Archive of Our Own ^beta

Maddie came to Celadon by air. Despite the safety gear she wore, some hair had gotten loose from under her hat and was whipped across her face by the wind. She had to squint from behind her goggles to see clearly, and the rider of the Pidgeot she’d hired kept trying to loosen her iron grip around his waist.

It was worth it, though, for the spectacular views.

The first thing she saw was miles upon miles of glass monstrosities, masquerading as greenhouses, sprawled across the farmland all around the city. More land was covered than not, and all of it was put to use growing something. Behind it all, Celadon itself crouched at the skyline. Closer in, the greenhouses were replaced with scattered high-rise apartment blocks and the more-numerous terraced brick houses squashed between them, but even here, sleek chrome-and-plastic pods were set up on balconies and rooftops and in front and back gardens. Looming across it all, at the top of the hill in the middle of the city, was the vast Celadon Gym, itself little more than a single giant greenhouse with some living quarters tacked on. The air was thick with the smell of farming: a hint of dung, a whiff of decay from the vast compost bins everywhere, and cutting through it all the rich scent of growing plants.

She hopped off the Pidgeot as soon as it landed and paid the rather squashed-looking rider. Maddie was supposed to meet a guide at the Pokemon Centre, and within a minute of arriving he’d come out to meet her.

Professor Tony – “just Tony, please” – was an excitable fellow who reminded her a little of her dad, and a little of her dad’s Shinx, and not very much of an academic at all. From his wisps of ash-blond hair so pale it looked almost grey, to his dirt-lined fingernails, to his tanned and weathered face, he looked the part of a farmer.

His energy was infectious. Maddie felt her excitement wane, however, when she was led to the university (swish and shiny and new) and then past it. Her guide took her down a dark and sketchy alley surrounded by run-down warehouses, where she first glimpsed a grassy meadow enclosed by a black iron fence. Here, he told her, was the Celadon University Phytozoology Research Centre. The grass was full of standalone hodgepodge metal frames covered by clear plastic sheeting. It resembled nothing quite so much as a collection of warts and boils growing on the arse end of the city. The budget greenhouses looked to be held together with duct tape and hope.

“We don’t get as much funding for buildings as the more traditional departments, even though we’ve got some impressive results,” Tony hurried to explain. “There’s some office space in one of the main buildings though nobody uses it ‘cause it’s too far to travel when all the experiments are here. And the setup might not be pretty but it’s reliable and robust. The equipment and Pokemon inside are top of the line.”

“How old is it?” Maddie interrupted.

Tony took the question in stride. “Five years or so, and it’s a sight better than the dump we were using before. It was all designed from the ground up by Erika. She’s gonna be a big deal one day, you mark my words.”

“She’s the director of the lab, right?” Maddie asked. Professor Erika was the one who’d invited her for the interview today.

Tony shook his head. “Officially that’s a guy called Cade. Erika’s the one who actually knows her way around the place, though. She’ll be the director in a few years at most. You’ll want to go to her with any questions once you start here.”

Maddie made some noncommittal noises at that. She wasn’t sure whether this was the place for her – there were more prestigious departments and universities out there, though admittedly Celadon was the first place to invite her to visit, and most of her fellow graduates were jealous she had any leads at all. A visit was usually the precursor to a formal offer of a doctorate position, which had led her here on this overcast Thursday morning.

“Let me show you round some of the more interesting stuff we have,” Tony said, sensing her waning enthusiasm. “It might not be the shiniest, newest lab but we have a lot of freedom and some of the projects are really cutting-edge.”

“Sounds exciting,” Maddie said half-heartedly.

They passed through a locked gate in the fence and ducked under a loose panel of the plastic sheeting to get into the greenhouse complex. The smell, at least, was like every other research greenhouse Maddie had been in as an undergrad – earthy, warm, and organic, with the sharp tang of chemicals cutting through. Snuffling and shuffling from the specimens in the crates made for a relaxing backing track, while barked commands to pass a scalpel or douse the fucking samples in formaldehyde before they started decaying, thank you, could have come from any of her peers back at Mossdeep College.

More hanging plastic sheets divided the larger building into separate chambers, each presumably with its own purpose. The wooden crates in the first room were a little larger than the standard cage size for bulbasaur experiments, though they were sterile in the ways that mattered – no living organic material, no mould, no damp patches. On a bench to one side of the greenhouse was a collection of gardening tools and a tank of disinfectant. The bench itself was covered in sap and the pale pink of washed-off blood.

“Each research project is kept in a separate structure, to help avoid cross-contamination. We have Bulbasaurs in here,” Tony explained as they walked through, gesturing at the crates around them. “For a long time, people have assumed that the reptile part is where the intelligence sits, but that might not be the case after all.”

“How come? That’s where the brain is, surely?”

“We’re still investigating the mechanism by which it happens. We were able to teach a ‘saur to catch red balls and avoid blue ones, and then transplanted its bulb to a different ‘saur. The transplant is the tricky bit, really. It involves digging out all the roots of the bulb without killing either the plant or the animal part. Afterwards, we’re able to get the same preference for red over blue in the new ‘saur. And this is a creature which hasn’t been trained at all to pay attention to colours! It might be to do with the enzymes stored in the root system, or something even more complex. We’ve yet to reach the limits of how much knowledge we can transfer this way.”

In most labs an experiment of that kind would have half a dozen Bulbasaurs at most. Maddie counted twenty pens in the tent and they all appeared to be occupied.

“How do you keep infection at bay during the transplant? By rights the flesh should necrotise,” Maddie said. She wasn’t all that interested in the answer, but figured that flaunting her knowledge might give her an edge in the admissions process.

Tony brightened at the question, clearly in his element. “Bulbasaurs can be primed to secrete an enzyme that keeps the necrosis at bay. They also have natural bactericides in their blood and sap. We think it might be necessary for the flesh-plant interface to stay stable, but it also makes transplants easier.”

“That’s really cool,” Maddie said. She was impressed despite herself. “The implications are huge! Pokemon storage, breeding, battling, training, there’s so many applications–”

“There’s a few papers already in the works, and we presented at a conference last week,” Tony interrupted. “Those findings aren’t confidential. What’s in this next tent is.”

“I understand. I’ll keep anything I see or hear to myself.” If there was something better than the bulbasaur research then Maddie wanted to find out about it. Her curiosity about plant pokemon was the whole reason she was pursuing a doctorate in the first place, and why Celadon had taken an interest in her. She followed Tony’s lead and went through a sliding glass door into the next room.

Dozens of Weepinbell were hung at waist-height around the chamber, arranged four to a rack on tall metal poles. Maddie took a closer look and recognised the base on the nearest one as coming from an office chair, with five spokes and wheels on the ends for ease of movement. The Weepinbell sat in small plant pots that were attached around the central pole and had plastic tubes feeding in a water and nutrient mix, which were themselves fed from a reservoir placed at the top of each pole, around shoulder height.

The setup was familiar, although it looked a lot less professional than at the Mossdeep lab. It let a researcher ensure that all test subjects were getting the same nutrients at the same rate, and helped avoid confounders. The racks weren’t usually mobile, though.

“This is Erika’s space,” Tony said, gesturing around the room. “Normally I wouldn’t interrupt but she asked to be introduced to you. She should be somewhere around here.”

There were a pair of small sheds set up in the corner, though Erika wasn’t in either of them. One had an office set up inside, with a desk strewn with papers and a small computer whirring away, while the other was stuffed with gardening tools and flasks of chemicals. They had to walk around the rows of Weepinbell to get to the other side of the room, where they had more luck.

“Erika, this is our potential new doctoral student, Maddie.” Tony was obviously a bit flustered as he called out to the slight woman with a short blue bob and a loudspeaker in her hand. She was inside another smaller room, this one much sturdier than the large greenhouse enclosing it, and the walls were covered with thick layers of plastic foam. A gas mask covered the lower half of her face. She met their eyes through the window and shook her head while mouthing something. A frame with four Weepinbell was in there with her.

“I don’t think she can hear us,” Maddie said.

Tony nodded, embarrassed. “Yeah, that’s ‘cause of the research. Weepinbell can produce all sorts of powders and secretions, right? They can–”

In a calculated gamble, Maddie took over the thread of the conversation. “–can poison their targets or send them to sleep, paralyse them or melt their faces off. They can even selectively attract some species of pokemon over others, by luring them in with specific scents.”

“Sorry, I’ve just done some tours with the undergrads. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know your stuff. But you’re quite right. What we’re looking at here is whether the cry of specific predator or prey species can affect what secretions Weepinbell produce, and how potent they are.”

“That’s why the racks move. You need to isolate each set so you can put them into the sound-proof chamber and play custom sounds,” Maddie said, piecing it together. It was an elegant solution for isolating the cries, and much easier than building a lot of soundproof booths. “I see why you’re so excited for it. I’m guessing it’s promising if you’ve got this many test subjects in?”

Tony shrugged, hands twitching. “It’s still in early stages, but we did a proof-of-concept test last month and found some small effect.”

“Mind if I have a closer look?”

Maddie was already moving by the time Tony stuttered out permission. The pokemon were well-cared-for, despite the crude setup, and the work had been done with precision and an eye to quality. It was cheap, sure, but there was never enough funding even in a well-run lab. Buying more pokemon to test on, paying for more grad students, hiring specialists for some advanced training, buying specialist instruments for better measurements, it all came out of the same pot of money. Maddie didn’t disapprove of their priorities.

Still, four Weepinbell per rack, and a dozen racks spread around the room? Even without taking the greenhouse, the equipment, the plant feed, and the time of the researchers into account, this was an incredibly expensive setup. Money wasn’t the only thing a lab needed to be successful, but it was a big help. Labs were one of the few organisations that could get permits to buy Pokemon. The market was small and this many pokemon, all of the same kind, wouldn’t be cheap. Not every Pokemon that a licensed catcher brought in would be research-grade. And going for an evolved form rather than the cheap and ubiquitous bellsprout or oddish?

If one of the lab’s projects were that well funded, Maddie would have assumed a private donor had helped out. It was rare but not unheard of. Two, though? Either Mossdeep was getting gouged on prices something fierce, or the Celadon University Phytozoology Research Centre was built on top of a vein of metaphorical gold.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of squeaking wheels. Erika had opened the door of the booth and was bringing the set of Weepinbell back out. “Next batch is due in half an hour, so let’s keep this brief,” she called by way of greeting.

“I’m Maddie, I’m a prospective student,” Maddie introduced herself. “I’m very impressed by your experiment here.”

“Grass Lab does have its charms,” Erika agreed. “Or if I’m channelling Cade, then I guess it’d be ‘Celadon University Phytobiology Research Centre does have its charms’. But odds are you’ll see very little of him. Has Tony brought you up to date on the projects going on at the moment?”

“I’ve seen the ‘saur research and now the Weepingbell,” Maddie said. She was leaning towards accepting the position as soon as it was offered to her, truth be told. Celadon seemed to be at the forefront of some major breakthroughs and rolling in dough to boot.

Tony coughed behind her. “Given the situation, I thought it best to start with some ‘wow’ factor.”

“Makes sense. In that case, I’d better give you the nuts and bolts of what you’d be doing here. I remember your project summary. Very thorough work, and it’s a promising avenue of research.” Erika took off her apron, halfway between a chirurgeon’s garb and a gardener’s outfit, and hung it on a hook. She spared a collegial nod for Tony and a smile for Maddie before gesturing at a small open-air garden outside the greenhouse. “As a doctoral student you’d help out with the undergrads on occasion. If you’d follow me?”

“I actually wanted to ask if there’s any tweaks to my project that would make it more attractive to you,” Maddie said, though she was swept up in Erika’s wake regardless.

“I’ve thought it over and I’d be happy to fund your proposal as-is,” Erika replied with a warm smile. “There’s no changes that are needed at the moment, strictly speaking, though I would be your supervisor. I’d expect you to take any pointers I give you seriously.”

Having Erika as a supervisor was another nudge in favour of doing a doctorate at Grass Lab.

They passed through another door and out of the greenhouse. Behind it was a mostly-empty garden with knee-high grass and wildflowers, and a couple of paths winding through it. Sheds and warehouses and water tanks were scattered haphazardly towards the rear of the grounds. There was a ring of bushes and towering over them all–

“This is Cutie, our lab mascot,” Erika introduced the huge Exeggutor, easily twice as tall as they were meant to grow. It had settled down in a patch of well-turned earth, presumably its usual resting spot, and was dozing in the midmorning sun. One of the heads opened a lazy eye as it heard Erika’s voice. “He’s responsible for security as well, and we make the undergrads take care of him. With oversight, of course. He’s been flourishing for two decades as a result. It’s a bit like having a team of doctors checking you over and giving you a tune-up every week.”

“Is he,” capable, strong, and aware were all considered and discarded as too rude, “fierce enough to protect the whole lab complex?” Maddie asked faintly.

Erika smiled. “He’s a very powerful psychic. Besides, he mostly deals with wild pokemon, birds and bugs, that sort of thing. We have extra security arrangements for dealing with malicious actors.”

“Ah,” said Maddie.

“Part of your job here will be managing the Exeggutor project for the undergrads each year, so I wanted to make sure it’s something you’d be comfortable with. He’s the largest Pokemon in the complex, but far from the only one that’s stronger than a human. Some researchers don’t like working with Pokemon that could overpower them.”

“I’m not here to get into fistfights with Pokemon,” Maddie said. “If he’s well-trained then there’s nothing to be concerned about.”

“He seems to like you. That’s a good sign. I have to get back to my research in a minute, but Tony can finish off the tour. I realise it’s quite a stretch to expect an answer this fast, so don’t feel under any pressure to accept immediately. However, it feels impolite to pretend the decision hasn’t been made on our end. I’d like to formally offer you a position here for the next academic year as a doctoral student. Tony’s a whizz with the paperwork and he can set you up with a bonus stipend. That’s on top of the standard salary everyone gets for teaching.”

“This is the first time you’ve spoken to me in person,” Maddie pointed out, a little overwhelmed.

Erika grinned. “I like to say I’m a good judge of character, and your project outline was compelling. Anyway, as I said, take your time and think it over.”

The rest of the visit went very well, and Maddie was shown the more practical aspects of how her doctoral research would work. It was only once she’d signed the papers and agreed to start her studies in a month’s time – just long enough to head back home, tell her family and friends, and move her things out again – that she realised she had never asked Erika where all the funding was coming from.

Three months later, Maddie was well-established in Grass Lab, as everyone in Celadon called it. It took time to learn the routines, especially since so many of the everyday tasks that kept the lab up and running were different to Mossdeep. The water tanks were filled from a well on the lab’s grounds, fed by an automated pumping system, but the well itself had a Staryu inside to filter the water, which needed checking on every week. Maddie also took to carrying around one of the standard-issue lab Pokemon belts. There was always a Butterfree, kept carefully free of contaminants and trained to manage unruly research pokemon with a minimum of damage. Gusts of wind and various powders could knock back and then disable most of the research subjects.

For more serious matters there was also a Pinsir, though Maddie only saw it in action once, and didn’t need to use one herself. A student working with some Exeggcute being fed a lean but meat-rich diet forgot to apply repel before entering their room, and got promptly blasted into unconsciousness by waves of psychic power. Tony was supervising and unleashed his Pinsir, which smashed the egg Pokemon to pieces in ten seconds flat.

“As exposure time increases, the risk of permanent harm goes up exponentially,” Tony explained later at the mandatory lab safety briefing that followed all high-risk incidents. “Better to lose a test subject than some extra brain cells on someone who clearly can’t spare any.”

Many research projects which were still in the exploratory stage worked on plant pokemon tissue rather than living pokemon, and they needed careful treatment in order to keep them alive. Bellsprout leaves were a favoured choice and the field of fifty-odd bellsprout in a smaller greenhouse were pruned every week or two. Most of the practical work in that area of the lab was done by undergrads getting some hands-on experience for the first time, but they needed supervising and that often wound up as Maddie’s job.

Not that she minded. It was nice delegating some of her own drudge work, like lugging around sacks of compost for her lab space, although she did quickly learn the number of bags needed to fill a standard-sized planter trough, among other practical details of her new workspace. After some discussion with Erika, a new structure had been erected in an empty corner of the lot, and now Maddie had her own personal greenhouse, ready to receive specimens. The metal-frame-and-plastic-sheeting construction meant it had taken less than a day to give her a few hundred square feet for her sole use.

Whenever she was using the library in the middle of the university grounds, Maddie had to squash a pang of jealousy at how much nicer the buildings were. That lasted until she visited another student’s lab space who was working on synthetic fireproof materials as a cheaper alternative to Growlithe fur. His shoebox of an office, and the rota attached to a shared workspace smaller than Maddie’s private greenhouse, was an eye-opening experience.

The first job of every researcher at Plant Labs was keeping their subjects alive, at least for the duration of the experiment. Everyone had their own preferred treatment plans for encouraging plant health and growth in what could be difficult and stressful circumstances. Maddie knew a few tricks from Blackstone and quickly added some new ideas from Celadon, stirring scraps of Pidgey meat into the standard compost blend that the other researchers used. It could cause aggression in plant Pokemon in some circumstances but boosted their growth and activity. There was also a risk of necrosis setting in as the meat decomposed near the roots of the test subject, but Maddie talked Tony into passing along some Bulbasaur enzymes. True to his boasting during her first visit, it prevented the decay entirely.

Maddie’s research was somewhat esoteric. She was studying the factors controlling intelligence in ‘true’ plant Pokemon, which was the technical term for non-hybrids. Bellsprout and Bulbasaur were very different, biologically speaking, and Bulbasaur had more in common with Charmander or Lickitongue in some ways.

Within the field of true plant Pokemon, there were creatures as simple as Oddish or Hoppip going all the way up to Victreebell. Brain size and complexity ranged across three orders of magnitude, though even the largest plants were still well short of even a Rattatta. By rights the widely varying levels of neural development should lead to very different intellects, none of them capable of more than the most basic tasks. Yet some plants were almost as smart as humans. Many could understand human speech and formed complex societies in the wild.

The day-to-day of that research involved finding pairs or sets of pokemon with similar enough traits that they were broadly equivalent, and then measuring their intelligence over time as they were exposed to stimuli. She started with a half-dozen Bellsprout and fed them different fertilisers, including Rattata bonemeal and mulched Bulbasaur bulb from some of the failed transplants in the next greenhouse along. It had no impact, same as her attempts to exercise the pokemon. Neither did spraying Butterfree pheromones, though it did lead to the amusing sight of an undergrad accidentally breathing in a faceful of stun spore and stumbling around half-drunk for the rest of the afternoon. Once Maddie took a leaf out of Erika’s book, she had more success. Caterpie calls, which were natural predators of Oddish, had no effect, but the sound of a Fearow on the hunt – which would eat Caterpie by the bucket – had a consistent effect if not interspersed with Caterpie cries.

It just wasn’t the effect she wanted.

Her test Oddish was slower to learn new commands than the control, less adventurous, less open to trying new foods, and quieter. Its physical attributes were unchanged – she made sure of that – so it was entirely a change in intelligence and demeanour, but Maddie was in a terrible mood when she discussed the results with her supervisor that Friday.

“It’s a complete failure,” she quietly admitted. “I was trying to make my research subjects smarter, but all I’ve found is a way to reduce their intelligence. Nobody wants a dumber pokemon!”

Erika frowned. “I wouldn’t be so quick to declare defeat. If you have a way of consistently reducing pokemon intelligence, that has enough practical applications to be worth a lot of money. The smarter a pokemon, the harder it is to control, and there’s certainly demand for easy-to-train pokemon which won’t challenge the owner too much. Besides, further exploration to uncover the mechanism that modulates intelligence could let you also increase intelligence, or at least disseminate knowledge on how to prevent any reduction.”

It wasn’t what Maddie had expected at all. At first she tried to keep the hope in check, in case it turned out to be for nothing, but after she and Erika had talked it over, her funding was doubled. Erika left her with some advice as well. “Make sure to reach out if you’re worried your preliminary findings aren’t worth pursuing. You’re smart, but your focus will be narrow by necessity. We have other smart people here with different foci. Use that. It’s the whole point of the university.”

Already Maddie wasn’t sure if she wanted to learn from Erika or become her. Perhaps it was a bit of both.

She spent a fair amount of time with the other doctoral students after that, as well as the postdocs, and was happy to discuss her own as well as the others’ research. She got on well enough with the majority, although Tony was her closest friend. She worried about him sometimes, since he never seemed to take any time off and worked long into the night, but he was buzzing with energy every morning despite that. His research on synthesising new chemicals was paying off, and he’d discovered a cheaper, more effective formula for chemical Pokemon repellants.

In the end, though, it was one of the students that Maddie spoke to least that gave her the next step of her experiments. Minn was a short and quiet man, barely more than a boy, and even among the Grass Lab crew he stood out as obsessed with plants. He worked with a mixture of Pokemon and regular plants, and sometimes he’d get drawn into heated arguments with other researchers over some minutiae of proper plant care.

One rainy Tuesday morning it was about cuttings. Tony had opined that trainers shouldn’t prune their Pokemon, and even professional researchers should do so sparingly. Minn disagreed strongly enough that he’d gone red in the face as he made his points.

“It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between plant and animal! Tangela shed vines during fights all the time, plants just don’t have the same conception of self and identity as we do. Take a cutting from a willow and you’ve got another willow tree. Take an Oddish leaf and, with enough care, you can do the same.”

“They still feel pain. If your finger grew back, would that make it acceptable to cut off? Do you want to start harvesting Slowpoke tails next, since they grow back eventually?” Tony shot back. Even though the effect was undercut by his bloodshot eyes, it was quite the accusation to level at someone. Slowpoke tail removal had been illegal for over a decade, but a handful of fringe organisations were still lobbying for it to be brought back.

“You can take your ‘finger’ metaphor and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, you uninformed talentless hack of a scientist!” Minn jabbed a finger in Tony’s face.

Maddie, along with the rest of the room, cleared out as Tony worked himself into a rage as well. He was trembling with anger as she left and she wondered if someone needed to have a talk with him about his blood pressure. The idea stuck with her though. Oddish cuttings were notoriously finicky and Minn’s research into the process had hit a series of dead ends, which explained why he was so angry as of late, but another Pokemon – Tangela, perhaps – would make a fascinating case study. Maddie could figure out how the new cutting slowly developed in intelligence over time, and how much of it was shaped by the original Pokemon.

She got the go-ahead from Erika and two days later, she gathered a dozen discarded samples from one of the other labs. The parent, as she’d taken to thinking of it, had picked a fight with one of the researchers and been subdued by two undergrads with Pinsir. Its attacks had left healthy vines strewn across the lab floor and nobody else wanted them, so now they were strewn around her office. Each had one end in a jar of her custom nutrient solution (Pidgey slurry, as she called it) and the other near a high-intensity lamp. Maddie wasn’t expecting much from her first attempt, so she was shocked one morning when she walked into the room and half the vines had escaped their containers and trashed the office. Catching one in a Pokeball made the news official – according to the lab’s Pokedex, it was a young but very much alive Tangela, with the same moveset as its parent had had.

Despite the mess they’d made of her workspace, Maddie was ecstatic. So many new Pokemon, for just the price of fertiliser and greenhouse space, would accelerate her research massively. Tangela budding was usually slow and finicky, and failed nine times out of ten besides, but her unique blend of nutrients plus ‘saur enzymes had cut through those barriers. Once the bud became a viable Pokemon, it would grow to the normal size for a Tangela, at which point the rate of old vines being shed and new ones growing would normalise. Shed vines were usually withered and unviable for cloning, which was why Tangela didn’t immediately overrun whatever habitat they were in.

Over time her profile in the department eclipsed the rest of the researchers – even Tony – though she was a long way off from challenging Erika’s prominence. Even a couple of trainers from Celadon Gym came to ask her questions. She was evasive about the precise process, especially since she needed to make sure she could replicate it, but when one of them offered her a few vines from Gym Leader Charles’s own Tangela in exchange for one of the children she raised from them, she couldn’t turn him down.

There were some combinations of hormones and fertilisers that sped the growth of the baby Tangela enormously, and here was where Maddie’s doctoral thesis found fertile soil – the developmental milestones of all the Tangela happened at the same rate, regardless of how fast they were growing physically. Maddie put half a dozen Tangela, carefully restrained by plastic ties to keep them from getting unruly, into what the other researchers called a growth chamber: bone meal mixed into the soil, special lamps pointing at the pots, and slow-feeding irrigation tubes doped with hormones and liquid plant feed. Another half-dozen were given the standard treatment for Pokemon which needed to be kept alive and healthy but weren’t being encouraged to grow. And lastly she put seven vines in a room with limited sunlight, reduced water and a sandier soil than was usually used.

The idea for that room had come in a stroke of genius. Slower-growing Tangela might wind up more intelligent than the norm, while still eventually reaching the size and power of their faster-growing kin. Only two of Charles’s Tangela’s cuttings had proved viable and one went to the trainer who brought them to her, but the other one Maddie wanted for herself. She wasn’t a trainer, but the upper echelons of Pokemon researchers all had a prize fighter or two. It was a status symbol as much as a tool, proving that the discoveries that’d been made were practical. She wanted to reach that level one day, and having a Pokemon physically on par with a Gym Leader’s would help enormously.

After an off-hand remark from an undergrad helping her with her research, Maddie decided to name her special Tangela ‘Spaghetti’. Its vines were unusually pale, much like its parent, and it resembled the pasta dish a little. As she crunched the numbers, though, Maddie realised that Spaghetti wouldn’t have finished its slow growth by the time the Tangela research was completed and (assuming all went to plan) she had her doctorate.

It was with that at the forefront of her mind that she was called into Erika’s office the next morning for an unscheduled meeting. Normally Erika did everything by the books, so a request to catch up and not mention it in her diary had Maddie a little on edge. Her research was undergoing a pivot now that she had access to the Tangela, and she was due to dispose of the Oddish, so she was worried she’d be losing lab space to some other researcher. Her doctoral thesis was almost finished but she was running some follow-up tests and hoping to get another paper out of it – given some of Erika’s offhand comments, Maddie had been pretty confident about getting a postdoc role once she was finished.

“Why the cloak and dagger stuff?” she asked bluntly once the usual niceties were out of the way.

“It’s a rather… delicate matter,” Erika said, meeting Maddie’s gaze head-on. “I need to know I can trust you.”

“Of course,” Maddie said, and meant it.

“Celadon Gym’s been pushing to cut our funding for a long time now. Leader Charles thinks that by rights all plant pokemon research should be done by him and his people, so we’ve had to get creative to make up for the lack of grant money. There’s not much that a lab can offer other than research, which every other lab is already competing with us on. What we do have, though, is a permit to purchase Pokemon as needed for said research.”

Maddie could see where this was going, and didn’t like the shape of it.

“When we’re finished with them, they get released somewhere safe, and we have a contract with a company that handles that for us. They, in turn, have an arrangement with – let’s call them interested parties – where some of those Pokemon are immediately captured and go to a good, and well-financed, home.”

Silence hung between them like a shroud.

“The timing is critical,” Erika continued after a moment. “I’m about to be promoted to lab director. Cade’s being pushed into early retirement for being fucking useless. You haven’t heard this from me, you understand? But I’m going to be running this place officially in a few weeks’ time. The, well, extra-legal sale of Pokemon is what keeps Grass Lab afloat and able to do all the great work we do, and if that takes a hit at the same time as my promotion, it reflects very badly on me personally. So the work must continue, and that means,” she gestured firmly towards Maddie, “we’re relying on you.”

“I’m surprised there’s not more of a black market for this, to cut out the need for middlemen like us,” Maddie said. It was easier than addressing the magnitude of what Erika had told her – had asked of her.

Erika grimaced. They were alone in the office, surrounded by people Erika mostly trusted, and had just discussed some serious crimes, as well as confidential information about the university. And yet Erika leaned in closer to Maddie and lowered her voice as she answered the unspoken question. Why is this so lucrative?

“Buying and selling Pokemon, especially in large numbers, isn’t considered a civil crime like rare candy abuse or something. It’s a national security issue. If we took all the combat-capable Pokemon in this lab today, we could set up a decent-sized militia and seize control of Celadon unless the Gym was willing to fight to the death over it. If we stockpiled the strongest specimens for a few years, the Gym doesn’t matter any more. Trainers are regulated to an extent, but trainer organisations are very carefully monitored for subversive tendencies. Research institutes get to skip all that bullshit, though. We’re in a blind spot and that’s what makes us valuable. Nobody thinks I’m about to declare myself a warlord and overthrow the government.”

Maddie swallowed hard. She wasn’t risking just a slap on the wrist if they were caught. “So what are you asking me to do, specifically?”

“Pick out the Oddish that are especially impressive, no more than four. Mark the Pokeballs with a green pen. Add a catalyst to their feed to bring on sudden-onset evolution – I know you know how, everyone with access to the library and the research chemical storage can do it – and then stash them away. When the retrieval service comes for the pickup, make sure Felicity is the one who takes them. If she’s not there, stall them and say you need to run some more last-minute checks. The Gloom will be ‘released’ somewhere that our client can pick them up immediately. Then in a few months’ time we’ll get a generous donation via some front company and Grass Lab stays solvent for another year.”

Erika’s tone made the dismissal clear, but Maddie had one more question to ask.

“Why tell me this now?”

“Because Tony’s decided to resign his position and I need someone I can trust to take over this duty of his. He’s, ah, spending more time with his family. I’d be asking you to do the marking anyway, but now I’m forced to also pass some of the duties of handing over the Pokemon to you. I really appreciate your discretion in this.”

This time Maddie didn’t have the courage to ask another question, like about Tony’s real reason for leaving. She nodded and left the room, feeling uneasy at the whole situation but not seeing an alternative to doing as she was bid.

Two of the Oddish were especially large and strong, while a third had a potent poison and a fourth was extremely obedient. Maddie fed them the finicky brew Erika had alluded to, nicknamed ‘Liquid Leaf Stone’ by researchers. Afterwards she marked their balls carefully and placed them with the other pokeballs in a locked crate that was collected the next morning. She made sure the lady collecting them wore the right name tag.

Erika gave her a discreet thumbs up a few days later, and a week after that she announced to the whole lab that she was the new director after Cade’s retirement. Since there was quite a bit of reorganising to do, Maddie would be promoted to assistant team lead despite not having finished her doctorate yet. She was going to fill Tony’s old shoes.

Erika also invited Maddie along to the evening sessions where the more battle-oriented lab workers trained their Pokemon. None of the doctoral students or postdocs had any illusions about going off on a Pokemon journey and becoming a trainer, not when they’d spent so much time and focus on academia, but there were undergrads as well as some local high schoolers who were more interested in the practical side of things.

Maddie’s Tangela had the same capabilities as the parent it had budded off, so despite its youth and small stature it was a terror in trainer battles. Its spores and toxins were incredibly potent and its vines were much stronger and faster than average. Erika watched the Pokemon’s performance closely but didn’t say anything to Maddie except to congratulate her whenever she won a fight, which was often.

She never managed a victory against Erika, although it wasn’t a priority for her. Maddie’s thesis defence preparations took up more and more of her time, to the point that she dreamed of huge tables of data each night. She felt well-prepared, or as much as she could be anyway, but still the stress gave her regular stomach aches.

It turned out to be entirely unnecessary.

Maddie received a surprise visit from her parents for the graduation ceremony where she was awarded her PhD, and surprised them in turn with some good news – she’d been offered a job, and quite a well-paid one at that, in Grass Lab. It was a continuation of her previous research in a postdoc role, with some supervision tasks thrown in. She would still be assistant team lead for the moment, though Erika had made some noises about promoting her to team lead once she’d established herself properly.

Maddie could tell they’d rather have had her move back closer to them, but she didn’t have the heart to tell them that Celadon had become her home over the last few years. The other researchers were like family as well, though that could be a bad thing. Some of her coworkers lacked boundaries or struggled to be objective about the work they were doing, as she found out in rather spectacular fashion when she discussed her new project one day.

“I’ve still got those Tangela cuttings from my doctoral research, and while the variation in intelligence was interesting, there’s some more practical implications as well,” she said to a handful of friends over lunch in the cafeteria. “Since cutting is the same plant as the parent, it’s effectively a clone – not as strong, necessarily, and the training doesn’t carry over, but a lot of Pokemon attacks depend on specific formulations of acid or poison, and that transfers just fine.”

“I didn’t want to say anything when you were still working on your doctoral thesis,” Minn interrupted from the next table over, “but really, cloning is my thing in this lab. I’ve been working on my project for a whole while longer.”

“Oh really? When did you last clone something then?” Maddie asked. She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she should have been more diplomatic, but the rush of having some weight to throw around in the department had made her a little arrogant. And she wasn’t going to back down, so the only way was through. “Or did you want to ask me for my secret sauce?”

Minn drew himself up, though he didn’t look particularly fierce. “I wanted to tell you that I’d appreciate you keeping your garbage opinions to yourself so you can’t claim credit when my research pays off. Just because I’m thorough and tackling a challenging problem doesn’t mean you can take all the attention by going for low-hanging fruit.”

“If it’s low-hanging fruit, why weren’t you able to do anything with it?” Maddie shot back. A moment later she realised that it could be taken as a jab at Minn’s height, which he was sensitive about.

It all went downhill from there, and fifteen minutes of shouting later they were dragged into Erika’s office.

“We collaborate here, and that means we need an environment where people can openly share ideas without worrying about someone else swooping in and stealing their thunder,” Erika said with a stern look for Maddie. Before Maddie could reply, though, more anger crept in and she turned to Minn. “That said, unless you think the well-documented behaviour of Tangela reproducing via cuttings should be forbidden across the whole lab while you’re working on it, Maddie did nothing wrong here. What’s got you upset is that she found results in a few weeks while you’ve wasted over a year on dead ends, and now she’s merrily working away on follow-up .”

Minn tried to interrupt but Erika spoke right over him. “You’re an adult and should be professional about this. If Maddie’s happy to collaborate with you, you could spin off a separate paper from the bulk of her work, as co-authors. That’s the attitude I want to see. Less complaining, more explaining – we’re here to solve the mysteries of Pokemon, not bicker.”

It took a few days for Minn to cool down, but eventually he approached Maddie about a joint research project, separate to either of their main work. He wanted to try stimulating Tangela vines with electricity to improve the rate at which buds turned into viable Pokemon. A quick feasibility study showed good results and it would be the politically sensible thing to do, so Maddie reluctantly agreed. He was a bit high-strung and Maddie couldn’t say she enjoyed working with him, but it wasn’t a huge drain on her time.

A pleasant side effect of cloning so many Tangela was the ease with which Maddie could sell them. The Pokemon weren’t on any official ledgers until the research finished, and Erika’s mysterious buyer was happy to take as many as Maddie could provide. After some back and forth between the lab leader and the criminal, his number was made available to Maddie for coordination purposes.

The process was simple. Maddie sent a message when Pokemon were going to be released, and he would request a certain number be diverted, as well as specifying a price. The money would arrive a few weeks later via grants from the Celadon Game Corner, which Maddie assumed was a money laundering front. It was impossible to predict which Pokemon he would want; sometimes he bought an entire shipment of Bellsprout for a high price, other times he let Ivysaurs pass by without any sign of interest whatsoever.

There was a thrill to the process at first, but soon it became just another part of the job. And one day Maddie looked at the latest request for more Tangela and felt only dread. She didn’t want to think about where she was sending all the life she was creating.

Throwing herself into her research helped, though only a little. It did take the word ‘assistant’ off her job title, though the life of a team lead wasn’t much different.

Over the course of nine months she and Minn designed and carried out their study, and it took another three to write it up and publish everything. The resulting paper boosted her profile at the lab and within the university as a whole. Once the story broke outside academic circles, Maddie even featured on the local news, and for a few weeks afterwards would occasionally be stopped on the street by excited trainers, or kids who wanted to become trainers when they grew up.

That last part was apparently a problem, as she found out when a white-faced Erika pulled her aside one day in a narrow alley between two potting sheds. “The Vice-Chancellor is being asked by Celadon Gym to audit Grass Lab,” she whispered, lips pinched and eyes too wide.

“Why? What does that mean? What will they find?” Maddie asked, her own worry rising in response.

“I’ve had some of the best accountants money can buy going over the books, but they’ll still find enough to sink us. We’re high-profile enough that questions are being asked, and we don’t have good answers.”

“What do we do?”

“Relax,” Erika said, though she didn’t look particularly relaxed herself. “I have a plan. It’s the gym that’s behind this, and specifically the leader. I’m going to pay a visit to Charles and encourage him to take early retirement. If I become the new Celadon Gym Leader this whole thing goes away.”

“So that means you have time to prepare,” Maddie said. It was the only way Erika’s mad plan made sense.

Erika shook her head. “It needs to be within the month. Any longer and this snowballs out of control – I’m applying pressure on the Vice-Chancellor to delay for now, but once the audit starts it’ll be impossible to stop without looking guilty. If Charles goes down before then, I can cancel it and say he was just using underhanded tactics to try to distract me and give himself an edge. Gym Leader was always the goal, for me, so this is just… moving the schedule up a bit.”

“Is your team ready?”

“No, but it will be. That’s actually why I grabbed you.” Erika was visibly uncomfortable as she made her request. “There’s a gap in my battle line-up. Once I win, in order to take over the Gym, I have to have a group of trainers backing me up. I need the strongest Tangela I can get my hands on, for myself and for them as well. I know your research isn’t finished, but this might make the difference between long and successful careers for all of us, or languishing in jail for the next few decades.”

The decision took a mere half-second. “How many do you need?” Maddie asked.

“The strongest for myself, and up to six more for my entourage. And we’d need to keep them.”

“You’ll have them.”

“Do you need a hand making the paperwork line up?”

Maddie shook her head. “I can fudge it, no problem. I’ll get them to you tomorrow so you have time to train. The best I’ve got is a clone of Charles’ own Tangela, so it’ll have access to every toxin he trained it to produce. At least up until a year ago, which is when I got the vine.”

The transfer went off without a hitch, though it set Maddie back six months in her own research. Still, better a delay than the inside of a jail cell, or fleeing back home with a warrant out for her arrest. Very little got done in Grass Lab for the next few weeks, as half the leadership team was going through a brutal gauntlet of training, while the other half was frantically hunting for any way to give Erika’s Pokemon an edge.

Maddie was almost too nervous to attend the Gym battle, but thought it would be a bad look if she didn’t show up to support her boss. The Grass Lab employees and students were seated in a block behind the challenger’s podium, while Gym Leader Charles was at the other end of the meadow of wildflowers he’d chosen as an arena.

The two battlers had spoken before the match, though whatever words passed between them hadn’t been friendly. Erika was fired up in a way Maddie had never seen her before, and Leader Charles looked ready to kill her with his bare hands.

He opened with his Venusaur, a grotesque and battle-scarred monster twice the size of the rest of its species. It was second in infamy only to his Tangela, and many would-be challengers had lost entire teams to those two beasts. Erika brought out Cutie to match the Venusaur, and for the first time Maddie considered that they might lose.

It was a foolish fear. Cutie stomped his way through a full half of Leader Charles’ roster of Pokemon before finally being brought down. Erika returned him once Charles had sent out his Tangela and stripped Cutie of all his leaves with a rain of powerful acid. She brought out her – Maddie’s – own Tangela to match it. Spaghetti was as pale as its progenitor and Charles blanched as his own poisons and powders slid off Spaghetti’s body with no impact whatsoever. The two beasts wrestled back and forth, neither of them able to injure the other except through brute force. Finally they both collapsed, too exhausted to keep struggling.

Erika switched to a Vileplume and blasted her foe’s weakened Tangela away. Charles had two more Pokemon on his belt but Erika’s Vileplume, Venusaur and pair of Victreebell were easily enough to wear them out.

Maddie screamed and cheered along with the rest of the crowd as the battle came to a satisfying close. Even those in the audience who knew their way around Pokemon battles had missed a lot of the nuances of the fight, and Maddie was less experienced than most, but it had been like doing a line of raw adrenaline despite that. She was swept up in the flow of people and didn’t get to see what passed between Erika and Charles in the aftermath, but it didn’t matter to her in the moment. She was elated. Grass Lab was safe, her job and freedom were no longer at stake, and the rivalry between the research centre and Celadon Gym was over.

The aftermath was pandemonium. The celebrations lasted through the night and into the next day, since Charles had never been as popular as Erika even before her sudden ascension. He left with ill grace, taking a third of the Gym’s trainers with him, but Erika was able to fill those gaps with a handful of allies from Grass Lab and a few new hires. In name she was still the Grass Lab director, but in practice she had no time and half the leadership had gone with her. Maddie picked up a lot of the slack, as did a handful of other fresher faces.

Cade was brought out of retirement to take over the lab, and Maddie found herself seamlessly sliding into Erika’s old role as director-in-all-but-name. It fit her surprisingly well.

The closer ties between the Gym and Grass Lab paid off tenfold over the first year, and Maddie personally gained a great deal of clout within the department. It was an open secret that she’d been the one to produce Erika’s Tangela, though the how wasn’t as widespread, and rumours went around that she had a whole room full of Tangela just as strong. Between that and a handful of research papers she was able to get out of some of the Gym trainers, Maddie had enough credibility in both academic and combat matters that her will went largely uncontested.

When Cade was unceremoniously retired again by the administration, it hardly made a difference to Maddie’s day-to-day.

Research Director of the Celadon University Phytozoology Centre was a lofty title, and came with a fair amount of power. Maddie was invited to formal dinners and black-tie events with names like Annual Celadon Agribusiness Forum Gala or Research Excellence Awards Ceremony, which she attended so she could flatter, charm and cajole a series of men and women into investing into Grass Lab. Minn was her usual companion, and turned out to be rather good at wheedling grants and investments out of the string of dour-faced businesspeople who attended those sorts of gatherings. There were also some invites that Maddie looked forward to, though.

Her first time in Johto was to visit a conference in New Bark Town, hosted by Professor Elm but attended by more senior researchers than Maddie had ever seen in one place. It was the largest gathering, but far from the only one. Every month or two, Maddie was travelling somewhere else, to the point that she traded for a Pigeot and took flying lessons in order to attend more easily.

The presentations and panels, and the quiet chats held after dinner with key figures from other universities, lit a fire in Maddie. These events, quiet and unassuming as they looked to outsiders, were shaping the future of science. She’d almost fallen into her current role, rather than reaching for it, and had thought herself unambitious as a result, but now she had something she wanted.

Grass Lab would be put on the map in a big way, and Maddie would be the one to do it. She was going to step out of Erika’s shadow.

Avenues of research that had been too costly, too resource-intensive, too slow to give results, or otherwise not so practical, were open to her now. She dug into them with relish. Rumours were coming out of other regions that the long-known upper limit to Tangela size could be breached with the use of the right materials, and Grass Labs threw its hat into the ring. The ‘Tangela Growth Via Modulated Substrate’ project (or Tan-growth for short) looked very promising.

Maddie wrangled enough cash together by promising an attached trade fair for the local businesses to advertise their wares, and put together a conference of her own. Not a Celadon University event, nor one hosted in collaboration with Celadon Gym, though both groups were invited; this was Maddie’s show from beginning to end. The centrepiece was going to be the unveiling of the Tan-growth project, and while other researchers would be presenting as well, Grass Labs would demonstrate its cutting-edge achievements throughout the three-day event.

A pair of postgrads had been handed Tony’s ongoing research when Maddie found she had too much on her plate. They’d served up a reminder that she wasn’t the only smart person in the department. The new repel chemicals that Tony had discovered could be secreted by other, more common, plant species than Victreebell. Maddie could have kissed them when they told her that Tangela was also a viable host. There was a potent synergy with Maddie’s own earlier research, now handed over to Minn. Low-intelligence clones of Tangela mass-producing repels were a source of revenue that didn’t involve ethically dubious Pokemon sales, and Maddie embraced the idea wholeheartedly.

She’d never followed the Kanto news closely. At first, she’d been more interested in the goings-on of her far-off home, and nowadays most of her coworkers assumed she didn’t care to hear about events in Kantoan cities she’d never visited.

She had a reputation as a ruthlessly focused academic, which was far preferable to people knowing the truth. Maddie had made the mistake a few years ago of reading up on a jewellery store robbery where the assailants had used Tangela to subdue the staff and customers. Some of the Tangela used an extra-strong acid to burn through the display cases, but that same acid left several people with severe scarring.

The pictures haunted her.

Her preferences were well-known enough that nobody in Grass Lab made small-talk about the news with her any more, but the first night of the Symposium on Phytozoology, every visiting scholar was discussing the same topic. It was a bombshell with impacts extending well beyond Kanto’s borders. A handful of organised crime groups had fallen under the umbrella of a larger conglomerate, and were calling themselves ‘Team Rocket’. They were implicated in racketeering, extortion, theft, corporate espionage, and even murder.

Their signature was Pokemon theft, and they also engaged in black-market buying and selling of Pokemon.

Maddie went through the motions for the rest of the conference, pretending to enjoy the attention, but afterwards she couldn’t remember any of the talks she’d attended. She felt physically sick and like the guilt was painted all over her face. Every time she was congratulated on a well-run event, or the quality of the science her lab was producing, it was another stone loaded onto her chest, until she couldn’t breathe right.

There was a shipment of Weepinbell due to be diverted two days after the conference ended, and Maddie refused point blank to let it go ahead. It was the first time she’d acted outside the clear parameters Erika had explained all those years ago, even though Maddie had been handling it by herself for over a year now. She would message the contact with a type of Pokemon, and get a response with the desired quantity and the offered price. This time, she cancelled an order.

Five seconds later the phone rang in her hand.

“Hello?”

“Explain yourself,” the voice on the other end demanded. It was electronically distorted and entirely anonymous, except that it belonged to an adult man. It was also, Maddie could tell, furious.

She swallowed, wondering how best to explain her change of heart, then decided that was a terrible idea. She’d have to lie her way out of it. That started with setting the groundwork. “I presume I’m speaking with Team Rocket.”

“That’s a presumption, yes.”

“Cut the crap,” Maddie barked with a confidence that was entirely fake. “Everyone knows about you, there’s no secret left to protect.”

“Then yes, we are Team Rocket.”

“Alright, that leads neatly to my next question. Are you fucking insane?”

There was a surprised silence on the line, emboldening Maddie.

“Seriously. The eyes of the scientific world are on this lab, and you make the number one topic of conversation a criminal organisation buying, selling and stealing Pokemon? People are worried about securing their labs, or how to make sure they don’t accidentally buy illegally-acquired Pokemon, or stopping an unscrupulous student from flogging a couple of Oddish for beer money, and meanwhile I’m meant to be sending crates of premium combat-capable Pokemon right into the hands of the biggest crime organisation in history.”

“We’re careful not to lead anyone back to our suppliers,” the voice dismissed, though it was a little less angry now.

“There’s exactly one lab in Kanto that handles a high enough volume of plant Pokemon to explain where you’re getting all these specimens, and it’s Grass Lab. People will be looking now, and there can’t be a trail for them to find. People are already asking questions.”

It wasn’t true, but the longer she spoke, the more Maddie wondered why it wasn’t true. Had nobody considered the evidence? Was it less conclusive than she’d thought? Or maybe the noose was already quietly closing around her.

“Which people?” he asked mildly.

Maddie considered her next words very carefully. Speaking a name right now might end up with them disappeared, or worse. “It’s not a specific person saying something actionable. That would be much easier to handle. It’s… rumours, little discrepancies being noticed, and if people were to start getting threatened, or disappearing, or whatever, it would make the rumours much much worse. The right play here is to slow down, let the attention dissipate as other events displace us from the public consciousness. In the meantime you’ll need to make do with less.”

“And if I were to order you to send this shipment anyway?”

“That would be a mistake.”

“If you’re of no further use to me, then perhaps I should simply… tie up loose ends,” the voice threatened.

Maddie’s heart leapt into her throat, but she just about kept her nerve. “Stop drawing the attention of the entire fucking world for five minutes and we’ll be able to go back to normal,” she hissed. “Don’t put this on me when you’re the one who can’t keep a low profile.”

She’d never been much of a liar, but for this, she was willing to learn.

“I’ll contact you again when your services are required. Make sure to get your house in order,” the man demanded. He hung up before she could answer.

Despite her bluster, Maddie wasn’t willing to be a hero. She wasn’t going to turn herself in and destroy the lab she’d devoted years of her life to. She also wouldn’t give Team Rocket a reason to send their operatives after her. For a few months she kept the situation under wraps, and when her contact refused to be put off any longer, she made sure to limit what Pokemon she sold on.

Not everything coming through Grass Lab was dangerous. Some Jumpluff that were part of a research project into invasive plant species, she was happy to sell off. The breeding pair of Venusaur that would give even Cutie pause, though? Those she made sure to pass on to Erika personally once they weren’t needed for research any longer. They might not be safe in the lab, but Celadon Gym was a tougher nut to crack.

Maddie still didn’t sleep well at night.

Celadon was a large city and a Gym Leader had many duties, so it wasn’t often that she and Erika met in person. Leader Erika, as she was now called everywhere in the city, had more valuable contacts in the administration besides. Most of Maddie’s day-to-day collaborations went via one of Erika’s lieutenants, a former Grass Lab researcher himself. And yet one day Erika showed up instead, entirely unannounced.

“The Leader role suits you,” Maddie said after they’d made the customary chit-chat. “It’s been, what, three years?”

“Nearer four, I think,” Erika replied, looking around the office. “You’ve not personalised it much, have you? Still using the same filing systems as well?”

“Yes, actually,” Maddie replied, then winked. “It works well, and I wouldn’t want to train the baboons who work here in a new way of doing paperwork if I could possibly avoid it.”

“You were one of the few doctoral students I had who could actually operate a filing cabinet,” Erika laughed. “It’s not the only thing that made you my favourite, but it definitely helped.”

“Is that why you’re here, then? To reminisce about the good old days?”

“We can get to that in a moment, if there’s anything you’re wanting to address first,” Erika offered.

Maddie frowned a little. Erika was an incredibly busy woman these days, more so than Maddie, and Maddie could barely afford to indulge in small talk, so what was Erika doing? What was important enough that she wanted to waste time buttering up her former student?

And how did she know Maddie had some old questions still bubbling under the surface?

“Go on, ask it. You’re a leader of sorts yourself now, and you want to know, don’t you? Don’t let it fester.”

Maddie swallowed her nerves and corrected her earlier assumption. That wasn’t an invitation for small-talk. Erika knew exactly what Maddie wanted to know, but was making her ask for it anyway.

She might not quite be on Erika’s level, but they were peers of a sort. Refusing the offer twice would look like cowardice, and that wasn’t something she’d allow herself. “Why did Tony really resign?”

A proud look passed over Erika’s face, so fast that Maddie thought she might have imagined it.

“He never wanted to do the work he was doing. I had leverage on him, and so he couldn’t turn me down easily, but eventually he planned on going to the police despite what it would mean for him.” Erika shrugged, though to Maddie it looked too casual, like it was covering the memory of real hurt. “It would have tarnished Grass Lab, perhaps irreparably, and ended my career in an instant. Instead I arranged for his substance abuse to be discovered by a couple of students, who went straight to the central administration. I stepped in and he was allowed to quietly resign rather than be fired. He was out of the picture and still beholden to me. Overall, an elegant solution.”

It was fucked up, but Maddie couldn’t quite bury the flicker of admiration she felt. Erika had kept the research group under complete control for years, even after she’d left, and funnelled vast sums of money into productive projects under the noses of the whole university. She’d gotten her hands dirty but it’d more than paid off, in discoveries and prestige both.

“He was cooking up his fun-time chemicals using Pokemon in his research lab, wasn’t he?” Maddie asked after a moment, putting the last parts together. Part of her was wondering if any of her current staff were doing something similar, and how she’d react if that were true.

“Very smart.” Erika grinned. “From the moment I first laid eyes on you, I knew you would be perfect. You’re ambitious, sure, but you’re also right at that sweet spot where you have personal loyalty but aren’t overly moral. You’re a lot like me; curiosity is the whip that drives you forward, rather than greed, which meant I could trust you as long as you were treated well. It’s all in the service of something, but you value the ends more than the means. We’re a lot alike.”

“What makes you so sure?” Maddie demanded, to cover for the thoughts whirling through her head. That compliment had rung hollow, more like the praise that she might lavish on a pet than on a peer. Erika flattering her intellect was supposed to cover something up. She still wasn’t being taken seriously, and it grated.

Once upon a time, Maddie had wanted to learn from and possibly become Erika. Now she wanted to surpass her.

Erika laughed, more carefree than Maddie had ever heard her be before. “Come on. Did you really buy all that ‘I’m a great judge of character’ stuff when you first showed up as a wet-behind-the-ears student? I have Cutie dip into the heads of all our prospective researchers before we hire them, and only take the ones who meet my needs. You were my masterpiece, though. The raw material was good, but I trained you and pruned you, and look at how you’ve flourished.”

“Is that why you’ve come here now? To claim credit for my every success, as though I’m just another way to reflect glory onto yourself?” Maddie stared at her former mentor, knuckles white. She didn’t like to think of herself as an overly proud woman, but she’d grown used to a level of respect that Erika wasn’t giving her. A quiet voice in the back of her mind whispered that she might never get it.

Erika shook her head, voice matter-of-fact as she answered. “I’m just cutting a few ties that have grown to be problematic of late.”

Maddie’s hands flew to the pokeballs on her desk, fumbling for one of her Tangela, but Erika was faster. She had her Exeggcutor out in a flash and it swept the balls out of reach with a single lightning-quick vine. Erika looked more bored than bothered by the act of attempted defiance.

“Calm down, I’m not going to kill you. That would be a huge waste. I just need to make sure you can’t give up anything under questioning that might be an embarrassment. Team Rocket’s moved from asset to liability and I’ve made sure there’s nobody on their end who could identify us, but we’ll need to remove a few memories here in the lab just to cover our tracks properly.”

“I won’t let you,” Maddie said, though her hands trembled. It had been a long time since she’d felt so helpless, or so betrayed. Her mind was hers, inviolate and intensely private, and the thought of Erika rifling through it with a Pokemon’s help was horrifying. “It’s my lab now, and I won’t let you root through my people’s minds. You’re morally bankrupt in all the worst ways. I can’t believe I ever trusted you.”

“Trying to explain things to you was a mistake, I suppose. Cutie, Amnesia,” Erika commanded.

When Maddie woke up in her chair a few minutes later the last fragments of recollection were already fading. She set the odd dream out of her mind, along with the anonymous figure who’d generously funded so much of her research over the years. For a brief moment she did wonder at why there were so many filing cabinets in the office if half of them were empty, but even that didn’t hold her attention for long. She resolved to redistribute the spares. With the anonymous funder gone, Grass Lab would have to get by on a leaner budget for the next few years.

That was spring, and by autumn the Celadon Game Corner had been shut down following a series of scandals. First a lone trainer fought his way through all the security and into an underground complex beneath the casino, getting away with an undisclosed haul of cash and prizes. Then that secret complex was revealed to be part of a crime syndicate called Team Rocket, who also owned the Game Corner. The complex was purchased by a competitor, though it was later revealed to be a shell company controlled by Team Rocket’s chief, and disgraced former Gym Leader, Giovanni. Celadon Gym and the mayor agreed to shut down the casino until the last of Team Rocket’s influence was expunged.

The Celadon Game Corner had never been popular with the locals, who saw it as attracting the desperate and the degenerate, so Maddie doubted whether it would ever reopen.

After the dust had settled, Celadon’s reputation was hurt, but not crippled. Erika went on a media offensive, with Grass Lab playing a key role, and Maddie found herself in the uncomfortable position of being the face of Celadon’s research community. She was elevated to a professorship soon after, and then got offered a pro-vice-chancellorship of research after a year in the role. It was an open secret that Erika was grooming her to become vice-chancellor of the entire university, though Maddie couldn’t figure out why. Her research was impressive, but the same could be said of any number of other postdocs at Celadon University. They’d worked closely together for a while, but Erika had a dozen former doctoral students at Grass Lab, some of whom were now trainers at Celadon Gym, with local ties that went back generations. They were fanatically loyal to her to boot. And yet she was aggressively promoting a foreign girl instead.

Sometimes Maddie thought she saw a flash of guilt cross Erika’s face when they spoke, though that raised more questions than it answered. What would Erika have to be guilty about?

She’d given Maddie everything Maddie could ever want.