Chapter 244: Mammon: Team Rocket's Goal Is the Stars and the Sea!
Sham came out of Mammon's room wearing an expression of someone who has set down a weight they've been carrying for a long time.
Done.
Mammon had accepted her. The Galactic infiltration assignment was in the past. She was Team Rocket — properly, openly, without the performance of being someone she wasn't.
She could use her actual abilities. She didn't have to pretend to be weaker than she was. She didn't have to take orders from Chakra while pretending he outranked her.
Chakra. That insufferable, arrogant, vertically-challenged—
Never again.
She walked down the corridor with the feeling of someone who has just realized what the air tastes like when you're not holding your breath.
This is a wonderful world.
Caitlin came around the corner after Sham left, having arrived at Mammon's room for reasons she hadn't fully accounted for in advance.
She looked at the door.
"Not what I thought," she said to herself.
She had assessed the situation efficiently. Sham's appearance was not Mammon's type — that was simply accurate. And Sham had been in there for approximately fifteen minutes, which was not enough time for anything to have occurred that would require Caitlin to revise her understanding of the evening.
Mammon's personal record, when relevant, was not compatible with fifteen minutes.
Business meeting. Caitlin filed this under confirmed and went to find Snowy for the planned training session.
Evening. Training field.
Mammon held a standard Poké Ball — red-and-white, which was notable because nothing in his primary lineup used standard Poké Balls — and released it.
The white light settled into shadow. The shadow moved. Shifted. Resolved into a shape that resembled something out of a nightmare by design rather than accident: a figure of darkness, collar-like white extensions, eyes the color of deep water.
"Is that—" Caitlin looked at it. "Darkrai."
"From Sham."
Mammon studied it with undisguised appreciation.
Darkrai's reputation was straightforward: Nightmare Pokémon, Dark-type, classified under "Pokémon of Dreams and the Moon" alongside Cresselia — one bringing sweet dreams, the other bringing endless nightmares. Its presence near sleeping humans produced said nightmares as an involuntary effect of what it was rather than any intentional hostility. This had not made it popular.
It was also black, vaguely terrifying in silhouette, and had the specific aesthetic that Mammon actively preferred.
I've been wanting a Darkrai.
The dark lineup he'd been building in his head was coming together: Dark Mewtwo as the anchor. Darkrai. Eventually, when he found one, Shadow Lugia. Yveltal, when the time came.
Beautiful.
"Sham couldn't control it," he said, to Caitlin rather than Darkrai. "Too strong for her roster's level. She kept it as an emergency option and couldn't use it consistently."
The Adventures manga version had ended with Sham releasing Darkrai into the Distortion World — Giratina's domain, the reverse of reality — because it was the only thing she could do with something that wouldn't follow her lead.
As a demonstration of loyalty, giving Mammon the Pokémon she couldn't use was — practical. She'd gotten value out of the gesture and given up nothing she'd actually had access to.
He didn't hold that against her.
"Sham gave you to me," he said, now to Darkrai directly. "You didn't think much of her capabilities, I'd guess."
Darkrai's blue eyes were on him. No response.
"You're strong. You were wasted. Come with me instead — I'll take you seriously."
He held up the Ball and pressed the release. It opened; the Ball was now empty.
Then he reached into his coat for a Premier Ball.
"How does that sound?"
Darkrai looked at him for a long moment.
Then it moved. Backward, smoothly, putting distance between them. Its posture shifted into something deliberate.
A test.
"That works too," Mammon said.
He smiled.
"Mewtwo."
Dark Mewtwo materialized. Purple fire in its eyes, watching Darkrai with the specific attention of something that has met very few things at its level.
Technically, Psychic-type moves did nothing to a Dark-type. But Dark Mewtwo was Psychic-and-Dark combined — which made this, strictly speaking, a Dark-type versus Dark-type engagement.
"Show me everything," Mammon said, to Darkrai.
Let's see what you've got.
Two days later.
A large private villa in Goldenrod. Spacious main room. Mammon in the center seat.
Around him, on both sides: a lot of people.
Kagura. Caitlin. Gladion. N. Colress. Rika. Anthea and Concordia, present but not central. The younger executives from the Alola-Hoenn-Unova pipeline.
And on the other side: Apollo, in white, with the composed attentiveness of someone who has been waiting for this meeting for a while. Orm, in his ninja-adjacent presentation, measured and unhurried. Carr, large and energetic, already unable to entirely sit still. Nata, doll-precise, saying nothing, watching Mammon with eyes that were doing more than they appeared to.
Mammon had not invited Giovanni.
Giovanni was embedded in the League. Giovanni could stay embedded in the League. The organization didn't need Giovanni managing it anymore — that had been the arrangement before, and the arrangement had changed.
"I've called everyone here to establish some direction," Mammon said. "You all know what happened two days ago."
He set down his wine glass.
"Before we get into strategy — let me introduce the new faces to the old faces, and vice versa."
He went through the introductions with the unhurried efficiency of someone who'd been thinking about how this meeting would run. Caitlin, Kagura, Colress, N, Rika, Gladion — each named and placed in the organizational structure. Apollo, Orm, Carr, Nata — the senior Kanto executives, given appropriate context for the newcomers.
Apollo greeted the new arrivals with the polished warmth of someone who understood that the organizational hierarchy had just been reorganized above him and was making peace with this quickly. Mammon — the young sir, as he still occasionally thought of him in his more private mental vocabulary — had assembled extraordinary capability in a short time. The fact that it came with a reconfiguration of Apollo's own position was simply the cost of working for someone exceptional.
Colress, for his part, was mentally recalibrating his assumptions about the Kanto executive bench.
Three Gym Leaders.
Nata. Gym Leader. Orm. Gym Leader. Carr. Gym Leader.
Three of Kanto's eight official Gyms were Team Rocket.
He'd known, theoretically, that Team Rocket had operated under the League's oversight through strategic infiltration. Seeing it assembled in one room was different from knowing it abstractly. The architecture of what Giovanni had built — and what Mammon had inherited — was more sophisticated than he'd appreciated.
No wonder they survived this long.
"Now that everyone's met," Mammon said, "let me lay out where we're going."
"Boss, do we finally get to take down the Pokémon League?" Chakra's energy had been building since he sat down.
"When did I say anything about that?"
"I just assumed—"
"Think it through." Mammon gave him a patient look. "What does toppling the League actually give us?"
Chakra opened his mouth.
"Nothing," Mammon said. "It gives us nothing useful. It gives us chaos, which is entertaining for about three days and then becomes a logistics problem. It gives us an organization that looked like an existential threat and then had to spend everything it had proving the point. It gives us a population that doesn't trust us, an infrastructure in ruins, and approximately infinite guerrilla resistance from people trying to restore the previous order."
He let this sit.
"If we win that fight, we've won a broken thing. If we lose it, we've lost everything. The expected value is negative from either direction."
"So we just — don't?" Carr was processing this.
"We develop what we're developing. We do what we do. We let the League run its business and we run ours. Occasionally we have frictions — that's inevitable when two organizations with different interests share the same geography. But friction isn't war."
He looked around the table.
"You all need to understand something about the structure of power. The underground king is still a king. The League holds the formal authority. We hold something else — reach, capability, resources they don't know we have, Pokémon they can't match. Those aren't nothing. Formalizing that into a confrontation throws most of it away."
N exhaled slowly in a way that suggested something had loosened.
Colress nodded with the expression of someone confirming an analysis they'd already run.
Apollo straightened almost imperceptibly.
"The League believes we're still the organization we were," Mammon continued. "Let them adjust their model on their own time. Meanwhile: the Kanto branch changes its practices. Clean operations, no civilian harm, no unnecessary confrontation. The other branches have been running this way already — Kanto catches up."
He looked at Rika.
"Kagura handles enforcement. If someone in your command runs outside the rules, that's your management problem first. If you can't solve it, bring it to her. Anyone who thinks old habits are optional—"
Kagura smiled at the room.
The smile was pleasant.
"—Kagura will clarify their options," Mammon finished.
Apollo and Orm absorbed this with the professionalism of people who had been in the organization long enough to understand that this was the new equilibrium and it was non-negotiable.
Nata continued not saying anything, but the quality of her attention toward Mammon had shifted.
"Boss." Apollo, leaning forward slightly. "You mentioned the underground king. Where are we actually going?"
Mammon looked at him.
"The stars," he said.
Apollo waited.
"There are parallel worlds," Mammon said, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone discussing known geography. "The Rainbow Rocket configuration — some of you have heard the legend — it did exactly that. Traversed parallel realities. Consolidated across multiple versions of the same locations."
He looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"I don't know how to do that yet. But I intend to find out. And when I do—" he brought his gaze back down, "—we're not limited to one world."
The room was quiet.
"In the meantime," he said, "this world is plenty."
(End of Chapter)
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