The security cameras on the Nimbasa Railway weren’t the greatest, but they did their jobs. If a child was lost, they could frequently be found through playback, if a Pokemon was suspected to be causing havoc, it could be narrowed down with video evidence. The same rang true for the Battle Subway. They didn’t have to resort to it often, but it was an important contingency in claims of foul play.

The footage was also fantastic proof that Unova’s competitive battling scene was a unique brand of weird. Emmet swore up and down that a challenger reached his car, sent out an Elgyem, and promptly teleported out? Easy to fact check. Harder to determine their liability. That time Ingo walked in on a car whose competitors had opted not to battle, but reenact their favorite musical numbers? Worth it, just to see the looks on their faces at the gleeful, “Bravo!” their performance was met with, and subsequent expulsion from the bracket.

One would assume these cameras would be key in solving a missing persons case, but alas, the footage from the day Ingo disappeared was worthless.

The last viable frames showed Ingo stopping to look at something behind himself– turning his back on an active battle– but whatever had distracted him couldn’t be made out. There was no way of knowing what had happened, because the playback dissolved into static, and even though the glitch only lasted a few seconds, that was all it had taken. When the camera resumed functionality, it was to a distressed Chandelure and a team of scattered Pokeballs.

Emmet had yet to reopen the line, terrified, primarily, for his brother, but also concerned for the safety of potential passengers. He combed through incident reports, just in case they had anything to offer, and it was through this lead that he noticed something interesting: in the middle of this battle, too, Ingo stopped to look over his shoulder. And when he began to look for it, Emmet found it, over and over again, spanning back entire months. What started as a sideways glance at the reflection in a window gradually turned into [?].

It had to be connected, and Emmet wracked his brain for any clues his twin might have inadvertently dropped along the way– reports of any odd sounds or suspected mechanical mishaps– but nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. Every time he thought maybe he had a lead, he had to step back and admit that, no, the people in Nimbasa City were just like that, and he had years’ worth of customer service experience to prove it.

But there was a pattern to be found, and find it Emmet did.

The records indicated that each of these momentary distractions had occurred in the same tunnel. Not every time a train passed through– not even every time one of Ingo’s [trains] [passed through]– but he never showed any sign of preoccupation on different routes.

Under the guise of routine maintenance, Emmet went to investigate.