The Red Stripe

Hi Dad, hi Mom,

I would like to say that I hope this letter will find both of you well and serene, but I guess that's not really the case, and not only for everything that happened recently. If the five years I passed far away from home didn't completely jam my memory, Blooming Season will be there in a mere matter of days, right? That's gonna be heavy.

You know, whenever I said I was from Floaroma, almost everyone started blabbering about the "beauty of the flower fields as immense as the sea" or "the breathtaking sight of the thousands of Bug types roaming in the skies". There was even one guy that compared the bugs to dancers that "Compose their choreographies following not ethereal, fading music, but the flowery scent of life, as invisible but more persistent and real than any sound could ever be," or something like that.

While it did sound rather poetic, that guy clearly had no idea what kind of hell our town has to go through every year when the flowers bloom. About that, Mom, please please please take at least one of dad's machine Pokèmon with you this year, whenever you take the road from home to the Combee hives. I know you don't like having them float around you, and you are not as much at risk as the ones patrolling the fields to keep the Bug pests away from the honey-reserved patches, but you know that some of the wild Bugs tend to wander into the city. Even after all this time, I still have nightmares for what happened the last time a wild Pinsir got close to the houses. Please stay safe.

...I just noticed I am derailing here. I guess talking about home absorbed me, eh... damn, I'll miss it.

Because I'm not coming back.

I just can't. Not after what happened. And the fact that I could get arrested if I were to do it... well, it does have a part in my decision, but not as you are probably thinking. Even if I were to be locked somewhere and made pay for what I did in this very moment, I feel it would be... useless. I don't, no, I can't feel guilty for what I did, because doing so would defeat the very purpose of everything I have done.

A part of me recognizes that what we did was wrong. We stole from others, we mercilessly fought those who opposed us, and we destroyed everything we needed in order to reach our goal, but it was all for something greater! Even in our worst actions, in the long run we wanted to help people! Why can't anyone see it? We just wanted to do something meaningful for the world!

And you know the best part? If we had really succeeded, not only the world may have been better, but none of what we had done would have even mattered anymore!

Or at least that was what most of us believed. What we were told. The theory behind this whole "world rewriting" thing was too complex for me to understand completely, so I just trusted what our leader said.

Thinking about it in hindsight, it wasn’t really my smartest move.

It's probably the worst, most ironic part of all this. We wanted to help the world, while everyone else for some reason believed we wanted to destroy it or something, and what he truly wanted, what he used us for, was something even worse.

I need to sort this out. I need to understand where exactly I screwed up. And I need to learn more about the world so that I will never be fooled like that again.

I don't know where I will go now. Nor what will I do. I can't even begin to describe how confused, angry, or anything I am right now, but I don't have a choice; I just have to go forward and accept whatever the world throws at me. Ironically, that's exactly what my Journey should have been like to begin with, if I hadn't chickened out and abandoned it so soon.

Not everything is going so bad though. I believe I finally took a step in the right direction with my team. Or they took it for me, I'm not sure, but until now, I never truly realized how much they all cared for me. Well, not all, just most of them. Sorry dad, I know when you gave Satellite to me as my first Pokèmon, you hoped we would become best buddies as you are with your own, but  even after it evolved into a Bronzong, it is still as affectionate as a paperweight. Seriously, it looks at me with the same interest a monitor has for its keyboard.

On the other hand, the other three have been really there for me when I felt down. Oh, right, you still don't know about the new member. It was a reward I received from my commander a couple of days before... you know, that happened and everything went down the drain. It is a little Spearow I named Beatrix. Despite being the most recent addition, and having been rather hostile towards me at the beginning, she warmed up to me incredibly fast in just two days or so. I think I may have triggered some kind of maternal instinct in her when she saw me so down after the ship I left Sinnoh with departed (oh, yeah, I left the region. I didn't mention that before). One moment, she was there, glaring at me from the other end of the room as she had done ever since I had first met her, and the next, she was nesting in my hairs, nuzzling me and chirping happily. I don't know what happened, but I won't complain about it.

Pudding has been trying to be helpful too, trying to crawl up my arm whenever he sees me depressed and tickling me with his little bulges. That Shellos is adorable when he wants to be. Add that to his pinkness and I might actually doubt it is a male at all. He might have ruined a shirt or two with all the slime he left in his wake, but I'm fine with that.

And then there is Garz... I'll be frank: he scared me a little at the beginning. Whenever I left him out of his ball, he just started make some strange munching noises while floating aimlessly, without even acknowledging me. Then, towards the end of the travel, he just evolved in a Gengar out of the blue. I think he actually managed to do it by absorbing the load of "bad" emotions I was letting out all at once, when usually it should take years for them to gather enough energy to trigger it, but I am no expert. However, I was there, curled on my bed and staring at him, worried that the sudden power up might put him against me, when he reaches out with his arms... and stretches his face while letting his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

After all I have put him through in these years, he was trying to make me laugh by making faces at me. It was... unexpected, to say the least. And while it got a laugh out of me, it made me feel even worse, after a while. For all this time I treated them unfairly, but now... I really need to make it up to them, somehow. So, don't worry about me, even if I'm far from home, I'll be in good hands.

I need to leave now; I have another boat to take. I don't know how much time will pass before I will be able to send you another letter, but I promise I will.

Until next time,

Your son, Nathan Wood

To Mr. Jonathan and Mrs. Lara Wood

23, Camelia Street

Floraroma Town

After some research, I managed to establish that your son's letter was sent about twenty days ago from Gateon Port, in the Orre region. As the only significant harbor of the region, it also is its most important commercial crossroads with the other regions, both of the legal and the illegal sort, and because of this the traffic of ships is extremely convoluted and hard to oversee for the international authorities. It's not so rare for people who wish to disappear to go there in order to acquire false documents and then board a random ship with their new credential, so to vanish without a trace.

Sadly, it seems it is exactly the path your son followed, and we are therefore unable to locate him. To make things worse, the International Court is still debating on the criteria to follow in order to prosecute the members of Team Galactic we actually managed to catch. On paper, most of them were simply employees of a company intent to study new sources of energy, and separating the ones of them who did commit criminal actions from the others will be a long and mazy procedure.

About that, we do have proof that, in the five years since he first joined the ranks of the organization, Nathan participated directly in some of their criminal actions, the most notable being the attack conducted on Lake Valor in order to catch the legendary pokémon Azelf which brought an important water deficiency in the nearby cities. Even so, because of the legislative mayhem I mentioned before, we cannot currently put him on any wanted list or print capture warrants.

I'm therefore sorry to inform you that the investigations directly regarding him have reached a dead end and will be put on hold until we can find other clues regarding his position, or his crimes will have to be re-evaluated and decided to be of extreme severity, as to make his capture a priority for international security.

If I am allowed to speak freely, the first case is unlikely in the actual situation. And the second, beyond alone too, would also be unfair to him. While the crimes he individually committed as a member of Team Galactic cannot be denied, personally, I believe that, like most of his colleagues, he is not a dangerous individual, but simply mislead.

I also wish to apologize for the stop inflicted upon the search, and I want to tell both of you to not despair. I promise to let you know as soon as something new comes up. Inside the envelope, you'll find the photo of Nathan we asked you as a reference to identify him.

We are not really supposed to give them back, as we need to keep papery documentation in case of a loss of data from the computers, but I got a photographer to make a copy, so there shouldn't be any problem.

Just don't let anyone know about it.

International Police AgentLooker