Morai appeared in the courtyard, holding the vase of flowers that Maria had given her minutes ago.

"Oh, hello Morai," Sheridan greeted, almost as if they hadn't fought a few hours before. The claw marks and bruises on her arms and face told otherwise. "Do you remember Lusamine?"

"Yes, somewhat," Morai answered. "You fused with an Ultra Beast and—"

Sheridan cut her off with a sharp cough, but Lusamine chuckled.

"It's nice to see you after all of this time, hm, Morai, is it now?" she said. "That's a nice name. Please excuse me if I slip up and call you by your old name. Although, you look so different I might not even make that mistake! I'm glad you're still here. Everyone was worried sick after you mysteriously disappeared from our lives for months."

Morai only looked at the Aether Presidant. Lusamine was talking to her both as if she were a stranger and an old friend.

"Where did you get those flowers?" Sheridan asked, breaking the awkward silence. Morai blushed a little and set them down behind her.

"Oh, nowhere," she quickly answered. "I've come to make a request."

"Oh?"

"I'd like to reconstruct this garden to my liking," Morai said. "I'll do the work myself, but I'll need materials, of course."

Sheridan was surprised. She thought Morai was about to ask her for blood or some other morbid request in front of the woman who had just supplied her with new employees and money, but this seemed rather innocent.

"Oh, that sounds like a great idea!" Lusamine said, clasping her hands together. "The Aether Foundation would be happy to help."

Morai cocked her head.

"The Aether Foundation is involved now, too?" she asked.

"You and your friends helped me return to good those years ago," Lusamine answered, looking her in the eye. "It would be remiss of me not to lend a hand to you now."

Sheridan's hand slowly and discreetly dropped to the gun hidden under her coat as distaste began to spread across Morai's face.

"I'm no charity case," she said through gritted teeth, a red glow returning to her eyes. "Were you so bad as a pseudo-beast—"

"That's enough, Morai," Sheridan warned.

"All of you teeter on the line between good and evil and act as if I'm so bad for falling one way. I could return you to the cold and heartless mother who abandoned her children in an instant. I could—"

"Morai! Let her go!" Sheridan snapped, pointing her weapon at the prisoner, who relaxed and let go of Lusamine's mind.

"I didn't even realize that I had done it," she said with a sigh. "My apologies, President."

"That's alright," Lusamine quietly said. She had obviously been shaken, perhaps not by the hypnotization, but by Morai's words.

Morai began to walk back inside but turned around to grab the vase of flowers she had almost forgotten.

"I see that your work is cut out for you," Lusamine said.

"Believe it or not, she's gotten better by perhaps the smallest measurable amount," Sheridan said. "Apologies from her are hard to come by."

"I'm afraid poor Lillie will once again be disappointed," Lusamine sighed. "Her and the rest of the group."

Morai continued to the dining hall accompanied by a guard. When the huge double doors swung open to reveal the large, cold room, she saw that a group of Aether Foundation employees were sitting in place of the last batch of nurses that had quit. A smile returned to the prisoner's face. She sat down at her usual spot to make her presence known, then she got up and walked toward the group, leaving her flowers behind.

"Hello, friends!" she greeted with a big grin, opening her arms as a celebratory welcoming gesture. "I don't believe we've met."

"Shouldn't you be over there?" a woman said from the other side. When Morai's eyes met her averted gaze, she let out a rather dramatic gasp.

"Pollie!" she exclaimed. "You've come back! I have a habit of forgetting faces, but I always remember the taste of their—"

"Strike one!" Pollie exclaimed, holding a finger up.

"Oh?" Morai replied with a smile, her eyes glowing red again. "The last time I made it to strike three...hm, I can't seem to remember. Oh, that's right! I tore you to shreds, and you quit!"

"Strike two," Pollie said, raising another finger.

"Alright, alright," Morai said. "What about you lot? Have I met any one of you before? Battled you, perhaps, when you were the evil ones?"

Pollie looked at her with a threatening glance, but Morai only smiled.

"You all look so innocent and sweet, dressed in white and gold. So saintly looking...and weak!"

Who should I take care of first? Morai asked herself. The smallest and weakest of the bunch, or the one who everyone sees as a leader?

The prisoner eyed them all before settling on one trainer, a small and short employee who had kept her gaze glued to her plate the moment Morai arrived. The prisoner could sense her uneasiness.

"You," she said, leaning in close and putting on arm onto the table from behind the employee, trapping her to her seat. She still had her gaze fixed in the same spot, her shoulders tensed almost to her ears. "I have a feeling we've met before. You all have the same eyes, but there's something about your eyes that seems familiar."

Morai's smile grew as she sensed fear steadily rising, not just from the employee she had chosen to antagonize, but from everyone else at the table. She really did like to scare people. The guards in the room had taken notice, but it was almost as if they wanted to watch what was about to happen for some reason.

"Eyes are important, you know. If you're always looking down, you won't notice the danger around you," she continued, sending her victim's plate sliding down the table with a shove. Her voice had become lower and more guttural. She slid her tongue over her teeth, realizing that they were probably stained with blood. "It's important to always be alert, especially in the dark hallways of a place like this at night. Because, well, you never know...you just might find something looking back at you."

The prisoner reached her other hand out to turn the employee's head and force her to look up into her eyes, and that was where Pollie had finally drawn the line. She stood up with a deep frown, a dart-gun the same as the one the guards were issued in her hand and pointed at Morai.

"Strike three. Back off or I shoot," she sternly said. Morai looked up at her to find that her gaze had been matched. Her smile grew even wider, and she began to laugh. She could still see the marks on the nurse's neck from being bitten.

"Who gave you that?" she asked, remaining fixed in place. "I don't recall that being a part of the nurses' tool kit."

"I've been practicing, just for you," Pollie spit back. "I'm a very good shot."

"I'm flattered. A very slow one, though," Morai said, keeping her smile and red eyes. "It would've been much too late by the time you decided to draw your weapon. What stopped you? Fear, perhaps?"

"I'm not going to warn you again," Pollie threatened.

Morai moved her arm even closer in, lowering her head further over the employee's neck. She kept her eyes glued to the nurse's.

"Do it," she dared with a smile, tapping her sharp nails on the table. "Take revenge."

Morai feigned a move toward the employee's neck to draw a shot from Pollie, dodging it with her Foresight. In a split second she had leapt over the wooden table and tackled the nurse, sending them both to the ground and causing the gun to fall from Pollie's hand and slide across the floor. Those who were sitting at the table stood up, except for the one Morai had frightened the most.

"You've disappointed me," Morai said with a sigh, pinning her arms to the ground. "You shouldn't have hesitated. It's a deadly mistake."

The guards finally rushed over, ordering Morai to move, which she did without protest.

"As time goes on and more blood is spilled in these sacred halls, do you all gradually lose trust in your own safety?" she asked, getting up and brushing herself off. She offered a hand to Pollie, who didn't take it. "When the lights go out at night, does an inkling of fear fester in your mind, wondering whether or not you're a good enough shot? Or do you worry that you, perhaps, will be the next one to end up in the hospital wing?"

As she spoke, Morai's eyes shifted to the Aether employee she had chosen before, catching her off guard while she was looking into her eyes. Her eyes flashed red for a moment, and she smiled, baring her teeth. It was an exchange only the two of them saw.

"Morai!" someone called from the entrance. To her surprise and dismay, her old Alolan friends had appeared. Lillie, Gladion, and Hau had all arrived, Gladion's Silvally sticking to his side with distrustful glances around the large hall.

Morai groaned. She eyed the guards.

"Even regular prisoners have a say in who visits them, no?" she asked.

"Regular prisoners are lucky to get any visitors at all," one replied, crossing his arms. "You should be grateful that you have people who still want to spend time with you after becoming...well, you."

"And everyone foolish enough to make that mistake gets hurt. Are you prepared for that outcome?"

The guard pulled his dart gun back out.

"I am. Now go and try to be a decent person for once. Eat with them or not at all," he replied, motioning for her to walk over to the group. Morai shook her head, but she acquiesced. She figured that if she was bothersome all of the time, she wouldn't have as much opportunity to do the things she really wanted later.

As Morai went to talk to the woman who usually made her food—whom she never mistreated, for a change—her old friends waved her down.

"No need! We brought Malasadas!" Hau cheerfully exclaimed.

"I haven't had one of those in a long time," Morai said, sitting down in her usual spot all the way at the end of the table, facing the doors. She liked to be able to see everything from her place while she ate. The group of new employees sat at the other end, almost on the other side of the room. Morai's old Alolan friends sat around her on both sides of the table but gave her plenty of space.

"Sophocles made 'em. Remember him?" Hau asked. "He figured out how to copy the smell of Steenee's Sweet Scent into them."

Morai took a bite, and Hau was right, at least as far as she remembered.

"So, what do you remember?" Gladion asked. Lillie looked a bit surprised at his direct question and seemed uncertain of whether it was the best thing to ask at the moment.

"This isn't simply a matter of forgetting," Morai said. "It's a matter of change. A change in memory. A change in personality. A change in mind."

"But you still have memories, even if they're buried deep inside," Lillie said. Morai wondered why she hadn't been put off most of all. After all, it was her that embraced the prisoner not long after she had first arrived, only to be rejected and taken control of. "And your memories make you who you are, don't they?"

"Not if you aren't anything in particular," Morai retorted.

"Everyone is something," Gladion said.

"Then what am I?"

"You're...you're..." Hau stammered. He looked to Lillie and Gladion, but they didn't have solid answers either.

"You can't call me anything without calling me by my old name," Morai said. "Champion, hero, even trainer. Those are all attributes of who I was. I have no Pokémon here, therefore I'm not a trainer. I don't know what's been made of my identity on the outside, but the people have no doubt separated me from the trainer who was their Champion and hero. And you even hesitate to call me your friend, and rightly so, because I'm different than I was. I've got entirely new attributes, ones that I'm sure you'd rather not associate with. But you still stick around because you knew who I was and are attached to that idea. I'm trying to do you a favor and allow you to keep your happy memories of the friend you knew instead of seeing me like this now. Maybe that's why you should leave."

No one spoke for a while. Instead, everyone awkwardly picked at their food.

"These are good," Morai said. She had a grin on her face. She seemed to do that a lot when she knew situations called for a serious demeanor. It was rare she could hold that for very long, which is why she was often smiling. Shadow Morai was the same way, and they often caught each other in fits of laughter, one feeding off of the other like a pack of Mightyena. Morai was lucky that it seemed to intimidate people more than anything else.

Gladion stood up and pushed his plate forward.

"I think she's right," he said with a frown.

"Gladion!" Lillie exclaimed.

"What? Are we just going to ignore it? If she doesn't want to be friends with us anymore, if she's forgotten us, then why bother?"

The trainer walked off, but his Silvally strangely didn't follow him.

"I'll talk to him," Hau said, hurrying to leave the tense and awkward situation. Lillie stayed behind and moved her food to sit across from Morai. She tried to hold a smile, but it quickly dissolved into a frown.

"Is it true?" she asked, looking the prisoner in the eyes. "Our entire journey? That time you saved me on the bridge when we first met all the way up to me challenging you for the Champion title after we saved my mother? All of those days and nights spent on the beach, having Pokémon battles and surfing on Mantine. Going out for pancakes with the other girls? Is it all just...nothing to you?"

Morai sat and stared at the trainer across from her as a foggy memory came into focus. She had just fought with Nanu and Hapu and had escaped arrest not long before the pancake breakfast she was having with her friends. She sat in her sundress—which she wouldn't be caught dead in today—worried that the injuries from her scuffles would be visible while she listened to Hapu retell the entire story from her own perspective. Everyone had agreed that The Mask Maker was indeed a monster, but no one would ever guess that The Mask Maker was sitting among them. It was then that Morai had realized that she was close to crossing a line that would set her apart from everyone she loved forever, and here she was, two years later, so far across the line that she could no longer see it—let alone find the way back over it.

"I wonder..." she said under her breath, getting up to lean forward and reach a hand out to Lillie's forehead, "if you can show me those memories from your perspective."

Lillie sat there with a puzzled look on her face, scrunching her shoulders up as Morai's clawed finger got close to her head.

"Stop it right there!" a guard yelled, running forward and grabbing Morai's wrist.

"I was testing something!" Morai growled.

"Sure," the guard retorted. "This just happens to look strikingly similar to the thing where you touch someone's forehead and they keel over in pain!"

"Why would I do that now? I was trying to see if—"

Morai realized that she shouldn't divulge her potential abilities to the people tasked with controlling her. She had wondered if Past Morai's skills could become her own. That's how it worked with Light and Shadow Morai, anyway, after they taught her how to use them. But Morai was not close to Light or Past Morai in any way, which made it impossible to use their abilities. Still, Morai wondered if Past Morai's memory and dream-related skills could be accessible by her, since they don't align with either good or bad wills.

"Never mind," she said instead, twisting her hand from his grasp. "I'm sure that from your perspective it looked like—"

"You!" an angry voice called. It's a good thing Morai had her Foresight turned on, which allowed her to dodge the shot from the rogue guard that had chosen to storm in and attack her. It was the guard she hypnotized in the garden, using him to fight with everyone else while she fought with Sheridan.

Morai dodged and got close enough to attack the man without getting hit. She slashed his face and wrestled the gun from his hand, throwing it to the side. Her eyes were a furious red and she wasn't holding back. Their fight went to the ground and she got the upper hand, throwing cutting elbows from above him.

"Morai!" a voice yelled. It have her pause and she looked up just enough to see Maria standing among the gathering crowd. It was enough time to allow guards to rush in and grab her, forcing her off and to her knees. It was now that she used the ace up her sleeve that she had prepared just in case. Silvally came running to her aid, attacking the guards that were trying to handcuff her.

"What the heck is that thing, anyway?" one of them yelled. He aimed his gun at it, but another guard stopped him.

"That's the President's son's Pokémon! You can't just shoot it! Shoot her, she's controlling it!" he yelled, pointing at Morai. The prisoner fought alongside the Pokémon until she had created enough of an opportunity for a getaway. The guard that had initially attacked her was lying on the ground unconscious and she didn't care to attack him any further. Instead, she swung herself over Silvally's back and rode it out of the doorway, using its axe-like headpiece to knock people out of the way. Morai did take care not to hit Maria, however.

This could be my chance to escape, she thought. She was almost to the door of the garden when she saw Gladion, Lusamine, Sheridan and a horde of guards in her way. Morai pressed forward knowing that people wouldn't stand a chance against Silvally's big frame.

"Damn!" a guard cursed. "This is why we need Pokémon!"

"Hey!" Gladion yelled. "Give Silvally back to me!"

He held his pokéball in his outstretched hand, ready to call his Pokémon back the moment it got close enough. But when Morai approached, and her eyes met his, he lowered his hand a little and neglected to call Silvally back. Morai raced past them all, dodging darts and frantic attempts to stop her. She jumped off ahead of Silvally and ran through the door first, allowing it to move and turn to fit its 7 foot tall frame through after her.

Is freedom really past the garden gate? Morai asked herself. She tightened her grip around Silvally's neck and urged it to go faster with her mind.

"Give me that, kid!" Arthur yelled, grabbing Gladion's ball from his hand before he could protest and darting out after the fleeing prisoner. Once outside he called his own Pokémon out, unsheathed his knife, and swung himself atop his steed as they both began to run.

"Arthur, wait!" Sheridan called. "Don't hurt—oh, never mind," she sighed, shaking her head. "He can't hear me now. Someone is about to get seriously injured and it's my fault."

When Morai cleared the garden's fence, she gasped. It turned out that what she had thought of as the courtyard was really just a small garden in the corner of a stretch of land spanning a couple of miles.

"Past this is freedom, then!" she yelled. When she looked back to see if she was being followed, excitement spread across her face.

"Come on!" she taunted, waving at him. She couldn't tell what Pokémon Arthur was riding, but it was gaining speed.

"We'd better not get caught!" she yelled to no one in particular. Silvally couldn't hear her because of its hypnosis. "But I won't mind a fight!"

Arthur was getting closer and Morai knew she was going to have to fight. There was no attack Silvally could dish out without slowing down and letting him catch up. She pushed Silvally to its physical limit and prepared to defend herself. She saw that Arthur's Pokémon was a Tauros, but not one she had ever seen. It was black and red instead of the usual tan and brown she was used to. Its horns began to turn a bright hot red, and when it got close enough, it began to try and stab Silvally with them. Morai managed to make it dodge all of Tauros's attempts, but she wasn't sure she could keep it up. Meanwhile, Arthur was swinging at her from atop his steed. He pulled a dart gun from a holster and began trying to shoot her. Morai put the mask hanging from her side onto her face, but she was unarmed. Her best bet was to defend and counter if she could.

"This is fun!" she yelled.

"Yeah, well see how you feel in a minute!"

Morai turned her Foresight on. Arthur pulled Gladion's ball from his belt and she made a daring move. She managed to move Silvally and get ahead of his Tauros just enough to lean right in front of Arthur and look it in the eye, causing it to come to a screeching halt and send him flying forward.

But she was too late. She saw the red beam hit the Pokémon she was riding and jumped off, rolling onto the ground and trying to mount Tauros. She ran to it and jumped, but Arthur pulled her back by the collar and caused her to hit the ground hard, losing her psychic hold on his Pokémon. He held her there and cut the strap of her mask, throwing it to the side and hitting her with his gun. Everything went black for Morai. Her escape had been thwarted right after it began.

The prisoner woke up to find herself lying in the grass just inside the garden gates. She moved to feel her hurting head, but she was unsurprised to find that her hands had been cuffed. Morai could tell that a crowd had gathered, but she didn't want to open her eyes against the bright sun.

"That title is under her old name," the voice of Sheridan said. "Though, I suppose it doesn't matter. She still has the badges and records to prove her rank, unless she got rid of them."

Morai groaned, not understanding what had just been said. She sat there for a moment, then a big smile spread across her face before she burst into laughter. She couldn't stop it. Everyone stopped their conversations to look at her with puzzled expressions until she finally got some words out.

"The look on your faces!" she laughed, mimicking the shocked expressions of everyone that had seen her riding through the building on a rare seven-foot-tall amalgamation of different Pokémon parts.

"I think you've damaged her head, Arthur," Sheridan said with a scowl.

"Nothin' that poison didn't already do," he replied, crossing his arms with a self-satisfied smile.

"She already did that before," Maria added. "Even in her sleep."

"Is it a hobby of yours to watch me while I'm unconscious?" Morai growled. "That's creepier than me."

"No, it's not," everyone agreed in unison.

Morai went to cross her arms before remembering that she couldn't.

"What are we all doing out here, anyway?" she asked. Sheridan, Arthur, the doctor, Lusamine, Lillie, Gladion, and Hau were standing around her, as well as the Aether Foundation employees and several guards. Pollie stood beside them, gun in her hand, seemingly waiting for an opportunity. The main group eyed each other before looking at Gladion, then Morai. Finally, Gladion sighed and stepped out of the group to address her directly.

"I challenge you for you Champion title of Alola," he said.