Sabrina sat cross legged in her office, by her desk, hovering over her office chair.

Sitting like that was an old habit, one she had half-heartedly tried to break a few times. But it was a more comfortable arrangement than many of the strange positions people sat in when sitting in a chair normally was too much to ask.

She was reading some papers that had been faxed over from Cinnabar. A collection of documents concerning the project and the people and properties involved in said affair.

They confirmed what the scientist in the pokémon center had said. There had been a fire and most of the personnel involved had died. Most of the equipment and records had been lost. The remaining records had been collected and sent to the project's backers.

Sabrina began looking over the documentation concerning the backers. It had been a joint effort by a few minor corporations, a couple private donors, a few universities, and surprisingly enough, the Cinnabar gym. Specifically, it had been Blaine's predecessor who had been involved in the project. She had died a few years later, of natural causes after leaving the gym to Blaine.

Sabrina made a note to contact Blaine to see if she could get her hands on some of those records and maybe see if he had any thoughts on the case.

The Saffron City Gym Leader sighed. It was a case now. She would probably need to call in the Rangers and maybe get some other investigators involved.

Or at least that was the procedure.

She was a gym leader, not a detective. The overall security of the city and the surrounding region was her responsibility, not mysteries. Gym leaders handled direct action, large scale operations and battles, and overt threats.

But Sabrina wasn't an ordinary gym leader, if there even was such a thing. Ever since her psychic talents had first blossomed, she had always been expected to find things out. To pick secrets out of people's minds. To read impressions of events using lingering psychic energies. To catch glimpses of the future.

People had always expected her to investigate things. And Sabrina never had seen the point of disagreeing with them. She was good at it.

So, she put aside any thoughts of calling the Rangers or getting the Saffron City Police to handle part of the case and picked up some more papers.

She started reading through the files on the various executives, professors, and others who had backed the project. And then she stopped before she had even made it through the first quarter of the list.

All of them were dead.

The dark-haired psychic threw herself back into her work. There wasn't a single person on the list who wasn't dead. Some had died in the fire. Some had died of obviously natural causes. And the rest had died of what Sabrina was starting to suspect were causes that only seemed natural.

Many of the deaths in the 'seemingly' natural category were surprisingly recent. Within the last couple of months in fact…..

Sabrina didn't need to be psychic to put two and two together.

Someone had been eliminating everyone connected to the project, and that someone was most likely Team Rocket.

But why? What interest did Team Rocket have in a failed genetic experiment? What could justify murdering tens of people? What could be worth risking their strike teams in the forest to kill a scientist who had left before the project was complete?

What indeed…

Autumn had ended and winter had just begun as Ash, Misty, and Brock walked down the dirt path that cut its way through the grassy plains of Kanto. A chill wind whispered its lonely tidings, unaccompanied by the chorus of birds and flying types that had been its companion in seasons past. There had been no snow yet, but the tall grasses and bushes around them still carried hints of the early morning frost. And the leaves had deserted the branches of the occasional lonely tree that the group passed by, leaving the trunk and branches to stick out of the grassy plains like boney fingers.

Ash had never been to this part of Kanto. He was used to the forests and the mountains. Not hilly grasslands that tapered out into plains that extended into the distance to become hilly grasslands once again.

His history classes had mentioned that the people of Kanto had once lived as nomadic tribes. Ash had always wondered how they had managed that. Travelling in the mountains could be a hassle and it struck him that travelling through forests probably wasn't any easier once the group was large enough.

But looking out on the open fields, tall grass waving in the wind for as far as his eye could see, Ash understood how such a people could have existed.

"How much longer is it to, uh, Celadon City?" Ash asked, getting off his previous train of thought, and looking back at his two human companions.

"It should be only another couple of days," Brock responded from behind Ash shrugging his shoulders to redistribute the weight of his hiking backpack.

"Tell me the gym leader there is nice," Ash pleaded. "I don't want to have to put up with someone like Surge again."

He was the worst, Pikachu grumbled from Ash's shoulder.

"The next one is very nice," Misty reassured him. "Well, unless you catch her on a bad day or insult her."

"Surge is…. unique," Brock told Ash. "Some of the other gym leaders can be gruff or short with people, but only Surge goes out of his way to be rude."

"Good," Ash replied. "He was a real jerk!"

"Part of it's an act," Misty said. "He likes to test people and keep them off balance by being rude. He's much nicer when he's not evaluating you for a badge."

"Really?" Ash couldn't imagine the man ever being anything short of an absolute bastard.

"Really," Misty nodded. "Whenever there was a gym conference the gym leaders would take turns babysitting and he was always the one who was the most fun."

"That's because he's too old to give a shit," Brock added.

"How old is he?" Ash asked.

"I know he was old enough to have played a major part in the Battle of Saffron at the end of the Unification War," Brock said, after moment, looking down in thought. "He's at least, fifty or sixty. He's probably even older than that though."

"Wow!" Ash's eyebrows rose. Fifty or sixty was supposed to be really old, with white hair and canes, at least when it came to humans….. Or at least Ash thought that it was. He'd need to try and look that up somehow.

"Who cares," Misty shrugged. "What was important was that he was the one who had your back whenever you wanted to do an ice cream raid."

"Your sisters never forgave him for letting all the kids get into their special stash, didn't they?" Brock said, raising an eyebrow and smirking.

"Oh, yes," Misty said with a wicked little laugh. "And I heard he snuck some away to give to all the other gym leaders at that conference."

"I can neither confirm or deny such rumors," Brock said, still smirking.

"Daisy has sworn an eternal vendetta against anyone who had any of her personal pentuple chocolate mix and she has type advantage on you," Misty grinned. "I think you should ponder that for a while."

"It's a good thing that I prefer caramel then, isn't it," Brock said nonchalantly. "Now, Erika on the other hand….."

"Who's Erika?" Ash asked.

"She's the gym leader at Celadon City," Brock informed him. "She specializes in grass-type pokémon."

"Her gym is also dangerous," Misty said, with a dramatic flair of her hands and a grin. "It is said if you go in there unprepared you… will….."

"I will what?" Ash asked, trying not to tense up or lean away as he imagined a variety of grizzly, horrific, plant-based fates.

"You… will…." Misty drew herself to stand on her toes, her hands reaching out like claws, looming over Ash who was trying not to flinch away, "…end up taking a nap," Misty said, giggling and returning to a more normal posture. "Seriously. That place is so damn relaxing, it's unreal."

"We're not kidding about it being dangerous," Brock grumbled. "Unexpected naps can lead to blackmail material that even trained ninjas have failed to destroy."

"My sisters will let down their guard eventually," Misty muttered. "And then everyone in the nap pile shall be freed from the hanging threat of those photos."

"I don't get it," Ash said. "What's wrong with photos of people sleeping?"

Yeah, Pikachu agreed. I nap all the time and I wouldn't be surprised if there were people who just had to capture a photo of such an adorable event!

"It's just a bit embarrassing," Brock shrugged.

"I don't need the older gym leaders teasing me about how 'young' and 'cute' I looked," Misty complained, crossing her arms. "It's hard enough trying to get them to take me seriously without stuff like that hanging over my head."

What's wrong with people thinking that you're cute? Pikachu cocked his head to the side. It's a great way to get them to feed you! Or at least squee at you while you grab one last bit of electricity before making a daring escape.

"I still don't see the problem," Ash shrugged.

"You will when you get older," Brock sighed.

"So, Erika's a grass-type trainer?" Ash said, changing the subject. "Do you think she'll have any tips for me on how to train Bulbasaur?"

"Obviously," Misty rolled her eyes. "All the gyms are experts on how to raise their type."

"Oh!" Ash pointed at Misty. "You're from the water gym! Do you have any tips on how to train Squirtle!"

"I was wondering if you were ever going to ask," Misty huffed, but her mouth was also twitching into a small smile. "Yes, I do have some."

"Really!" Ash said, getting right in front of her, his eyes going wide in excitement. "Tellmetellmetellmetellme! Please!"

"Okay, I will," Misty said, backing up and holding up both hands. "Just calm down before you have a heart attack."

"Sure!" Ash replied, stepping back.

"Alright," Misty began. "Well, since he's got legs, we can skip the part where we teach him how to battle on land."

"You had to do that?" Ash asked.

"Yeah, I had to spend a lot of time training Staryu and Starmie on how to function out of the water," Misty told him. "See, part of being a water-type specialist is knowing how to function in multiple environments. I had to learn how to battle underwater, by bodies of water, and on dry land. You and Squirtle will need to train in all those environments too."

"Okay," Ash nodded. It seemed obvious now that he thought about it.

"Hmm…. what can you tell me about your squirtle?" Misty asked. "I haven't had a chance to watch you train him yet."

"Uh…. He's clever, he's good at special attacks, and at physical attacks," Ash said, trying to think of things that a trainer who couldn't properly communicate with their pokémon would be able to say.

"You're going to train him to be an all-rounder then?" Misty asked.

"I guess," Ash shrugged.

"Well, the training for that is pretty basic it then," Misty told the boy. "All you have to do is constantly have him working on drills for his normal and his special attacks."

"Got it."

"And you personally need to start learning the best times to use a physical or special attack," Misty went on. "If you're making him into a generalist then the key is using the right attack at the right time…. I mean, more so than usual."

"Yeah," Ash replied. "It always matters, but it matters more when…. Uh… I don't know how to describe it."

"It matters more when you've got a range of good skills rather than a few great ones," Brock finished for him. "You won't beat anyone in their specialty, but you can go after them where they're weak."

"Yeah!" Ash exclaimed. "That's it."

"Are you looking to have him fill any particular role in your team?" Misty inquired. "Do you know what ability he has?"

"Uh…." Ash tried to remember what his pokédex had said. "Torrent, I think?"

"And what role do you think he should fill on your team?"

"Uh…. I think he's going to be one of the pokémon in front that hits a lot and gets hit a lot?" Ash replied. Ash had never put it into words, but he had always had an idea in the back of his mind about what Squirtle would do. Squirtle knew how to take hits on his shell and liked to jump into the action to hit other pokémon with said shell.

"You might want to work on his defensive moves first then," Misty told Ash. "Oh, and you'll want to be very careful with his diet to make sure his shell is healthy!"

Misty then began to ramble on about the different dietary regimes for water types and the benefits of each. Ash listened with rapt attention and continued to do so when the topic of conversation turned to the different drills that he could have Squirtle run. After that Brock jumped in with some general advice on drills and got into a minor argument with Misty about it.

Eventually Ash joined in the fun and the three of them continued walking down the dirt path, bantering and laughing.

Most of the gym leaders were impressed by the sheer power of the Cinnabar Island Gym's air conditioning and Sabrina was no exception. She was sitting in an office built into the interior of a volcano and she wasn't even sweating. Sabrina wondered how much it cost to run the thing and then decided that she was better off not knowing.

"So, Sabrina," a bald old man wearing a lab coat and sporting a white mustache, and sitting in the office chair on the other side of the desk from Sabrina. "Have you-"

"Awls, Blaine," Sabrina rolled her eyes, though she knew that the old man, Blaine, the gym leader, could only see one of them. The other eye was hidden behind the curtain of her dark green hair.

"You could at least wait for me to finish the riddle," Blaine replied, frowning.

"Why bother when I can just pluck the answer from your mind and skip the hassle," Sabrina replied.

"What about-"

"Fire."

"Okay, then how 'bout-"

"In love and war," Sabrina rolled her eyes again. "Now can we quit it with the riddles?"

"Sure, just repeat the answers three times fast and we can move on," Blaine said with an evil grin.

"Awls fire in love and war. Awls fire in love and war…. All's fair and love and war. Ugh." Sabrina groaned as she realized what he had been up to. "Did you really have to do that?"

"If you're going to cheat your way out of my riddles, then you have to accept the punishment," Blaine said, eliciting another groan from Sabrina.

"This is why none of us visit you," Sabrina told the man.

"I thought it was because I'm the only gym leader who lives this far south," Blaine replied, smirking.

"No," Sabrina shook her head. "It's the puns. I'm sure Giovanni would visit more, but you keep him away with your puns."

"Nonsense, he at least has some grounding in puns," Blaine replied.

Sabrina winced. "Please tell me you've got the documents I've requested so I can go somewhere else and read them."

"Oh, you're in a hurry to leave already?" Blaine's smirk transitioned back into an evil grin. "But we haven't even finished warming up. The good puns are still to come."

"There's no such thing as good puns old man," Sabrina glared at him from behind her hair. "I cannot wait to get back to Saffron so I can shower and wash away the feel of your puns. It was a mistake to read your mind."

Blaine chuckled. He opened one of the drawers on his desk and took out a manilla folder. "Here are the documents from my predecessor, but I don't know how much help they're going to be. Half of them are burned-"

"You didn't have any digital copies?"

"If there are digital copies the gym never got them," Blaine told her. "Honestly I was lucky to find these at all. They were in the wrong section of the archives. I think they got misfiled during the reorganization we did last week."

"That would have been unfortunate," Sabrina said, taking the folder from Blaine.

"Careful, they're delicate," Blaine told her.

"I'll be gentle," Sabrina reassured him. The folder floated into the air and the papers gently floated out, hovering around Sabrina.

"Any particular reason you're heading this case yourself?" Blaine asked, sitting back in his chair.

"Not really," Sabrina answered, looking over the papers. "What do you know about the project?"

"Not much," Blaine replied. "My predecessor tended to play her cards pretty close to her chest. None of us senior gym trainers were involved."

"Too bad," Sabrina muttered.

"All I know is that it was about genetic engineering and psychic types," Blaine said. "Which should be up your alley."

"Hmmm," Sabrina hummed, too absorbed in the documents to reply.

"I'll leave you to it then," Blaine said, getting up out of his chair. "I'll be in the break room when you're done."

"Sure, thanks," Sabrina replied, not looking away from the papers floating around her.

The Saffron City gym leader was so absorbed in the papers that she didn't even hear the door shut behind him. She began to cycle through the collection of documents, looking over half-burned papers and records that were clearly supposed to be part of a set.

From what was left, Sabrina was able to confirm that Blaine was correct about the project involving genetic engineering and psychic types, but she wasn't able to confirm that they were the main focus of the project. Most of the documents lacked the proper context, even the ones that weren't fire damaged. For all that she knew, research involving genetic engineering and psychic types could have been a side project, or had been put to the side after Aoba had left the project.

It was hard to imagine that Team Rocket would be so interested in such a project. Even if the project had managed to engineer a pokémon twice as strong as Sabrina's personal alakazm (who she still sometimes thought of as an abra named 'Sleepyhead'), Sabrina couldn't imagine that the organization would risk so much for it. A live specimen would be powerful, but nothing special, and Sabrina didn't think it would be easy to mass produce such a pokémon…..

Unless that was the real prize, a method to cheaply and easily mass produce powerful psychic pokémon. Sabrina glanced through some of the documents again. There didn't seem to be any mention of such a method. Unless it was in a missing record…..

Sabrina groaned. This was going to give her a headache. She shook her head. The gym leader reminded herself that she needed to focus on the evidence she had, not spend time speculating.

She began to read through the rest of the papers. She sifted through gibberish, trying valiantly to reconstruct the context that would allow her to make sense of the maze of data. But it was futile; all that she could make out was that there had been an important sample of…. something.

Though she couldn't even be sure that it was a sample, rather than say an artefact. The scientists and staff only referred to it as 'The Primary Source'. She couldn't tell why they had done that, whether it was for the purpose of obfuscation, a joke, or if they simply hadn't felt the need to call it anything else.

Sighing, she moved on to the last documents. Sabrina didn't harbor much hope that they would be anymore illuminating than the earlier ones. She figured that she might need to look for psychic residue in the burned mansion, though it would be hard to sense anything beyond the final moments of the people who had died there. The gym leader was hoping that she wouldn't have to resort to that.

Sabrina went over another document and stopped partway through.

The document was singed and damaged, but it mentioned something that Sabrina hadn't yet seen. It discussed containment devices, containment devices for pokémon using terminology that Sabrina had only seen in one other place.

Somehow whatever the scientists on Cinnabar on island had been working on was related to Masterball technology.

Ariana took a sip from her hip flask and sighed. She was on a small yacht, leaning against the railing, dressed in casual clothing, accompanied by a few other members of Team Rocket who were also in civilian garb. They were travelling the seas between Cinnabar Island and Pallet Town, heading back to the mainland.

One of her subordinates, a woman with short black hair, joined Ariana.

"Celebrating a job well done?" She asked her boss.

"I wish," Ariana sighed. "No, I'm just settling my nerves. I just got a report that Sabrina is at Cinnabar now."

"Wow, we're lucky we got out when we did," the short haired woman said, raising her eyebrows.

"Yeah," Ariana said, taking another sip. "And now we'll have to wait and see if she takes the bait."

"Please," the other woman smirked. "The League's proven themselves to be incompetent time and time again. We keep making fools out of them and they don't even realize it. I doubt Sabrina's any different. She'll take our bait, no doubt about it."

"Oh dear," Ariana shook her head. "You're making a grave error in judgement there. The League's not incompetent."

"Please," the black hair woman sneered. "We've infiltrated them so many times-"

"And once we're in charge of Kanto we'll be constantly infiltrated," Ariana replied. "Look, the fight's asymmetric for now. The League's in charge of not only securing, but managing the whole region. They're a public entity. We know where their shit is, we know what they're doing in broad terms, and we know who works for them.

"Meanwhile," Ariana continued, "our shit is hidden, we try to keep everything we do under wraps, and none of us have public lives any more, to put it mildly. The League has to guard everywhere against everyone really and they've got no idea where we are, or where we're going."

"Maybe, but I'm sure we'll do a better job once we win," the black-haired woman replied.

"Do a better job at securing un-important outposts?" Ariana snorted. "Do a better job a guarding some documents that you don't know are important in an old basement? Do a better job at keeping people out of the wilds? Be real. It's too much to look after."

"If you don't think that we're going to do a better job, then what's the point of taking over Kanto?" The woman asked angrily.

"We'll do a better job at running things," Ariana reassured her. "We won't have the League's whole thing with former warlords and their damn modern-day warrior caste. But when we take over, we'll be vulnerable to the same tricks and methods that we're using against the League today."

"At least we'll know what to look out for," the woman muttered, looking out at the sea.

"Yeah," Ariana smiled. "We will. But now we just have to wait and see if Sabrina takes the bait."

AN: Short chapter this week. Next week is the Celadon Gym.

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