"You're wrong. Justice is what elevates us above the Pokémon we surround ourselves with. It is not just for a Houndoom to devour a Patrat, even if it needs to do so in order to survive. It is the obligation of our species, and of men like you, to define the concept and defend it."

This man reminded him of the sheriff. The gaze is similar. Their disposition is similar. The only thing that changed was different came from experience. Howard knew what sat within the sheriff's heart, but what of the man chosen by a self-proclaimed sword?

What form would his soul take?

"In history, the victors decide the law. When Team Rocket loses, the League will define the term of justice and you will enforce it, unless the system is broken. You must be better." The admin spoke of treason, his hand on his hip as he regarded Eddie. Howard had accepted that the League would win this war and that he would swing.

The ending was clear. His route to reach Ever Grande's gallows? Less so.

He walked around the monument, reading each name carved into stone. Nineteen was a small amount compared to the lives lost in the Ultra Deep Sea, but the nineteen weighed more in his soul. Howard Slayte was fallible, and he was beginning to realize it.

"But Navy's reasons are just. We fight for the same thing, funnily enough. A world without Eternatus." He stopped. "Did he ever tell you why I attacked Dewford?"

---

Eduardo Hisakawa

Howard Slayte would meet multiple people at this monument. Ghosts from yesterday that haunted today. Eduardo Hisakawa and Roze Falkner looked upon him and did not recognize the man that had made their lives undeniably worse. Eddie was a soldier and had a soldier's will. Roze was simply... alone.

A tragic thing to be in a world with no friends, and where every other person was a Rocket plant who wanted to stab their foes in the back.

He met those who carried Dewford's legacy, in front of the monument that held Howard's greatest shame. It was also at that monument, in this precise moment, where he met Eris Halla.

"If I had failed, it would have been my failure. I would have held it as I fell to my death, and it would have been my final mark upon this world." He should have died. He wanted to keep living, but occasionally there were moments where self-annihilation called his name. A human life for Regirock? He would have accepted that bargain.

Yet that exchange had never mattered. He had never mattered.

"I could have done it. Eris, why? How could you be so blind?" He bemoaned the twisted view of a child who had been raised for war. "We could have won in that moment. If I couldn't catch Regirock, then how the fuck am I going to kill Eternatus?"

She refused to let him grow. She refused to let herself grow.

---

Eris Halla

Curious, that the place where the dead went did not stay shackled and unchanging. Death was absolute. It did not change. Why, then, did the afterlife need to? It was a contradiction that the admin would've found interesting if the place didn't unnerve him.

"What an interesting place. It's a shame it's so... scary."

Though asking spirits of the damned where they had died and of their accounts interested Howard, it was not something he had time to invest into.

Maybe when he had been less overworked and with less responsibilities. Occasionally, the notion of simply letting go enticed him. Maybe he could return to grunt duties and simply follow his dream again. Then he woke up and saw Petalburg rotting and Regirock and Regice's Pokeballs on his nightstand and reality came seeping back in.

"Our world is falling apart, Adrian. Are we surprised that the afterlife is collapsing too? I suspect that this world will be closed, one day. Yet that is not today." Howard closed his eye in thought. "Nor tomorrow."

Adrian stopped. Howard did as well.

"What's wrong?"

---

Adrian Malcolm

Naomi Sato arrived, yet the admin did not blink. Howard was used to her trick by this point, and while she could certainly atomize him with her mind, it wasn't a particularly big worry. They were allies. She was the Visionary. She knew the direction that they would walk.

He was needed. His purpose had not yet been reached, yet. Howard's pieces had not yet been assembled on Hoenn's chessboard. When it was time, the board would break under the weight of epochs, and they would enter a golden age.

"Underboss Quinn and I have looked into the plates. We've both seen them before." He raised a relit cigarette to Cillian Quinn and nodded to him, a mutual chain of respect forged for their passion for ancient and forgotten things. "The ones we hold are not noticeably different from these new ones. The old ones are carved with distinct phrases that the new ones only universally share."

Carved in an old language, ancient and dusty. It had not been a hard one to read. If anything, Howard welcomed the challenge after toiling with mountains of braille.

"I can't accommodate that request, Beast Inoue." He addressed his beast with a shrug. With Kanto's introduction and the scouring of Petalburg and Sootopolis, funds and material were required elsewhere. "When the opportunity presents itself, we'll look into it. Until then, have faith in the Head Scientists and Neon. They will unravel the secrets of this world, and of these plates."

And he would toil over ancient texts. Perhaps it was finally time to look more closely into the various knickknacks that GIDEON GRAVES and Remiel Calcifet had stashed away in that museum of theirs.

"We will not be hoodwinked by the divine."

That was the purpose of the Arc Suits. A fraction of heaven had been chained up and bound to the will of humanity. Every god's gift was poisoned, but occasionally they had to sup from the chalice. With that, his eye turned to Shred . He refused to comment on Elisabeth Fiorelli 's broken grave.

He shredded rose petals between his fingers.

"A paradox cannot form a bond like that. It's impossible! It cannot be done." They were abominations born of delusion. How could they instill anyone with this much power? "You cannot-"

With a horrible thought, he thought of june sleigh . His eye twitched.

"No."

---

Nomi arrives, Howard thinks of their exchange in the Unown Dimension. Thinks of their goal and of Hoenn's future.
Tells Hitoshi that the budget isn't there (tell shiv to discount sygna suits in the shop and we'll talk) and to trust the nerd squad to crack the code. Moment of solidarity with Cillian
ELISABETH IS NOT REAL SHE IS NOT
Tweaks over Shred

"They're worse."

Half of the city was gone, and what remained was struggling to shoulder the weight of those who had survived the end of the world. The land itself had been reshaped, and Regirock had buried a large swath of the city and replaced those portions with mountains that scraped the heavens.

The terrifying thing? They looked natural. With enough time, nobody would be able to tell that the mountains here had been placed by a golem.

The initial looting and pillaging was bad, but now it's the tallying of the dead and the clearing of rubble that is a problem. There's a pushback from the civilian populace. They don't understand that Regirock wasn't ours when it attacked the city. All they know is that it's ours. They blame it." He lit a cigarette and puffed it. His anxiety hardly lessened. He considered smoking another, but maintained composure for Makoto.

They didn't deserve to see him lose it again. He had already raged and screamed enough. All that remained was a weary obligation to fulfill his duties.

"They blame me."

Not that he could blame the city. He blamed himself.

"When I was climbing Regirock, I was so close to the summit when I was cast down. I fell, Makoto. I fell and I should've died when I hit the ground." A trickle of ash fell from the cigarette and disappeared into the wind. "I fell from the tightrope. It's a victory for Rocket, but sometimes it feels like a personal failure."

His eye flickered.

"I should've done more. I should've caught it earlier."

---

Makoto Kurumi

The passage of time was a frivolous thing. It seemed absurd to utter it, but Howard knew it to be true. Dynergy gnawed at spacetime, alternate worlds where months could pass in seconds, and Lulu's Interdream Mist all made a mockery of a concept that had dictated the human condition since the dawn of life on this planet.

Ironically, it was the greatest proof of the human condition. A fun time passed quickly, whereas a boring time passed slowly. Perception could distort a field over which divinity had held sway for millennia.

"Fine, mostly. Nothing you'd consider a medical issue. I'm tired and everything hurts, but Petalburg and Regirock are to blame for that. Besides that, it's not so much my body as much as it is my brain." He tapped his temple with a finger. "I just feel different. Wrong."

Tera Crystals glimmered around them as Lulu led the way.

"Ever looked in a mirror and wondered who was looking back at you?"

---

Lulu Flint

Damn. He was normally better at ancient languages than this. Yet the draconic script existed for dragon masters to parley with creatures that sat at the pinnacle of the food chain. It was a language used to converse with what many cultures had considered deities.

Yet as this region tended to prove, gods could die.

He knew from experience, because he would kill one. Humanity would know if Necrozma's blood was as black as its armor, and Eternatus would fall to siege engines designed to bring down the heavens.

"I'll have to practice. There weren't many times that I could attempt it, though I guess that's why Dreepy tend to attack me in tombs. It really kills my throat, though." He chewed his lips thoughtfully as he looked from the Applin to Freya. "You sure?"

As its tongue tasted the archaeologist's flesh, it shuddered at the familiar sensation of tasting a liar hiding in plain sight.

"Last time someone gave me an Applin, it wasn't even the real deal. It was an eraser. It's on my desk somewhere."

---

freya morningstar

"They don't, because people's dreams never end."

The answer contradicts the question. It will likely frustrate Alba in the same way that the phantom pain of missing a limb was ceaselessly annoying. There was no way to solve the quandary. It was an unending labyrinth did not end, despite the systemic desire to consistently turn left.

Yet Alba desired a feast. Howard provided him with one.

"We are all driven by something, even if we don't know it yet. There is something that every single person desires that they cannot easily attain, and it's why we exist in this world. If you can easily reach it and take it, then it wasn't your dream at all."

Shirley growled, and the admin scratched her head thoughtfully. The rim of his hat covered a large swath of his face.

"It was... simply a 'want'." The admin broke eye contact to observe the Floette. "And what are human beings if not wanting creatures?"

---

Alba Evovae

Lulu Flint was a confusing woman. A revenant who hid every emotion behind an umbral shade of inscrutable expressions. It made interacting with her made him uneasy. Howard liked her in a lab. On the field? Much like Regirock, she was an unknown variable.

Thus, Howard regarded her warily. A plume of smoke curled up around the roof of the cave. She lit another one, and the admin resisted the urge to do the same. Every day, it felt like he was smoking more and more for an anxiety that he could never fully control.

"Okay." He looked at the clock as she returned from rummaging around in the bunker, before raising an eyebrow. "What's with the clock? I have a watch, Lulu."

One that didn't work, from a gift from someone he'd never see again. She didn't need to know that, though.

Instead, the admin followed her.

"Where're we going?"

---

Lulu Flint

Strangely enough, the Frenzy Plant doesn't seem to do much damage to the monkey. It made sense, given its Poison-typing, but it seemed to do even less than normal. Maybe it was Munkidori's accursed powers at work, or maybe it was something else entirely.

What did happen was the monkey was sent flying, Screeching all the way until it landed on the floor in a disgruntled heap.

"Aw, Max Nuts." Munkidori shook his head from the shade of the trees above as he looked up at Pon, who now looked down at him with her majestic mask. "That's a nice mask, ogre. Did your human make it for you? It's pretty good..."

Munkidori sneered at her.

"For a shitty-"

---

Andrea Vaneau

Another day, another careless researcher descending into the earth's maw with little care for their own safety. If Rocket had worker's compensation, they would've been bankrupted in weeks. That was how many good people this crater chewed up and spit out.

"The crater is an anomaly, just like everything else in this region. It came out of nowhere, and the biome it created does not make logical sense. Something like this could not have formed without us catching wind of it. It just... appeared."

It was frustrating how many things could be described like that. Still, it was remarkably exciting. Howard would enjoy it more if it wasn't related to the Tera Crystal phenomenon. It made this place dangerous. It meant that they were underprepared.

"You're trying to justify the impossible. Call it a paradox."

It was worse than that. If Howard knew what Elisabeth or Jayden knew, he would've made a beeline for the depths of the crater to lay siege to the Ting-Lu that threatened to sunder the old world and remake it anew.

"You're lucky. This place used to be even more dangerous."

---

NIKOLA SAMSA

"We've made the League into what they are now. We've raised the stakes so far that they will struggle with the moral quandary that has stricken governments since we first discovered that people bleed when you stab them."

A realization that, paradoxically, every human failed to understand despite the fact that it had happened a thousand times before. Realizations such as this made the admin a pessimist, as optimistic as he tended to be about tomorrow.

"They're forced to ask if victory is worth sacrificing freedom. Seems they found their answer with Kyogre, no? They cracked Sootopolis open like an egg and now it's ours to repair. Money that I have to find, money built on the suffering of others."

His eye twitched. This had been so much easier when Howard's job was to simply sell artifacts and raid tombs. When was the last time he had practiced his craft? When had he last been an archaeologist instead of an admin? Even if that part of him never faded, it was certainly buried under a thousand miles of paperwork.

"War is good for business. If the League wanted to end Rocket, they could've crushed us. They did not. Thus the war continues, and I'm here doing this fucking job until they finally kill me."

A genuine moment of frustration. Then, a revelation.

"That attack wasn't us. Wasn't that councilwoman there? You really think we wouldn't send a few avatars to put her in the ground? I would've done it myself." He clenched the steering wheel with enough force that Howard feared it would snap. June could've broken it, but the archaeologist was not her.

That councilwoman had to die. He avoided June's question for a while longer.

"When I shot you down and let you pretend I was innocent, didn't that make me a bystander? You should be kicking my ass."

---

june sleigh

A second humorless laugh fills the room, joining the first. There is no joy, no grand proclamation. Team Rocket did not believe in laughter, nor did it believe in tears.

It did believe in anger, though. If enough bubbled up, a region could be swayed and a god could be cast down into the dust. Boris learned that after seizing Jirachi. Now he rotted in a cell. His contempt had not been directed. Their disdain had not been focused into a purpose.

Occasionally he liked Cillian Quinn, if it wasn't like looking into a mirror.

"As if either of us are lucky."

---

Cillian Quinn