Decisions

In a cramped meeting room, Ranger Sasaki questions the bound geologist, Yuuta, while the dig's people ring him in a half-circle. Red stands in the corner, technically without standing — he didn't work the site, wasn't attacked, has nothing to add — and only slowly understands why no one asks him to leave. Yuuta admits the theft but rages against the word Renegade: his abra was a standard emergency escape, his mountain pokemon are natives, his sandslash only answered an attack. Each point has a surface plausibility, and Red, watching the man's genuine-seeming fear, can't stop his own reflex — what do I think I know, and why do I think I know it? He floats the counter-possibilities aloud (memory turns cruel once you've decided to distrust someone) until Blue hisses, whose side are you on?

It's Red who finds the clean test. If the abra was trained for emergencies, it teleported to a fixed home — a Pokemon Center, a hospital — and a non-psychic can't improvise a new destination on the spot. Tell us where it went. No unaccompanied abra has been reported anywhere. Yuuta has no answer, and falls silent. Sasaki lays out the charge — not merely theft but exploiting a Tier 1 emergency, endangering lives with the graveler, abandoning the seismograph that should have warned the site — and brands him. One by one the witnesses speak it: Witnessed. And Red realizes the room has been waiting for him; it's the Ranger plus four witnesses, and Blue and Leaf can't qualify, having been involved. He's the impartial fourth. He notes, distantly, that they didn't engineer the pressure — placing him first or last carries the most resistance, where the middle of a row would have softened it — they simply expect him to do a trainer's duty: listen, decide, witness. I witness, he says, and a man is sentenced to die.

Afterward he buries his rattata at the tree line. Leaf recites a trainer's funeral verse, ending not on the usual In death your battle's done but Now rest, your duty's done, and Red speaks a few plain words for the small creature that fought without hesitation from day one. Then he interrogates his own grief and finds it thinner than he expected — sadder for the strangers who died, sadder still for the Renegade, than for the pokemon at his feet. He won't pretend otherwise. The simplest explanation isn't a broken heart but an honest one: pokemon don't matter to him the way people do, and Leaf, whom he's known no longer than he had Rattata, already matters more. The thought sits uneasily, but he refuses to lie himself out of it.

The Renegade keeps gnawing at him. Yuuta is a person — one who could, unlike a pokemon, learn to stop — and writing him off as irredeemable without anyone even trying feels wrong. But recanting wouldn't reform him; it would only free someone who let coworkers die to steal their work. The trio circle the harder question over trail mix: what is the Renegade system for, and at what error rate? Better to brand ten innocents than free one Renegade — the damage one can do (Modama Town, Old Agate Village) is reckoned to outweigh the ten — yet Red and Leaf both admit the fear of being one of those ten, and how circumstantial the whole thing was, how heavily they leaned on the word of friends. What they'd need, Leaf says, is numbers: how many die to Renegades, how many as them, how effective the killing actually is — none of which they have. Ryback gifts them three fossils for their help; Leaf takes the aerodactyl amber, Red an omanyte, Blue a kabuto. And Leaf frets over the Pewter mayor's plan to plug her article — grateful for the boost, wary of being handled into a stranger's political faction.