The assignment had been sitting in Sieg's queue longer than he had preferred.
The target was a man named Briney, a known figure in Slateport, and public enough that his name appeared in city directories, but also private enough that three Team Rocket operatives before Sieg, including at least one squad leader, had come back from the assignment without any results. That failure rate couldn't be explained because he was hard to fight. Briney was not a fighter after all. He was an old man who ran a museum and a boatyard. The failures stemmed from something else: On first glance, it seemed deceptively simple, but whatever was truly going on, he was skilled at hiding it
Sieg had gone to the black market intelligence trader first, specifically because going in blind was the kind of mistake that explained the failure rate.
The three requests he had submitted were not three equal objectives. They were a structure. The Absol location and the Flame Orb sourcing existed to make the Briney request look like one among three rather than the only one that actually mattered. A competent intelligence trader would sell to multiple buyers, and Sieg had no particular interest in advertising which of his three queries was actually the important one to him. Burying his real purpose inside two decoys cost him two extra deposits and was worth every credit.
He had paid the thirty thousand upfront, ten thousand per query, the highest deposit rate in the market segment he had surveyed, and high rates generally meant something, and left the contact details the stall's instructions specified. Then he had returned to the Pokémon Center, confirmed his room was clean, and had been asleep before he had finished processing the thought.
Umbreon took the visible post, settled at the edge of the pillow with the settled patience of a Pokémon that had performed this function enough times to have made it entirely routine. Honchkrow disappeared into the room's shadows without being asked, covering the angles that couldn't be watched from the pillow. Between the two of them, they had the space accounted for, and Sieg's sleep was the deep, uninterrupted kind that only came when the part of his mind responsible for threat assessment had been given reason to stand down.
The Pokémon Center's dining room the following morning was packed beyond any reasonable capacity.
Sieg stood in the entrance, assessed what he was looking at, and began backing out to find an alternative when the crowd shifted, and the noise changed character, from the ambient sound of people eating to the sound of people reacting to something specific.
"Coming through, please. Miss Cynthia needs to get through."
"Cynthia, over here, can I get a photo!"
"Get off my foot, I'm just trying to have breakfast!"
He stepped outside and waited, mildly curious, and watched through the glass as the crowd reorganized itself around a moving center. The people who had apparently been eating here as normal patrons and had found themselves suddenly sharing the room with the most recognized trainer in Sinnoh were navigating the situation with varying degrees of grace.
He went to find a restaurant.
He had covered perhaps thirty meters when he heard someone behind him moving at a pace that suggested they had been trying to close the distance for a little while and were working harder than usual to accomplish it. He slowed slightly without turning.
"Wait."
He turned.
Cynthia was slightly out of breath, which was not something he had previously seen, and was holding his coat folded over both forearms with the deliberate presentation of someone who had specifically not stuffed it into a bag. She had apparently navigated the crowd at significant personal cost to reach the door before he was too far gone, and the effort was visible.
"You didn't have to run," he said.
"I wasn't running." A brief pause. "I was walking quickly."
He accepted the coat and put it away. Then he looked at her and waited, because the coat alone would not have justified the effort.
"I also wanted to ask you something." She straightened, and the composed register she operated in reasserted itself naturally once she had a moment to let it. "A match. Honchkrow and Togekiss. A proper flying-type bout, no tournament format, no stakes, just the two of us seeing what we can learn from each other."
Sieg considered it. The appeal was genuine. A future Sinnoh Champion as a sparring partner for Honchkrow, at a level where the gap was interesting rather than academic, Togekiss had just evolved and was sitting at approximately the same threshold as Honchkrow. The matchup had real instructional value in both directions, and he knew it.
He declined anyway.
"I have something I need to handle while I'm in Slateport. I can't spare the time right now."
Cynthia's expression registered the disappointment without dramatizing it. She had made the request because the logic was sound, not because she had assumed the answer would be yes. She accepted it the way she accepted most things, by filing it and moving forward.
"The Contests," Sieg said, before she could turn away. "The Grand Festival circuit. You're entering, aren't you?"
She looked at him with the slight recalibration of someone who had not expected that specific question. "I'm considering it."
"Then we'll settle it there." He offered the kind of smile that indicated the conversation was finished and that he meant what he had said. "I'll find you on the field."
He left her at the restaurant entrance, still holding her menu, working through a decision that apparently required considerably more processing than it had any right to require. He caught the last fragment of her internal debate as he moved away, curry bolognese versus tomato pasta, the future Champion of Sinnoh momentarily defeated by a breakfast menu, and found, somewhere in the vicinity of genuine amusement, that this was among the more human things he had observed about her.
The satellite phone was for communications that did not go through any channel with a record attached to it.
Sieg found a lane off the main port street that was narrow enough and poorly lit enough to make casual observation difficult, released Honchkrow to cover the approaches, and checked all four directions before he took the phone out of the dimensional ring.
Three voicemails. Three sets of code strings, one per query. He entered them into the portable decryption terminal in sequence and waited the seconds it took for the files to unpack.
The Absol file opened with a partial preview: a sighting in the forested outskirts south of the city, within the past week, specific location and time withheld pending final payment. Standard practice. The preview gave enough to confirm the lead was real without giving enough to act on it for free.
He read the Briney file in full.
Sixty years old. A fixture in Slateport for long enough that most residents thought of him as part of the city's permanent furniture. Two businesses: the Marine Museum, which he had built into a genuine institution, and the shipyard that bore his name, which was by most measures the most respected operation of its kind in Hoenn. His reputation as a sea-channel explorer and adventure hand was established enough that it had stopped being remarkable. He had worked earlier in his career at a large capital holding company managing drilling platform operations. The company had collapsed, and Briney had absorbed a substantial portion of its stranded workforce directly into the shipyard, which was the kind of thing that built the loyalty of the sort that didn't show up in financial records. He had posted a public bounty on the League's open platform seeking skilled trainers willing to take on a sea expedition to a site he described only as a "treasure point."
The file went deeper: family, daily patterns, known associates, the texture of how he moved through the city, and who he moved through it with. The intelligence trader had earned the premium rate.
Sieg read through it twice, slowly.
Three experienced Rocket operatives had failed this assignment. The surface read of Briney was a sixty-year-old local personality with two businesses and a taste for adventure. Nothing in the file explained the failure rate on its own. Which meant the difficulty wasn't in the profile. It was in the approach, something about getting close to this man, specifically, that had defeated people who should have been capable of it.
He put the phone away and thought about the expedition bounty for a long moment.
Then he paid the balance on the Absol file and the Briney file. Six hundred thousand League Credits in total, a sum that registered as barely a rounding error against what he was currently carrying, which was itself a strange sensation to sit with.
The Flame Orb file he left was locked. The lead could wait.
He called Honchkrow back, pocketed the terminal, and walked back toward the main street with the specific quality of focus that came from having moved from a question to a direction.
The direction, at present, pointed south toward a forest and a sighting that needed to be confirmed before it went cold.
But first, the harder problem: how to get close to a man who had already turned away everyone sent before him, without making the same mistakes they had made when they didn't know what they were walking into.