Koffing was manageable, at least. It could keep its vents shut and hold its exhaust in when it wanted to.

Grimer was a different story. The stink leaked out of its entire body, and there was no stopping it. Ordinary Poké Balls could not seal the smell away either. Reiji had no interest in walking around reeking like a dumpster. That was the last thing he needed when he was trying to stay hidden.

That said, he remembered Tai had a Grimer. Tai would probably be interested in a shiny Grimer.

This time, though, Reiji was not giving it away for cheap. Last time had been about keeping things quiet. This time, it would be a real deal.

The acquaintance he had run into earlier was Tai, the man he had not seen in more than two months. By all rights, Tai should have been in Team Rocket. So what was he doing here?

Maybe Team Rocket had planted him here. Then again, this city was worthless unless you cared about Grimer and poison resources. The whole place stank, and not much else stood out. Strange. He would get his answer once Tai came over.

“The Poké Ball with the Grimer is in Gengar’s stomach, isn’t it?” Reiji asked, looking at Gengar. If Darkrai and Gengar had spotted a shiny Grimer, there was no way they would have left it uncaught.

“It is,” Darkrai said with a nod.

It still did not have Gengar cough it up. The smell was that bad. Even Darkrai had no desire to deal with Grimer’s stench in a closed room.

Now that was initiative. Darkrai knew Reiji liked shiny Pokémon, saw something rare, and caught it for him on the spot. One Pokémon catching another was not something you saw every day.

“Leave it in Gengar’s stomach for now,” Reiji said. He had no wish to take it out either. If even a Poké Ball could not block the smell, then opening it here was asking for trouble. He put the shiny Grimer aside for the moment and turned to Darkrai instead. “Go see whether that guy’s asleep yet. If he is, pull him into a dream.”

“Wait for my signal,” Darkrai said, then slipped into the shadows and headed for the apartment building they had seen earlier.

It moved quickly through the darkness and soon reached the third floor, where it found Tai tending to his Muk and Haunter.

He was feeding both of them poison—specifically the toxin crystals Darkrai and Gengar had gone out to find. That alone made his reason for coming to Gringey City obvious.

Darkrai studied the two Pokémon and noticed something else. Both Muk and Haunter were darkening again. Black patches had started spreading across their bodies, uneven and blotchy, like they were inching toward some kind of shiny-like mutation.

After that, Darkrai returned to the hotel room and told Reiji everything it had seen.

“So that’s it,” Reiji said.

He had a good idea now why Tai was here. Same reason as him. Tai wanted to use the city’s poison resources to push his Poison-types further and make their venom deadlier.

That still left one question unanswered, though. Why had Tai come out of the power plant? Why was a Team Rocket grunt working there? Was he undercover, or was the power plant itself one of Team Rocket’s bases?

“I’m getting some sleep,” Reiji said. “Once he’s out, pull him into the dream.”

He went to wash up, then lay down on the bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

Who knew when Tai was going to turn in. Reiji was exhausted, so he might as well sleep first.

Sometime after midnight, around one or two in the morning, Darkrai called to him inside the dream and let him know Tai was asleep and ready to be brought in.

When Reiji opened his eyes, he found himself back on the sofa in that Trovitopolis villa. He was already waiting for Tai, and this time he had disguised his face too, using the same appearance Ditto had worn before.

Not long after, Tai appeared outside the villa and stared at it in confusion. He had no idea this was a dream. At that point, he did not even realize he was dreaming.

Darkrai guided him over little by little until he entered the living room and dropped onto the sofa in a haze. Only then did Darkrai release its hold on him.

“Long time no see, Tai,” Reiji said with a smile, watching his expression clear. Two months had passed. He was not sure whether Tai would still recognize him.

“You’re… Rai?” Tai asked after studying him for a moment. The candlelight was dim, and he sounded cautious, like he did not quite dare trust his own eyes.

“It’s me,” Reiji said. “What are you doing in Gringey City?”

“Yeah… why am I here?” Tai muttered, then froze. A second later his eyes flew wide open. He stared at Reiji in shock. “Wait, why are you here? I was in Gringey City, wasn’t I?”

He looked around again, more confused than before. “Right. I was in my rental room in Gringey City. So why am I here? Where even is this?”

“This is a dream,” Reiji said. “We’re both in Gringey City, and talking here means nobody can overhear us.”

He had to admit it—this was the right way to use Darkrai’s nightmare world. Passing messages like this was silent, invisible, and impossible to trace.

“A dream? You’re serious?” Tai stared at him, dumbfounded.

It was not that he thought it was impossible. He was just stunned. Reiji had always been hard to figure out, ever since they first met. Now he was dragging people into dream meetings. Somehow, that fit.

“Enough of that,” Reiji said, cutting him off before the questions could start piling up. “Let’s talk business. Why are you in Gringey City? Aren’t you with Team Rocket?”

“I am,” Tai said. “My training with Team Rocket ended. I passed the rookie assessment last week. I was supposed to head back to the Orange Archipelago, but I heard Gringey City was rich in poison resources, so I came here to take a look.”

He leaned back and let out a long breath. “After I got here, I realized this place is perfect for a Poison-type trainer. So I applied to stay and take assignments here instead.”

“Assignments?” Reiji said. “What kind of assignment is there in a dump like this? Don’t tell me Team Rocket’s after the poison resources too.”

He thought it over, but there really was not much else here worth coveting. Strip away the filth and the smell, and poison resources were the only thing left.

“They run a black market here,” Tai said. “Its job is collecting poison resources, including Poison-type Pokémon. A lot of Team Rocket’s poison specialists come here to build themselves up.”

He did not hide anything from Reiji. He laid it all out without hesitation.

After all, half of what he had now traced back to Reiji. Especially the three Pokémon Reiji had given him—Houndoom, Gyarados, and Weepinbell.

All three had evolved, all three were strong, and together they had become the core of his team after he joined Team Rocket. They had carried him through a lot.

In those first days, he had survived Team Rocket’s rookie training, rookie trials, and rookie assessment on the backs of those Pokémon. Without them, he never would have made it out of the training camp alive.

His feelings toward this mysterious man were complicated. Gratitude was part of it. Caution too. And something close to admiration.

Even if he said nothing, Reiji would probably uncover everything here sooner or later anyway. Back then, it had been Reiji who told him the Poison Gang was tied to Team Rocket in the first place.

“Oh?” Reiji said with a grin, tossing him a cigarette. In a dream, smoking came easy. “Doesn’t sound like you feel much loyalty toward Team Rocket.”

Tai caught it neatly. He moved like a man who had done this plenty of times before, then glanced around for a lighter and ended up leaning toward the candle instead.

After a long drag, he said, “I’m on the outside there. Nobody trusts me. Hard to feel loyal when that’s how they treat you.”

He exhaled slowly, then kept going. “People like me—the trainers Team Rocket recruited from the Orange Archipelago—were supposed to go back and help them expand there. But I asked to come here instead, so now they all call me a coward.”

He looked down at the cigarette between his fingers. “And this assignment only lasts three months. Once that’s up, I go back to the Orange Archipelago and start helping Team Rocket seize more territory.”

“If you go back now, they’re sending you straight to the front,” Reiji said after a moment, rubbing his chin. “You’ll be up against the black ships and the major local families, trying to claw territory away from them. Sounds like cannon fodder to me.”

Tai gave a helpless smile. “What can I do? I’m in Team Rocket. When orders come down, I follow them. I don’t get a vote. Getting these three months here was already the longest extension Instructor Viper could squeeze out for me.”

“Oh, so Viper’s been pretty good to you,” Reiji said. “After I left, did he say anything about me?”

Viper had once been his boss too.

Too bad Reiji was never going to stay with Team Rocket. Otherwise, Viper really would have made a decent superior. At least during his time with the Poison Gang, the man had gotten him off mine duty and handed him a much easier job.

“He didn’t say anything,” Tai said with a shake of his head.

He thought it over, but nothing came back. It had been more than two months, and Viper’s words were not the kind of thing he kept replaying in his head every day.

If nothing stuck, then there probably had not been anything to remember. The League raid had come out of nowhere, and Reiji had vanished just as suddenly. Right after that, Tai had been shipped to Kanto and thrown straight into Team Rocket’s training camp for two straight months of brutal training.

Reiji laughed. “Guess he forgot a nobody like me. Boring.”

That said enough on its own. In Team Rocket, people died as casually as they ate and drank. A missing grunt barely counted as news. That was the kind of place it was.

Tai’s mouth twitched.

He had heard the stories. Riku’s backpack had been stolen, and the whole underground scene had gone crazy over it.

The topic came up all the time while he ate with the other recruits from home. They kept turning it over, again and again, trying to guess who had stolen it.

Tai was the only one who had a real suspicion.

The thief was probably Rai.

From beginning to end, he had never once seen Rai’s true face. Not back then, and not now. For all he knew, the face in front of him was fake too.

And it was fake. Reiji had never shown Tai his real face. Not to someone from Team Rocket. That would have been reckless.

“You’ve only got three months,” Reiji said, easing the conversation back to where he wanted it. “How far along are you? Any real progress?”

He sounded like an old friend chatting, but he had already confirmed one thing. Tai had no real loyalty to Team Rocket. That meant he could be useful later—someone Reiji could plant on the inside.

“It’s slow,” Tai admitted. “So far I’ve only tested it on Muk and Haunter. The toxin is starting to change their color, but it’s been half a month already, and the darkening is barely moving.”

He did not hide that from Reiji either. Reiji had once taken one look at his Bellsprout and seen something special in it. Maybe he could do the same here. Maybe he knew a better way.

Tai had three months. In that time, Muk and Haunter had to finish changing color. They had to complete the mutation process described in the Poison-type breeding books and become a black Gengar and a black Muk.

Only Pokémon like that could keep him alive in the battles ahead. Only something that strong would give him a chance to survive the front line.

He still had a younger sister.

He could not die.

If he died, she would be left alone, and that was the one outcome he refused to accept.

If he wanted to stay alive once Team Rocket threw him into the war back in the Orange Archipelago, he had to get stronger now. A mutated Gengar and Muk were the only way he saw himself surviving against a quasi–Elite Four trainer, maybe even standing his ground.

That was why he had come here in the first place. He wanted to use the city’s poison resources as a shortcut, push himself into the quasi–Elite Four bracket as fast as possible, and give himself something to rely on.

“Good thing you only tried it on those two,” Reiji said with a sigh. “This method won’t work on just anything.”

His own Gengar had gone through a process like that, but his Gengar had one advantage Tai’s almost certainly would not have—it could evolve and revert.

“Where did you get the Haunter?”

“Bought it through Team Rocket,” Tai said. “It was just an ordinary Gastly before it evolved. That’s why I came here to try and force a mutation. But Haunter’s proving even harder to change than I expected.”

There was something underneath those words. He was fishing for guidance without coming out and asking for it outright.

“You want to work with me instead?” Reiji asked.

He heard what Tai was really saying, but there was no chance he was handing over his methods for free.

His way of raising Pokémon might have come to him easily, but to Tai, that knowledge was worth a fortune.

Tai spread his hands. “Work with you? I’m in Team Rocket. Even if I wanted to, I don’t know who you really are. And getting out of Team Rocket isn’t easy.”

At least with Team Rocket, he knew what he was dealing with. Once you were in, though, leaving was another matter. They were already keeping an eye on his sister. That was their leverage over him.

Maybe one day they would drag her into Team Rocket too. That was the future he feared most. All he wanted was for her to live like an ordinary girl, far away from the fights between trainers.

“Me?” Reiji said with a smile. “I’m working undercover in the League. I’ve already joined a Gym in the Orange Archipelago. I took the League route so I’d have a clean way back later.”

Tai choked on his cigarette.

That was the first time he had ever heard where Reiji stood. The shock hit him so hard he started coughing.

He was a Team Rocket man, sitting here in a dream, casually talking with someone planted inside the League. There was a lot wrong with that picture, and he did not even know where to begin.

“Go legit…” he murmured.

Then he fell silent.

It was not like he had never thought about it. Right now, he was not in too deep yet. If he wanted out, there was still a chance.

If he stayed with Team Rocket much longer, that chance would disappear.

Maybe this was the opening he had been waiting for.

The only problem was his sister. He needed to secure a way out for her too.

“I could work with you,” Tai said slowly. “But what about my sister? Team Rocket knows I have one. If they realize I’ve betrayed them, they’ll never let her go.”

“That part’s easy,” Reiji said after only a brief pause. “Find a chance to bring her into the Gym. Make her a Gym trainer, and Team Rocket won’t touch her.”

The answer came to him almost at once.

The girl was about Amber’s age. If he brought her into the Gym, she could keep Amber company too. And with Blaine watching over the place, Team Rocket would not dare go after her.

[End of chapter]

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