Maxie, the great and powerful leader of team Magma, was so close to having it all.

He was so close to having the red orb, so close to awakening Groudon and achieving his goals of expanding the landmass of the world for both Pokemon and humans to inhabit!-

.. But then he found some random four year old abandoned in the weather institute while looking for the orb and, well, he couldn’t just leave her- she had over heard him discussing his plans with Tabitha and Courtney! She knew too much!

Since then the girl had grown rather.. clingy towards him. Excessively so- it was quite the set back, and annoyance. She had even somehow bonded with that damn team Aqua leader Archie, Archie! His arch rival- his enemy! Of all people! Apparently she had come to view both of them as her new parental figures. Maxie could understand himself of course, but Archie? Really? (And he certainly wasn’t mainly upset about it because the thought of having children or a family of any sort with Archie made his heart clench and his stomach fill with beautiflies. It most certainly did not.)

Yet he could never bring himself to try and push or give the child away, trust him he tried. The poor kid was too loyal for her own good, she even used to insist Maxie should take her back to the weather institute because ‘her mother would be coming back for her soon’ (even though it was clear she most certainly would not be since according to the kid it had been at least a year since she abandoned her- who in their right mind just abandons a child like that? And at a weather institute of all places?).

So, he was stuck with this now. With a four year old, constantly clinging to his side- and also concerningly anxious about the world and the adults around her, probably once again something to do with the her birth mother, and putting a good amount of his plans on the back burner for the moment. But only for now, he’d be damned if he let Archie summon Kyogre and ‘expand the sea’ or whatever the hell he wants to do before he can summon Groudon.