The beach outside Slateport looked like a response had been staged there, because one had. Police vehicles lined the sand, the blue and white of their livery visible from the air, and the perimeter they had established extended far enough in every direction that most of the casual foot traffic along the southern waterfront had been rerouted. Team Aqua operatives in various states of cooperation were being walked toward transport vehicles in ones and twos, and the whole scene had the organized, unhurried quality of an operation that had been planned in advance for exactly this kind of outcome.
Sieg and Cynthia descended separately. Honchkrow came in low and clean over the outer perimeter, and before Sieg had both feet on the sand, something hit him from the front with the specific commitment of a person who had been standing in one place for a while and had decided waiting was over.
Chloé.
The sound she made when she pulled back enough to look at his face was somewhere between relief and the aftermath of relief, the kind of thing that happened when tension that had been holding for hours finally found permission to release. Her eyes were red at the corners in a way she was not trying to hide.
Sieg's first coherent internal thought was that he was going to need the Joy family's support at some point in the next few days, given what the Sea Mauville situation was about to become with League investigators involved, and that the person currently gripping his jacket with both hands was probably the best access point for that.
His second thought arrived about a second later and was considerably less calculated.
He put his arms around her properly.
"Hey," he said, close enough that it was just for her. "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
The sound that had been building in her throat stopped. She pulled back just enough to look at him, the question in her expression doing more work than whatever words she had been planning to say.
Sieg held the look without deflecting it. Somewhere in the vicinity of genuine, he thought. Somewhere in the vicinity of something he was going to think about later when there was more time and less beach.
They stood there for a moment in the quiet between words.
A few feet away, Cynthia had been intercepted by someone representing her family's interests in the region, and was in the process of not listening to them. Sieg noticed this in his peripheral vision and filed it for later.
The Joy family limousine was less ostentatious on the inside than vehicles of that size usually managed to be, which probably said something about the family's taste. It was comfortable in the way of things that had been designed by people who understood comfort as a functional quality rather than a status signal. Sieg spent most of the ride trying to convince his muscles that the situation was resolved.
"Your arm," Chloé said.
She had spotted it the moment they settled in, the line of bruising along his forearm where the brass knuckles had connected through the Team Aqua jacket. She was already reaching for it before he had fully registered she'd noticed.
"It's surface damage," he said, extracting the arm with enough care to avoid making it a negotiation. "I'd actually forgotten about it until you mentioned it."
She gave him the expression that this statement deserved.
He redirected. "Here." He produced the incubator from the dimensional ring and set it on the seat between them. "Spoils from the operation. I'm fairly certain it's a Froakie egg. Can you check?"
The distraction worked in the sense that Chloé immediately shifted into the professional register she occupied whenever anything related to Pokémon health and development was in front of her. She took the incubator, settled it in her lap, and ran through the kind of tactile and visual assessment that came from years of handling eggs she could not otherwise scan.
"Definitely Froakie," she said after a moment. "Kalos Water-type starter. The pattern is unmistakable." She paused. "But the shell color isn't right."
"How so?"
"Standard Froakie eggs are deep sea-blue. This one is lighter. Sky blue, almost." She held it up at a slight angle, as though the angle might clarify something. "The coloring is consistent across the whole shell, so it isn't damage or discoloration. Whatever it is, it's inherent."
Sieg considered this. "Genetic variation?"
"Possibly. It's very rare, but it happens." She looked at it for another moment. "I can't tell you what it means until it hatches. But something is different about this one."
"That's reassuring," Sieg said, without particular conviction.
"You wanted reassurance, you shouldn't have gotten the unusual egg."
He conceded the point.
Chili was waiting outside the Pokémon Center.
He was not a man who was easy to overlook. The build of someone who had spent decades training actively, the specific composure of a Gym Leader who had seen enough challenges to have stopped being surprised by them, and next to him, a small girl in a carefully selected dress who was currently scanning every face that came near the entrance with the focused intensity of someone on a mission.
Sieg saw Yao before she saw him.
She was six, maybe seven, with Chili's determined expression rendered in a miniaturized and significantly more expressive version. She had apparently been asking the same question at regular intervals for some time, because Chili had the resigned patience of a man who had answered it enough times to have stopped finding it anything other than affectionate.
Then Yao spotted the limousine.
Then Yao spotted who stepped out of it.
Then Yao spotted who stepped out with him.
The sequence took about two seconds. Sieg watched it happen in real time. There was a visible phase where recognition and something less easily named crossed Yao's face simultaneously, and then Chloé took Sieg's arm to steady herself on the step down, and the less easily named thing won.
"You!" Yao announced, in the voice of someone who had arrived at a verdict. She pointed at Chloé with the directness that only small children and experienced prosecutors managed without embarrassment. "Let go of my big brother right now!"
Chloé stopped.
Chili looked at the sky.
Sieg crouched down to Yao's level, which required a certain amount of coordination given the arm situation. "Hey. You okay?"
Yao immediately transferred the full weight of her complaint to him instead, which involved grabbing his sleeve and looking up with an expression that was both deeply aggrieved and deeply relieved in proportions that didn't quite add up to either.
"I've been waiting forever," she informed him.
"I know. I'm sorry. It took longer than I expected."
"Dad said you were fine seven times."
"He was right seven times."
Yao considered this. She cast one more evaluating look at Chloé, decided to table that particular grievance for the moment, and then simply attached herself to Sieg's side in the manner of someone establishing a territorial claim.
Chloé, to her considerable credit, looked at this and found it mostly funny.
Upstairs, with Yao temporarily occupied by the task of explaining to Sieg's Pokémon why she was the most important person in the room, Chili settled into the chair across from Sieg and dropped the casual register.
"The Team Aqua situation is going to draw attention you're not going to be able to redirect," he said. "Tomorrow, there are people who want to talk to you. League level, not investigator level. You should be prepared for that."
Sieg met his eyes and nodded once. He didn't need the rest spelled out. Their interests were already aligned; the Citrus Gym had resources in him, which meant the Gym Leader's calculation about Sieg's outcomes was not purely personal. When Chili said prepared, he meant something specific about which version of the story to lead with and which details to let surface on their own.
"Understood."
Chili let the silence confirm it, then leaned back and let Yao back into the conversation by pretending he hadn't noticed she had been listening from the doorway.
"Dad, you're being boring again," she announced, climbing back into the room with the authority of someone who had decided the grown-up portion of the evening was over. She redirected immediately to Sieg. "I have a complaint."
"I'm hearing it," Sieg said.
"Dad's Gym challenges are really good, but he never lets me watch from the side because he says I'm distracting, but I'm not distracting, I'm very quiet..."
"You threw confetti at the last challenger," Chili said, to the ceiling.
"That was encouragement." Yao burrowed into Sieg's side with the finality of someone who had chosen their position on the matter. "Big brother, tell him encouraging people is important."
Sieg looked at Chili. Chili looked at Sieg. Both of them produced the expression of men who had decided that some situations were above their pay grade.
"She's got a point about encouragement," Sieg said carefully.
Chili closed his eyes.
Yao made a triumphant sound.
The room, which had been carrying the weight of the last fourteen hours in every surface and corner, lightened by a few measurable degrees.