The last thing Marcus Chen remembered before dying was a YouTube comment section.
Not the most dignified final memory, admittedly. He'd been lying on his couch in his apartment in Sacramento, scrolling through the discourse surrounding the latest Pokémon Legends: Z-A trailer on his phone, a half-eaten bowl of ramen balanced precariously on his chest, when he'd made the catastrophic mistake of reading the comments.
"Graphics look like a PS2 game lmao Game Freak is so lazy"
"Can't even see the pores on the characters' faces 0/10"
"Another mid Pokémon game, dead franchise"
And then, beneath that, the reply from the same user, timestamped three hours later:
"Just pre-ordered the double pack and the special edition Switch 2 bundle LET'S GOOOOO"
Marcus had laughed. Not a chuckle, not a snort—a full, deep, diaphragmatic laugh, the kind that starts in your belly and works its way up through your chest like a volcanic eruption of pure, unbridled amusement. Because that was the Pokémon fandom in a nutshell, wasn't it? Complain about everything. Nitpick every frame of every trailer. Write twelve-paragraph essays about how the tree textures weren't photorealistic. Produce forty-five-minute video essays titled "Pokémon Is DEAD and Here's Why" with a thumbnail of a crying Pikachu. And then—and then—turn around and buy every single version, every DLC, every special edition, every piece of merchandise, and dump four hundred hours into the game while continuing to complain about it.
It was performance art. It was theater. It was the most elaborate form of masochism the internet had ever produced, and Marcus had found it genuinely, deeply, cosmically hilarious.
He'd enjoyed Legends: Z-A. Genuinely enjoyed it. Was it perfect? No. Did the graphics make him weep tears of joy at their stunning photorealism? Also no. But he could see what was happening on screen, the gameplay was fun, the Mega Evolution mechanic was sick, and frankly, he'd stopped caring about graphical fidelity in Pokémon games approximately never, because they were Pokémon games. He played them to catch little creatures and make them fight other little creatures. If he wanted to count the individual eyelash hairs on a character's face, he'd go play whatever the latest Naughty Dog release was.
Now, Scarlet and Violet?
Those he had opinions about. Strong opinions. Nuclear opinions. Opinions that could power a small city if you could somehow convert pure, distilled frustration into electricity.
But not about the graphics. God, not about the graphics. He couldn't have cared less about the graphics. The world could have been rendered entirely in crayon and he wouldn't have blinked. No, his problems with Scarlet and Violet ran so much deeper than that. They were structural. They were fundamental. They were the kind of problems that made him want to sit down with the entire development team and have a long, quiet conversation about what the word "innovation" actually meant.
It was the formula.
The exact. Same. Formula.
Again.
For the millionth time.
Except now—oh joy, oh rapture, oh what a time to be alive—you were a student. That was the big shakeup. The revolutionary change. The bold new direction. Instead of being a ten-year-old who wanders away from home to fight God, you were a student who wanders away from school to fight God. Someone alert the Nobel Committee. Someone get Game Freak a MacArthur Genius Grant. Someone carve Junichi Masuda's face into Mount Rushmore for this unprecedented act of creative daring.
And the world. Good lord, the world. He'd played open-world games before. He'd wandered the vast, breathing landscapes of Breath of the Wild, where every hill promised a discovery and every ruin told a story. He'd gotten lost in the dense, layered ecosystems of Elden Ring, where the world itself felt like a living, malevolent entity that wanted you dead in increasingly creative ways. And then he'd booted up Scarlet and Violet and found himself standing in an open world that had all the density and personality of a parking lot.
There was nothing there. It was just... terrain. Flat terrain, hilly terrain, terrain with some grass on it, terrain with some sand on it, terrain with a Pokémon standing on it looking vaguely confused about why it existed. It was like someone had heard the phrase "open world" and thought it meant "world that is open" in the most literal possible sense—just a big, empty space with nothing in it. A world that existed not to be explored but merely to be traversed, a void between point A and point B that you crossed as quickly as possible while trying not to make eye contact with the barren nothingness stretching out in every direction.
And the new Pokémon! Marcus had been a Pokémon fan since Generation One. He'd defended Gen Five's designs when everyone was screaming about the ice cream cone. He'd championed Gen Seven's Alolan forms as creative reinterpretations. He had limits. He had standards. And when he'd looked at the Paldean Pokédex, he'd felt something inside him wither and die, like a flower that had been shown a particularly uninspiring PowerPoint presentation.
They weren't bad, exactly. They were just... there. Existing. Taking up space in the Pokédex the way a decorative throw pillow takes up space on a couch—technically present, technically fulfilling a function, but completely devoid of the spark that makes you actually care about its existence. Where were the designs that made you gasp? Where were the creatures that made you think "I need that on my team or my life has no meaning"? Where was the magic?
And don't—don't—get him started on the turn-based battles.
Actually, no. Get him started. Because this was the hill he was prepared to die on, and as it turned out, he was about to die anyway, so the timing worked out perfectly.
Turn-based battles.
Turn-based battles.
The same turn-based battle system, fundamentally unchanged in its core structure, since nineteen ninety-six. Twenty-eight years. Twenty-eight years of selecting "Fight" from a menu, picking one of four moves, watching a little animation play, watching a health bar go down, and then waiting for the other side to do the same thing. Twenty-eight years of the same basic rock-paper-scissors type matchup system. Twenty-eight years of "Super Effective!" and "It's not very effective..." and "The wild Pokémon fainted!" Twenty-eight years of essentially the same combat loop, dressed up in slightly different clothes each generation like a mannequin at a department store that gets a new hat every season but is still, at the end of the day, a mannequin.
He was tired. The entire fanbase was tired. They were all tired and nobody wanted to admit it because admitting it meant confronting the uncomfortable reality that the core gameplay loop they'd been addicted to since childhood had the depth of a puddle on a hot sidewalk and always had. It had been carried, hard, by nostalgia and charm and the sheer brilliance of the creature designs, and now that those were faltering too, there was nothing left to hide behind.
And then—oh, and then—there was Terastallization.
The latest gimmick. The newest in a long, proud line of generation-specific battle mechanics that existed for exactly one generation before being unceremoniously abandoned like a puppy on the side of a highway.
Mega Evolution? Gone. Z-Moves? Gone. Dynamaxing? Gone. Terastallization? Here, for now, until the next generation came along and introduced some new flashy nonsense that would also be gone within three years.
And what was Terastallization, exactly? What was this revolutionary new mechanic that was supposed to redefine the way we thought about Pokémon battles?
It put a crystal hat on your Pokémon's head.
That was it.
A crystal hat. A big, sparkly, gemstone crown that appeared on your Pokémon's head, and in exchange for this piece of mineral millinery, your Pokémon got... a type change. That's it. That was the whole thing. Your Fire-type could become a Water-type, or a Grass-type, or a Normal-type, and the visual indicator of this paradigm-shifting transformation was that it was now wearing a chandelier made of crystals on its skull.
Marcus had stared at the screen the first time he'd Terastallized a Pokémon and felt his soul leave his body. Not in a dramatic, spiritual way. More in a "my consciousness has checked out of this experience and is now sitting in a waiting room somewhere, reading a three-year-old copy of Reader's Digest" kind of way.
A crystal hat.
And here was the thing—the thing that really, truly, deeply got to him, the thing that burrowed into his brain like a parasitic worm and refused to leave:
They had Area Zero.
They had this incredible, mysterious, lore-rich location at the center of the game, this massive crater full of impossible energy and ancient secrets, and connected to it, they had the Paradox Pokémon—these wild, incredible reimaginings of existing Pokémon as either ancient, prehistoric beasts or futuristic, mechanical monstrosities. And the concept was so cool. The designs were so cool. The idea of Pokémon being warped by time itself, pulled from the distant past or the far future, was genuinely one of the most fascinating concepts the franchise had produced in years.
And they did nothing with it as a battle mechanic.
Marcus had spent an embarrassing amount of time—lying on this very couch, staring at this very ceiling—imagining what could have been. Picture this: instead of Terastallization, your character gets a device connected to Area Zero. When activated in battle, it channels the temporal energy of the crater into your Pokémon, transforming it into its Paradox form. If you're playing Scarlet, your Pokémon transforms into its Ancient Paradox form—a primal, prehistoric version of itself, all raw power and savage instinct and teeth and claws and fury. If you're playing Violet, your Pokémon transforms into its Future Paradox form—a sleek, mechanical, cybernetic evolution of itself, all chrome plating and energy weapons and cold, calculated efficiency.
Every Pokémon. Every single one. With its own unique Ancient form and Future form, each with new types, new abilities, new moves, new stats. The version differences wouldn't just be "you get this exclusive Pokémon and they get that one"—the entire battle mechanic would be different depending on your version. Scarlet players would be running ancient powerhouses. Violet players would be fielding robot armies. Competitive play would be transformed. Team building would have an entirely new dimension. The metagame would be split along version lines in a way that had never been done before.
And the names. God, the names. The one thing about the Paradox Pokémon that Marcus genuinely couldn't defend was the naming convention. "Great Tusk." "Scream Tail." "Iron Treads." "Iron Bundle." They sounded like the titles of rejected metal albums. They sounded like what you'd get if you asked a very tired person to describe Pokémon at three in the morning. "What's that one?" "Uh... it's got a... great tusk." "And that one?" "It... screams? With its tail? Scream Tail." "You need to go to bed." "Iron Bundle."
Give them real names. Cool names. Names that sounded like they belonged to ancient legends or futuristic war machines. Names that rolled off the tongue and stuck in your memory and made you think "yes, that is a Pokémon I want to use."
But no. Crystal hat. Type change. Moving on.
Marcus had been thinking about all of this—the formula, the emptiness, the crystal hats, the missed potential—while scrolling through that comment section on his couch, ramen balanced on his chest, when the earthquake hit.
Sacramento wasn't supposed to get earthquakes. Well, no, that wasn't true—California was all about earthquakes. But Sacramento wasn't supposed to get this earthquake. This earthquake was, in seismological terms, completely unreasonable. The building lurched. The ramen went flying. Marcus's phone launched out of his hand and struck him directly in the forehead with the force of a particularly malicious brick, and the last thing he saw before everything went dark was the YouTube comment section, still open, still scrolling, one final comment burned into his retinas:
"Pokémon peaked at Gen 1, everything since has been garbage. Anyway can't wait for Legends Z-A, already took time off work"
And then the ceiling collapsed.
And then Marcus Chen, age twenty-seven, died.
He became aware of three things simultaneously.
First: he was alive. Or at least, something adjacent to alive. He was conscious. He was thinking. Cogito ergo sum and all that.
Second: he had a headache. A truly spectacular headache, the kind that felt like someone had taken his brain, put it in a blender, set the blender to "pulverize," and then poured the results back into his skull and expected them to reassemble themselves into a functioning organ.
Third: he was sitting behind a desk.
This was concerning, because the last thing he remembered before the ceiling had performed its unscheduled renovation of his apartment was very much not sitting behind a desk. He'd been lying on a couch. Couches and desks were different pieces of furniture. The transition between them should have involved, at minimum, the act of standing up, and he had no memory of doing so.
He opened his eyes.
The room was dimly lit, all dark wood and deep shadows, with the kind of aggressive, oppressive ambiance that suggested whoever had decorated it had very strong feelings about the color black and very weak feelings about natural light. There were no windows. The walls were lined with bookshelves—not the cozy, inviting kind you'd find in a library, but the kind that existed purely to make the room's occupant look important and intimidating, filled with leather-bound volumes that had almost certainly never been read. A Persian—a large, cream-colored, catlike Pokémon—was curled up on a plush cushion in the corner, its gem-studded forehead catching what little light existed in the room and refracting it into tiny, dancing specks across the ceiling.
Wait.
A Persian.
An actual, living, breathing Persian.
Not a plush toy. Not a figurine. Not an image on a screen. A real, physical, three-dimensional Persian, lying in the corner of a real, physical, three-dimensional room, its flanks rising and falling with the slow, steady rhythm of sleep, its tail curled around its body like a furry crescent moon.
Marcus stared at it.
It continued to sleep, blissfully unaware that it was currently serving as the fulcrum upon which one man's entire understanding of reality was pivoting.
He looked down at his hands.
They were not his hands.
Marcus Chen's hands had been the hands of a twenty-seven-year-old man who spent most of his time typing on a keyboard and holding a game controller. They were pale, a little soft, with bitten-down nails and a callus on his right thumb from years of analog stick abuse. These hands were different. These hands were larger, broader, with thick fingers and well-manicured nails. These hands were the hands of a man who had people to do things for him but who was also entirely capable of doing those things himself, violently if necessary. These were hands that had signed death warrants and also probably petted cats. These were hands that conveyed authority and menace in equal measure.
These were, Marcus realized with a dawning horror that spread through his body like ice water through veins, the hands of Giovanni.
He stood up so fast that the chair—a massive, high-backed leather monstrosity that probably cost more than his entire apartment had been worth before the ceiling fell on him—went skidding backward across the floor with a shriek of protest. The Persian in the corner lifted its head, regarded him with the calm, disinterested gaze of a creature that existed in a state of perpetual judgment, and then went back to sleep.
There was a mirror on the wall. A full-length mirror, because of course there was—a man like Giovanni would have a full-length mirror in his office, not out of vanity but out of the pragmatic understanding that a crime lord needed to look the part at all times. Marcus crossed the room in three long strides and stood before it.
Giovanni stared back at him.
The suit. The slicked-back hair. The heavy brow and the sharp jaw and the expression of permanent, low-grade disdain for everything and everyone. The orange suit with the dark shirt underneath, impeccably tailored, radiating the energy of a man who had decided that if he was going to be a criminal, he was going to be the best-dressed criminal.
Marcus raised his right hand. Giovanni in the mirror raised his right hand.
Marcus touched his face. Giovanni in the mirror touched his face.
Marcus opened his mouth and said "What the fuck," and Giovanni in the mirror mouthed the words in perfect synchronization, and the voice that came out was not Marcus Chen's nasal California tenor but Giovanni's deep, resonant baritone, the kind of voice that had been specifically engineered by genetics and life experience to make people shut up and listen.
"What the fuck," he said again, because it bore repeating.
The Persian raised its head again, yawned—revealing a mouth full of teeth that could very easily puncture human skin—and made a soft, questioning "mrrow?" noise.
"I'm fine," Marcus said to the cat. To the Pokémon. To the actual, literal Pokémon that he was now talking to, with his mouth, which was Giovanni's mouth, because he was Giovanni.
He was Giovanni.
He was the leader of Team Rocket.
He was the villain of Pokémon Fire Red.
He sat back down in the chair—slowly this time—and put his head in his hands. Giovanni's head. His head. This was going to take some getting used to.
Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. Think. Process. Contextualize.
He was dead. That part was fairly certain. The ceiling had fallen on him. Ceilings falling on people was generally considered a terminal event. So he was dead, and now he was... here. In the body of Giovanni. In the world of Pokémon Fire Red, assuming the games were sequential and the décor of this office was anything to go by.
Why? How? By what mechanism or cosmic joke or divine intervention had he been plucked from the afterlife—or from the void, or from whatever liminal space dead people occupied—and deposited into the body of a fictional crime lord in a world populated by magical fighting animals?
He didn't know. He might never know. And honestly? Right now, in this moment, staring at his reflection in a mirror while a Persian judged him from the corner of the room?
He didn't particularly care.
Because Marcus Chen, Pokémon fan, Pokémon critic, Pokémon enthusiast who had spent twenty years of his life immersed in this franchise in every conceivable way except actually being in it, was now in it. He was in the world of Pokémon. He was standing in a room with a real Persian. Outside this building, whatever building this was, there were real Pokémon. Real Pidgeys and Rattatas and Caterpies and Bulbasaurs and Charizards and everything else. A whole world of them. A world he'd been dreaming about since he was seven years old and first picked up a Game Boy Color.
And he was Giovanni.
Not just any character. Not a random trainer, not a faceless NPC, not even the player character. He was the boss. The villain. The leader of the most iconic criminal organization in Pokémon history. A man with resources, with influence, with an army of loyal grunts, with connections spanning the entire Kanto region.
A man who, in the original games, lost to a ten-year-old and disbanded his entire criminal empire out of what could only be described as profound embarrassment.
Marcus was not going to let that happen.
A grin spread across Giovanni's face—his face—slow and wide and full of a kind of manic energy that the original Giovanni had probably never experienced, because the original Giovanni had never been a Pokémon fan from another dimension who suddenly found himself in the driver's seat of his favorite franchise's most famous villain with full knowledge of every game, every mechanic, every legendary Pokémon, every hidden item, every secret, every exploit, and every single thing that was going to happen in this world's future.
"Okay," he said aloud. The Persian's ears twitched. "Okay. Let's think about this."
He leaned back in the chair and steepled his fingers. It felt natural. It felt right. Giovanni was a finger-steeper. Marcus had never steepled his fingers in his life, but Giovanni's body knew the motion like muscle memory, and it turned out that steepling your fingers while sitting behind a massive desk in a dimly lit office was one of the most satisfying physical sensations available to the human body. He understood now why villains did it. It was incredible.
"First things first," he muttered. "What do I know?"
He knew he was Giovanni. He knew this was the world of Pokémon Fire Red—or at the very least, the Kanto region during the time period of Fire Red. He knew he was the leader of Team Rocket. He knew he was also, presumably, the Viridian City Gym Leader, though that was a secret that most people in this world weren't supposed to know.
He knew that at some point in the near future—or perhaps it was already happening—a young trainer was going to leave Pallet Town, receive a starter Pokémon from Professor Oak, and begin a journey that would ultimately lead them to systematically dismantle everything Giovanni had built.
He knew the future. Not just the immediate future of Kanto, but the future of the entire Pokémon world. He knew about Johto, about Hoenn, about Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, Alola, Galar, Paldea. He knew about every evil team, every legendary Pokémon, every world-ending crisis, every game mechanic.
He knew about Mega Evolution.
He knew about Z-Moves.
He knew about Dynamaxing.
He knew about everything.
And he was the leader of a criminal organization with apparently unlimited resources and a network that spanned at least one entire region.
The grin widened.
"Persian," he said.
The Pokémon opened one eye.
"We have work to do."
The first order of business was taking stock.
Marcus—Giovanni—Marcus-as-Giovanni, he'd figure out the nomenclature later—pulled open the desk drawers and began rifling through them with the focused intensity of a man who had just been handed the keys to a kingdom and needed to figure out how the plumbing worked before the toilets backed up.
Papers. So many papers. Giovanni was, apparently, a meticulous record-keeper, which made sense for a man running both a legitimate gym and an illegitimate criminal syndicate. There were financial reports, personnel files, operational memos, supply chain documents, and what appeared to be a surprisingly well-organized filing system for tracking stolen Pokémon.
Marcus paused on that last one. Right. Stolen Pokémon. Team Rocket stole Pokémon. That was kind of their whole thing. Along with general thuggery, extortion, illegal experimentation, and whatever was going on at Pokémon Tower with the dead Marowak.
He was the bad guy.
He sat with that for a moment. Let it settle. Felt the weight of it.
He was the bad guy. He led an organization that stole people's Pokémon—their partners, their friends, their family. He ran operations that caused suffering and fear. He was, in the moral framework of this world, unambiguously a villain.
And he was going to stay one.
Not because he wanted to be evil. Not because he relished the thought of causing harm. But because Giovanni suddenly becoming a good guy would raise approximately ten thousand questions that he had absolutely no interest in answering. If the leader of Team Rocket woke up one morning and announced that he'd had a change of heart and was disbanding the organization and donating all their ill-gotten gains to charity, every single person in the Kanto underworld—and the legitimate world, for that matter—would either think he'd lost his mind, been replaced by a Ditto, or was running some kind of elaborate con. Suspicion would fall on him from every direction. His own people would turn on him. The power vacuum would be catastrophic. Other criminal elements would move in. It would be chaos.
No. He was Giovanni. He was the boss. He ran Team Rocket. That was the reality of his situation, and he was going to work within it.
But he was going to be a better Giovanni. A smarter Giovanni. A Giovanni who didn't lose to children because he made idiotic tactical decisions. A Giovanni who actually used the vast resources at his disposal instead of sitting in his office waiting for a ten-year-old to kick down his door. A Giovanni who planned ahead, who thought strategically, who understood that in a world full of literal gods and reality-warping monsters, the man who controlled access to those beings controlled everything.
He was going to be the greatest criminal mastermind the Pokémon world had ever seen.
But first, he needed to figure out what his current team looked like.
He reached for his belt—Giovanni's belt, which sat heavy on his waist with the familiar weight of Poké Balls—and felt a jolt of electricity run through him. Not literal electricity, though in this world, that was also a possibility. An emotional jolt. A thrill. Because those were Poké Balls. Real Poké Balls. With real Pokémon inside them. His Pokémon. Giovanni's Pokémon. His Pokémon.
He unclipped the first one and held it in his hand. It was smaller than he'd expected—about the size of a billiard ball, smooth and warm to the touch, with the distinctive red-and-white coloring that was as iconic as any symbol in gaming history. He could feel something inside it, a subtle vibration, a presence, a life.
He pressed the button.
The ball opened with a flash of white light and a sound that Marcus had heard ten thousand times through speakers and headphones but never, until this moment, with his actual ears—a bright, crystalline ping that seemed to resonate in his chest, followed by the materialization of a Pokémon on the floor in front of him.
Persian.
Wait, no. He looked at the corner. The other Persian was still there, still sleeping, still radiating feline indifference. This was a second Persian. This was the Persian from his team—Giovanni's team—the one he used in battle.
The Pokémon stretched luxuriantly, arching its back with the practiced elegance of a creature that had elevated laziness to an art form, and then fixed Marcus with a look of such intense, penetrating intelligence that he actually took a step back. This wasn't like the sleeping Persian in the corner. This one had eyes that saw. Eyes that evaluated. Eyes that looked at you and made a series of rapid calculations about whether you were worth its time and, if not, how quickly it could remove you from its presence.
"Hey," Marcus said softly. "Hey, buddy."
The Persian's ears tilted forward. It made a low, rumbling sound—not quite a purr, not quite a growl, something in between that conveyed a cautious willingness to engage.
Marcus knelt down—Giovanni's knees protesting slightly; the man was not young—and extended his hand, palm up, the way you'd approach any unfamiliar cat. The Persian regarded the hand with the air of a sommelier being presented with a wine that might or might not be worthy of its palate. Then, slowly, deliberately, it pressed its forehead into Marcus's palm.
The fur was incredible. Soft beyond anything he'd ever touched, warm and alive and subtly vibrating with that low, resonant almost-purr. He could feel the hard, smooth surface of the gem on its forehead against his fingers, and beneath the fur, the powerful musculature of a predator that could move with devastating speed and precision.
"You're gorgeous," Marcus breathed, and meant it with every fiber of his being.
Persian purred. Actually purred this time, deep and loud and resonant, like a motorcycle engine made of velvet.
He spent a full five minutes just petting the Persian, because he was a human being who had been transported into a world of magical creatures and he was not going to let this moment pass without fully appreciating it. Then, reluctantly, he returned it to its ball and checked the rest of his team.
The roster was roughly what he'd expected for this point in the game. Persian, of course. A Beedrill—which surprised him until he remembered that Giovanni's canonical team in various iterations sometimes included unexpected choices, and also that Beedrill was actually kind of sick when you weren't looking at it through the lens of competitive viability spreadsheets. A Rhyhorn. A Nidoking. A Kangaskhan. And finally, a Nidoqueen.
Ground-types. Lots of Ground-types. Giovanni loved his Ground-types. And Marcus could respect that—Ground was a solid type, no pun intended, with good offensive coverage and only a handful of weaknesses. But it was also predictable. Anyone who knew they were fighting Giovanni knew they were fighting Ground-types, which meant anyone with a Grass-type, a Water-type, or an Ice-type could walk in and clean house.
Which was exactly what happened in the games. A kid with a Blastoise could solo Giovanni's entire team without breaking a sweat. It was embarrassing.
Marcus sat back down at the desk, pulled out a blank piece of paper from one of the drawers, and began writing.
IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES, he wrote at the top, in Giovanni's precise, angular handwriting. Then:
1. Better team composition. Current team is functional but predictable. Need coverage. Need diversity. Need Pokémon that will make people regret challenging me.
2. Dratini from the Game Corner. This is non-negotiable. I am getting a Dragonite. Dragonite is amazing. Dragonite is a flying orange dragon that can also learn Thunderbolt and Surf and Fire Blast and basically any move in the game. I WILL have a Dragonite.
3. Mega Stones.
He underlined that last one three times.
Mega Stones. The items that, in the Kalos region many years from now, would be discovered to enable a temporary evolution beyond evolution—a transformation that pushed Pokémon to the absolute limits of their power. In the games, they were a Generation Six mechanic, introduced and then promptly abandoned like every other good idea Game Freak had ever had. But in this world—in a world where these things were real, where the stones presumably existed somewhere in the ground right now, regardless of whether anyone had discovered them yet—they were the single most powerful advantage he could possibly acquire.
Imagine. Mega Kangaskhan. Mega Beedrill. Mega anything. While every other trainer in Kanto was running around with their regular, non-Mega Pokémon, Giovanni would be fielding a team of powerhouses operating at a level that wouldn't be publicly known about for decades.
He added to the list:
4. Z-Crystals. Find them. Don't care how long it takes. Z-Moves are ridiculous and overpowered and I want them.
5. Dynamax energy. Somehow. Figure out how Dynamaxing works and replicate it outside of Galar. This might be impossible. Don't care. Try anyway.
6. Legendary Pokémon.
He paused on that one. Stared at it. Felt the weight of it.
Legendary Pokémon. The gods of this world. Mewtwo was already part of Giovanni's story—Team Rocket had created it, or was in the process of creating it, from Mew's DNA on Cinnabar Island. But beyond Mewtwo, there were dozens of legendaries spread across the world. Articuno in the Seafoam Islands. Zapdos in the Power Plant. Moltres on Victory Road. And beyond Kanto—Lugia and Ho-Oh in Johto, the Weather Trio in Hoenn, the Creation Trio in Sinnoh, forces of nature and time and space and reality itself, all out there, all theoretically catchable by a man with the right resources, the right knowledge, and the right Poké Balls.
He was the leader of Team Rocket. He had a criminal empire at his fingertips. If he was going to be the villain, he might as well be the best villain. Not the villain who lost to a child. Not the villain who gave up and walked away. The villain who controlled legendary Pokémon. The villain who had Mega Evolution before anyone else. The villain who was so far ahead of everyone else that by the time they figured out what he'd done, it would be far, far too late.
He wrote:
7. Be a better boss. Treat the grunts better. Pay them more. Give them actual training. Stop sending them on suicide missions against ten-year-olds. Invest in the organization. Make Team Rocket the most efficient, most feared, and most competent criminal syndicate this world has ever seen.
He looked at the list. It was ambitious. It was insane. It was the kind of plan that could only be conceived by someone who had played these games for twenty years and knew exactly where every piece on the board was going to be before anyone else even realized the game had started.
It was perfect.
"Persian," he called to the sleeping one in the corner. "Wake up. I need to go to the Celadon Game Corner."
Persian opened one eye, gave him a look that clearly communicated "I was sleeping," and then, with the exaggerated reluctance of a cat being asked to do literally anything, rose to its feet, stretched, and padded over to him.
Marcus scratched it behind the ears. It purred.
"We're going to get a Dratini," he told it. "And then we're going to take over the world."
Persian purred louder.
It did not seem particularly concerned about the world-domination part. It was a cat. Cats understood ambition.
The Celadon Game Corner was exactly as Marcus remembered it from the games, except more.
More in every dimension. More noise—the cacophony of slot machines ringing and chiming and occasionally erupting in cascading avalanches of coins that sounded like someone was emptying a dump truck full of wind chimes. More lights—neon and fluorescent and LED, blazing in every color of the spectrum, turning the interior into a seizure-inducing wonderland of visual excess. More people—trainers and tourists and locals and Team Rocket operatives who were definitely not supposed to be obviously Team Rocket operatives but were wearing the uniform anyway because subtlety had never been the organization's strong suit.
And the women.
Marcus stopped dead in the doorway.
The women in this world were...
He blinked. Looked again. Blinked harder.
Okay, so. Here was the thing. He'd noticed something when he'd walked through Celadon City to get here. Something that his brain had been trying very hard to process and had been, thus far, entirely unsuccessful at. Something that defied not just the aesthetic conventions of the Pokémon franchise but also, quite possibly, the laws of physics as he understood them.
Every woman he'd seen—every single one—was built like a Renaissance painting that had been fed through an algorithm specifically designed to maximize the concept of thickness. Not in a subtle way. Not in a "oh, she's curvy" way. In a "how is she standing up" way. In a "the structural engineering required to support that figure should be studied by architects" way. In a way that was so extreme, so exaggerated, so aggressively, mind-bogglingly, reality-defyingly pronounced that Marcus's brain had simply refused to engage with it, the way a computer crashes when asked to divide by zero.
The woman behind the prize counter at the Game Corner was no exception.
She was wearing the standard Game Corner uniform—a fitted vest over a white blouse, with a short skirt—and the uniform was losing the war. It had been designed, presumably, for a person of average proportions. It had not been designed for her. The vest strained against a chest that could only be described in terms usually reserved for astronomical phenomena—vast, gravitationally significant, existing on a scale that made the word "busty" feel like calling the ocean "damp." Below that, the skirt clung to hips and thighs that were... that were...
Marcus's brain attempted to formulate a coherent thought about her hips and thighs, encountered a buffer overflow error, and defaulted to its safe mode, which was "pretend you didn't notice and focus on the task at hand."
He walked up to the counter.
"I need a Dratini," he said, in Giovanni's authoritative baritone, looking directly at the prize list posted behind her and absolutely nowhere else.
The woman—her nametag said "Aria"—looked up at him. Her eyes went wide. Her cheeks flushed a deep, rosy pink. Her lips—full, glossy, the kind of lips that existed in a state of permanent, effortless sensuality—parted in a soft gasp.
"B-Boss!" she stammered. "Sir! Mr. Giovanni! I—we didn't know you were coming! I would have—I mean, we would have—is there anything—can I—"
She was flustered. Deeply, completely, almost catastrophically flustered. Her hands were fidgeting with the hem of her vest, which was doing interesting structural things to the fabric across her chest, and her thighs—those impossible, physics-defying thighs, each one thicker than Marcus's waist had been in his previous life—were pressing together in a way that suggested her body was having a reaction to his presence that went somewhat beyond professional respect.
Marcus didn't notice any of this. His eyes were on the prize list.
"Dratini," he repeated. "How many coins?"
Aria swallowed. The motion traveled down her throat and drew attention to her collarbones, which were elegant and fine-boned, a delicate contrast to the absolute abundance that existed below them. "F-five thousand, eight hundred coins, sir. But—but you don't have to pay, sir, you own the Game Corner, you can just—"
"Right." Marcus nodded. He'd forgotten that part. He owned the Game Corner. It was a Team Rocket front. He could literally just take whatever he wanted. "Right, yes. I own this. Get me the Dratini."
"Yes, sir! Right away, sir! Absolutely, sir!"
Aria turned to retrieve the Poké Ball from the prize vault behind her, and the act of turning presented Marcus with a view that, had he been paying attention, would have required immediate medical intervention. Her skirt—already fighting a losing battle against her hips—rode up approximately two inches as she moved, revealing thighs that were smooth and impossibly thick, the kind of thighs that could crack walnuts, or possibly watermelons, or possibly the foundations of small buildings. Her rear was a thing of architectural marvel, projecting outward and upward with a defiant disregard for gravity that suggested it existed in a slightly different dimensional plane where the rules of physics were more of a suggestion than a law. It was round. It was full. It was immense. It was the kind of rear that, were it a celestial body, would have its own Wikipedia page and several ongoing scientific studies dedicated to understanding its gravitational field.
Marcus was looking at the slot machines, wondering if the Game Corner generated enough legitimate revenue to justify its existence as a front or if it was purely a money-laundering operation.
Aria returned with the Poké Ball, holding it in both hands like a sacred offering, her chest heaving slightly from the exertion of bending down to retrieve it from a low shelf—an action that had done extraordinary things to her blouse, things that the blouse's designer could never have anticipated and would probably have wept over.
"Here you are, sir," she said, breathlessly, extending the ball toward him. Her fingers brushed against his as he took it, and she made a small, involuntary sound—not quite a gasp, not quite a whimper, something in between that lived in a register designed to short-circuit the rational mind.
"Thanks," Marcus said, clipping the ball to his belt. "Good work. Keep the place running."
He turned and walked away.
Behind him, Aria stood perfectly still for approximately four seconds, the Poké Ball's absence leaving her hands empty and slightly trembling, her face the color of a Cheri Berry, her thighs pressed together so tightly that the friction could have started a fire, before she exhaled a long, shuddering breath and fanned herself with a stack of prize redemption forms.
The other Game Corner employee—another woman of equally impossible proportions, with dark hair piled atop her head and a uniform that appeared to be engaged in active negotiations with her body about how much surface area it was responsible for covering—sidled up to her.
"Did you talk to him?" she whispered, her eyes wide, her own considerable chest heaving with vicarious excitement.
"He touched my hand," Aria whispered back, her voice cracking on the last word.
They both made a sound that can only be transcribed as "eeeeeeeeee."
Marcus, entirely oblivious to the fact that he had just caused two women to experience what could generously be described as a religious crisis, was walking through Celadon City with a Dratini on his belt and a plan in his head.
The Dratini was step one. A baby step. A single piece on a much larger board. But it was an important piece, because Dratini evolved into Dragonair, which evolved into Dragonite, which was a six-foot-tall orange dragon with the stats of a demigod and the movepool of a Swiss Army knife. Dragonite could learn Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Fire Blast, Surf, Earthquake, Outrage, Dragon Dance, Extreme Speed, and approximately forty-seven other moves that made it one of the most versatile and dangerous Pokémon in existence. Once he had a fully trained Dragonite on his team, the number of people in Kanto who could challenge him and survive would drop to single digits.
But training took time. And Marcus had more pressing concerns.
He pulled out his phone—not a phone, he reminded himself; it was some kind of communicator device that Giovanni carried, sleeker than anything that should exist in the Kanto region's apparent technological era, probably custom-built by Team Rocket's R&D division—and scrolled through his contacts.
There were a lot of contacts. Giovanni knew people. Giovanni knew everyone. Crime lords, gym leaders, politicians, business owners, black market dealers, Pokémon breeders, researchers, mercenaries, informants, and approximately two hundred people listed only by code names that Marcus would need to decipher at some point.
He found the one he was looking for: BLAINE.
Blaine. The Cinnabar Island Gym Leader. Fire-type specialist. Riddle enthusiast. And, most importantly, the man who ran the Pokémon Lab on Cinnabar Island, which was where Team Rocket's Mewtwo project was based.
Marcus needed to check on that project. Not to accelerate it—Mewtwo was going to happen regardless, and frankly, the creation of the world's most powerful Psychic-type Pokémon was a net positive for his plans—but to make sure it was being handled correctly. In the games, Mewtwo had escaped, gone berserk, and ended up sitting in Cerulean Cave being angry at everything. Marcus wanted a Mewtwo that was loyal. Or at least, not actively trying to destroy him.
But that was a project for later. Right now, he had a more immediate destination in mind.
He turned down a side street, away from the Game Corner's neon glow, and headed for the department store. He needed supplies. Poké Balls—a lot of them, the best quality available. Potions, Revives, Full Restores. TMs, if the department store stocked them. And information. He needed to know what was happening in the world right now, what the current state of affairs was, and most importantly, whether a certain kid had left Pallet Town yet.
The streets of Celadon City were lively, bustling with trainers and shoppers and Pokémon of every conceivable shape and size. A Growlithe trotted past him on the sidewalk, its trainer—a young woman in shorts and a tank top whose body was doing things that Marcus's peripheral vision registered and his conscious mind immediately deleted—jogging to keep up. A Machoke carried crates of produce into a grocery store, its four arms making the work trivially easy. A pair of Butterfree drifted overhead, their wings catching the sunlight and scattering it into prismatic fragments.
It was beautiful.
Not in the way a video game was beautiful, with its rendered textures and carefully designed environments. Beautiful in the way that life was beautiful—messy, chaotic, imperfect, real. The Growlithe's fur was slightly matted on one side where it had been lying down. The Machoke had a small scar on its lower left arm. The Butterfree wobbled slightly in the wind, correcting their flight paths with tiny, unconscious adjustments.
Marcus felt a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with Giovanni's physiology and everything to do with the fact that he was standing in the middle of a world he'd loved his entire life, and it was real, and he was part of it, and no amount of cynicism or critical analysis or frustration with Game Freak's design choices could diminish the sheer, overwhelming, staggering wonder of that.
He was in the world of Pokémon.
He had a Dratini.
He was going to catch legendaries and collect Mega Stones and build an empire that would make every other villain team in history look like a group of disorganized children playing pretend.
He was going to be magnificent.
The Celadon Department Store was six stories of organized commerce, each floor dedicated to a different category of goods. Marcus took the elevator to the top floor, where the vending machines were, bought a Fresh Water, a Soda Pop, and a Lemonade—because he was thirsty and also because Giovanni's body apparently ran on caffeine and spite—and then worked his way down, floor by floor, buying everything he needed.
On the third floor, he found the TM section and spent what would have been an obscene amount of money for anyone who wasn't a crime lord on a shopping spree. TMs in this world weren't the infinitely reusable discs of later generations—they were single-use, which meant each one was an investment. He bought Earthquake, Ice Beam, Thunderbolt, Flamethrower, Psychic, and Shadow Ball. Coverage. His team was going to have coverage.
On the second floor, he stocked up on Ultra Balls, Great Balls, and a small mountain of regular Poké Balls. He also purchased every evolution stone available—Fire Stones, Water Stones, Thunder Stones, Leaf Stones, and Moon Stones. Not because he needed them immediately, but because controlling the supply of evolution stones was the kind of strategic thinking that a competent crime lord should be doing.
On the first floor, he bought medical supplies in bulk. Full Restores. Max Revives. Ethers and Elixirs. If he was going to be training Pokémon seriously—and he was, oh, he was—he needed the resources to keep them healthy and fighting.
He was on his way out, arms laden with shopping bags (Giovanni did not use shopping bags; Giovanni had people for this, but Marcus had forgotten to bring any people and was now awkwardly carrying six bags like a suburban mom after a Target run), when he nearly walked directly into someone.
"Oh! Excuse me, I'm so—Boss!"
The woman who had nearly collided with him was a Team Rocket grunt. Or rather, she was wearing the Team Rocket uniform—the black outfit with the red R emblazoned across the chest—but "grunt" seemed like an inadequate descriptor for the person standing in front of him.
She was tall. Nearly as tall as Giovanni, who was not a small man. Her uniform was... well, it was doing its best. The Team Rocket uniform had been designed with a certain aesthetic in mind—sleek, intimidating, functional. On this woman, it was achieving approximately one-third of those goals (sleek, arguably) while catastrophically failing at the other two, because it was very difficult to look intimidating when your uniform appeared to be in a state of constant, desperate negotiation with your body, and it was very difficult to be functional when every functional movement threatened to cause a structural failure in the fabric.
Her chest was absurd. There was no other word for it. Absurd. The kind of chest that made you question whether the universe had a quality control department and, if so, whether they had been on vacation when this woman was being designed. The black fabric of her uniform stretched across it like a tarp over a suspension bridge, every breath creating subtle, hypnotic shifts in the tension of the material. The red R of Team Rocket's logo was warped and distorted by the sheer topographical complexity of the surface it was printed on, the letter looking less like a corporate insignia and more like a cartographic symbol on a relief map of the Himalayas.
Below the R, the uniform tapered to a waist that was, by comparison, almost absurdly narrow—a dramatic, swooping curve inward that created a silhouette resembling an hourglass that had been designed by someone who thought regular hourglasses didn't go far enough. And below that, the uniform flared out again over hips that were...
Marcus's brain performed its now-familiar emergency shutdown procedure. Error 404: rational thought not found. Rebooting in safe mode. Focusing on operational concerns.
"What's your name?" he asked, looking at a point approximately six inches to the left of her head.
"M-Mira, sir! Agent Mira! I'm stationed here in Celadon, sir, I run logistics for the—for the Game Corner supply chain, sir." She was doing the thing. The thing that Aria had done. The flushing, the stammering, the slight trembling, the thigh-pressing. What was with the women in this organization? Was Giovanni some kind of... was he attractive to them?
Marcus glanced at his reflection in the department store's glass door. Giovanni stared back at him. Broad-shouldered, sharp-jawed, immaculately dressed, radiating an aura of power and authority that was practically visible.
Oh. Huh. Yeah, okay, he could see it. Giovanni was—objectively speaking—a handsome man. In a rugged, dangerous, "I could have you killed but I'd rather take you to dinner" kind of way. And he was the boss. Power was attractive. Authority was attractive. And Giovanni had both in spades.
"Right. Mira. Good." He shifted the shopping bags in his arms. "Help me carry these."
"YES, SIR!" Mira snapped to attention with such enthusiasm that her chest performed a dramatic oscillation that, had Marcus been watching—which he was not, because he was busy handing her shopping bags—would have been genuinely mesmerizing. She took four of the six bags from him with an eagerness that bordered on religious fervor.
"Where are these going, sir?"
"Back to headquarters. I have plans to make."
"Plans, sir?"
"Big plans. World-changing plans. Plans that are going to make Team Rocket the most powerful organization on this planet." He started walking. Mira fell into step beside him, her considerable hips swaying with each stride in a way that caused the shopping bags she was carrying to swing like pendulums. "But first, I need to train a Dratini."
"A Dratini, sir?" Her eyes lit up. "Oh, Dratini are beautiful. I love Dragon-types. When I was little, I wanted to be a Dragon-type specialist, but then I—well, life happened, and I ended up here, and—" She stopped, suddenly self-conscious. "Sorry, sir. You don't want to hear about my—"
"No, keep going," Marcus said. He meant it. One of the items on his priority list was being a better boss. And being a better boss meant actually giving a damn about the people who worked for him. Giovanni—the original Giovanni—had treated his grunts like disposable pawns. Marcus was not going to do that. Happy, well-trained, motivated employees were more productive than terrified, expendable ones. This was basic management.
Mira stared at him for a moment, her mouth slightly open—her full, glistening, utterly ridiculous mouth—and then a smile broke across her face like sunrise over the ocean, wide and warm and so genuine that it made Marcus feel something he couldn't quite identify.
"Really? You want to hear about it?"
"I asked, didn't I?"
She beamed. She actually beamed. And then she started talking, and Marcus listened, and they walked through Celadon City together—the crime lord and the grunt, carrying shopping bags full of TMs and Poké Balls and evolution stones—while the sun set over the Kanto region in shades of gold and amber and rose.
Back at the headquarters—a building that was disguised as a legitimate business but was very obviously a criminal hideout to anyone who looked at it for more than thirty seconds—Marcus retreated to his office, locked the door, released all of his Pokémon, and got to work.
First: the Dratini.
He released it from its ball and it materialized on the floor in a flash of light—a small, serpentine creature about three feet long, with smooth blue scales, a white belly, and a tiny horn on its forehead. It looked up at him with large, dark, impossibly endearing eyes and made a soft, musical sound that was somewhere between a coo and a chirp.
"Oh my god," Marcus whispered. "You're the cutest thing I've ever seen."
Giovanni's baritone voice saying those words with genuine, unironic emotion was a sound that the universe had not been prepared for. The Dratini, however, seemed to appreciate the sentiment, because it slithered forward and nuzzled against his leg with a warmth and trust that made his chest ache.
He knelt down and stroked its scales. They were cool and smooth, like polished gemstones, and the Dratini trilled happily under his touch.
"I'm going to train you," he told it. "I'm going to make you the strongest Dragonite this world has ever seen. And I'm going to do it right. No shortcuts. No cruelty. Just hard work and patience and a lot of Rare Candies."
He paused.
"Actually, we might use some shortcuts. I'm a crime lord. Shortcuts are kind of my thing."
The Dratini chirped agreeably.
Persian—the battle Persian, not the office Persian (Marcus was going to need to give them different names at some point)—watched the newcomer with a mixture of curiosity and territorial suspicion. The Beedrill, released from its ball, hovered in the air near the ceiling, its compound eyes fixed on the Dratini with insectoid intensity. The Rhyhorn stood in the corner, looking confused, as Rhyhorns generally did. Nidoking and Nidoqueen stood together, a matched pair of purple royalty, watching the proceedings with regal calm. The Kangaskhan shuffled its feet and made motherly cooing noises at the Dratini, because Kangaskhan was genetically incapable of not mothering every small creature it encountered.
"Team meeting," Marcus announced, standing up. Six pairs of eyes (and one pair of compound eyes) turned to him. "Things are going to change around here. We're going to train harder. We're going to get stronger. We're going to learn new moves and develop new strategies and become the most dangerous team in this entire region."
He looked at each of them in turn.
"Persian. You're fast and you're clever and you're going to learn to be even faster and cleverer. We're working on your coverage moves. I want you hitting things that Normal-type moves can't touch."
Persian flicked its tail imperiously.
"Beedrill. You're underestimated by everyone. That's going to be our advantage. We're going to make you a glass cannon that hits so hard, so fast, that nobody gets a chance to exploit your weaknesses."
Beedrill buzzed its wings in what Marcus chose to interpret as enthusiasm.
"Rhyhorn. You're going to evolve. Soon. And then you're going to learn Earthquake and become a walking natural disaster."
Rhyhorn grunted. It was unclear whether this was agreement or indigestion.
"Nidoking, Nidoqueen. You two are my backbone. Versatile, powerful, reliable. We're expanding your movepools. Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Flamethrower—you're learning everything."
The royal pair nodded in unison.
"Kangaskhan. You're already terrifying. We're going to make you more terrifying. And someday—someday soon, if I have anything to say about it—we're going to find a Mega Stone, and you're going to become a nightmare that makes grown trainers weep."
Kangaskhan tilted its head, not understanding the specifics but appreciating the tone.
"And Dratini." He looked down at the little dragon, still nuzzling against his leg. "You're going to be my ace. My secret weapon. My Dragonite. It's going to take time, and it's going to take work, but when we're done, you're going to be legendary."
Dratini chirped.
Marcus grinned. Giovanni's face was made for grinning like this—broad and sharp and full of dangerous promise.
"Alright, team. Let's get to work."
Over the next three hours, Marcus did something that the original Giovanni had never, to the best of his knowledge, actually done: he trained.
Not in the abstract, delegated, "have my subordinates handle it" way that a crime lord might typically approach Pokémon training. Actually trained. Personally. Hands-on. Down in the basement training facility of the headquarters—a cavernous space equipped with reinforcement-reinforced walls, padded floors, target dummies, obstacle courses, and a surprisingly well-stocked move tutoring station—he worked with each of his Pokémon individually.
Persian drilled speed and evasion, weaving through obstacle courses at progressively higher speeds until its movements were almost too fast to track, a cream-colored blur with glinting red eyes. They worked on Power Gem, refining the technique until the gem on Persian's forehead could fire concentrated beams of jewel-bright energy with pinpoint accuracy.
Beedrill practiced Twineedle and Poison Jab against reinforced target dummies, its stingers moving so fast they hummed like tuning forks. Marcus timed each attack sequence, pushing for faster and faster execution. Beedrill was not strong in conventional terms—its defenses were paper-thin and its HP pool was laughably shallow. But it was fast, and it hit harder than people expected, and in a world where most trainers had never fought a seriously trained Beedrill, that element of surprise was worth its weight in gold.
Rhyhorn charged into walls. Repeatedly. With what appeared to be genuine enjoyment. Marcus let it do this—it was a Rhyhorn; charging into things was its primary source of enrichment—while also working on its Rock Blast technique, which needed refinement.
Nidoking and Nidoqueen sparred against each other, their massive bodies colliding with impacts that shook the floor and rattled the ceiling, while Marcus called out instructions and adjustments. They were already well-trained—Giovanni's original training had been competent, if uninspired—but Marcus could see room for improvement everywhere. Nidoking's Earth Power was devastating but slow to charge. Nidoqueen's defense was formidable but she over-committed to blocks. They needed to balance each other, cover each other's weaknesses, fight as a coordinated unit.
Kangaskhan punched a reinforced heavy bag so hard it broke off its chain and embedded itself in the far wall. Marcus stared at the crater, looked at Kangaskhan, looked back at the crater, and made a mental note to double Kangaskhan's food rations, because a Pokémon that could do that deserved all the food it wanted.
And Dratini...
Dratini was a baby. A literal baby Pokémon, small and young and untested. But Marcus could feel its potential the way you could feel static electricity in the air before a thunderstorm—a crackling, buzzing promise of power waiting to be unleashed. He started simple: basic movement drills, small-scale use of Dragon Rage, learning to wrap around targets with increasing pressure and control. The little dragon was eager, almost desperate to please, throwing itself into every exercise with an enthusiasm that made Marcus's heart swell.
"You're going to be incredible," he told it, during a rest break. Dratini had wrapped itself around his forearm and was purring—actually purring, a low, vibrating hum that resonated through his bones. "You're going to be the strongest Dragonite anyone's ever seen."
Dratini chirped and nuzzled deeper into the crook of his elbow.
Marcus scratched the tiny horn on its head, felt the cool smoothness of its scales under his fingers, and marveled—again, for the hundredth time, for the thousandth time—at the sheer, impossible reality of what was happening to him. He was training a Dratini. A real, living, breathing Dratini, that trusted him, that liked him, that was looking up at him with those big dark eyes full of absolute faith.
He was going to be the best trainer this world had ever seen.
And also the worst villain.
The best worst villain.
The greatest leader Team Rocket had ever had.
A knock on the training room door interrupted his reverie.
"Come in," he called.
The door opened and a woman walked in. Another Team Rocket operative, this one apparently in a position of some authority, judging by the slightly more elaborate version of the standard uniform she wore—a longer coat, higher boots, and a belt loaded with Poké Balls.
And she was—
Marcus's brain began its emergency shutdown procedure again, but this time, it was forced to process at least some of the visual information, because she was standing directly in front of him and looking at him expectantly and it would have been rude not to make eye contact.
She was beautiful. That was the first and most undeniable fact. Beautiful in a way that was aggressive, almost confrontational—high cheekbones, sharp eyes, lips curved in a permanent slight smirk that suggested she knew something you didn't and was enjoying the information asymmetry. Her hair was a deep, dark purple—natural or dyed, impossible to tell in a world where people routinely had blue and green hair—pulled back in a high ponytail that cascaded down her back like a waterfall of ink.
And her body was...
Look. Marcus was trying very hard not to notice. He was trying incredibly hard. He was deploying every ounce of willpower that Giovanni's considerable frame could muster to focus on her face, her eyes, her words, and not on the frankly unconscionable situation happening below her neckline.
Her uniform coat was buttoned—theoretically. In practice, it was buttoned in the middle but straining to the point of material failure at both the top and the bottom, because the dimensions it was being asked to accommodate at both ends were simply beyond the scope of what the garment had been engineered to contain. The top two buttons had given up, leaving the coat open from the collar to approximately mid-sternum, revealing the black undershirt beneath and the sheer, gravitationally improbable volume that the undershirt was tasked with constraining. Each breast was—Marcus's brain attempted to find an appropriate comparison, failed, attempted again, failed again, and finally settled on—approximately the size and shape of a prize-winning honeydew melon, except softer, rounder, and possessing a subtle, hypnotic quality of movement that suggested they existed in a slightly different temporal reference frame than the rest of the universe, reacting to her movements with a fraction of a second's delay, a gentle, rolling inertia that...
Marcus's eyes snapped to her face. Her face. He was looking at her face.
"Report," he said, his voice impressively steady for a man whose peripheral vision was currently being assaulted.
"Sir." She snapped a crisp salute, which did things. Things. "Executive Domino reporting. We have updates from the Silph Co. operation, the Lavender Town operation, and the Cerulean Cave survey team."
Domino. He knew that name. She was a character from the movies—one of Giovanni's most trusted agents, known as "The Black Tulip." Intelligent, ruthless, competent, loyal. Exactly the kind of operative he needed.
"Go ahead," he said, settling into a chair and folding his arms across his chest. Giovanni's body language came naturally—the pose of a man who was in charge and knew it, who expected information to be delivered to him promptly and precisely, and who would respond to failure with consequences.
Domino delivered her report with crisp efficiency, detailing the progress of various Team Rocket operations across Kanto. The Silph Co. infiltration was proceeding on schedule. The Lavender Town operation—Marcus felt a twinge of discomfort at this one, knowing it involved the Pokémon Tower and the whole dead Marowak situation—was encountering some civilian resistance but was manageable. The Cerulean Cave survey team had mapped approximately sixty percent of the cave system and confirmed the presence of unusually powerful wild Pokémon, including what preliminary scans suggested might be an extremely high-level psychic signature.
Mewtwo. That was Mewtwo. Or would be Mewtwo, eventually.
"Good," Marcus said. "Anything else?"
Domino hesitated. Just for a moment—barely a fraction of a second. But Marcus, with Giovanni's trained eye for reading people, caught it.
"What is it?"
"Sir, there are... reports from Pallet Town." She pulled a tablet—some kind of Rocket-tech device—from her coat, and the act of reaching into her coat caused a shift in the fabric's stress distribution that Marcus's peripheral vision detected and his conscious mind aggressively purged from his working memory. "Professor Oak has apparently given starter Pokémon to two young trainers. A boy named Red and a boy named Blue."
Marcus's stomach dropped.
Red.
The protagonist. The player character. The ten-year-old world-beater. The kid who was going to tear through Team Rocket like tissue paper, defeat Giovanni at every turn, become the Pokémon League Champion, and ultimately bring about the dissolution of the entire organization.
He was already out there. The clock was ticking.
"When?" Marcus asked, keeping his voice level.
"Three days ago, sir."
Three days. Red had been on his journey for three days. That meant he was probably in Viridian Forest by now, maybe approaching Pewter City. He hadn't reached any Team Rocket operations yet. There was still time.
"Thank you, Domino. Keep monitoring. I want daily reports on both of those trainers."
"Yes, sir." She saluted again. The salute, again, had consequences. Consequences that Marcus did not observe because he was looking at the far wall with the intensity of a man trying to set it on fire with his mind.
Domino turned to leave, and as she did, Marcus caught a brief, momentary glimpse of something he hadn't noticed before—a slight flush on her cheeks, a softness in her usually sharp eyes, a subtle shift in her posture that transformed her from "deadly operative" to "woman who has feelings she's not sure what to do with." Her hips—wide, round, powerful, each one a masterwork of biological engineering that could power a small turbine with the energy of their sway—moved with a rhythm that was not entirely professional as she walked to the door.
She paused in the doorway.
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
"It's... good to see you training personally." Her voice was softer than before. Less report-sharp. More... human. "The Pokémon seem happy."
Marcus looked at his team. Persian was grooming itself contentedly. Beedrill had settled on a rafter and was cleaning its stingers with fastidious precision. Rhyhorn was asleep against the wall, making small, rumbling snores that sounded like distant thunder. Nidoking and Nidoqueen were leaning against each other, eyes half-closed, radiating satisfaction. Kangaskhan was curled around its pouch-baby, both of them drowsy and warm. And Dratini—his Dratini, his future Dragonite—was still wrapped around his forearm, purring softly, its tiny body rising and falling with each breath.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "They do seem happy."
Domino smiled. A real smile, not the professional one. A smile that transformed her face from striking to breathtaking, that made her eyes crinkle at the corners and her lips curve in a way that was warm and genuine and so utterly lovely that Marcus almost—almost—lost focus.
"Good night, sir."
"Good night, Domino."
She left. The door closed behind her.
Marcus exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
He looked down at the Dratini on his arm. It looked up at him.
"This world is insane," he told it.
It chirped in agreement.
That night, alone in Giovanni's private quarters—a lavish suite at the top of the headquarters building, all dark wood and leather and the kind of aggressive luxury that screamed "I have more money than God and significantly less moral fiber"—Marcus sat on the edge of the bed and planned.
He had a notebook. A physical, leather-bound notebook, because Giovanni was the kind of man who wrote things down on paper, presumably because paper couldn't be hacked. He'd been writing for two hours, and the notebook was already half full.
MEGA STONES:
Confirmed to exist (will exist?) in Kalos region. Terminal Cave. Unknown location in current timeline.May also exist in Hoenn (Primal Reversion = related phenomenon?)Key Stones needed to activate. Where? How? Research required.Priority targets: Kangaskhanite (Mega Kangaskhan = BROKEN), Beedrillite (Mega Beedrill = fastest Mega, insane Attack stat), Mewtwoite X and Y (obvious)Consider: sending covert teams to Kalos to begin searching. Long-term investment.
Z-CRYSTALS:
Found in Alola region. Specific locations TBD.Require Z-Ring to use. Z-Rings made from... Sparkling Stones? Found on Alolan beaches?Each type has corresponding Z-Crystal. Some Pokémon-specific Z-Crystals also exist.Priority: Dragonium Z (for Dragonite), Groundium Z (for team coverage), Normalium Z (versatile)Long-term project. Alola is far. May need to establish Rocket presence there.
DYNAMAX:
Galar region phenomenon. Linked to Eternatus energy.Power Spots required for Dynamaxing. Power Spots only exist in Galar.Can Eternatus energy be replicated? Transported? Contained?Gigantamax forms for specific Pokémon. G-Max Meowth? G-Max Gengar? G-Max CHARIZARD?Longest-term project. May not be feasible. Pursue anyway.
LEGENDARY POKÉMON:
Immediate targets (Kanto): Articuno (Seafoam Islands), Zapdos (Power Plant), Moltres (Victory Road). All obtainable with current resources.Medium-term targets (Johto): Lugia (Whirl Islands), Ho-Oh (Tin Tower), Celebi (Ilex Forest - time travel implications???)Long-term targets (Other regions): Rayquaza (Sky Pillar), Giratina (Distortion World), Arceus (LITERAL GOD - might be overreaching)Mewtwo (in-house production, handle with extreme care)
TEAM COMPOSITION - IDEAL:
Persian (lead, utility, beloved partner)Dragonite (special attacker/physical sweeper, eventual Mega?)Nidoking (mixed attacker, coverage king)Kangaskhan (physical wall/attacker, eventual Mega)Beedrill (glass cannon, eventual Mega)Flexible slot: Rhyhorn/Rhydon → eventually Rhyperior? Legendary?
ORGANIZATIONAL IMPROVEMENTS:
Pay grunts more. Immediately. Happy employees don't defect.Implement actual training programs. Stop sending untrained idiots with Raticate and Zubat to fight gym-quality trainers.Diversify operations. Less petty theft, more high-value strategic acquisition.Intelligence division expansion. Need to know everything happening everywhere.R&D investment. This organization creates MEWTWO and somehow still can't beat a child. Allocate more resources to practical tech development.
Marcus stared at his notes. It was overwhelming. It was the most ambitious plan any villain in any Pokémon game had ever conceived, and he was fairly certain of that because he'd played all the games and none of the villains had ever demonstrated this level of strategic thinking. Cyrus wanted to unmake reality but couldn't figure out how to lock a door. Lysandre wanted to destroy the world and announced it at a press conference. Chairman Rose forced an apocalyptic event because he was worried about an energy crisis that was a thousand years away.
Marcus was going to succeed where they had all failed, because Marcus had something none of them had ever possessed: twenty years of game knowledge, a complete lack of ideological fanaticism, and the basic common sense to not monologue his plans to his enemies.
He closed the notebook, placed it in the desk drawer, and locked it.
Then he released Dratini from its ball. The little dragon materialized on the bed, chirped happily, slithered up the pillow, and coiled itself into a perfect little spiral, its tail tucked under its chin, its eyes already drooping.
Marcus smiled. Giovanni's face was not designed for soft smiles, but it managed. Barely.
"Good night, little one," he murmured, running his finger along Dratini's smooth scales. "Tomorrow, we start for real."
He lay back on the bed—Giovanni's bed, which was far too large and far too expensive for a single man but which was, admittedly, the most comfortable thing Marcus had ever lain on—and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere out there, a ten-year-old boy named Red was sleeping in a Pokémon Center, dreaming of badges and glory, utterly unaware that the man he would eventually face as his greatest challenge was not the same man he'd been yesterday.
Somewhere out there, the world's most powerful Pokémon was gestating in a lab, its creation guided by science and ambition and a reckless disregard for the natural order.
Somewhere out there, buried deep in the earth and scattered across continents, Mega Stones pulsed with ancient energy, waiting to be found.
Somewhere out there, legendary Pokémon slumbered in their sanctuaries—in caves and mountains and ocean depths and dimensions beyond mortal understanding—unaware that a man with knowledge of their locations and the resources to reach them was drawing up a plan to catch them all.
And here, in this room, in this body, in this world that was real and impossible and magnificent and his, Marcus Chen—formerly a dead Pokémon fan from Sacramento, currently the most dangerous man in Kanto—closed his eyes and began to dream of empire.
The Dratini purred against his pillow.
The Persian in the corner of the room—the office Persian, which had apparently followed him to his quarters—purred from its cushion.
Outside, the night was full of stars, and in the distance, a Noctowl called, its voice carried on a wind that smelled of pine and possibility.
Giovanni slept.
And the world, vast and wonderful and entirely unprepared for what was coming, turned on.
END OF CHAPTER 1
Next Chapter: Giovanni goes Dratini training, makes his first move toward the Seafoam Islands, discovers that his administrative staff is 97% ridiculously attractive women who all seem weirdly flustered around him, and absolutely does not notice any of this because he's too busy theorycrafting optimal EV spreads on a legal pad.