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While Nova was wrapping up his fruitless search along the border, while Jenny was still tending to the wounded out in the desert, and while Robbin was making his way back to Team Origin's hidden base — something else was unfolding in the Norlandia Alliance capital of Purple Gold City, quiet and unseen beneath the cover of night.
Apple had spent the entire day in isolation and interrogation. It was close to eleven in the evening by the time she was finally released and made her way back to the small apartment she rented.
Less than twenty square meters. Barely a room, let alone a home.
Then again, Apple — who currently served as a communications officer at the Public Security General Bureau of the Norlandia Alliance — no longer had a home to return to. Not really.
Two years ago, during her final year at a higher education institution in Purple Gold City, she had received the news that tore her life apart. Her parents, and her younger brother who was still in elementary school, had all been killed in a flash flood — one triggered by a territorial dispute between a group of Ground-type and Water-type Pokémon. In a matter of hours, everything ordinary and full about her life had simply ceased to exist.
She had thought seriously about ending things. Then a man had appeared at her door, and something in what he said had kept her here.
"Do you want revenge? Pokémon like these never should have been part of this world to begin with. Work with me. Together, we can build a world where tragedies like this never happen again."
He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a steady gaze and a strong jaw. His voice was the kind that seemed to reach past your defenses and settle somewhere you couldn't quite locate. To a person who was grieving and adrift, it felt like a lifeline.
From that day forward, she had carried a second identity: a member of Team Origin.
The man's name was Pris. He was one of Team Origin's Executives operating within the Norlandia Alliance, and in his official capacity, he served as Director of the Confidentiality Department at the Public Security General Bureau.
With Pris working quietly behind the scenes, Apple had passed the Bureau's entrance exams and secured a position as a regular communications officer in the Communications Department. When Team Origin had launched their operation to eliminate the Security Officers' elite mobile forces in Lune Town, she had been part of it — coordinating at the command center alongside Pris, feeding Robbin the information he needed after the plan had been compromised.
It hadn't been enough. The operation had collapsed, and Team Origin had been forced to retreat. Pris, too deeply embedded in the Bureau's internal structure to distance himself cleanly, had been unable to avoid the subsequent investigation. Everyone who had been present at the command center was placed under varying degrees of strict isolation and questioned.
Apple was only a junior communications officer, barely a year and a half into the job. Her interrogation had been relatively brief, and she was let go the same night. But the strain of the day — the fear that something might slip, the constant worry about Pris — had taken a toll. She had eaten almost nothing and drunk very little, yet somehow she didn't feel hungry.
What she did notice, stepping through the door of her apartment, was a faint smell in the air. Vague and chemical, like something left to linger after a long time.
Something is wrong.
The thought arrived before she could fully form it.
The smell was wrong. The drowsiness creeping in at the edges of her awareness was wrong. She had barely been home a minute.
She reached for her waist. Two things were kept there: the Poké Ball containing the battle Pokémon Team Origin had issued her when she joined, and a compact signal generator she could use to call for Pris in an emergency.
But her body was already failing her. Everything below her shoulders felt locked in place, unresponsive, as though her limbs had turned to stone. Only her fingertips retained any movement at all.
One chance. One choice.
Whether it was her deep-seated hatred of Pokémon, or her deep-seated trust in Pris — she reached for the signal generator.
She pressed the button.
What the device discharged was not a distress signal. It was a Poison Sting, concealed inside the casing and waiting. The sharp point drove into her thigh, and dark purple venom flooded through the wound, stripping away her remaining strength, pulling her consciousness down with it.
As she lost her grip on the world, the source of the smell finally took shape in the dim room.
A large Gengar crouched there — scarlet eyes, long lolling tongue, that permanent grin stretched wide across its face. It watched her fall with an expression that looked almost like amusement.
Pris's Pokémon was a Gengar. She was fairly certain of that.
In the last moment she had, she understood. The man she had believed in, the one she had thought of as her reason to keep going — he had never once seen her as anything more than a useful piece. And when a piece stopped being useful, it got discarded.
That was all she had ever been to him.
The Gengar let out a low, unsettling laugh and set to work. It moved efficiently through the small apartment, placing a forged suicide note and carefully prepared false evidence into every corner — tucked into drawers, slipped between papers, arranged just so. When it was done, it let its form fade gradually, growing transparent, until there was nothing left in the room but a body on the floor that had already gone cold.
It was as though the Gengar had never been there at all.
Across the city, Pris was driving home. His interrogation had already concluded. He wore a thin smile.
"Good work," he said to no one visible. "You handled it cleanly. And you're right — a dead witness is far more useful than a living one."
Jenny arrived at the Public Security General Bureau at speed, her Arcanine skidding to a stop outside the entrance. She had come straight from dealing with the aftermath of Robbin's escape, and she was not in the mood to be patient.
She was not given the opportunity to be patient.
"Suicide out of fear of punishment?" She stared at the high-ranking officer responsible for internal investigations. "You're seriously trying to tell me that a junior communications officer, on her own, planned and coordinated an operation that nearly wiped out an entire elite unit? You believe that?"
The officer met her with an expression that stopped just short of being openly dismissive. "Officer Jenny, we work with evidence. All the evidence we have points to Apple as the mole inside the Bureau. If you have something pointing elsewhere, bring it to me and I'll act on it immediately."
Jenny laughed, though there was no warmth in it. "I asked a reasonable question. How did that become me trying to implicate someone? You people—"
"Captain, please."
Pris had been standing to the side, listening quietly. Now he stepped in, positioning himself just close enough to speak without being overheard by anyone else. His voice, as always, was smooth and easy.
"Director-General is doing what he can within a difficult situation," he said. "We can't expect him to pursue every thread indefinitely, can we? Who knows what might turn up if he digs too deep..."