Professor Augustine Sycamore stared up at the glittering stars from his spot on the hill, the soft wind whistling through the grass around him.

He didn’t get to do this often anymore, relaxing with a bottle of pastis underneath the stars, allowing his thoughts to flow with the breeze. When he was a younger man at university it seemed like he had spent every night out with his friends, drinking and toasting that they would live forever.

Those nights were gone, however, and he was content with merely enjoying the peace, away from the hustle and bustle of Lumiose City.

And Augustine needed peace after this past month.

He took a drink of the alcohol, relishing the sweet, anise-and-licorice taste. Wine might certainly have been the stereotypical drink of choice for Kalos, but pastis was more popular in the south where he had grown up.

It wasn’t that he hated the city, just the opposite as a matter of fact. He loved being in such a central location, with so many people from so many different backgrounds coming together in a massive melting pot. Sometimes he needed the quiet of the countryside to gather his thoughts.

It was why he had come out here to Route 16 today, after Lysandre had been arrested.

Ostensibly it was for tax fraud and insider trading, but Augustine was one of the few people who knew the truth of the matter.

It had all begun with a phone call several months ago with his old mentor, Professor Rowan. Augustine had been expecting a pleasant chat with his teacher, maybe cooperating on some research they were doing. After all, Augustine had spent a couple of years abroad in Sinnoh to learn from the old man, but instead he had gotten a bucket of ice-cold revelations thrown over his head.

The things Rowan had said sounded crazy, they were crazy, and if it had been anybody else, Augustine would likely have called them insane.

After all, who would have expected Lysandre of all people to try and destroy the world?

But the more Rowan talked, the more sense he made. Rowan couldn’t tell Augustine where he had gotten the information from, but he had been convinced it was accurate. The more he laid things out, the more Augustine had found himself agreeing with his old teacher, especially when Rowan started talking about Team Flare.

Team Flare had been a minor phenomenon for a while in Kalos, and most people considered them nuisances, but nothing more than common criminals. Comparisons had been made between them and Team Rocket in the Indigo League region, but since Flare had never done anything too heinous, they had been low on the list of priorities.

What reports did exist on them had an overwhelming debate on the subject of beauty, and creating a better, more beautiful world.

Lysandre was a strange man, that much was known. He consistently brought up beauty as a concept, rambling on at length to anybody whom he could trap in a conversation.

He was also fantastically wealthy, and his Lysandre Labs had been making great strides in developing technology. Their Holo Caster was rumored to be coming out in the next year or two, which would have made him even more money.

When Rowan laid out the actions of Lysandre and Team Flare, there were enough similarities that Augustine couldn’t ignore them.

The rich and famous could get away with having their eccentricities, which was how Lysandre had snuck under the radar for so long.

Using the information Rowan had given him, Augustine had gone to the authorities, bringing the matter to the attention of Champion Diantha herself.

She hadn’t believed him. Diantha and Lysandre were friends, after all, and regularly got coffee together to discuss their beliefs.

A man with a rumpled, stained suit had approached Augustine the day after the disastrous meeting with Diantha, announcing himself as Jacques Lacroix, a member of the Commission des Opérations de Bourse, the Exchange Transactions Committee.

Over a cup of coffee, Lacroix had told Augustine that he had been following Lysandre for a while now, along with some compatriots in the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques de Kalos, the General Directorate of Public Finance of Kalos.

They had been investigating him for tax fraud, as something didn’t quite line up with Lysandre Labs’ earning reports. The bureaucrats had been convinced that Lysandre had been cheating the system somehow. Then, Augustine’s report had mysteriously landed on their desks, and they were very interested in the answers it provided.

As it turned out, the odd transactions in Lysandre Labs’ books were thanks to Team Flare’s operations. Lysandre Labs had bankrolled several of Flare’s activities, and the money and resources that Team Flare had stolen had gone right back into Lysandre Labs’ coffers.

Lysandre had been essentially operating a massive money laundering scheme, and while the Pokémon League - Diantha in particular - had been loath to investigate the man, Kalos’ civil government was more than willing to levy charges.

The Lumiose City Police Department had raided Lysandre Labs several days ago, arresting Lysandre and several members of Team Flare who had been working behind the scenes there.

The news sent metaphorical waves throughout Kalos, but from what Augustine had seen, not much beyond his region’s borders. After all, much of the world was still recovering from the quite literal waves caused by Kyogre.

Diantha in particular was under close scrutiny, and there were even whispers of a formal investigation by the Pokémon League to ensure that she hadn’t been abusing her power with her friendship with Lysandre.

A rustle in the grass behind him caught his attention, and Augustine’s hand drifted down to the Luxury Ball at his waist.

“Who’s there?” He called.

“Just a weary traveler.” An ancient, exhausted voice replied.

Augustine turned, and blinked in surprise as his eyes traveled up, and up, and up.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

The man was utterly massive, easily three meters tall if he was a centimeter. He was covered in ragged clothes that barely hit his lanky frame, and long white hair spilled out from his orange knit cap.

Augustine stared at the man, then sighed, and patted the ground next to him. The man walked over and sat down, folding his legs beneath him to be marginally shorter than his full height.

“Drink?” Augustine asked, holding the bottle out.

He wasn’t normally in the business of sharing his drinks with strangers, but something about the man reassured him that he wasn’t going to do Augustine any harm. He seemed… tired, not hostile.

A small smile peaked out of the corner of the man’s face, and he took the bottle with a gracious nod, taking a sip of the alcohol.

“Ahh, it’s been a while since I’ve had a drink on such a calm night.” The giant said, staring out at the stars.

He went to pass the bottle back, but Augustine shook his head before reaching into the basket at his side and pulling out another bottle.

The man raised an eyebrow as Augustine popped the cork on the bottle, taking a swig of the fresh booze.

“It’s been a long day.” Augustine said, before laughing. “A long week. A long month. A long year.”

“A long life.” The man said knowingly, nodding at Augustine’s words, and taking another sip himself.

The two sat in silence for several minutes, occasionally drinking from their bottles, but mostly just staring at the night sky.

“Tell me.” Augustine said, breaking the silence. “Why do you think people are naturally good, or evil?”

The giant hummed. “A difficult question, I don’t know if I have an answer.”

“My economics professor would have said that it doesn’t matter, but a lack of support systems opportunities for the underprivileged force them to commit crimes. They would be naturally good then, but forced to be evil. But yet at the same time, I’ve known many naturally spiteful and awful people who have turned around and done some of the most kind gestures I have ever seen. They were naturally evil, so to speak, but chose for a moment to be good.”

“Do you have an answer?”

Augustine sighed. “I don’t know.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I knew a man. He wasn’t a friend, but… an acquaintance. We traveled in some of the same circles. He seemed like a genuinely good man, if somewhat strange. Then I learned that he was one of the worst people I knew. He wanted to do unthinkable things for beauty.”

Augustine stared in disgust out at the world. “Not that beauty is not a worthwhile thing to have. The world is beautiful, people are beautiful, Pokémon are most certainly beautiful. But to kill millions, billions of people and Pokémon for the concept of beauty?”

“People have done such violence for worse reasons.” The man’s voice was low.

“That brings us back to the original question.” Augustine said. “Are people good, or evil? Because this man had every chance to be good. He had every opportunity and support system you could think of, and did some genuinely kind things that made people’s lives better, and at the end of the day he still wanted to destroy everything.”

“For an ideology.” His drinking companion said after a minute. “Your acquaintance, he wanted to commit an atrocity because he believed it was right to do so. All people are like that, just look at Hoenn and the strife they’ve been having.”

“But why do they decide that they are the ones in the right? That their ideology is correct and everybody elses’ is wrong. That they are good, and the rest of the world is evil?”

The tall man eyed him thoughtfully.

“That’s not the question you really want to be asking.” He said, and Augustine deflated, taking another sip of his pastis.

“No.” He said quietly. “No it’s not.”

“Why didn’t I see it coming?” the man asked. “Why didn’t I stop? Why didn’t I do better?”

Augustine nodded, keeping silent for fear of what he would say if he were to speak.

“Those are the questions I’ve asked myself millions of times.”

“Have you ever come up with an answer?”

The man sighed, shaking his head. “No. I keep thinking all day, every day for a proper answer, something that will make sense, and you know what I keep coming up with?”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know the answer today, but I’ll ask myself tomorrow.”

A memory came to Augustine, and he laughed bitterly.

“What’s so funny?”

“Just an old joke I was told a long time ago. A wise man is asked why he is always so happy, and never is sad. He responds ‘I am always so happy because I know that today is my last day on Earth, for I shall surely die tomorrow.’ The joke of course being that it’s never tomorrow, when the clock rolls over to 12:01 AM, it’s a new day.”

“Not a particularly funny joke.”

“The man who told it was not a particularly funny person.”

The two of them took a swig of their drinks at the same time.

“What do you think of these ‘Trainers’ of today?” The tall man asked.

Augustine looked over in curiosity at the non-sequitur, before shrugging.

“They’re good people.” He said honestly. “There’s a few bad eggs, but I’ve found that, almost universally, Trainers love their Pokémon. Nobody is perfect, of course, but it’s generally been a boon for society.”

The man hummed.

“A fair answer.”

Silence reigned for the next several minutes, before Augustine’s phone buzzed.

He pulled it out and looked at the screen, sighing as a text came in.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to go. A problem at the lab requires my help.”

“Will you be safe getting back?”

“Hm?” Augustine looked down at the mostly-empty bottle in his hands. “Oh, yes. Bouc here knows the way back.”

He pulled out one of his Poké Balls, releasing Bouc, his Gogoat.

The Pokémon eyed the bottle with a bit of disdain, but allowed Augustine to hop on his back.

“Keep the bottle!” Augustine said. “And be safe when traveling… well, wherever you’re going!”

“One last question!” The man said, standing up to his full, massive height. “If you were talking to your acquaintance, the one who committed those crimes, who was going to hurt all those people. If he truly regretted his actions, if he despised what he did more than anything else in the entire world and has suffered immensely for it, do you think you could forgive him? Do you think he could forgive himself?”

Augustine stared at the man, before shrugging.

“I don’t know.” He said honestly. “Ask me again tomorrow.”

The wind blew across the two silent men, before the giant threw his head back and laughed, tears springing to his eyes as he almost doubled over with the effort of laughing.

Augustine and Bouc set off, and even miles down the road, he thought he could still hear the laughter of the mysterious man.

Although based on the sound, they could have been sobs.

/^\

It was almost morning by the time Augustine sorted out the issue with a small pack of Dedenne eating at the wires in his lab, when he realized he had never gotten the man’s name.

He shrugged and collapsed into his bed, falling asleep in seconds.

If in the morning he was still curious, Augustine could try and look him up online. After all, there weren’t many people who were over three meters tall, surely somebody would know about him.

But that could wait until tomorrow.