. She tilted her head slightly.
"I gave him a few pointers once. He's interesting. I like him." She looked at the screen, then at the vice chairman. "If you're going to take twenty minutes running through approval processes for a rescue team, I'll just go myself and save everyone the time."
From the corner, Glacia, the Ice-type specialist and Phoebe's counterpart on the Elite Four, crossed one leg over the other and brushed a strand of golden hair back.
"I wouldn't mind going either," she said, in the measured tone she applied to most things. "Sieg. Yes, he's an interesting one." A brief pause, as if locating the memory. "He bought me a bowl of pasta at that food court in Mauville. Insisted. I thought about it afterward, and I'm still not sure why."
The room exchanged looks.
The officials who had spent the past ten minutes primarily focused on the Sinnoh connection, the family pressure coming from that direction, and all the diplomatic implications of having a trainer of that particular background in an active Team Aqua incident, quietly reassessed.
Two Elite Four members. Unprompted. For the seventeen-year-old.
The thought that passed through at least four people's heads at once was not stated aloud, but it had a shape something like: whose kid is this, exactly?
The vice chairman moved quickly to avoid whatever that conversation was going to become.
"Winona. You're leading the response."
The Fortree City Gym Leader stood. She wore a teal flight suit with white feather trim at the wrists and ankles, a hood pushed back to reveal two long lavender-tinted strands of hair that reached her waist. The look of someone whose entire professional identity was built around aerial mobility.
"Understood." A clean, simple acknowledgment. "I'll have the flight unit on-site and all exits sealed."
Underground, Sieg had stopped paying attention to the time and started paying attention to the temperature instead.
Half an hour of walking had taken them deep enough that the passages felt fundamentally different from the surface ruins. The ceiling was lower, the walls closer, and the cold had moved past the outdoor-chill category into something that lived in the stone itself, the accumulated years of sitting beneath water pressing in from every direction. Their breath was just barely visible.
No Pokémon. That was the other thing.
He had expected the underground sections to be densely occupied. Sea Mauville had been abandoned long enough for a complete ecological takeover, and the surface ruins had shown exactly that. But the corridors down here were empty. Not naturally empty. Cleared. The evidence was in the marks on the floor and walls, the occasional dark stain that neither of them commented on, the small shapes here and there that had once been alive and were no longer.
Cynthia had gone quiet after the third one.
She was not a person who showed a lot of expression in unfamiliar situations, which was something Sieg had clocked early and found useful. When Cynthia went quiet instead of staying composed, it meant she was managing something.
"They didn't need to do this," she said eventually, and her voice was level, but the level was doing some work.
"No," Sieg agreed.
Wild Pokémon who attacked humans in combat were one thing. Wild Pokémon that had been cleared from a corridor because they were inconvenient were another. The bodies they were passing had not been in a fight. They had been removed. Cynthia's League upbringing drew a hard line at that, and everything about her posture said Team Aqua had just crossed it.
He filed the information about how seriously she took this.
They reached the bottom.
The passage opened without warning into something that was not a corridor. A chamber, vast by comparison to everything they had walked through to reach it, with walls that were not solid stone but reinforced glass, dark ocean pressing against every surface from outside. Somewhere beyond the glass, deep enough that no natural light reached it, the water was absolute black.
The drilling platform's lowest operational level. Whatever this had been built to access was directly below them.
In the center of the chamber, elevated on a raised section of the original platform structure, someone had built an altar.
It was not subtle. Three sides, roughly triangular, each corner marked by a shard of deep indigo blue that gave off a faint light that had no clear source, not reflected, not bioluminescent, just quietly present. The light it put out was enough to make the closest surfaces visible, not enough to reach the glass walls.
In front of it, a man in a darker shade of Team Aqua blue was on his knees.
Not kneeling in the way of someone who had tripped or fallen or was catching his breath. Kneeling deliberately, both hands raised and open, head inclined toward the shards in an attitude that had a specific name: devotion. His lips were moving, too far away to hear.
He was big. Even kneeling, that was obvious. The darker uniform marked him differently from the members they had encountered above; Team Aqua apparently had internal ranking reflected in color depth. Darker meant higher, and this shade was close to navy.
Sub-Elite Four Commander. One of the Mightyena at his flanks turned its head toward the corridor entrance.
Sieg had already read the situation when the dog barked.
The Commander was on his feet faster than a man that size should have been able to manage it. One Pokéball in his hand, already releasing. The Sharpedo that materialized was not the same category as the ones Sieg worked with casually. It was larger, denser, the energy coming off it in the flat and compressed way that Sub-Elite Four Pokémon radiated it, contained rather than broadcast.
The same Pokémon he used. Different tier.
Sieg and Cynthia stepped out of the corridor mouth into the chamber because there was no other direction to go, and released their teams.
Crawdaunt, Sharpedo, Honchkrow. Pelipper and Mantine are behind them, already reading their support roles. Cynthia brought out all three: Garchomp, Milotic, and Togekiss. The chamber filled with the layered energy signatures of eight Elite-rank Pokémon and one Sub-Legendary, and the contrast between that and the single Sub-Elite Four Sharpedo on the other side of the room was visible in the way the air in the space rearranged itself.
Garchomp's presence was the loudest part of that equation.
The Commander looked at Garchomp for a long moment.
Cynthia had not moved and was not going to. Her expression had the quality of something that had already finished deciding.