Outside the airplane window, Giovanni just happened to catch the very moment the plane burst through a cloud and into a surreal, mounded valley colored by the sunset. He leaned on his armrest toward the window to better take it in.

"Don't put your face on the glass, it's filthy."

In the seat across the aisle from Giovanni sat his mother, regarding him with disdain. It was a familiar expression on her beautiful face: dark eyebrows checked low over smoky eyes and long lashes, a small, straight nose, and full red lips that were easy to read at a shout or a whisper. Right now they were saying he was disgusting her with his proximity to an unclean surface, or maybe just with his visible interest in an act of nature.

Giovanni straightened in his seat again and leaned his head back. After twenty years, he'd well learned there was no rebuttal. Crying hadn't worked as a child and acting out in his teenage years never paid more than it cost him... But now he was finally beginning to cop to the resource management mechanic at play: Everything had to have tangible value for Mother or she did not have patience for it.

Fortunately, this revelation led to Giovanni's adjacent discovery that, if mother could be made to see value in something, she would become quite invested. Following that logic had unlocked this most recent project for Giovanni: a trip to the Orange Islands to secure a lucrative distribution deal. The trip included a few extra days for "networking" and "reconnaissance" but she was so pleased with the overall projections that she was happy to overlook some luxury padding. Her fair-weather generosity was a charming feature if it shined on your project, but the fallout was usually a nightmare for the financial department. Not that any one of them would utter a word of complaint about the actions of Madame Boss.

Giovanni stole one last look at the sunset cloudscape, then closed his eyes. The view was beautiful, but the turbulence of the small heli-jet left him a little seasick.

"Are you ill?" his mother asked.

Was she always watching him?

She didn't wait for Giovanni to answer. With a gloved hand, she pressed the call button on her armrest. She didn't wait for the attendant to answer either before she started issuing orders.

"An evening wine, and fetch a ginger ale for the boy!" she called out.

The attendant did a small loop, exiting the rear galley of the jet, reaching the back of Madame Boss's chair as she finished barking her order, then silently turning on his heel to execute as quickly as possible.

It was not Giovanni's preference to be referred to as "the boy", but his preferences hardly mattered to his mother. She hired his tutors, hand-selected his friends, had final approval on his Pokémon, and controlled the budgets in every sense. She even designed his clothing, though that was no great imposition.

Madame Boss had built an empire with needle and thread. She "clawed her way from department store seamstress to fashion icon with only one arm, because," she said once in a magazine interview, "I was holding my sweet little Giovanni in the other."

Across Kanto, mother was hailed as a visionary not just for her desirable designs but for the prodigious production of seasonal releases and capsule collections and brand crossovers and pop-up shops. Trends were set, sold out, played out, and re-set every other month, and her "R-Style" storefronts were always stocked with the latest. Companies ranging from tele-coms and fast food brands to musical acts and movie stars wanted to collaborate, which meant things were never dull in Madame Boss's radius. Except perhaps for the Boss herself.

Only profit excited Madame Boss. Money. Cold, hard cash. Delivered all at once in briefcases if you wanted to hurry a deal along.

Struggling out of poverty had made her determined never to return, but somewhere along the way, the act of acquiring money became her chief pleasure. Spending it was enjoyable only if it led to greater earnings later. Loaning it came with strict terms and high interest. Giving it was unheard of.

The private jet that mother and son were enjoying was a necessity, enabling Madame Boss to expand her network of business partners as well as her web of enforcement. The fashion industry, as it turned out, was a gateway to perpetually greater earning potential for the Boss. Her distribution network could move people, Pokémon, and other products as well as it could shirts and shoes, and carefully-worded collaboration contracts could conveniently culminate in corporate coups. Over the course of Giovanni's life, his mother's domain had grown to include, among other things, a parcel delivery business, a fishery, several restaurants and cafes, two luxury hotels, a monthly magazine, the rights to a lucrative shipping route, a diverse fleet of seaworthy vessels, a decommissioned government laboratory, a construction company currently occupied building additional laboratories, and hundreds of acres of land across the Kanto region, both rural and commercial.

But in the magazine interviews, she only spoke about her fashion brand.

Madame Boss accepted a glass half full of red wine from the attendant, rewarding him with a sweet smile. Those were rare. A random reward schedule guaranteed the best response rates when training behaviors.

"Sir."

A glass of ginger ale appeared at Giovanni's elbow. He received it with the slightest of nods and left it untouched on the wide armrest.

ZZZT! ZZZT!

Giovanni heard a muffled vibration, almost lost in the steady hum of the plane propellers.

"Mother?"

She looked up at him across the rim of her glass. "Hm?"

"Do you have your pager turned on...on the plane?"

Confusion and realization flashed across her face in quick succession. She bent forward and groped about in the massive tote bag at her feet, coming up moments later with a buzzing black box in her fist. She glowered down at the digital readout.

"CODE GRN. NW CERU LAB. CALL ME," she read aloud. "What does she mean by 'code GUHRN'? Honestly."

"There's a staff disruption at the Mt. Moon base."

"Then why doesn't Miya just write that!? These pagers are hard enough to understand. We don't need to invent a new language too." The Boss looked disgusted again.

"Because, Mother, as it stands to reason...if we can send and receive these messages, others could potentially intercept them. It protects us," Giovanni explained patiently. "It would also protect us if you would turn that off so it doesn't interfere with the plane's ability to fly."

As if to underscore his point, the plane jostled on a bit of turbulence. Outside the window, Giovanni thought he saw a small shape dart past in the fading light. He dismissed it.

Madame Boss hurried to switch off the device, then dumped it back into her cavernous purse. Down the aisle, they could see into the heli-jet's cockpit.

"New destination! Take us to the Mount Moon base!"

The pilot and co-pilot turned to her in unison and nodded curtly. "Yes, Boss!"