I lay back in the grass, lazily watching the clouds drift by overhead. My arms were outstretched to either side, and I breathed in deeply before exhaling just as deeply, allowing my muscles to fully relax as I simply…was.

I’d been terrified the entire run up the mineshaft and back to Merraga. It hadn’t really registered in the cave how bad of a situation Hobbes and I had found ourselves in, and the little bit of distance was enough for me to almost collapse in a nervous heap once reality punched me in the face. But we’d still needed to escape, so I’d forced myself to run all the way to the ‘pokemon center’ of Merraga, where they had the single working telephone in the town.

That had been almost two hours earlier, though, and I couldn’t maintain my freak-out forever.

The building wasn’t really a pokemon center, just this town’s imitation of one that served as Merraga’s treatment center, pokemart, sheriff’s station, post office, and even hosted square dancing with live music for the locals on the weekends, if the faded flyer posted to the cork board was to be believed. The man managing it obviously didn’t believe my claims of a criminal organization mining diamonds underneath the nearby mountains, but he hadn’t stopped me from using their phone, an old-fashioned landline, to call out to the nearest actual police station. And he was currently treating both Hobbes’ and the sableye’s injuries, so I couldn’t complain.

All I could do was wait for the response from the police station. It had been hard to tell over the phone, but the person taking my call had sounded similarly dubious when I told my story, but she’d assured me they would send someone to Merraga to check it out.

I was worried that their laissez-faire attitude would give the Rockets time to track me down and silence the loose end, but when no one had stormed the town after the first hour, I allowed myself to start to relax. An illegal mining operation was one thing; storming a town to eliminate a witness was something entirely different.

Eventually, I spied a tiny dot in the clouds along the southern horizon. It swiftly grew into the form of a man in uniform atop a pidgeotto, and I waved my arm toward him as he circled over the town. I wasn’t sure if he saw me, but a few moments later he came into land, and I shielded my eyes from the dust his mount’s wings kicked up.

“Are you Marcus?” he asked, wasting no time as he hopped to the ground next to me and pulled up his goggles.

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“Yeah, are you here to investigate the Rocket hideout?”

“I will, if I decide it needs investigating. I’m Officer Bragg. Why don’t you run through with me everything that happened, first.”

It took surprisingly little time, all things considered — I hadn’t actually been in the cave with the Rockets for more than an hour and a half, and most of that time had been spent hiding in the dark. The officer listened with polite disinterest as I told my story, making notes in a small notebook and nodding every few seconds.

“And do you have any evidence to corroborate your claims?” he asked, and I winced.

“No, not beside my word,” I said, but then I paused. “Actually, I completely forgot…” I reached into my backpack and pulled out one of the stolen belts, pokeballs and gun still attached. “I stole this off of one of the Rockets…” I began, but before I could say any more I found myself facedown in the dirt with a pidgeotto’s claws digging into my back.

In hindsight, pulling out the gun without warning wasn’t the smartest of decisions, but in my defense I was extremely tired and not thinking quite straight. Luckily, this world didn’t have quite as negative of a history with guns as my old world, and the officer didn’t overreact. After a few urgent questions and a close examination of the belt — along with the confiscation of it and the other belt from my backpack — I was allowed back to my feet.

The officer used a small, fancy-looking handheld device to scan each of the pokeballs, and his frown grew after each scan. He used the same device to make a call to what I presumed was headquarters, reading off the serial numbers etched into the balls, before turning back to me with a much more serious and focused look to his eyes.

“These are unregistered, which is highly illegal. Did you know that?”

I shrugged. “No, but it doesn’t surprise me. Team Rocket are criminals, after all.”

His frown grew. “Do you know the pokemon inside these balls? And is there anything else you can tell me? Any other information or evidence you might be leaving out?”

“One of them is a granbull, I think. The rest, I have no idea.” And then I paused. Because I realized there was another piece of evidence I’d left out — a piece of evidence that I’d prefer if the authorities never knew existed. But I’d so recently sworn off foolish choices made out of greed, and I couldn’t go back on that decision only a few hours after it was made. So with a sigh, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a handful of diamonds. “I also have these. I swiped them from one of the crates they had in the mine.”

The officer’s eyes widened, and he reached out and plucked a single, tiny diamond from my hand, holding it in front of his eye before gently placing it back. “Hold onto that, for now. I think I need to call in some backup. Stay here.”

I nodded as he walked away, fiddling with his fancy device, and I plopped back to the ground, staring up at the clouds. It had been a long day, but it seemed unlikely that it would end any time soon.