At twenty-six, Jenny was no longer the nervous new recruit she had once been. She had built up a fair amount of patience over the years, and she was not easily rattled. Even so, Nova's sudden outburst caught her off-guard. She quietly shifted her rickety three-legged chair back a few centimetres, putting a little more space between them.
She was half-convinced he might start shouting for help.
He was not going to do that. Nova had every intention of behaving himself. Besides, spending so much time around Aresdra had made him considerably more composed around attractive people in general. The only reason the name had thrown him at all was a deeply ingrained habit from another life — a reflex that activated the moment someone said Jenny in a police uniform.
He got it under control quickly enough.
Mr. Leon, on the other side of the room, had no such control.
Nova and Jenny were still sorting through the interview notes when the noise outside started.
Jenny's expression shifted from focused to storm-cloud in about two seconds.
What exactly were her officers doing out there? Could they not manage a single hour without something going wrong?
She got up, crossed the room, and kicked the already half-broken door of Mr. Leon's house clean off its hinges.
"What is going on? You are Security Officers — act like it!"
The team looked back at her with sheepish expressions.
"It's not us, Deputy Captain. When Mr. Leon found out that the man Nova brought in was the one responsible for the Trapinch attacks in the desert, he lost it completely. He grabbed a shovel and went for Taylor's head. We barely got to him in time. Another ten seconds and he'd have forced his way into the ambulance."
Fair enough — stopping him was the right call.
The more pressing question was how Mr. Leon found out Taylor was the one behind it in the first place.
Jenny looked at her officers. They looked back at her.
She did not need to ask.
Nova, watching from the doorway, found himself understanding something he had wondered about for a while — why, year after year, organisations like Original Team managed to keep operating despite the League's ongoing efforts to shut them down.
In his previous life, a criminal network that size and that well-documented would have had every level of government bearing down on it. Specialised units, coordinated operations, the works.
But this world did not work that way. Humans were never the central force here. Pokémon were — present in every region, shaping everything from how towns were built to how conflicts were resolved. Without the capacity for large-scale organised warfare, neither governments nor criminal groups ever grew to the scale he had once known. People lived spread out and relatively unbothered. They heard about groups like Original Team, said something like "that sounds terrible", and got on with their day.
When the authorities were slow, the criminals were not particularly sharper. In the end, it was mostly just clueless organisations bumping into each other.
That made people like Nova and Jenny stand out — not because they were exceptional, exactly, but because they actually followed through on things.
Nova had acted when his community was threatened. Jenny could not look the other way when there was a criminal to catch.
As it turned out, they worked well together. Tasks that should have taken three full days wrapped up in under one. Jenny had planned to keep Nova at the Forest City Security Bureau for formal questioning and documentation — standard procedure for a case this significant. Instead, by the time the sun went down, every required statement had been taken and every form had been completed.
There was even time left over for a proper set of publicity photographs — Nova and his Pokémon partner, for the League's records.
Capturing Taylor was significant news. The kind of thing worth reporting upward with some documentation to go with it.
Nova had hesitated at first. Drawing that kind of public attention while Original Team was still operational felt risky. If any of its remaining leadership wanted payback, a photograph gave them a face to attach to the problem.
Then he thought it through. If a group like that decided to come after him, a few official photos were not going to make any practical difference. They would find him regardless.
He believed in meeting threats directly. If someone came looking for trouble, he was prepared to let them find it — and collect whatever bounty came with them.
In the end, though, the reason he agreed was simpler: the League paid well. They offered the full reward plus a twenty percent bonus, with additional benefits on top. He had expenses coming up that required proper funding. More importantly, it meant he could finally do something he had put off for too long — take Aresdra to the League's premier Pokémon Breeding House and let her choose her own starter Pokémon in person.
Taylor, in keeping with the general stubbornness of someone who had survived as long as he had, had not died.
During his formal confession, he revealed the core of what his research had uncovered. The harmful substance he had developed — the one that burned through a Pokémon's potential and lifespan in exchange for a temporary boost across all stats — had an unexpected secondary property. Through breeding, a portion of those gains could carry over to the next generation.
He had stumbled onto something that could change everything, and he had known it.
For years he had funnelled the entire budget of the Lune Town branch into the project, quietly establishing a second laboratory in Forest City far enough away to avoid scrutiny.
In a narrow sense, the research had worked.
But his own nature had undone him. He trusted no one — not colleagues, not subordinates, certainly not his Pokémon. He had run the entire facility by himself, and in order to keep his work secret, he had not even brought in a specialist who could assess an egg's potential.
Without Nova's ability to evaluate an egg at a glance, Taylor had resorted to the only method available to him: hatch every Flygon egg produced, administer the substance, release the hatchlings into the desert, and let nature decide which ones were strong enough to survive. He had been waiting for talent to surface on its own.
His ambition and his isolation had cost him everything in the end.
His greatest result now sat in Nova's backpack, waiting for someone to give it a proper home.
After the confession was documented, Nova and Jenny stayed through the night to go over the statement carefully. By quiet agreement, they edited out one detail entirely — the part about the stat boosts being heritable through breeding.
Jenny did not know that one of the buried eggs carried Elite Four-level potential, nor that the egg Nova had carried out of that collapsing tunnel held something rarer still. But she understood enough. If any part of Taylor's claim got out, someone else would pick up where he had left off — and more Pokémon, and more people, would pay the price for it.
Nova had no doubt the research was real. The last thing he wanted was for it to be replicated. He backed her decision without hesitation.
With that settled, his time in Forest City was drawing to a close. He had been planning to head back to Harmony City and focus on the eggs. But before he could say as much, Jenny stopped him.
"Nova." Her voice shifted slightly — less official, more careful. "There's something I'd like to ask you. It's personal."