Morning hadn't reached the guest quarters yet when Orion cracked the seal on Doom's blueprints. The bundle was heavier than it looked. Luthor's reply to the decline hadn't come, and wouldn't for hours yet, maybe longer. There was nothing to do but wait, and Doom had left them homework instead.
A heavy wooden table sat in the corner of the room, solid and unremarkable under Orion's hands. A single lamp cast a pool of yellow light over the spread sheets, leaving the rest of the room in soft, domestic shadow. None of it matched the throne room's gold-trimmed grandeur. The air here smelled of old paper and the faint metallic tang of the heating vents.
Valeria sat across from him, scanning the technical layouts. She tapped a finger against her tablet's edge, comparing the digital files to the physical sheets.
"Honestly, the wing dimensions are ridiculous."
Orion traced a line of text. "The foundation alone is massive."
"He's building for longevity."
She moved further down the page.
"Then there's the material specs. Reinforced titanium alloys for the outer hull."
"That's overkill for a single monument."
They kept skimming, voices low and easy, trading numbers back and forth: square footage for the plazas, projected energy loads for the lighting systems. Two people reviewing a construction plan, nothing more, with no idea yet what they were actually looking at.
Orion's eyes drifted to the bottom of a schematic for the southern sector. He stopped mid-sentence.
The word sat there in a clean, sans-serif font, labeling a small enclosed area tucked between the main hall and the research labs.
Sanctuary.
His breath stalled somewhere behind his ribs. The blueprints blurred at the edges of his vision, the room falling away from him and back to the center of his whole life instead. The Aurawood rose in his mind: light filtering through leaves, Pokémon resting without fear, a Poliwag's quiet trust, Zygarde's steady watch beside it, silent and constant.
This wasn't a monument to a king's ego.
"Orion?"
Valeria's voice pulled him back. He didn't lift his head right away. It took effort to drag his mind into the dim room and the girl sitting across from him.
"He isn't building a monument, Valeria." He leaned back; the wooden chair creaked under his weight. "He's building a real operation. If there's a sanctuary in here, he's making a place for them to live. To be housed. Studied. Under Latverian authority."
Valeria stared at the blueprint, then at him, her face blank for a long moment.
"I didn't see that as part of the plan. Not really." Her voice came out uncertain, her analytical mind snagging on the gap between the monument's decoration and the habitat's function. "I thought he just wanted to prove a point."
Orion studied her. "Did you know this was part of what he wanted?"
Valeria shook her head, gaze dropping to the table. "I knew he wanted the report. I knew he wanted to crush Luthor's credibility. But this?" She lifted her eyes again, frustration tangled up with something closer to being blindsided. "I didn't think he was planning to house them. He's being far more thorough than I gave him credit for."
The realization sat heavy between them: a permanent shift in the world's balance of power, and neither of them had seen it coming until it was already built into the blueprints.
"We can't sit here and guess what he's thinking."
Valeria closed her tablet with a definitive snap. "Agreed."
They stood together, leaving the blueprints spread across the table like a map of a war neither of them had signed up for.
Crossing from the guest quarters to the main throne room felt like stepping into another world entirely. Beyond the heavy doors stood a hall of polished stone and oppressive height. Even with the lights dimmed for the evening, the air hung thick and electric. The casual warmth of the room they'd left behind was gone, replaced by a stillness that made even Orion's own footsteps feel like an intrusion.
Doctor Doom sat on his throne, his metallic hands motionless on the armrests. He didn't look up as Orion approached. The silence stretched long enough that it started to feel deliberate.
Orion stopped at the foot of the dais. "Does the sanctuary wing mean Latveria intends to research and house Pokémon under its own authority? Separate from mine?"
He kept his voice level, no accusation in it, just a straight question waiting for a straight answer.
"It's a logical conclusion for a nation of your caliber."
Doom finally lifted his head. Light caught the edge of his steel mask, a cold silver glint.
"You finally ask a question with actual substance."
He didn't sound offended. If anything, his tone carried a hint of clinical approval, the way a teacher might acknowledge a student who'd finally grasped something basic.
"The pursuit of absolute perfection requires the integration of every available variable." He leaned forward, slow and deliberate. "Pokémon represent a biological and energetic phenomenon of unparalleled complexity. To leave such a resource unexamined is to admit a failure of vision. Latveria will master this variable, as it has mastered all others."
His voice fell flat and absolute, each word already law. He spoke of the creatures not as companions or mysteries, but as untapped strategic assets: another frontier of science and magic, a way to grow his nation's prestige and power.
"That's just another way of saying you want more control." Orion held his ground, though arguing with Doom felt like arguing with a mountain. "You're finding new ways to wrap authority in the language of care."
Doom didn't argue. From behind the mask he studied Orion, his expression unreadable, his posture unyielding. To him, "control" was a redundant word for "order." The conversation had moved past debate into a difference in worldview neither of them would cross tonight.
"The matter is settled."
He turned his attention to a holographic display near his throne and didn't look back. The meeting was over.
Orion fixed his eyes on the dark wood of the table back in the guest quarters, the silence pressing against him like something solid. The blueprints lay in front of him, no longer engineering marvels: a map of predatory intent instead. Doom had meant every word of it. Orion had built Pokémon Home on the belief that these creatures belonged to themselves, bound to humans only by a shared, voluntary bond. The throne room's chill still clung to him, older and colder than anything in his own world.
Doom's sanctuary was a flag planted in claimed ground.
The Monarch had taken the wild, unpredictable freedom Orion protected and folded it into a structure of absolute order. It felt like theft. A hollow ache opened in his chest as the edges of his own influence slipped: years spent nurturing trust, and now a titan had stepped into the clearing to claim the soil for his own conquest. The creatures felt more exposed now, stripped of the illusion that their place in this world had ever been simple or peaceful.
"I brought him into this." Valeria sat perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the blueprints. "If I hadn't thought of Doom, none of this would be sitting on this table."
Orion was already shaking his head before she finished. He pulled a chair around to sit beside her instead of across, no accusation anywhere in the motion.
"You didn't put anything in him that wasn't already there. I knew what he might try the second you said his name."
Valeria turned to look at him. "You knew?"
"I've heard enough about how he operates to know he doesn't hand anyone a weapon for free. There's always a price folded in somewhere, usually one he thinks you should be grateful for." Orion tapped the edge of the blueprint. "I needed what only he could give us. That part was worth the risk. This is the price. That's mine to carry, not yours."
"You still let me set up the meeting."
"Because I trusted your read on him more than my own." He held her gaze. "That hasn't changed."
Valeria's shoulders eased, just slightly, though the tightness around her eyes stayed. "I keep running the numbers and I still don't see the version where this doesn't cost us something."
"It already has." Orion looked down at the sanctuary label one more time. "The advantage is real, and so is what he took to hand it over. Both things are true. We don't get to pick just one."
The weight of it pressed into the quiet between them, heavy and permanent. The balance of power across the United Superverse had shifted in a way no diplomacy or research could undo easily. By folding his ambition into the very infrastructure of the Pokémon world, Doctor Doom had secured a stake in their future that nothing could touch.
"So what do we do with that?" Valeria asked.
Orion didn't have an answer yet, not a full one. But for the first time since the word Sanctuary had stopped him cold, he had somewhere to start.
"We figure out what he actually wants out of it," he said. "Nobody builds something like this just to prove a point. Not even him."
***
Give power stones to support this book.
Advance chapters in P@T0n Najicablitz.