The square had thinned out enough that James felt comfortable pulling the black case from his pack. He set it on the low wall beside them and clicked it open.
Fifteen Mega Stones, nestled in foam padding, caught the evening light.
Ash picked one up and turned it between his fingers, his Aura reading it without any conscious effort on his part.
"These are well preserved," he said quietly. "Each one still has roughly five uses left in it." He went through them one by one, setting each aside as he identified it. "Three Beedrill, one Pidgeot, two Kangaskhan, three Charizard, one Gardevoir, two Blastoise, three unknown."
He paused on the last three.
The energy signature was completely different from the others, closer to psychic energy but with something else threaded through it that he couldn't cleanly identify. He turned one over slowly and set it back down without a conclusion.
"Can't read these three," he admitted.
James looked genuinely surprised. "You identified twelve on instinct and three stumped you?"
"The elements don't match anything I've catalogued." Ash closed the case and slipped it into his storage seal. "Either way, good work. The ones I needed are here. Keep anything I didn't take as a reserve."
"These things are worth a fortune," James muttered, more to himself than anyone. "Every single one of them. And you're treating them like pocket change."
Ash didn't respond to that.
...
Alto Mare's downtown square was exactly what James had described. Vendors lined the surrounding streets, trainers from out of town clustered around stalls and food carts, and the energy of pre-tournament excitement was already building ahead of tomorrow's race.
"The canal race," Meowth explained, walking alongside them. "Not a Pokémon battle. Trainers team up with their Water-types and race on platforms through the waterways. Speed and coordination."
Ash glanced at a posted flyer for it and kept walking. "Not interested."
"Didn't think so."
James had picked up his pace noticeably since they'd entered the square, scanning the crowd with barely concealed impatience.
Ash raised an eyebrow at Meowth.
"He and Jessie just got together," Meowth said, with the resigned expression of someone who had been a third wheel for weeks. "They're basically attached at the hip now."
"Good for them," Ash said.
Meowth looked like he had more opinions on the matter but kept them to himself.
...
Ash stopped walking.
It was subtle, the kind of thing that registered below conscious thought first, a pressure at the edge of his Aura sense, directional and deliberate. Someone was watching them. He turned his eyes toward the feeling without moving his head.
Nothing. No life signatures in that direction at all.
"Something wrong?" James asked, catching the shift in Ash's posture.
"We're being watched," Ash said. "That direction. But my Aura sense isn't picking up any life signatures there."
James looked. "There's no one there. We've been careful, we haven't drawn any attention."
"My Aura doesn't register non-living things," Ash said, still looking. "Objects, machines, infrastructure. I've tested it before at the Whirl Islands and in some of the Rocket operations. Cameras, submarines, anything mechanical just reads as dead matter." He paused. "Which means it's probably a camera."
Meowth straightened up with a proud expression and reached into his small pack. He produced a tiny ant-shaped robot and set it carefully on the ground.
"Leave surveillance to the professional," he said.