~~~ Chapter 76 - Postmortem ~~~
Art opened a page on his pokedex, the link from the guy who'd talked with the other night. He'd sandbagged it, but while sitting and waiting for a train that would take him back to Castelia, he figured it was a good way to pass the time.
He didn't like being annoyed at people who were being, well, annoying, and so Art decided giving the guy's recommendation a shot couldn't hurt anything.
Still, Art was getting tired of long arguments with adults without morals or preaching to him. It made him want to get back into theatre and art. If he liked the blog post, he'd read some more instead of pulling out his drawing pad on the train ride.
He was also a bit guilty of listening to gurus on the radio.
Constant online personalities that eternally acted like the world was ending.
There was a decent chance that the leaders of the movement the guy was trying to evangelize were more charismatic than a single acolyte.
So, sitting there at a bench on a surprisingly sunny day, Art looked at the most recent blog post on the site — IncreaseInReason.nova
A bit pompous of a name, but perhaps it wouldn't be that bad?
~~~
Cyrus - A Postmortem
With the death of Cyrus, and the arrest of his "lieutenants" before they could disturb the sleeping Heatran, interpol reports that all activities of what we now know as not just Galactic Group, but Team Galactic, we're immensely saddened to hear about the designs he had.
But before we get into this, I want to posit a question, a thought experiment. Consider that this was a mentally depressed and ultimately incredibly lonely man. He had generations of legacy to live up to, his family being anchored in the region since the first settlers tamed their wild pokemon and brought civilization to the land.
He was a fiscal and business genius, he played a direct hand in many of the engineering feats they accomplished, like many of the tools that we now use which are hardened against Distortion. If stories are true, despite those who swooned over him for his wealth and genius and good genes, he was so committed to the cause that he had no children.
Consider his younger home life—I had the opportunity to talk with him at length multiple times, and the stories of his childhood never included his parents. No father figure or mother figure was present. If he mentioned a person in a story of his, it was, at most, a maid or other wealthy child his family deemed important to try forcing interaction with him. In fact, he never willingly brought up those people even in casual conversation. But from what we can gleam, the mantle of responsibility that fell on him weighed heavily.
That he didn't entirely buy into it and often spoke of the cruelty of the world, speaks to his actual beliefs. What he really thought is demonstrated by his actions and behavior. Cyrus never smiled. He never talked about things that made him nostalgic for the past, Cyrus was no traditionalist.
Nor did he care much for what other people thought of him. He never went for facelifts or other treatments. The world is cruel. Humans are cruel, no? Cyrus looked at the structure of the world and said that it was unfair. The fact that people could suffer and be sad. That some people had less than he did.
In terms of his detractors? Well, you can only look at the comicality of the court cases trying to pin him and his followers to the wall. Sure, a few employees and contractors he had hired went a little too far in their goals, but the leaders of Galactic Group who helped organize the companies and minor object-level goals?
A girl named Dawn accused Galactic Group of being a Team. I have a hard time believing that. Teams are cults. They focus on their one overriding directive, and only the top members are paid. Team Magma and Aqua are examples—driven to the end and eventual self-destruction by their devotion toward Groudon and Kyogre.
Galactic Group was a business that wanted to make the world a better place, and strove toward those goals. All Galactic Group members were paid, handsomely at that. They had contracts, they paid their taxes. They went through every legal structure to go on their expedition with the stamp of approval from the league, even as they were being chased around by a single, deluded girl who had been chasing them for years.
They brought with them a multinational team of academics. With Cyrus' failure, we are mining even further into the past of our history on this planet. If ever there was a Team, you have to squint really hard to see it. Even now, the leftovers of Galactic Group are only being charged with trespassing on private property and disturbing the peace, and the so-called lieutenants' crimes only occurred after Cyrus' internal monitors and back plans triggered, signaling his death.
Is this how someone who thinks themselves king over reality would behave? Dawn, on the other hand, his primary detractor, was known for getting extrajudicial in pursuit of Cyrus. There's a rumor that she even stole a master ball from Cyrus. A mythical-tier pokeball that should not even exist, permanently binding a trainer's will to a pokemon!
Cyrus was certainly ambitious in his attempts to control the gods of Space and time, but we cannot impeach his intent. On the other hand, I cannot say the same for his Detractor. A girl so focused to the point of obvious self-destruction over an endeavor that was so clearly, obviously going to fail from the start, even if we assume he was half as megalomaniacal as claimed.
My feelings about getting violent over fears about something someone only says cannot be overstated. It's easy to portray Cyrus as the villain, but as I've stated in the past, reality is more complicated. We need to take a step back and decouple from our emotions in order to analyze the situation with a more coherent view of reality.
Unfortunately, because Cyrus lost from within the distortion world, and Dawn, his primary and loudest detractor, trespassed on Mount Sinnoh to chase him into the distortion world, is not here either, we can naught but speculate on the specific series of miss-steps that led to his death.
For those unaware, Dawn has also been declared dead, though she was seen days after his disappearance, so we must imagine that they took each other out while within the distortion world. Cyrus leaves no heirs, and automated systems automatically sent much liquid cash outside of Sinnoh, far before the region could make up reason to freeze the funds.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The dissolution of the Galactic Group ends more than a hundred years of contribution to the future of humanity on this world. Now, what else can we learn from Cyrus?
Well, as noted earlier, he noticed improper allocation of resources. Some pokemon get it better than others. Some humans have more than others. Not everyone is born with the same gusto required to become millionaires and billionaires.
Reasoners and clear thinkers should be able to notice this— arbitrage exists and is possible. The existence of the unfair and working to overcome coordination failures. That's exactly what Cyrus did, to the alienation of himself from his fellow humans. Had he reached out, gotten some psychiatric help, and cleared his thinking, I have no doubt that he could have gone to greater lengths.
The increasing tally of crimes of each individual human against pokemon, the existence of coordination failures, the existence of the concept of suffering. That not everyone was gifted with intellectual acuity. I think Cyrus saw all those things and wasn't happy. I think he dreamed of a fairer world and worked to build it.
~~~
This guy really liked Cyrus a lot.
Art pulled a piece of candy out of his bag, both Leah and Fidget immediately took notice. Leah less so, trying to hide it, but Art just smiled. He could tell when her antennae went taut at new smells in the air without even looking at her.
The blog post seemed like it had a point it was trying to get to, but it sure was taking a long time to get there. He skipped a few paragraphs and tried again.
~~~
I'll say again, just to be clear to the more sensitive members of the readership. Trying to capture literal gods and force them to do your bidding was a critical failure to reason on his part. It also would have simply furthered human-centered injury on pokemon. Doing those things were wrong, and demonstrable of his own anguished mentality.
We can't fault the commitment to his beliefs and ethics to the very end. A desire to restructure the world and make it better for everyone, not just him? Admirable, in the same way someone might admire the prose in a lonely person's poems.
~~~
The random person he'd met had really talked up this site a lot. Said it had really changed how he thought and saw the world on a fundamental level.
Art sighed and skipped a bit more.
~~~
So, what do we learn from Cyrus as a person?
Getting over-focused on the problems of the world so much so that you fail to take in the greater picture. The greater picture is the harm humans perpetrate on pokemon, and working to minimize that. It is not to try and rewrite reality by way of modifying space and time itself. Nor an appeal to chaos.
Seeing structural problems in the very fabric of reality, and then working tirelessly to solve them is a moral good. Unlike most others who simply build wealth and work to hoard and keep it, Cyrus and the galactic group were incredibly involved along the way into building up sinnoh.
Working to improve the human condition? This is also a moral good. These are good things. Taking money you earned legally and grew up with and turning them toward building up your region? Also good things.
Be better parents? Be involved in their lives? Let them meet and play and don't stress too much the burden of maintaining the familial line. By all means, keep your genealogy, and pick smart partners, but it does no good if your kids end up terminally depressed!
Even if you have the means, try to keep your goals reasonable and smaller. A speech here, a conversation there. Raise your pokemon team if you want. Do it ethically, make sure they're treated well, don't be the average trainer.
For those concerned about his treatment of his team, Cyrus' houndoom was capable of mega-evolving, and crobat is a pokemon that evolves from building a long-term relationship! That Cyrus gave one of them away showed that he was not, personally, tied to earthly goods nor did he expect to have his pokemon bound to him for the rest of his life.
(Aside: Kalos is now demanding the return of the houndoom's mega stones. The darkrai cultist Cyrus gave his to is currently fighting that battle. We will see who wins out in the end)
Not every trainer or every human, even, is going to treat their pokemon with the same concern. We're talking about his efforts trying to control the gods of space and time.
~~~
The essay kept going! Art scrolled down further.
~~~
With a single look, a single glance from either, they can analyze every molecule of the planet, every action a person took through their entire lives. What if Palkia saw the actions of the people Cyrus took with him, the way they unfairly treated their nonhuman companions, and decided to judge humanity?
One of these times, someone is going to wake up one of these gods, or commit some heinous crime against pokemon, and one day, it's actually going to stick. The angry god will carry out their retribution on humanity and we won't even be a footnote in the planet's existence.
Retroactively deleted from existence. Humans really got lucky in that the gods of space and time seemed to let Cyrus' slights pass.
- Steve Gorm
~~~
Art breathed a sigh of relief when the logo of the blog finally appeared. He was happy for the guy he'd talked to, at least in the sense of finding something that resonated with them, but the first essay was dull, at best. The section on Teams had managed to pique his interest.
If a Team was any group of trainers that advocated for some cause, then clearly you could end up silencing a lot of people just by calling them a Team. At the same time, Gorm had handed Art the exact logical flaw he needed to dismiss him entirely. Even this guy didn't deny that Cyrus had tried to rewrite reality itself.
The train to Castelia finally rolled into the station. He tossed the candy to Leah and Fidget, who both caught it and ate it. Grabbing the Silcoon in his arms, they walked onto the train.
He liked reality as it was. He was alive, and his best friends were there with him, so instead of worrying too much about what some people were saying on a blog, Art pulled out a pen and paper and decided to draw Leah and Fidget as they continued to wrestle with each other. Leah was getting better, finding herself more opportunities to use her overwhelming strength on Fidget, though it only lasted a round before she found a faceful of train floor.
That extra energy from unburnt calories was fully burnt off, and she was focusing tactically again. Being in the city and around humans, there weren't a lot of acceptable targets for fighting and getting stronger.
"I'm always surprised how few people take these trains"
Art looked up, toward the voice, a few seats down started to talk.
"Looker!" he said.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm one of the handsome ones," the detective said.
"Were you following me?" Art asked, both Leah and Fidget pausing in their play to glance between the two.
"Not exactly. More trying to follow some leads on the next case."
"The, uh, darkrai cultist?"
"Nah, that's an open and shut case. We've left the evidence for the region's courts to decide, though I'm surprised you were aware of that one."
There were a number of extremely sketchy things going on in the region that would draw a Looker's attention.
"So, while we're here, how's your leavanny?"
Man, I just want to draw.