Invasion

At the Cinnabar unown lab, Red relaxes his mental shields to read the floating unown. The mild psychic buzzing suddenly spikes into a sharp jolt. The unown go still, then violently attack, summoning elemental spheres of stone, fire, and electricity. Jensen immediately reacts, releasing his houndoom and haxorus to blast them with Flamethrower before yelling for Red to flee. A mental partition opens automatically, connecting with his abra, Bagra, and teleporting Red to his Interpol saferoom.

Red quickly reorients, opens a new partition, and teleports back to Cinnabar Labs, arriving just outside the domed facility. He files an emergency Code White report with CoRRNet and projects his "battle calm" outward to the people fighting inside. The unown's chaotic mental jangling is painful to endure, but he manages to focus the projection. Looker calls, ordering him back to base and warning that the unown might infect psychics. Red refuses, arguing his projection is helping and he is safer near Elite Agatha. Looker reluctantly allows him to stay outside but demands he remain visible to arriving reinforcements.

As Red maintains his projection, he notices a strange new presence in the psychic mix. His mind reflexively reaches out, only for him to suddenly blink and realize a few minutes have inexplicably passed since his call with Looker—he has deliberately amnesiac'd himself. Before he can puzzle out why, the lab's roof grinds open. Red senses ghosts deploying—Agatha's pokemon—and the unown signatures vanish as they are consumed. He drops his battle calm, connects with Jensen, and learns the immediate unown threat is neutralized, though they have bizarrely "revived" some fossils.

Interpol reinforcements arrive. Red and his guards enter the dome, finding it a chaotic sea of debris and wounded researchers. The internet cuts out locally, leaving short-range comms as their only connection. Artem walks over, noting a glitch on his pokedex screen, but before anyone can react, thick metal spikes violently erupt from the device, impaling his chest.

Red is yanked back and teleports away to a field outside Mt. Moon with Bagra. A staggering wave of grief hits him. Artem's heart is destroyed, rendering potions and revive capsules useless. Red screams, desperately holding on to the sliver of hope that his friend's brain might still be viable. Pushing past the grief with pure adrenaline and battle calm, he empties a large survival container ball, planning to capture Artem's body to suspend it. He realizes the lab cameras will show him removing the body, making him a prime suspect, but resolves that he must exhaust every option to save a life, consequences be damned.

He teleports back into the lab. The situation has severely escalated. A towering, shifting monstrosity made of broken terrariums and auto-catchers is rebuilding itself as it attacks. Agatha is locked in combat with a bloated, surreal ghost-like anomaly. Jensen and Lin are cornered by a skeletal kabutops that resists attacks from their raichu, victreebel, and glaceon, while a fossilized aerodactyl battles a jolteon overhead.

Red finds Artem lying in a pool of blood. Swallowing the mental flinch, Red swiftly places Artem inside his survival container and withdraws it into the ball. He immediately pivots to the fighting, deploying his charizard and nidoqueen to melt the shifting junk-monster with Fire Blast and Sludge Bomb. He asks Jensen why they aren't catching the kabutops skeleton; Jensen yells that it burst out of its heavy ball, warning Red that if it glows, he must teleport, as it already got Noah. Red spots an omanyte crawling from a terrarium and puts it to sleep to catch with his venusaur.

He rushes to assist Agatha. Visibly exhausted, she warns that the bloated anomaly is immune to all attacks and mentally impenetrable, asking for a Ghost or Dark type. Having none, Red improvises: he commands Charizard to fly close, projects a tailored emotional blend of challenge and endangerment to prime the fire-type for physical combat, and transmits the maneuver for Shadow Claw. Charizard rakes the anomaly, staggering it, and with a follow-up swoop from Agatha's mismagius and another claw strike, the ghost collapses into a pile of black sand. The other anomalous monsters soon fall apart into debris.

With the immediate threat quelled, Red's guards find him. They are mourning Noah's loss but insist they accompany him. Convinced this was a coordinated attack and suspecting Professor Rowan, Red resolves that the time for holding back is over. He orders his team to meet him at Sabrina's gym, then teleports away to warn Bill and Looker.