Inside Out

Red returns alone to his old room at the Saffron Gym, keeping his arrival discreet to take advantage of his indoor teleportation ability without alerting anyone outside. He meets with Sabrina, accompanied by Jason, and notes subtle signs of deep exhaustion beneath his teacher's makeup. When they discuss Rowan's cryptic poem, Sabrina reveals that Rowan had spent months researching mental partitions—specifically trying to replicate Red's unique ability to safely copy and inhabit another mindstate while keeping his main self detached. After failing to replicate the effect through multiple pokemon mergers, Rowan abruptly abandoned the project to join groups tracking unown swarms. Following Jason's advice, Red sends a cautious, innocuous reply to gauge Rowan's intent.

After Jason leaves to brief the other students, Red apologizes to Sabrina for the chaos surrounding the Silph Co. attack. Sabrina assures him no apology is needed. Anticipating the social fallout of Red's powers, she reveals she had confided in Leader Giovanni long before the attack, valuing his political experience to help navigate the societal implications without bias. Sabrina acknowledges she may need to publicly disclose Red's abilities if it becomes necessary to regulate partition training in the psychic community, depending on what has happened to Rowan.

Red joins the remaining psychic students in the communal kitchen, noting the arrival of new students like Sanskriti, a merger specialist, and Kenzo, a boy with an abnormally massive reception range. Sabrina announces her suspicion that one of her former students is responsible for projecting the mass psychic "dreams." She is unsure why the dreamer has intentionally avoided targeting Saffron City. Daniel casually reveals that the dream's trajectory across Kanto was highly predictable, allowing anyone tracking it to intercept the phenomenon—a technique he taught Rowan weeks ago. As Tatsumaki and Daniel bicker over Rowan's mental state, Sabrina asks the students to discreetly reach out to their contacts for any news. Suddenly, Red receives a reply: Rowan wants to meet him, alone.

Red arranges the meeting on a secluded rooftop, establishing a ripcord phrase with his concealed Hunter escort. When Rowan teleports in with an alakazam, Red is horrified by his skeletal, unkempt appearance and erratic, manic behavior. Speaking in plural, Rowan immediately interrogates Red about his partitions and whether he has discovered the "origin of species" through the dream.

Rowan reveals a terrifying reality: he is consciously holding over a hundred and fifty partitions to contain an alien "outside mind"—similar to the incomprehensible ghost marowak Red briefly touched in Lavender Tower—which Rowan inadvertently merged with. The alien mind is slowly infecting his other partitions. Rowan's mind is a fractured battlefield between a "lonely dreamer" striving to stop the unown at any cost, and other corrupted parts driven to destructive extremes.

Desperate to ground the older boy, Red draws upon his therapy, explaining how he learned to integrate his own conflicting parts. He tells Rowan that he had to stop fighting his internal divisions and instead accept them with honesty, trusting that all his parts ultimately wanted what was best for him. He emphasizes that a part not getting exactly what it wants is not a deep loss of potential happiness, but a necessary compromise for the whole.

Rowan briefly stabilizes, tearfully expressing jealous admiration for Red's self-improvement and integration. However, the connection is fleeting. Convinced that the alien mind is an existential threat, Rowan declares that he must stop the unown and the infected parts of his own mind, cryptically warning that a devastating plan involving "every island on the planet" is already in motion. Recognizing the imminent danger, Red drops his partitions and attempts a desperate maneuver: he projects an overwhelming wave of safety and love to prevent Rowan's alakazam from teleporting away out of fear. Despite bringing his fully unpartitioned mind to bear, the projection fails to hold the powerful psychic pokemon. Rowan disappears, leaving behind only a tragic apology for Sabrina.