If he could, he'd nudge the story in a slightly different direction going forward, just enough to keep things fresh without breaking anything that mattered.
Once the timing lined up, he could drop a classic remaster and let people experience something that had been legendary back in his world twenty years ago. That alone would pull in another wave of emotional points. Why pass that up?
Kairos had barely gotten through the thought when his phone buzzed.
A message from Simon.
Simon led with a wall of question marks.
"???"
"$???"
"Dude, what did you just walk into?"
A second message came right on its heels:
"No way. Seriously, don't do anything reckless, okay?! The money can wait, I'm not worried about that. Did you get tangled up with some shady lender or something? If you're in a tight spot, just tell me!"
Reading that rapid-fire chain, Kairos could almost picture Simon wearing a hole in the floor, and he couldn't help smiling.
That guy. Sure, he'd grown up with money, but he was genuinely a good person.
"Relax. This is clean money. I made an animated series, it just started streaming, and this came from viewer donations."
He followed it up by forwarding the livestream link.
"See for yourself. I made it."
---
On the other side of the city, inside a sprawling villa in one of the more exclusive neighborhoods, Simon was stretched out across a leather couch in the living room.
He had his phone pressed tight in both hands, reading Kairos's message with an expression that cycled through what had to be five separate emotions.
"Clean money? An animated series?"
He muttered it under his breath, turning it over.
He knew Kairos well. The guy had real talent and a mind that never stopped running, always chasing some wild idea nobody else would have thought of. But none of those ideas had ever actually paid off before. Every single one had bottomed out in some way. So how had this one worked?
And not just worked, but well enough to send back a hundred thousand right off the bat?
Something felt off.
Simon stood up and took a few steps across the room. Fifty thousand wasn't a number that kept him up at night. He could drop that on a dinner without blinking. What actually worried him was Kairos's headspace.
What if he borrowed from the wrong people, figured he was done, paid me back, and now he's about to do something stupid? Simon stopped the thought before it finished, but the more it sat with him, the harder it was to shake. "No. I'm going over there."
He was already moving toward the door when the link came through.
Simon stopped, looked at it, and exhaled. Still skeptical, but a little less tense.
Alright. There was a link. Might as well see what this actually was.
He dropped back onto the couch, snapped his fingers, and the wall in front of him shimmered with a ripple of blue light as a massive projection screen materialized in the air. He flicked the link to it and the video loaded on the display.
Just then, footsteps came from the staircase upstairs.
A girl in a white sundress came down.
She shared some of Simon's features, but the vibe she carried was something else entirely.
If Simon was the kind of rich kid who blended in without trying, she was the kind who made a room aware of her the moment she entered it.
Her name was Sierra, Simon's younger sister.
She was around Simon's age, tall, put-together, and currently holding a glass of red wine, moving through the room with the kind of easy elegance that would have looked completely natural at a charity gala or a rooftop opening.
Sierra reached the bottom of the stairs, caught Simon staring at the screen like it owed him something, and frowned.
"Simon, what are you doing? You scared me."
Her tone was calm, but clipped, like her evening had already been inconvenienced.
Simon didn't look up. "Watching a new show. My friend made it. It's called Pokémon: Indigo League."
"Pokémon?"
Sierra drifted toward the couch and took a slow sip of wine. A flicker of distaste crossed her face.
She glanced at the footage on screen and shook her head.
"That sounds like something for eight-year-olds. You can tell just from the title. Animation."
She said the word like it had let her down personally. "There is nothing interesting about cartoons. Complete waste of time."
She looked entirely unbothered by what she was missing out on. As far as she was concerned, the only things worth her attention were actual art, fashion events, or a negotiation worth sitting through. "You watching this in here is genuinely lowering the quality of the room."
Simon turned the volume up.
Sierra, seeing she was getting nothing from him, gave a light shrug, wandered to the armchair on the far side of the room, settled in, and pulled out her phone to scroll.
The living room went quiet. Just the sounds coming from the screen.
At first, Sierra tuned it out. Background noise, mildly irritating.
But a few minutes in, she noticed something. Simon's side of the room had gone completely silent. Normally he'd be laughing at something, or commenting out loud, or making some kind of noise. There hadn't been a peep.
She glanced up without really meaning to.
And then she stopped.
Wait.
What is...
Twenty minutes later.
To Be Continued appeared on screen.
Simon was locked in. His jaw had drifted open somewhere during episode one, and the remote in his hand looked like it had been through something.
His buddy actually made this?
This was genuinely something. The way it pulled you in had no competition on the market right now, not even close.
Kairos had actually gone and done it.
No wonder people were donating. If this thing took off the way it looked like it might, he'd be set.
Simon felt a surge of excitement and started to push himself off the couch, ready to call Kairos, ask him how he'd pulled it off, maybe even put some real money behind it. But just as he moved, a hand appeared from beside him and plucked the remote clean out of his grip.
Simon turned, startled.
Sierra was staring at the screen with total, undivided focus. And in those eyes that were usually so composed and above it all, there was something unmistakably alive. Genuine excitement.
"What are you doing?" Simon asked, completely lost.
Sierra froze. A faint flush moved across her face.
She cleared her throat. Looked away.
"I, um..."
She paused, clearly buying herself a second. Then she bit her lip and said, quietly, "I just want to see if there's a second episode."
Simon lost it. He burst out laughing.
The flush on Sierra's face went from faint to very, very visible in about half a second. She whipped around and stared him down.
"What is so funny? Stop it."
Simon raised both hands, still grinning. "Okay, okay. But you literally just called it something for little kids. And now you're trying to queue up episode two?"
Sierra answered with a sharp exhale, snatched the remote the rest of the way from his hand, and started navigating the interface without another word.
"Give me that."
When the screen confirmed a second episode was available, something flickered across her face, quick but real, and she hit play before she'd even finished looking at it.
"I'm just checking where the story goes. Someone should make sure this thing isn't misleading people."
She said it mostly to herself, then settled back against the cushion and fixed the screen with a look that was somehow even more focused than before.
Simon shook his head and said nothing. He stretched out and watched alongside her.
The room went quiet again, the show filling the space.
Sierra gradually stopped thinking about the moment from before and let herself sink into it completely.
After a while she noticed that Simon, right next to her, was just as locked in as she was, maybe more so, and she couldn't let that go without comment.
"You're watching it too. Don't even think about giving me a hard time."
Simon didn't turn his head. "I never said it was boring. That was you."
"And I'm not making fun of you. I'm just impressed my friend actually pulled this off. That's called recognizing what someone's capable of."
Sierra pressed her lips together. Said nothing. Her eyes stayed on the screen, and the wine glass she'd been holding had been sitting on the side table for a while now, completely forgotten.
---
Across the city, Kairos looked at the message that had just come in.
Simon kept it short.
"Man. That's real. I always knew you had it in you."
Right behind it came a transfer notification.
Two hundred thousand, received.
Then one more message: "Call it an investment. Don't cut me out when this blows up."
Kairos looked at the number and understood exactly what Simon was doing.
Simon didn't need this money back. Two hundred thousand was probably what he'd spend on a weekend without thinking about it.
The reason he'd framed it as an investment was to give Kairos an out, to make it feel like an equal deal instead of a handout. It was a way of offering real support without making Kairos feel like he was on the receiving end of someone's generosity.
That wasn't lost on him.
Though Simon probably had no idea what this particular investment was actually going to look like on the other side.
A hundredfold return would be the floor, not the ceiling.
But at this point, money in this world didn't carry much weight for Kairos anyway. He could hand the whole thing back to Simon without hesitation. He pocketed his phone, turned his focus inward, and pulled up the system panel.
His eyes moved to the quest log. Phase two of the main quest called for a hundred thousand views.
With the second episode now live and the first still picking up momentum, the combined count had hit thirty-five thousand.
At this pace, a hundred thousand was coming. It was just a matter of how soon.
His mind drifted.
The Pokémon IP wasn't just the show and the games. There were the films too, the theatrical releases, and those weren't something anyone should skip over.
Mewtwo Strikes Back. The Power of One. Spell of the Unown. Jirachi: Wish Maker. Destiny Deoxys. Lucario and the Mystery of Mew.
If he was already producing animation at this level, and the CG was holding up, then a film wasn't out of the question.
Worth looking into eventually.
Some of those movies had visuals and storytelling that still held up years later. And they could potentially travel across multiple worlds the same way the show had.
If that worked, the point haul would be massive.
But for now, it was time to head back and check on things.
Kairos activated the transit scroll from the panel.
Light flared.
That familiar weightlessness swept through him, and when his vision cleared, he was standing on a quiet side street in Saffron City. Nobody around.
He looked up out of habit.
His expression shifted.
The light was pale and thin. Early morning, clearly.
That wasn't right.
When he left, it had been afternoon. The sun was still up. How was it morning?
He pulled out his phone and checked the time.
The date on the screen hit him like cold water.
Three days had passed.
Which meant the other world moved at more than three times the speed of this one.
Much faster than he'd planned for.
A cold feeling settled in as the next thought followed immediately.
Omnyte.
Omnyte was still back at the apartment.
He'd left saying he'd be right back, and three days had gone by.
If Omnyte had been sitting there hungry this whole time, or had decided to take out its frustration on the furniture, things were going to be ugly.
He couldn't wait. He had to move.
Kairos was already dialing the Pokémon transport rental service.
"I need the Dragonite. Right now, western Saffron City."
Ten minutes later.
A rush of displaced air broke through the still morning overhead.
The same Dragonite dropped down onto the street below, looking as easygoing and reliable as it had the first time.
The moment it touched down, it scratched its belly out of habit, then looked over at Kairos with that same patient, hopeful look.
It remembered the energy cubes.
Kairos skipped the pleasantries and pulled out the remaining canister from his bag, holding it out.
The Dragonite's eyes went wide. It grabbed the canister and worked through the whole thing in seconds.
When it was done, it let out a satisfied belch, its scales looking just a touch more polished than before.
Kairos watched it and turned something over quietly in his head.
He was going to need steady, reliable transportation going forward, on a regular basis. Renting wasn't going to cut it long term, and in other worlds it wouldn't even be an option. Back in the second world, or the Ghost World, having a Dragonite on hand would have changed things significantly.
This one had proven itself. Steady, cooperative, easy to work with. Keeping it made sense.
"Hey. What if you got to eat these every single day?"
He held up another canister and let the Dragonite get a good look.
"Draaaa?!"
Its attention locked on completely. Its eyes went wide. It started nodding before he'd even finished the sentence, head bobbing like it couldn't stop itself.
"Then come with me," Kairos said. "From here on out, you fly for me. Nobody else."
The Dragonite paused, then nodded again, clearly on board. But a beat later it hesitated, shook its head slightly, and looked uncertain. It pointed toward the sky, then at itself, its expression shifting into something closer to troubled.
Kairos got it immediately.
It was thinking about its contract with the rental company. It was a working Dragonite, after all, with obligations that weren't just its own to walk away from.
Kairos gave it a light pat on the shoulder.
"Don't worry about that. I'll buy out your contract."
The Dragonite stared at him, eyes wide, looking like the words hadn't fully landed yet.
Kairos was already dialing the rental platform's customer service line before the Dragonite could react.
"I'd like to purchase the Dragonite I just rented. Tell me what it'll take."