Cynthia's fame was something Sieg had understood vaguely before he saw it in action, before him.
Thousands of people had turned up at Slateport's dock ahead of the ship's arrival, having tracked her itinerary through whatever combination of fan networks and informed speculation produced that kind of coordination. They were already there when the Chansey came in, packed along the quayside in a density that made the press contingent look modest by comparison. The moment Cynthia appeared at the top of the gangway, the sound the crowd produced was less a cheer than a physical event.
Sieg's own reception was considerably more contained, but not negligible. Several dozen journalists, far more than a nobody with no public profile had any natural right to expect, had been pointed in his direction, the Joy family's influence made visible in the most practical way possible. He stood in the cluster of microphones and answered questions with the composed fluency of someone who had rehearsed the account thoroughly and knew exactly which details to include and which to leave in the conference room where they belonged. The cameras flashed with a frequency that took some adjustment.
Two lifetimes, and he had never once stood in front of this many lenses pointed at him specifically.
He managed it. He smiled at the right moments, gave the journalists enough texture to write something interesting, and never said anything that would require clarification later.
By the time the crowd thinned enough to move through, the sun was dropping toward the western horizon, and Slateport was settling into its evening rhythm. Sieg made his way to the Pokémon Center and secured a room, dropped his bag, and stood at the window for a moment watching the harbor lights come on one by one across the water.
He had been on his way to find food when the spectacle at the ice cream shop stopped him.
Cynthia had gone in. She had spent perhaps three minutes inside, ordered something, and came back out with a cone. What followed was instructive. Within the time it took her to reach the pavement, the shop had been flooded by several hundred people, all apparently motivated by a single objective: to order whatever she had ordered. The line spilled out the door and down the block. The staff inside were visibly not prepared for what was happening to them.
Sieg watched this for a moment, shook his head once, and continued walking.
He ordered food through the Pokémon Center's delivery service and ate it in his room, reading back through messages on his Pokédex while he worked through the meal. He had gotten through approximately half of it when someone knocked.
He already knew who it was before he opened the door. Officer Jenny came in most of the way Sieg expected her to: professional, direct, no particular hostility, a printed form on a clipboard, and a recorder running on her belt. She had questions about the incident aboard the Chansey. He answered all of them fully and in sequence, following the account he had aligned on in the conference room, adding the human details that made the testimony feel genuine rather than rehearsed.
She did not ask about the Pokémon he had captured during the engagement. He did not raise the subject. They were his by every applicable regulation, spoils of a League-authorized emergency response, and she was clearly experienced enough to know which questions to ask and which ones to leave alone. The interview concluded without friction.
"Thank you for your cooperation, Trainer Sieg." She tucked the recorder and clipboard under her arm. "Enjoy the rest of your evening."
He let out a quiet breath after the door closed and finished the last of his food.
Then he put on the black robe, fitted the mask, and went out.
Slateport's black market occupied a section of the lower port district that did not advertise itself and did not need to. The people who needed to find it found it, and the people who stumbled into it by accident tended to leave quickly. Sieg moved through the evening crowd on the main streets first, taking a route with enough turns and doubling-back to confirm that the two people who had picked him up after the Pokémon Center had lost the thread before he reached anything he actually cared about. Losing surveillance that attached itself to him was a skill he had maintained since long before this voyage.
The market itself was busy for a weeknight, the vendor stalls running in close rows under strings of dim overhead lighting, the air carrying the mixed smell of everything people brought to sell and buy when they preferred not to do it in a place with cameras. Most of the people he passed wore something to obscure their faces. Nobody found this remarkable. It was simply the dress code.
He started with the sell side.
The miscellaneous items that had accumulated across too many encounters, minor spoils, low-grade materials, Pokémon below any useful threshold, went first, distributed across several stalls for speed and tidiness. None of it was worth much individually; collectively it cleared a small amount of carrying weight and put a modest sum onto one of his anonymous cards.
The Elite-rank Pokémon required more care.
He had eight in total, counting the ones taken from the twin brothers and from Rose, alongside the Pelipper and Mantine captured during the Gyarados engagement. Two of those eight he was keeping: the Pelipper for its Drizzle ability, and the Mantine for Swift Swim. The pairing was too synergistically clean to give up, and both Pokémon had come through the battle with the kind of practical combat conditioning that took time to develop.
The remaining six presented a different calculation entirely.
Every one of them had belonged to another trainer before it belonged to Sieg, and that history could not simply be discarded. Bonds between a Pokémon and its original trainer went deep enough to make the reassignment genuinely difficult under the best circumstances. Under these circumstances, where Sieg was the person responsible for removing those trainers permanently from the equation, the prospect of those Pokémon ever choosing to work with him willingly was close enough to zero that he did not waste energy on it.
Selling them was the correct answer. Six Elite-rank Pokémon in a single transaction, however, was the kind of volume that generated exactly the wrong kind of attention. Elite-rank Pokémon were not something you found in bulk bins, and anyone paying attention to the market would notice.
He spread them across six separate shops over the course of an hour.
Slateport's black market was large enough that the distribution absorbed the sales without producing any visible ripple. Each shop received one. Each transaction was clean and anonymous. By the time he stepped out of the last one, his anonymous card collection had grown considerably heavier.
He paused in the alley outside and did the arithmetic.
The three hundred thousand he had come onto the voyage carrying. The betting winnings from the Kimhee Takumi match. The cash was taken from the twins and from Rose in earlier encounters. The tournament prize value. And now six Elite-rank Pokémon have been sold across a market that priced them correctly.
The total sitting on his cards had crossed ten million Pokédollars.
He stood with that for a moment. The most reliable way to fill your pockets, he reflected, was to take them from people who had deserved what happened to them.
He moved on to the buy side.
Most of what he needed was findable. Materials, supplies, and a few items that the mainstream shops did not stock. He worked through the list efficiently, stall by stall, acquiring what was useful and passing what wasn't.
The Flame Orb was not findable. He checked five shops that carried specialty held items and came back empty from all of them. The Toxic Orb, same result. Both of them existed in a tier of rarity that removed them from standard market inventory: not elemental boosters like Charcoal or Mystic Water that a factory could produce in volume, but items that required an Item Artisan working through methods that had not been widely practiced for generations. Supply was thin. Demand, among trainers who understood what Synchronize could do with a status orb, kept whatever supply existed absorbed quickly.
The consolation came from an unremarkable stall near the market's back section. A Focus Sash, in good condition. The mechanic was simple enough: one survival. If the holder was at full health and took a hit that should have finished it, the Sash intervened and left it standing at the thinnest possible margin instead. Sieg turned it over in his hands, considered the roster, and made the obvious call.
Zorua was the newest addition and the least seasoned fighter on the team by a significant margin. It had real potential, but potential and current capability were different things, and Zorua was currently operating in an environment where most of what it encountered outclassed it. A guaranteed survival against one otherwise-fatal hit was not a sophisticated tool, but for the right Pokémon at the right stage of development, it was exactly what was needed.
He clipped it onto Zorua's ball and moved to the last errand.
The intelligence stall was in the corner of the market where people went when they wanted information rather than merchandise. The setup was deliberately low-key: a folding table, a pen and paper, a locked box with a slot in the top. You wrote your question, you included your contact method, and you dropped it in. If the trader decided the request was within scope and the compensation was acceptable, you heard back. If not, you didn't. The system worked because the trader's entire value rested on a reputation built across years of accurate, reliable information, and a single bad delivery could erase everything that reputation had taken to build.
Sieg had done enough background checking to be satisfied with this particular trader's record before he approached the table.
He picked up the pen. Thought for a moment. Then wrote three lines.
The first was a location query on Absol.
The second was a detailed profile request on Professor Birch.
The third was a sourcing inquiry on the Flame Orb.
He folded the paper, included his contact details in the format the stall's small posted notice specified, and dropped it through the slot.
Then he walked back through the market, out through the lower port district, and returned to the Pokémon Center through a different route than he had left by.