(Pokémon Home, After Closing)
The last customer left with a bag of Poffin mix and a promise from Orion that Pikachu would autograph a photo the next time she came in. He locked the front door behind her, flipped the sign, and let the quiet settle into the shop the way it always did once the day finally let go of him.
The tablet was still open on the counter. The broadcast had ended a while ago, but the anchor's last frozen expression was still there, caught mid-sentence, waiting for an answer nobody had given yet.
Orion carried it back to his office and set it down on the desk. He pulled up the full report this time, not the news summary, not the clipped version the anchor had read aloud. Every page of it. He wasn't looking to confirm what Latias had already told him in the shop. He already knew the incidents were real. What he wanted now was smaller and harder to find: a number stretched past what it should carry, a comparison that only worked if you didn't look too closely at what was being compared.
He read for over an hour. Nothing gave.
Worse than that, somewhere around the fourth section, a colder thought settled in under the first one. He wasn't sure he'd recognize the flaw even if it were sitting in front of him. He knew Pokémon. He knew what a scared Growlithe looked like before it bolted, what a Trainer walking too fast through a crowd meant for the people around them. He didn't know how a risk model got built, or what made one honest and another one quietly rigged to look worse than it was.
He closed the report and opened a blank document instead.
The first draft came out defensive, every sentence answering an accusation nobody had technically made. The second one came out like a lecture, the kind of tone that made people feel talked down to instead of reassured. The third one he deleted before he finished the second paragraph. By the fourth attempt he stopped typing altogether and sat there with his hands still resting on the keyboard, the cursor blinking in an empty line.
The door opened behind him.
"You didn't come up."
Latias stood in the doorway with two mugs, Pikachu trailing at her heel already half asleep on its feet. She set one of the mugs down beside him and looked at the screen, at the four failed drafts still open in separate tabs, at the report underneath all of them.
"I couldn't find anything," Orion said. "I read the whole thing. Twice."
"And?"
"And it's all true. I already knew that." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I kept thinking if I read it closely enough I'd find the part where he was lying. There isn't one."
Latias pulled the second chair over and sat down beside him, close enough that her shoulder rested against his. She read the last open tab in silence, the draft he'd abandoned halfway through, and didn't say anything about it.
"You can't argue someone out of the truth, Orion," she said. "Not when it's already true."
He didn't answer right away. It was the kind of thing that landed exactly where it needed to, quiet and complete, no room left to argue with it.
"Then what do I do with it?"
"You stop trying to disprove the report," Latias said. "And you find someone who can actually take it apart. Someone who'd know if the numbers were built wrong, even if the numbers themselves are real."
Orion sat with that for a moment. A name came to him almost immediately, the kind of name that felt like it should have been obvious from the start.
"Reed," he said. "Reed Richards would know in about five minutes if something in there didn't hold up."
He said it like the problem was already solved. Then he heard himself say it out loud, and the certainty started to slip.
"He'd never agree to tear it apart in public, though. Not on camera. Not against someone he's had actual dinners with." Orion shook his head slowly. "Reed builds things. He doesn't fight people. If I asked him to go after Luthor's methodology in front of an audience, he'd find the kindest, most diplomatic way to say nothing useful at all."
"So not him," Latias said.
"Not him." Orion exhaled. "Which means I don't actually have anyone."
The room went quiet in a way that felt heavier than it should have for such a small admission. Pikachu had already curled up at the foot of the desk, one ear twitching at nothing.
"You don't need the smartest person you know," Latias said finally. "You need the most competitive one. Someone who'd want to prove Luthor's report is sloppy just as much as they'd want to help you."
Orion looked over at her.
"Valeria," he said.
"Valeria's twelve and brilliant, but even she'd tell you she's not the one who could go head to head with LexCorp's entire science division." Latias's expression stayed steady. "Her family isn't just her, though. She'd know people. The kind of people who can't resist a scientific fight, especially not one that makes them look better than a rival."
Orion turned the idea over. It was thinner than he wanted, a name that led to another name he didn't have yet, but it was the first thing all night that hadn't collapsed the moment he looked at it directly.
"I'll go see her tomorrow," he said. "First thing."
"You don't have to call Reed and tell him no first?"
"No." A faint, tired smile crossed his face. "I think I already got my answer from him just now."
Latias didn't say anything else. She reached over and closed the report on the tablet, the anchor's frozen half-sentence finally gone from the screen, and left the blank drafts open behind it, a small, honest record of everything that hadn't worked tonight.
Orion picked up the mug she'd brought him. It had gone lukewarm, but he drank it anyway.
Tomorrow, he'd have a name to actually chase. Tonight, that would have to be enough.
***
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