Celadon City is one of the great cities of the Kanto region, with everything a city needs — commercial districts, shopping plazas of every kind — and the famous Celadon Department Store stands in it.
Celadon University, one of the finest schools in the world, is here as well, and so is Kanto's Grass-type Gym.
Out on the main street the crowds came and went, the traffic ran nose to tail, and the noise of the place never let up.
*Celadon City, I'm back. This time I'm taking back everything that belongs to me. All of it.*
Vance, behind a pair of sunglasses, looked out over the thriving city and said it loudly inside his own head.
It felt good, too, saying it.
He stood where he was for a few seconds, then set off toward the outskirts.
However thriving the place was, none of it had anything to do with him. He did not belong here. He was not one of the city's people.
His old "home" was in a slum on the edge of town.
Yes — underneath all that prosperity there were slums as well.
Before long Vance reached the "slum". It looked the way it always had: broken streets, filthy water running along both sides of them, giving off a smell you could not get away from.
The houses were built any way at all. The better ones used a little brick and cement; others were thrown together out of boards, and together they made stretch after stretch of shanty.
In front of the houses stood a few stalls selling fruit and cooked food, with the vendors calling out over them.
"Handsome, want some fruit? Cheap here."
"Don't listen to him, come to me. Worth every coin, and I'll give you a good price."
Perhaps it was the trench coat and the sunglasses, the look of a man from the city proper, and a bearing that did not match the slum at all. Several of the stallholders had noticed him, and they all started in at once.
Vance did not answer. He walked on quietly, his boots pressing into the mud, picking up the stains of it.
"So it came down."
Vance stopped in front of a house that had already collapsed, and nothing at all moved in his eyes.
This house had been his home. It was where he had lived when he first transmigrated here.
The experience had not been a good one.
A little way off, a few young men in loud clothes stood idling, watching him.
"Hey, hey. New face. Wonder if he's a fat sheep. Wonder how much we can squeeze out of him."
A yellow-haired youth with a cigarette in his mouth elbowed the companion next to him.
"Don't know. Nobody like that around here that I know of. Let's hold off and watch him a while longer."
The one beside him was thin and dark.
"That coat of his looks good, though. There ought to be plenty in it."
"Leave it. Let's go and collect the protection money off the others first. We can't read this one."
The thin dark youth said it carefully.
"What is there to be scared of? We're Black Dragon Gang. Who in this district dares touch us?"
"Leave it, leave it."
Vance heard every word of it.
"Old acquaintances, and here of all places. I suppose I've changed enough that nobody knows me any more."
He knew that pair. They had extorted him before — two of the best-known thugs in this part of the district.
"Enjoy what's left of your lives."
There was nothing in Vance's eyes but the will to kill. It all came back to him, and his fists closed. Besides looking the place over, he had come today for one other thing: revenge.
When he had no strength, that was one thing. Now he had strength, and Vance did not want to wait another moment. He wanted those pieces of filth dead.
Everything they had put him through would be paid for with their lives. That part was not open to discussion.
Then he took out a communicator and placed a call.
"Emery. Use my authorisation and look into a gang called the Black Dragon Gang, out in the eastern outskirts of Celadon. I want the details."
"Right away."
Vance ended the call and left the place, found a passable café, ordered a coffee and waited for the answer.
He was a Team Rocket Squad Leader now. A dark organisation it might be, but it was still an organisation, and a man inside one could borrow its strength for his own business.
Emery was very good at digging up information, so Vance had set him on it — though gathering it was something he could have done himself.
It took less than half an hour for Emery to send the results through.
The file recorded every member of the Black Dragon Gang in detail, along with everything else that touched on them, down to the smallest thing.
"Boss, the search is done and I've sent the results over. Anything else you need from me?"
Another message from Emery.
"Can you jam a network signal?"
"I can. That's my speciality."
"Good. Come to Celadon City. I'll send you the address, and then......"
Having answered, Vance turned to the intelligence Emery had sent.
The Black Dragon Gang's name was grand enough, but it was only a small outfit. The boss was an Advanced Trainer with three Pokémon at Advanced strength and a dozen or so below it, the strongest of them an Arbok.
The boss was called Ulric, a steady-minded man with no little skill in handling people, with connections to the East District police station and the agencies around it. Beyond the extortion his members did out on the street, there was a great deal of business behind them that would not stand daylight.
They even had a degree of collusion with Team Rocket.
In the list of names Vance also found the men who had extorted him and beaten him.
"So they've plenty of people covering for them. Somebody else might be worried about the trouble. But I'm Team Rocket."
Vance laughed under his breath. He had the gang's strength measured now. Tonight he would go in.
A low-crime East District, was it. Then he would hand them a major case.
Vance admitted it about himself: he was petty, and he paid back every grudge.
He was not about to come over all saintly. What use was that?