The Pokémon Center's intensive care unit was quieter than the main floor, the equipment arranged with the kind of deliberate precision that medical spaces developed over years of knowing exactly what was needed and where. Sieg stood at the monitoring station while Chloé ran the diagnostic sweep on the incubator, watching the readout populate.
"There's nothing wrong with the egg itself," she said, which was not quite the same thing as nothing being wrong. "The Froakie inside is healthy. Vitality is high, it's close to hatching, probably impatient about it." She paused at one of the secondary readout lines. "But there's an energy signature in there that we can't categorize. Something dark, for lack of a better term. It doesn't match anything in our reference database."
Sieg frowned at the readout. "And that's what's causing the color difference?"
"Most likely. The shell color in Froakie eggs tracks closely with internal energy composition during development. Whatever this signature is, it affected the shell pigmentation." She set the incubator down and looked at him directly. "My recommendation is to hold off on hatching it. Keep it in stasis while I go through the family's case archive. There are records going back generations, unusual presentations, genetic anomalies, and energy irregularities. Something in there might give us a comparison point."
Sieg accepted this without argument. Chloé's expertise in this area was considerably more specific than his, and she was offering to do the work voluntarily.
"I'd appreciate that," he said. "Thank you."
Chloé shifted slightly, in the way she sometimes did when straightforward gratitude felt excessive to her. They both knew why she was willing to spend her time on this. Sieg also knew why he was willing to receive the help, and what it represented in the running calculation of what the Joy family's connection was worth. Neither of them made these things explicit. The arrangement functioned without the words.
"There was something else," she said, her voice dropping to the careful register of someone approaching a topic sideways. "The little girl from yesterday."
"Yao," he said. "Chili's daughter. You know that the Citrus Gym had me as an investment before the Joy family came in. She's attached herself to me at some point, and I'm not entirely sure when."
Chloé absorbed this. Then, in a tone that suggested she had not finished thinking about the question before it left her mouth: "Do you have a thing for that type?"
The words registered, and she apparently registered them registering, because her expression did something involuntary, and she looked away quickly with color spreading across her face in a way that made her look significantly younger than twenty-five.
Sieg's face did nothing whatsoever.
Inside his head, several things were happening simultaneously, none of them charitable.
Out loud, he said: "No."
This was accurate. Sieg's relationship to romantic interest was, if he was honest about it, the kind of relationship that existed mainly in theory. There were women in his life; he was aware of them, he was not indifferent to them, and in some cases, he was actively managing the connection because it was useful. That was different from what, which required a kind of sustained attention he was not currently willing to budget. He was seventeen in a world where the ceiling he was trying to reach was still very far above him. Sentiment cost time, and time was a resource he was not willing to squander until the climb was further along.
The specific thought he had about Chloé, if he was going to be precise about it, was that she was worth keeping. Not because of the feeling she produced, though the feeling was real enough to acknowledge. Because of what she represented and what she might represent in the future, and because the day he could no longer make use of that connection was probably a long way off.
It was not a romantic framework. He was aware of this.
He moved on.
The planning session lasted two hours.
He spread the notes across the desk in the order that made sense for review, went through them section by section, and by the end had something close to a working timeline.
The Grand Festival was the immediate anchor point. He had made a commitment, however casually, to Cynthia about meeting there, and it served other purposes too: visibility, record, another data point for the League's assessment of where he stood. After that, Kalos.
The Kalos section of the plan had several moving parts.
The region was unusual in ways that most people who hadn't studied its history didn't fully appreciate. It had been a kingdom, properly and literally, until the League moved on it roughly a century ago. The transition had not been seamless. The reforms that followed left certain legal structures intact, partly because removing them was more complicated than leaving them, partly because Kalos had enough internal cohesion to push back when the pressure exceeded a certain threshold. The result was a region that operated under League umbrella rules but maintained local law on a number of fronts where those rules diverged from League standards.
Sieg's interest in Kalos was specific and not romantic.
The financial piece was about Fairy-type, which technically didn't exist yet, not as a recognized type category, not in any public taxonomy. In his previous life, he had watched its introduction reshape the entire competitive landscape, overnight, and the speed of that reshaping had been possible precisely because nobody outside a small group of researchers had seen it coming. The Dragon-type families within the League, who stood to lose the most, had not been able to stop it. The metagame had pivoted, and everyone who hadn't been positioned for the pivot had been left behind.
He was positioned.
The Fairy-type Pokémon that were currently wandering around, being categorized as Normal or unclassified, he knew which ones they were and roughly where to find them. He knew which berries currently dismissed as simple food items were going to become high-value resistance tools the moment the type went public. The Roseli Berry was one of them, sitting in markets at foraging prices because nobody yet understood what it was for. The Fairy Gem was another angle, mineral deposits that would need to be identified and stockpiled before anyone else thought to look.
None of this required dishonesty. It required being in the right place with the right information before the right moment, which was the cleanest possible use of an advantage he had not asked for and could not return.
He wrote the framework out in full, section by section. Start times. Resource requirements. Contacts needed. The specific Pokémon he was looking for and their last known habitats. The berry markets worth surveying. The mining regions worth approaching quietly.
When he finished, he set the pen down and read it back once.
The Dragon Clan within the League would eventually push back against Fairy-type's emergence, because that was what powerful families did when their position was being eroded. They would not succeed. The type's introduction was a structural event, not a political one, and structural events did not respond to faction pressure the same way policy decisions did. By the time the pushback began, the early movers would already have their positions locked in.
He intended to be one of the early movers.
He put the planning notes away and picked up the reference book he had been working through, a comprehensive text on unusual Pokémon health presentations, compiled by an intermediate-level Breeder over what was clearly a long career of encountering things that didn't fit the standard categories. He had started reading it, looking for something that matched the Froakie egg's dark energy signature.
He hadn't found a match yet. He kept reading.
The attachment to the egg was harder to explain than the investment rationale for it. Greninja was a Pokémon he had followed closely in his previous life, felt something about in the way people felt things about work they admired without being able to fully articulate why. That kind of feeling didn't transfer cleanly into the new life. It arrived as a residue, not a reason, but not nothing either. He wasn't going to let the egg go based on the anomaly alone. Whatever was inside it, he would figure it out.
He turned the page and kept reading.