"That won't be necessary. I'm fine with the freedom you've given me."

Truthfully, it felt wrong to be given so many luxuries after coveting this position for so long. If he indulged in them, it would feel wrong. After struggling to get a job in the field for so long, he was allowed time to recover? It felt wrong. He should've been fired for resting.

Indulging in Gideon's openhandedness was a betrayal to everything that the admin thought he deserved as an archaeologist. That was to say, nothing.

Even a job was a luxury. Asking for anything beyond that was a dream that reached into delusion.

"You're remarkably greedy, but everyone is entitled to a smidge of selfishness. You, more than most. Me, less than most." Greed was a human necessity for ambition, but Howard had none. There was no future that he dared reach for, no world he dare create.

Not yet.

"Running into that desert to chase ghosts was a mistake. I was too greedy for my own good." He confessed as Celpho's quick eye snipped a flower from a grove, sending a minute fairy careening through the air. A Pokeball flew. "But I don't regret it."

---

GIDEON GRAVES
CATCHA DA FLABEBE

He'd get Wright his blood money for reconstruction. It would become known that whatever was torn down, Rocket would rebuild as glorious as before. Finding the money was always an issue, but if Howard could afford to pay for all the military toys that Rocket had lost in Mossdeep and Sootopolis, then he could find the coin to pave a few roads.

But first, politics.

Joy.

Who knew that rebuilding a city could invite so much contention? Howard had read of historical accounts where cities had been razed and rebuilt, but he hadn't peered too closely into the conflict that went into reconstruction. It had seemed trivial in his historical pursuits.

"If another Dynamaxed Pokémon decides to erupt through the ground, Wright, it won't matter how resistant the buildings are. They will fall. Regirock shifted the landscape with one attack." All it had taken was one attack to change Petalburg forever. If it had attacked again, there would be nothing here but stone. "Dynamaxed Pokémon aren't meant to move."

Yet Regirock had. Regice had. Registeel had. Titans designed epochs ago overruled rules they had recently decried as absolute.

"I'm not an architect. I'm not an engineer. But." He frowned. "Rebuild within the mountain range that Regirock created, and create a wall to cover what the range does not. What's the estimate on cost?"

Expensive. Obnoxiously so.

---

Yuan Wright

"It's a big one." He agreed with her statement. "We'll cut away the necrotic flesh as we need to."

A scalpel was preferable to a sledgehammer. A threat could be excised with both, but a blade was more likely to excise a threat and allow the surrounding flesh to heal, rather than to shamelessly smash it.

Tsubame was a better trainer. She was a better soldier. She was thus a better sword. They had brought him someone who had clashed with Navy and lived, and the admin knew from his interactions with Zaria in Galar that Navy would do his hardest to bring down any enemy on the battlefield.

His kagemusha was here, thus she was strong.

"Two swords are better than one. I am not a warrior, but I would consider a shield instead. Human bodies are fragile, and they're remarkably easy to break." His eye reflected bodies crushed by boulders in Petalburg and bloated corpses in Sootopolis. "And when they're broken, they can't be fixed."

In the face of Tsubame's question, the admin shook his head. Despite the threat, he seemed eerily unconcerned.

"No, but I suspect the remains of resistance fighters. There's a lot of places to hole up in the ruins of this city. They'll jump at us when we're most vulnerable." Howard lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the sky. "Which is why you're going to turn into this next alleyway with me."

---

Aoki Hana

Lulu Flint's gaze could've turned flesh into stone. Unfortunately, that implied that the man before her wasn't already cast from it. That alone made the stranger suspicious. Howard tended to wilt when she glared at him. He was a craven and she had years of experience and authority under her belt.

This man hardly flinched. A baleful red eye glared back at the Noctowl, before turning to Lulu and a memory of Project Lockbox. It was a memory of Team Rocket's brilliance, but all things had their time in history. This project's era had concluded long ago.

Though with the war in full swing, it likely had interesting applications. Howard didn't bother to understand the intricacies of warfare.

"I'm hilarious, actually." Her angry face is met by his exhausted one. This sense of familiarity from a stranger seems exhausting. "Light me."

He pulls out his own cigarette.

---

Lulu Flint
BRILLIANCE

If anything, the fact that Grigori parked so well caused Howard to choke as he sat down in the driver's seat to pick up June. Yet surprisingly, Grigori returned to the passenger seat. It seemed that their conversation was not done.

The question caused his knuckles to tighten.

"Why would you ask that?" He turned to look at Grigori, though Howard refused to meet his eyes. It gave the game away, yet the admin seemed content to do what archaeologists did best: take a shovel and keep digging.

"I think that she's had enough suffering in her life, and that she's entitled to happiness. She's good at fixing things, is a good mechanic, and is good at fixing things. She's never given up, and she tries to solve her own problems. She's really good at—"

He was rambling.

---

Grigori Sokolov

"Grigori." The doors clicked open as the two exited the car. Howard would drive the rest of the way through Slateport to pick up June, and Grigori would watch Absinthe Blackwood's bar. He wondered if the two would meet. "Don't. Whatever Rocket tears down, we must build it back up. What they destroy, we must rebuild."

What Rocket razed, they would raise.

He met the older man's gaze.

"I'd like you by my side." He swallowed nervously. "For as long as your dignity allows."

---

Grigori Sokolov

"You collapsed in my apartment. I took you to the hospital, and..." An idea sparked in his head. She didn't remember anything from the dream, but the circumstances of it? The details that surrounded that void? They could justify the existence of something that wasn't there.

It was like archaeology. If a piece of a skeleton was missing, there was a reason for it.

"Call Grigori! When you collapsed, I brought you to Rustboro's hospital. Matchstick was there." He silently kicked himself for not paying for it himself, or getting a receipt, but how was he supposed to anticipate this scenario? "He paid for it, so he can back me up. Call him right no-"

CRASH! The window shattered into a million pieces of flashing glass. What descended alongside translucent pieces of window was something strange.

An anomaly.

Regirock's pattern flashed as a foreign threat entered the warehouse. Except it wasn't the warehouse that mattered, it was the fact that a mechanical serpent that had no right to exist bothered to be born at all. It was a stranger in a stranger's home, an automated piece of life that did not belong in this world.

It rose, but stopped when the admin raised a hand.

"I know you." The admin spoke in wonder, recalling a book that he, Naomi Sato, and BARNABY FINCH had once looked over. "I've seen you before."

---

june sleigh

The car grew silent. If these words reached anyone else's ears, only one thing could happen:

Grigori Sokolov would be branded a traitor.

"You're right." Howard's voice was a whisper. An exhausted expression overtook his face as he stared out the window. "Team Rocket will wage its war, like it did in Kanto. It will overextend, much like it did in Johto, and we will fail."

He clenched his fist as he thought of Cillian Quinn.

"But you can't leave."

It was the realization that had struck him when Howard became an admin.

"You just can't."

He crumpled a ledger in his hand.

"They'll kill you, Grigori."

---

Grigori Sokolov

Money was the universal balm for any problem one might face. It was the lifeblood of the world, and the heartbeat that ensured that Rocket could never truly be quashed out. One day, Rocket would own much of the material wealth in the world, and they would become a heart of commerce that pumped gold throughout Hoenn.

One day, that golden heart would stop beating by Rocket's will alone.

"You humble me, Maki." His eye twinkled slightly, before the sparkle of life left the admin's eye as they turned to more important tasks. "As for our captive..."

The admin coughed into his fist, clearly discontent with the brutality that they would have to enact on. Torture was such an ugly thing, and it was often impractical. Yet it served a very specific purpose: vindication.

"He will be sharply interrogated at headquarters. There is much to ask him, and I suspect more than a little of it will reach beyond the scope of tonight." Rocket would need him before Maki would need him. The Megalopolan was an asset, and a reminder of a war that had ended years prior. "However."

His voice turned conversational.

"If the key to his cell was conveniently located on the floor where one of his guards was supposed to be, and he happened to be out on break when you came by... That'd be unfortunate, but there'd be little that Rocket could do about it. Wouldn't you agree?"

---

MAKI YUKIMURA

"I'm furious that this happened. Why did you help me? I was going to succeed! I could do it! I know I could! And yet..."

He clenched a fist, furious. He didn't know if it was Mesprit's doing, but his emotions were bubbling and boiling in turmoil. Were his emotions even his own in this precise moment?

Did it matter?

In exchange for being born with control over the concept of emotion, Mesprit had never been allowed the freedom to express its own opinions besides rambunctious tantrums before meeting the child that watched Howard rage. It was incapable of functioning as an emotionally vindictive god.

A god was meant to rage with greater intensity. A god was designed to love with greater passion. A god was designed to cower in theatrical proportions.

But a Being of Emotion cannot be allowed to be blinded by the field it holds sway over. Thus Mesprit could never be allowed to understand the human heart, and it had bonded to someone that had never held control over her own emotions or logic to begin with. It was a cycle of tragedy.

"I was never given the chance to succeed."

---

Eris Halla

Every other person in this region is broken. Those who remained were simply cobbled together from pieces that they didn't know existed in the depths of their character.

Every person had a breaking point. Every person would eventually reach it. The true measure was how they pulled themselves back together again. Admin Fox had fallen apart into a pile of shattered glass, and Howard had pieced himself together again. That was the curse of carrying the weight of the world.

Yet as he looked at this woman and her sapphire, he remembered a flicker of a promise, a vow to preserve rather than maim. One he still intended to keep, even if the world branded him as a destroyer.

"I-" His eye widened as he stared at Roze. His face paled as he gave her a long look, recognizing her. He had fought this woman for no other reason than that she had once stood on the other side of the battlefield. "No, you don't."

His voice betrayed him, and memories of captivity did not fade silently into the night. She would not forget Petalburg. He would not forget the war. Yet he saw this woman marred by war and felt something he hadn't felt since seeing Eris again: shame.

"I'm sorry. I must be going. Enjoy paying respect to yesterday." He started walking past her.

Yesterday.

---

Roze Falkner
BINGO: SAPPHIRE

Howard's eye followed Eddie's. The price of having only one eye was that he saw twice as much.

"It doesn't matter." In truth, it did. Yet the admin did not want to clash with Eddie on this hallowed ground. Howard had already scorched the ground with a hoarfrost that would never fully melt, and fighting the Paldean here would only cause further suffering. "I have no qualms with kyle lopez 's sword. I suppose it's yours now, though. I hope you're better than Kyle was at keeping it unsheathed."

Despite the words, there was a clear hint of pride in the admin's voice. Not for his own greatness—he lacked any—but for Kyle's restraint and forbearance. He had loved the man from a distance as Hoenn's greatest hero, yet there were hardly any heroes left.

They were all buried or at wit's end. noah faber was running out of men to grieve.

"He fights because he loves this world. He fights to make amends with his own heart. Maybe he even fights for justice." Navy fought. That was his purpose in this world. Yet Zaria had demanded more of him. "Justice."

Howard chuckled.

"Heh."

He found the concept amusing as he regarded the man standing before him, a soldier on his way to becoming a broken man. They all broke at the end. 

"It's a human concept. Why does Terrakion represent it? Why does it defend a human premise when its purpose is to defend Pokémon?" He remembered whispers of the sword in Unovan song, back when he wandered the world. "You fought with it. What's your opinion?"

---

Eduardo Hisakawa

Howard Slayte knew Eris Halla better than most. He knew about the innocence of childhood and the weight that it put on those aware of its purity.

Humanity was incapable of shouldering the innocence of childhood.

"I knew you would come." His gaze lingered on Mesprit's ruby, its brilliance shining in salt-kissed wind as waves crashed against a distant shoreline. It could not help but approach in its attempt to understand the maelstrom of emotions swirling, yet unsaid. "Being of Emotion."

His coat flapped in the wind. The two Pokeballs sat by the monument, dormant. Yet the admin was bound to them in blood.

"You could not help but heed the call of one suffering from the domain that you command." His eye flicked from the sprite to Eris. "Just how you couldn't help but meddle in my struggle against Regirock."

His fist clenched.

"I'm furious."

---

Eris Halla
BINGO: RUBY