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Chapter 93

Part 1

Once they were safely in the hideout where she could be sure eavesdroppers were not present, Tallie double-checked the Pokémon in attendance one more time.

Buddy, Watcher, and Asunder. All present.

Brace without the usual Otto at his side. Good. Lonely, though.

Arcana disguised as Glower. Expected.

Gemstone and Dragonheart. Present.

Leo, Zona, Adamant. All there.

Kerzek, Lyre, and Scarlet, all looking a bit concerned, as if they somehow already expected what Tallie was about to tell them.

Zachel stood beside the entirety of Team X, who had been also invited to the meeting at Kerzek's suggestion.

And finally, there was Eva, who looked insufferably bored and indignant about being rustled from her nap. Technically she was the one who should have been running the team in Char's absence, except that she seemed plainly uninterested in actual responsibility, and seemed mostly content in parading herself around as Char's royal consort. That, and showing off how uncannily well she performed in any missions involving stealth or psychological trickery.

Did Tallie find herself a bit uncomfortable with Eva being around without Char to rein her in? Yes, very much. Did she secretly wish Eva would have gone with Char like a good, loyal partner should have done? Absolutely. In fact, that was actually the part which bothered her the most: she couldn't for the life of her figure out what prompted Eva to not stay at the side of her favorite Pokémon in the whole world, and instead to stay behind with a group of Pokémon who seemed so insufferably boring, Pokémon who Eva only put up with because she got to be with Char.

Tallie tried playing several scenarios through her head about Eva's methods and motives, but nothing matched with reality. Every logical conclusion pointed to Eva leaving with Char, not turning Char down at the last moment like she did. It didn't make sense.

Tallie knew she had her own ways of addressing an unruly Eva if things ever came to that. For now, Eva remained an enigma. But hopefully she could prove herself a useful enigma to the team.

"OK, listen up," shouted Tallie, standing tall and trying to sound as serious and authoritative as possible. "We've been given a special, high-priority, top secret mission from High Intelligence! So I'm going to need everyone to listen very carefully and not share this with anyone else."

"Oh… another one of those red letters?" Eva sighed. "Right after all our senior talent has been stripped away? Yes, this will go well."

"What's the big deal?" prodded Scarlet with a juvenile grin, "Last I checked, we don't have talent any more senior than yours."

The joke flew past everyone's head except for Kerzek, who didn't bother to hide her snicker.

Eva turned up her nose. "Yes, it seems that I'll be the one having to do all the work," she sneered. "I see how things are around here. Where's our target? As long as it's not a mystery dungeon, I'll see to it that the problem disappears."

"Our target, miss prissy-cat, is the Gold Division base itself," said Tallie, though she immediately regret how bluntly she broke the news. The whole team fell silent, and even Eva suddenly looked interested in what this mission could be.

"Yeah, alright, look, this is actually kind of serious," Tallie said, lowering her voice and her posture. "This isn't some exciting high-level mission. This isn't even an official mission. It's not going on your personal record or anything. This is… more like a personal request from Xatu herself. Xatu thinks that the security of the base has been compromised. Some bad actors have snuck in, or something. They could be anywhere, and we're the only team that Xatu can trust right now. So she's asked us to keep our eyes peeled for suspicious activity."

A heavy silence fell over the hideout for a moment. The younger Pokémon looked to be in shock and awe.

"Sounds vague," Brace commented. "Anything more specific? What's their endgame? If they've compromised the base already, why haven't they blown us all up?"

"Actually, I asked Xatu the same question," said Tallie, perhaps a bit more smug than she intended. "Xatu's theory is that some force is trying to repurpose the base for some other, sinister intent. If they're working for the Master, maybe the Master wants us to all start working for him, without knowing we're working for him. That sort of thing."

"Wellll…" began the Seviper. "That, uh, miiiiiight just describe us, if we're going to be completely honest… We struck a deal with Scythe, we snuck in, and we do happen to serve the Master… in some manner of speaking, I guess you could say. We serve the Master's ideals, without serving the current ruling party. But trust us; we're not so ambitious as to get our hooks in the entire Division and restructure it to suit our interests. We're our own team. We operate independently."

Tallie glared at the snake. "Luckily for me, I have a way to verify your truthfulness. Zachel? Care to vouch for them?"

Zachel pat the snake on the head as though it were a little Eevee. "Yeah, I'm afraid so. I can say with a thousand percent certainty, these guys are harmless," she said with a childish grin of her own. "I know a bit more of their inner workings than I'd ever be willing to admit, but I can tell you that they're legitimate double agents. They fight the same things that the resistance fights. They're on our side. And they wouldn't know the first thing about corrupting the Gold Division, even if it were their top assignment."

"Hey, now, I wouldn't go that far…" the Seviper playfully shot back. "Maybe I would be fantastic at corrupting a criminal organization from within. Never know until I try. But no, sadly, she's right. If we were plotting against you guys, we'd turn ourselves in right now. Thousand percent honest. I'm afraid we're not your guys."

Scarlet crossed her arms. "But you got in by getting Scythe to trust you, is that what you said?" she questioned.

"Yes, but that should not be of any surprise," said Dusknoir. "Social engineering is the primary method of infiltrating an enemy organization. We began by vaguely trying to earn Char's trust. Emphasis on vaguely. By taunting and threatening Char's team, you could say we did a VERY poor job of earning his trust. But ultimately we were still trying to leverage them as an entry point into the base."

"That's… kind of the point I was getting at," said Scarlet. "Whoever Xatu is worried about, we should assume they got in the same way as these blockheads. We should assume they earned someone's trust. Social engineering."

"Ah, but look! We didn't socialize nobody," said Croagunk. "Scythe is the one who socialized us. Came to us all by himself and asked us the favor. We didn't had to negotiate anything."

"Yeah, and there's another unpleasant possibility that we're overlooking," said Kerzek. "There's another way that baddies can infiltrate the base. That's when they don't start out as baddies. They can start out perfectly trustworthy, walk in line and all that, then they snap and decide to turn against us. Happens occasionally, to be honest. But we have ways of watching the warning signs and addressing the issues. If something got past us, we probably weren't paying enough attention. And by that I mean Team Cog wasn't paying enough attention. Not really my problem anymore."

Scarlet shook her head. "Doesn't change the end result," she said thoughtfully. "What I'm saying is: if they're in the base, they've got to be part of the base. And that means, registered on resistance teams. They're not lurking in the shadows so much as they're lurking with someone. They're either a team of their own, or they're hiding out with someone else's team."

Eva squinted at Tallie. "I'm not understanding exactly what we're expected to do about it," she said flatly. "What, does Xatu want us to personally find the infiltrators? What if there are none, and this is just baseless paranoia, and we accomplish nothing but to disrupt our day-to-day operations?"

Tallie glared an evil, knowing glare at the Espeon. "Tell me something," she said. "You're a good spy. If you were tasked with infiltrating the Gold Division and slowly turning all of its members to some other cause… how would you go about doing it?"

Eva blinked, suddenly looking keenly interested in the question. She stared at the ceiling and swiveled her tail on the floor for a moment. "This would require taking control of the leadership. A coup, essentially. To organize a coup, I would first sow discontent among the Gold Division members," she reported. "I would attempt, in a number of subtle ways, to convince the teams of the Gold Division that High Intelligence were not operating in their best interests, insinuating reasons to doubt their leadership."

"Go on," said Tallie. "I'm liking it so far."

"Whoa, whoa, wait," said Kerzek, waving her claws up to Tallie. "I see where this is going and I don't like it. If we try to stage our own coup, we're just going to get framed as the perpetrators, and the actual bad guys will get away with it. That's actually the worst idea I've ever heard."

"Yeah, because you heard it from yourself," Tallie shot back. "That's actually not where I was going with this at all, but somehow I'm not at all surprised that's the first place your head went. Eva, please continue. First you get everyone angry at High Intelligence. What next?"

Eva smirked. "Next, I would attempt to turn at least one member of High Intelligence to my side," she described. "While not guaranteed, it's an endeavor worth attempting. The easiest way to defeat High Intelligence is to break them apart, and to ensure the one who wins is my puppet. Perhaps they would remain the public figurehead while I rule from the shadows."

Eva sighed whimsically and then stared at the floor for a moment, as though wishing this were a realistic goal and not a hypothetical.

Tallie pressed her further. "So now you're ruling from the shadows. You have the whole Gold Division at your disposal. How do make sure they don't all rise up against you? What's your plan to keep them all in line?"

Eva cackled for a moment, showing off her fangs. "Oh, now we're getting into my areas of expertise," she said gleefully. "The main thing to consider, when trying to control a population: if they are content with their daily routines, you must not change anything. You would be surprised: Pokémon who are comfortable with their work will gladly work for a different cause, if it means they get to keep doing the same work. So I would implement policy changes, ensuring they would have no direct effect on any of the working resistance teams here, but would instead reroute the effects of those efforts to benefit whatever would be my personal cause. For the Gold Division it would be business as usual: crawling dungeons, collecting treasure, helping townsfolk, contributing to charities, and following the same primary rule set as always. Only perhaps now they might be working for the Master instead of against him."

"Yeah? And what policies would you change, exactly?" Tallie wondered. "What policies could you possibly change that would redefine the entire purpose of the Gold Division, without making enough waves that the residents would fight back?"

"Perhaps a restriction on the types of jobs that we accept and allow," Eva thoughtfully offered. "Perhaps we would blacklist certain cities, or organizations, from our system. Post a formal notice saying that, for instance, Nincadia and its residents are no longer accepted as clients to the Gold Division, for their heinous affiliation with the Master. Of course, the precise opposite might be true – we could blacklist them because they are not faithful to the Master enough – but nobody would be in a position to challenge the statement. As long as the Master keeps creating problems for us to solve, and as long as we allow our Pokémon to continue doing what they enjoy doing, and as long as we do not blacklist so many clients that we spur a counter-resistance to form somewhere, we can selectively choose certain demographics to wither and die without our help. That is how I would handle things if I were in charge of the movement."

After a pointed moment of uncomfortable silence, Kerzek said, "You sound like you've done this sort of thing before."

Eva just shrugged. "Well, yes… before I joined the resistance, internal relations were a large part of my job. Of course, they still are, to an extent, but on a much smaller scale… if you catch my understanding."

"No, I'm afraid I really don't," Tallie returned snidely. "But you make your point clear. If someone has infiltrated the base like Xatu thinks, that means they're changing things slowly under our noses. They want to destroy the purpose of the Gold Division without destroying the whole place in the process. Now, if Xatu trusts us enough to be her personal eyes and ears, we need to figure out a way to keep an eye on things without making it too obvious. We need to be like Team Cog, and form our own little surveillance force. But we have to keep purportedly working for the base, so that nobody suspects we're up to something, especially the infiltrators themselves. Any idea? Kerzek, any plan you could come up with? I'm assuming you know a thing or two about surveillance."

"I'll be honest, I was never actually assigned to surveillance as much as I would have liked," Kerzek admitted. "Though I have access to the Book of Secrets now, I can't exactly sneak in there and check it anytime I want. And besides, I don't remember there being anything on file about someone trying to change the whole directive of the Gold Division. Whoever's doing this, if they even exist in the first place, they're good at flying under the radar."

"Actually… I might have an idea," said Gemstone. "We need to watch other teams, right? But we also need to do our job. So… let's make watching other teams be our job. Stop accepting submissions for our job board and finish them off as fast as possible. Then, we start only accepting partnerships. Offer ourselves as members-for-hire to other teams. So then we get an inside look into the other teams and we can see if anything is off. We can report back to you, if we notice anything weird going on."

Tallie tapped her talon on the floor. "Hm. I like the idea, but we'd have to make it work fast. Scarlet, go take down all the missions on the board and make some kind of a big sign that says we're temporarily not accepting job requests. Then you'll have to help me go through them all and return all the jobs we can't get finished in only one day. I'd ask Otto to help with the paperwork if he were still here. Never realized how much I'd miss his enthusiasm for bookkeeping, of all things…"

"Don't worry, I'm sure he misses you just as much," Scarlet said with a little grin.

"As for everyone else," continued Tallie, pointedly ignoring the remark, "If this partnership ploy is going to work, we're going to need advertising for it, and fast. Anyone who's an alumni of a previous team, I need you to go back to your old team and tell them about our new teammates-for-hire business. Oh, and tell them the first job is free. If our goal is to get into other teams, we've got enough savings stored up that we can afford to work for free for a day or two. Hunter left half his pile of gold here, I'm sure we can dig into that if we need."

"Oh! Hey! I bet I can get us a few jobs from Team Remorse!" said Dragonbane. "But wait, if we're just gonna infiltrate all the other teams, why don't we just keep working for free? Or, y'know, offer a price that's so low that other teams would be crazy not to work with us all the time?"

The Seviper seemed eager to answer this question. "Well, I can think of at least three reasons that wouldn't work," he said smoothly. "The top two reasons, they're obvious, so I won't even bother explaining them. The third reason, quite understandable if you haven't come up with it yourself, is that customers tend to see things with lower prices as having less value. In other words, if you charge a team five golds to help them out for a day, they'll assume your service is only going to be worth five golds. That's not very good marketing, and you won't get a lot of business that way. Just like if you buy a magical scarf for three Poké, you assume it's broken."

"Oh… yeah, I guess you're right…" said Dragonbane, looking disappointed in himself. "Ah, and I realized what the other two reasons are, too. It's super suspicious, right? And it might actually make us run out of money…"

"Ah, see? I knew you were as smart as you are adorable," laughed the Seviper.

As Tallie used her mind to follow this idea where it might lead, she found herself locking eyes with the Espeon across the room. Truthfully, she was still rather shocked at the audacity of Eva's replies, and her insights into the mind of a deceiver.

Eva spoke in telepathy: All I will say for now is, you'd better hope this is just some ragtag band of rebels who slipped through the cracks. I will do some of my own investigation and report my findings in a few days. Promise me you'll prioritize keeping the team safe.

That's already my highest priority, Tallie replied, eyeing her oddly.

Good, said Eva, already returning to the base. Because if this runs any deeper than we think… it won't be pretty. Pray to whatever legendaries you pray to that we'll all get out of it safely.