When the Mount Moon range first came into view, the peaks looked soft blue and blunted in the moonlit haze. As the plane began to descend, aiming for a landing pad deeper into the mountain system, the silhouettes sharpened to black, jagged teeth.

"Cutting lights for approach," one of the pilots announced over the speaker, then switched off the plane's interior and exterior lights.

Giovanni dimmed the face of his watch. It was a small difference, but he liked to be careful, and with it the darkness was complete.

Visible now below them was a landing pad lit in four corners by sputtering red flares.

Further down the mountain, another source threw flickering red light into the valley. Part of the base was on fire. Miyamoto hadn't mentioned that in her coded message to the boss.

Giovanni was in agony fighting to sit patiently as each minute before touchdown dragged on. He glanced at his mother and noted her cool, distant expression. If she felt as antsy as he did about the status on the ground, she didn't show it. Fidgeting and other tells were harshly punished under his mother's rearing, but she always had the decency to practice what she preached.

The moment the landing gear made contact, mother and son were on their feet. Giovanni threw open the exit before one of their attendants could do it for them. Another of the staff outside secured the stairs, and Giovanni stepped back to let his mother exit first.

Madame Boss stood for one imposing moment at the top of the stairs, surveying the assembled staff. There were a dozen young men and women arrayed on the tarmac, all clad in various cuts of black with accents of the same bold red. In pairs, they patrolled the perimeter, guarded the walkway, and unloaded the heli-jet. Giovanni noticed a Zubat flapping over the heads of a patrol, but no other Pokémon were visible. Instead, their Pokémon were carried inside Pokéballs attached to each employee's belt.

The nearest four attendants arranged themselves into an escort formation at the base of the stairs. As Madame Boss took her first steps down, the double door entrance to the base burst outwards. The staff jumped to face the noise, hands on Pokéballs.

A tall woman in black and red strode forth, her long purple hair bouncing in two curled ponytails behind her. Madame Boss gave a subtle signal as she approached, a small wave of her left hand, and the guards relaxed.

Miyamoto was one of the boss's top executives and her close confidant. She had joined the company as a researcher when Giovanni was fifteen. She wasn't much older than he was, but she had a science degree and a young daughter and an ever-increasing monopoly on his mother's attention.

Giovanni trotted down the steps and pulled up to his mother's side just as Miyamoto met them on the tarmac.

"Boss!"

"Miya, what's going on?"

"We have a revolt among the geneticists, Madame." Miyamoto straightened up to deliver her message, looking directly into the boss's eyes and then into Giovanni's. As the son of the boss, and as a top executive in his own right, Giovanni was afforded full deference by the staff. He was above Miyamoto in the hierarchy, but only by a blood edge, and he got the sense she was looking to test its thickness. At least she had the sense to hide her intentions well.

"Is that the source of the fire?" Giovanni asked.

"Yes, they started burning their notes under the fume hoods and the computer system caught."

"Those ungrateful idiots! Why would they do that!?" The incredulous sneer Madame Boss wore was her standard response when confronted with wasteful expenditure.

"I don't know, Madame."

Sensing an opportunity to wrest back control of the dynamic from Miyamoto, Giovanni started towards the doors. Two of the guards flanked him, and the rest of the group followed automatically.

He led his mother, Miyamoto, and the guards at a brisk but confident pace into the entrance of the base, through a series of doors requiring scanned credentials, and onto a freight elevator.

There was an awkward silence as the executives and bodyguards stood corralled in close proximity on the ride down.

Then the elevator doors opened onto chaos.

The expansive room was overwhelmed with smoke and unbearably hot. A cacophony of yelling and furniture crashing drowned out whatever exclamations the people in the elevator made. Giovanni took a step into the room and, with a single motion, released two of his Pokémon near his feet.

The white lights of his Pokéballs resolved into two very different creatures. Rhyhorn was a large beast on four stumpy legs, with a pointed horn on the bridge of its snout and a thick grey hide of stiff, overlapping plates. Diglett, in contrast, was small and rounded, no taller than a pulled-up crew sock. It had no visible arms or legs, but its expression was fierce, eyes narrowed and peering over a bulbous, sensitive nose.

"Diglett, fire your Sand Attack at the hottest areas. Rhyhorn, use your Tail Whip and blow away as much of the smoke as you can," he instructed, then raised his jacketed elbow to cover his nose and mouth against the smoke.

Diglett's enthusiastic sand distribution quickly brought the flames under control, but as much as Rhyhorn moved the smoke around, it was thickening and had nowhere to go. "Rhyhorn, bust the window. Mind the drop beyond."

At its master's word, the armored creature turned around to face the smoke and lumbered into it. Moments later, there was an audible CRUNCH, followed by a much quieter tinkling sound. A breeze ruffled Giovanni's black hair.

The haze inside the laboratory started to thin as the hot smoke was sucked out a broken window into the cold mountain air. More staff members entered from the stairwell, just now catching up with Giovanni and the rest.

"Blow this smoke out of here and get a team topside to disperse the plume. We don't need to draw any more attention to this location," he told the nearest agent.

"Yessir," she replied and peeled off to execute his orders. Giovanni returned his own Pokémon to their Pokéballs.

"Stop him!"

Someone was charging out of the haze.

"Tangela, Bind."

The next step the person took, their foot missed the ground. They hovered in the air at the end of two sinewy vines. Giovanni's eyes followed them to their source, a Pokémon on two small feet lost in a bushy tangle of plantlike cords. Behind it stood Miyamoto, looking pleased with herself.

Giovanni turned back to the prisoner and saw the silhouette of someone else approaching.

A fin of red hair appeared first, slicing through the thinning smokescreen. "Ha... Well, that works-" a woman's voice said, followed by the sound of coughing. She stepped into the clearing next to the restrained man. Her fiery hair was flying about her round, furious face. She clutched a clipboard in one hand and a spent fire extinguisher in the other, gagging slightly from the smoke and exertion. "-but what were you thinking letting a Rhyhorn loose in here, you idiot!?"

"Huh?" Giovanni glanced left and right to see who the woman was yelling at. When he heard Miyamoto snicker behind him, he realized. She was yelling at him.

"And you-! You selfish old man!" The red-haired woman turned her attention to the man Tangela was holding. "That was priceless research! You had no right" She struck out with the clipboard she held. It made a loud WHAP! when it connected.

"What kind of research?" Miyamoto jumped in.

"Classified research," the woman snapped. It was Miyamoto's turn to field an attack.

"Surely that's a topic you can share with us."

Madame Boss stepped between her two executives and into the center of the conversation. She lowered a silk handkerchief, held over her nose against the smoke, to reveal a pouting crimson frown.

A look like fear came over the young woman. She froze mid-strike. Her eyes widened in time with the dawning of the realization of how badly she may have fucked up - steadily then rapidly.

In the vast room around them, Pokémon and people bustled in to clear debris. Garbage bins were rolled out. Brooms and dustpans scraped the floor. Giovanni could see through the haze now to the wall of windows, but he couldn't tell which were smudged with smoke and which was broken against the blackness of night.

"Are there any more lab employees intent on destroying data?" Giovanni's question broke the tension in the group before him.

The woman, likely grateful for the chance to move on from her embarrassment, replied quickly.

"It was just him. I'm the only other researcher on the project at the moment." She turned to address Madame Boss and, after a sharp salute, continued. "The focus of our research is Pokémon genetics, and the specific goal of this project involved the transference of Pokémon-like infinite energy manipulation abilities to non-manifesting organisms."

Madame Boss gave the entangled man an appraising look. "And what, exactly, were his qualms with that?"

The man thrashed against Tangela's restraints. "People!" he shouted. His words were muffled but "exPERIments" and "FOUL" came through, as well as "people" again and a gasping sob.

"He's a coward!"

"...should NEVER pre-" WHAP!

"I discovered he'd been sabotaging our data from the start when I ran an experiment to confirm his results. And when I started solving more of his errors, he went ballistic."

"-can't SURVIVE-"

"Tangela, use Mega Drain," Miyamoto instructed.

The man's form slumped in the vines' grip. Tangela lowered the limp body to the floor and retracted its noodly appendages, revealing a thin older man in a rumpled white lab coat. He took shallow breaths, exhausted of energy from the Pokémon's Mega Drain ability, but otherwise unharmed.

"Take him to a holding cell," Madame Boss commanded one of the agent pairs still standing by. They moved forward automatically towards the body and the red haired woman took a step back. "What's your name and designation, agent?"

The woman looked up at Madame Boss, then at Giovanni and Miyamoto on either side of her. "My name is, ah, Ariana. I'm... I'm interning under Doctor Moro." She glanced down at the floor and the two agents hoisting the man's body. "Or I was."

"An intern…"

Giovanni ignored Miyamoto's snark. He was still nursing the small blow to his ego from earlier, but he could look past it enough to appreciate Ariana's boldness. If any data from their experiments could be recovered, the lab would have her to thank.

"You'll provide me a status report on you project next week. Once maintenance is finished here, include their invoice as an expense in the budget breakdown." Madame Boss's eyes swept the room again. "I will decide then if this project has a future." She turned sharply, her thick cloud of black hair whipping behind her, and stepped back onto the freight elevator, still flanked by one pair of R-marked agents.

Miyamoto dashed into the freight elevator too and mashed the 'door close' button. Giovanni sighed as the doors slid shut. He couldn't afford to embarrass himself by clamoring in after them. Instead, he turned away and began to walk toward the lobby and the regular elevators.

"Hey."

He stopped and looked back.

"You must be Giovanni." Ariana gave him a friendlier version of the salute she gave his mother, accompanied by soft eyes and the hint of a smile. "I won't make that mistake again."

"Hm." He gave her a nod, and the slightest of smiles back, then turned away. "Be sure you don't."

"...Be SuRe YoU dOn'T…" Ariana murmured to herself, watching the pompous son of the boss saunter off in his soot-stained shoes and undoubtedly-expensive suit. She hadn't met him personally before today, but in the eight months she had interned at Rocket Labs, she'd had plenty of chances to observe him.

In his natural habitat, he was a preening alpha. His loyal pack of direct reports followed at his heels, constantly competing for his approval. The matriarchal structure of the tribe proper meant he was beyond reproach and, more importantly, that he had unique access to resources.

It had felt good to reproach him in her pretend ignorance, but it would feel better to slap a couple pay days' worth of his privileges out of his pockets.

Ariana had invested the entirety of her own resources into Doctor Moro's research. She apprenticed under him at school, and when he accepted the Rocket Labs job in North Cerulean, she readily followed him as an intern. She'd given up her scholarship, her friendships, and any other ambitions she'd once held dear because she believed so much in the possibilities they were discovering. And just when everything was coming together... Just as their equipment was primed... the professor snapped. Now Ariana had to fight for the project herself.

From the corner of her eye, she watched Giovanni until he reached the doorway. Once he left her sight, she let her posture slacken with a sigh. Her pounding heart slowed.

Awareness crept back in from all directions- of exposed wires sparking and crews hurriedly dismantling piles of debris. A fat, furry creature crawled over Ariana's boot, trailing a long, bald tail. She yelped and it reared up and chittered at her, clicking its huge front teeth.

"Eaugh! Get away!"

The creature hissed at her and hurried onward, bent on some mission that never involved her in the first place.

Ariana's heart was pounding all over again. Pokémon were wild creatures with far too much strength. She never understood why humans tolerated them in civilized society. Certainly, they were useful tools for accomplishing tasks - far away from people. They didn't belong underfoot in a lab or an office building though. …And if people could wield the power of Pokémon for themselves, there would be no reason to tolerate Pokémon at all.

Unconsciously, Ariana clutched her clipboard so tightly her knuckles whitened.

Consciously, and very intentionally, she took deep, square breaths. Her eyes sought familiar objects in the room among soot and shadows and she listed them to herself.

Chair.

Desk.

Printer.

Free-standing fluid suspension chamber.

Server rack.

Genome sequencer.

Mug.

She breathed normally now. Frustration beat out fear as she berated herself internally for being more afraid of some toothy Raticate than the boss of a crime syndicate.

And Rocket Labs was, she felt quite certain, part of a crime syndicate.

During her time as an intern, Ariana had borne witness to a wide variety of wayward activities. Her badge granted her free access to the labs, cafeteria, and dorms. Anything else required advanced credentials or an escort. And yet she often came across propped-open doors, dropped key cards, a cypher decoded onto the same paper as the message, and other flotsam and jetsam of criminal corporate incompetence.

They even faxed her lab machine a confidential mission briefing once and copied her on several of the correspondences until either someone caught on or the topic died. Contents of the conversation related mostly to procuring raw materials, but no one at any point brought up purchasing negotiations, just shipping schedules of a Hoenn-based cargo fleet, ship schematics, and known security exploits.

In short, Ariana knew just what sort of people she was working for. In fact, it was a major part of her benefactor's appeal, now that she had reached a critical stage in her research. No university would allow her to perform the experiments she had in mind.

Ariana lifted the clipboard she held and thumbed through the contents. Secured to it were several printed pages of procedure and lined sheets full of handwritten notes. On top of the stack was a plastic sandwich bag holding photographs, pinched to the board along its seal. Some data may have been lost in Doctor Moro's rampage, but Ariana had already repeated his process once, to great effect. She could do it again.

That is, if she could make Madame Boss understand the importance of it all.