Kairos looked down at Diantha, who had fainted on the floor, then turned to look at Mewtwo. Its expression was completely blank, almost confused.
Mewtwo clearly had no idea that the faint, barely-leashed trickle of its aura had been enough to knock a grown adult unconscious.
Kairos pressed his fingers hard against his temples, where a dull headache was already starting to build, and let out a long, helpless sigh into the empty room.
There was nothing to do but wait for her to come around on her own before they could get into any of it.
Three days later.
Somewhere in the Kanto region, deep underground, at coordinates known to no one.
---
Team Rocket's secret base sat buried beneath the lightless earth. Cold white lights stuttered along heavy metal corridors, and the whole facility held a silence that had no business being so complete.
But that was only on the surface.
In the deepest part of the base, a vast laboratory that occupied an entire floor was thick with a suffocating pressure.
At the center of the room stood an enormous cylindrical tank that reached nearly to the ceiling.
Inside, dark red nutrient fluid churned and rolled without stopping, a steady stream of tiny bubbles rising from the bottom.
And deep within that murky crimson liquid, a dark figure hung suspended in sleep: larger than an ordinary Mewtwo, its frame harder and more angular, every line of it built for something brutal.
Its body was encased in a metal exoskeleton extending from its back all the way down its limbs. At the center of its chest, a dangerous red light pulsed in and out like a slow, mechanical heartbeat.
Giovanni stood at the floor-to-ceiling window along the inner wall, his back to the tank.
Rapid footsteps came from behind him.
The lead scientist hurried over, sweat already beading on his forehead, a thick stack of data reports clutched in both hands.
He swallowed and launched into his briefing. "Sir, the neural link synchronization for Armored Mewtwo has been completed by force. Armor integrity is now three times the original, and the Hyper Beam output has been pushed to its maximum limit."
He paused.
A fresh wave of cold sweat broke out across his face.
"However... the psychic core still lacks the stability of the original. If operated at full force, there may be uncontrollable..."
Giovanni let out a cold laugh and cut him off. "Enough. As long as we can capture it, everything else will work itself out."
The lead scientist went rigid and said nothing more, bowing his head and retreating to one side.
At that exact moment, a shrieking alarm tore through the entire laboratory without any warning.
Red warning lights erupted into rapid strobing, washing every surface in deep crimson.
The enormous screen on the far wall lit up automatically, throwing up a map of the Kanto region. A bright red dot blinked at one location, steady and insistent.
The lead scientist froze for a second, then lunged at the control panel and started working furiously.
Seconds later, he called out: "Mewtwo's location has been exposed. It's been stationary inside a human settlement for three full days and hasn't moved."
Giovanni's gaze sharpened instantly.
He turned around, eyes cutting straight to the tank.
"Does it think hiding among people makes it safe?"
His voice was ice.
"Move out. Activate Armored Mewtwo. Lock onto the target and bring it back alive."
The words had barely left his mouth when the red light inside the tank flared violently.
The dark red nutrient fluid erupted into a rolling boil, bubbles surging and crashing in a frenzy.
The dark figure suspended inside stirred slowly, and then those eyes snapped open behind the murky fluid. A mechanical, emotionless light flickered in the pupils.
The great metal hatch split apart, and dark red liquid poured outward across the floor.
Armored Mewtwo stepped out of the tank through the spilling residue, each footfall sending a faint tremor through the ground.
The same day.
Outside the largest cinema in the Kanto region.
There was no question this was the most lively spot in all of Cerulean City tonight.
A long red carpet stretched from the entrance all the way to the end of the street.
On either side stood enormous promotional banners, every single one of them draped in heavy covering cloth that concealed everything, not so much as a corner peeking out.
The venue had been dressed to the nines. Lights blazed in every direction, and if you didn't know better, you might have thought you'd stumbled into some elite gala.
But the guest list made any gala look modest by comparison.
Nearly every attendee was among the finest trainers in the League, along with former Champions and Elite Four members who had traveled in from every region.
Cynthia, Drayden, Lance: the kinds of names you normally only caught on television had all turned up tonight.
Beyond them, a large number of top-ranked players from the game leaderboards had come as well. Red, Blue, and others at that level were all in attendance.
A live-action film from Wind Studio, and that name alone was enough to send everyone's expectations through the roof.
Over the past three days, Wind Studio had released absolutely nothing beyond a title and a date. Everything else had been left to speculation.
And clearly, nobody had chosen to stay home.
The crowd outside had long since erupted into excited chatter.
"Isn't Wind a game studio? Since when did they start making movies?"
"I heard the lead actor is actually him. That's a pretty wild pivot, isn't it?"
"Who knows, but think about it: they wouldn't put something sloppy out there."
Skepticism and anticipation mixed together, filling the lobby with noise.
Up in the VIP lounge on the second floor, the atmosphere was something else entirely.
Diantha sat on the sofa in an elegant evening gown, a glass of red wine resting in her hand.
But if you looked closely, you could see that her fingers were trembling slightly.
Her feelings right now were impossible to sort out.
The memory of herself being scared out of her mind and hitting the floor in that café three days ago, from nothing more than a barely contained leak of Mewtwo's aura that had still nearly crushed her from the inside out, kept playing itself back.
That kind of fear, the kind that gets all the way into your bones, was something she never wanted to feel again for the rest of her life.
And yet now, looking down through the lounge's glass window at all those people still chattering away below, she couldn't help finding it a little funny. They were about to feel something of it themselves, through the film.
Come to think of it, everything that had happened over the past three days felt to Diantha like some kind of dream.
After all her years in the industry, she had never once imagined that a film could be made in three days.
By her initial estimate, a production at this scale would have taken even her own elite team working at full capacity a minimum of two months to barely finish post-production.
And yet Wind had handled every part of it alone: the storyboards, the music, the editing, everything. He had even played the male lead himself. Three days, just three days.
She still remembered the first time she had been pulled into Wind's studio to watch the finished cut. She had sat there with her arms crossed, staring at the screen with the deepest skepticism she could muster.
Then two hours later, when the film ended, she had just stayed in her chair, completely still, unable to say a single word for a long time.
There were no words adequate for that kind of impact.
So of everyone in that building tonight, she was looking forward to this premiere more than any of them. She wanted to see the looks on all those skeptical faces below when this film played out on the biggest screen available.
She raised the glass to her lips and took a quiet sip.
Go ahead. Start already.
Soon enough, showtime arrived.
---
The lights in the screening hall began to go out, one by one.
The noise dropped away instantly. Without quite realizing it, everyone found their seats and settled in.
The excited hum that had filled the theater gradually faded, replaced by a charged, waiting silence.
In the VIP lounge upstairs, Diantha set down her wine glass and fixed her gaze on the massive screen ahead.
And in the shadows at the highest corner of the theater, a faint purple figure that was nearly invisible to the naked eye floated silently just below the ceiling.
Mewtwo's eyes were narrowed. Its powerful psychic energy formed a barrier around itself, and not a single person in the room could sense its presence.
It wanted to see how the finished product had turned out. This thing called a film, the one it had appeared in.
Every light in the hall went dark.
The screen came alive.
No opening credits, no distributor logo, no transition of any kind. It cut directly to a wash of cold blue-white light.
A laboratory.
---
Enormous tubes filled with viscous fluid, and inside one of them, a small figure writhing in pain. Countless tubes ran from its tiny body to the surrounding surfaces, data streaming across holographic displays.
The film cut to a series of close-ups, clinical and flat: scientists with expressionless faces, and hands writing steadily in notebooks. "Subject 01. Gene fusion successful. Emotion module suppressed."
The moment that line came through the speakers, stripped of all feeling, the atmosphere in the theater shifted.
Players who had been reaching for handfuls of popcorn stopped mid-motion.
The film continued.
Mewtwo awakened.
The instant it rose from the cultivation pod, the entire image seemed to tremble with it. When it opened its eyes, those violet pupils held no confusion whatsoever, only pure, concentrated rage.
"Who am I?"
It demanded this of the scientists in front of it.
The answer came cold and flat.
"You are a miracle of science. Our instrument."
The next second, Mewtwo's eyes exploded with blinding violet light.
The entire laboratory began to come apart. A psychic storm surged outward from the center of Mewtwo's body, shredding the metal walls like paper.
Fire and debris spun wildly through the air. Equipment was ripped from the ground and thrown in every direction. The scientists didn't even have time to scream before the storm swallowed them whole.
New Island collapsed in the upheaval.
A single gasp swept through the entire theater.
Lance sat rigid in his seat, eyes locked on the screen, pupils contracting slightly.
Mewtwo?
A film with Mewtwo as its subject?
From what he'd just watched, he understood perfectly well what that level of destructive power actually meant: Legendary class, and not the ordinary kind. "His special effects are still that intense," he said, genuinely struck. "He even got the aura right."
Beside him, Cynthia watched with a visible flicker of surprise.
The subject was Mewtwo?
Why this one?
The film moved forward.
The scene shifted. Ash and his companions appeared.
Ash wore that signature red cap, carried a worn backpack on his shoulders, and had that look on his face that said nothing in the world could scare him. Pikachu crouched on his shoulder.
The story moved quickly from there. Mewtwo's trials, the trainers invited to New Island stepping up one after another.
The battle sequences between various Pokemon were sharp and thrilling, but by now the audience's attention had been caught by something deeper running underneath it all, and the fights themselves became texture rather than the main event.
The story pressed steadily onward. Mewtwo appeared and made its intentions known, drawing murmurs across the hall.
A Pokemon that wanted to become the greatest trainer in the world, and intended to strip humanity of the right to be trainers at all.
Then came the climax.
Mewtwo's fortress, in the middle of a raging storm.
The sky was a crushing leaden grey. Lightning cracked again and again through the cloud cover. Rain fell in solid sheets, hammering everything below.
The cloned Pokemon and the originals tore into each other through the downpour, the battle chaotic and brutal. Their moves cut blazing trails of light through the curtain of rain, every collision sending great plumes of water exploding outward.
Ash ran out into it.
He ran toward the center of the battlefield without a second thought, screaming at them to stop. Nobody heard him. The Pokemon and their clones had long since passed the point of listening, too consumed by the fight to register any human voice.
Pikachu launched a Thunderbolt at Mewtwo. Mewtwo's psychic force caught him and sent him hurtling through the air.
Then Mewtwo raised its hand. A devastating energy beam launched directly at where Pikachu had fallen.
Ash saw it, and his eyes went red.
He threw himself toward Pikachu like a man possessed.
The beam hit him square in the chest.
The entire screen went white in an instant, then slowly faded back.
Ash's body began to turn grey from the feet upward, the texture of stone creeping from the tips of his shoes and spreading with unstoppable, relentless speed until it had consumed him entirely.
He fell into the rain.
Pikachu staggered over and pressed his small paws against the stone figure, pushing at it again and again. He called out, his voice sliding from frantic urgency into something trembling and broken.
Everything stopped, Pokemon and clone alike, as though the world itself had forgotten how to move.
Rainwater traced slow lines down the contours of the statue.
"Pika! Pika! Pika!!"
Pikachu's tears fell.
One. Two.
Landing on the stone.
Then more tears came, and where each one struck, a soft golden light bloomed outward. The grey coating on the surface began to soften and peel back, revealing warm skin beneath.
Ash's fingers moved.
And then, slowly, he opened his eyes.
The theater was completely silent.
On screen, Mewtwo hovered in midair, looking down at the human boy who had just come back.
Its expression, which had started as something entirely cold, had shifted into something it had never worn before, something close to confusion. Rainwater moved down its face. Whether it was rain or something else, you couldn't be sure.
Having just witnessed something it couldn't explain, it seemed to be reconsidering, for the first time, that thing that existed between humans and Pokemon, the thing it had always dismissed as irrelevant.
"You have shown me something. And so I will leave."
"I will go. There is something I need to find."
After those words, the Mewtwo on screen rose slowly into the sky, all its clones rising with it. The storm began to ease behind them.
A break opened in the thick clouds, and a shaft of golden sunlight poured through, falling across Mewtwo's retreating form.
Its silhouette was no longer lonely. Because it had made a choice.
The screen went dark.
The end credits began to roll.
The entire theater was silent as a held breath.