Hoshi Mutsu has never been a happy person. There are a lot of things he could blame that on. His mother's disappearance when he was young. His father's creeping madness during his teenage years. And in the present, the general miasma of ill sentiment building as Johto steals more and more power from Kanto under the guise of normal Indigo League operations. But more than anything else, Hoshi thinks he's just not cut out for happiness. That's just not… the sort of person he is. He's angry. Resentful. Spiteful. A petty man, driven to petty criminality by petty circumstances. But on an otherwise unremarkable day, in a low-class pub newly opened in Vermilion's Young District, Hoshi meets an orange-haired woman who changes his life, and emblazons a thick red 'R' on his very heart. This is a fanfiction, set in the Pokémon world ten years after the events of Generation II. Though I'm primarily basing the setting on the canon of the games, I will also be using the show and manga to bulk out continuity – as well as my own imagination, of course. Honestly, it'll probably be mostly headcanon by volume, if not necessarily weight. I hope you enjoy this slightly darker-than-average Pokémon adventure.