"I have chosen Team Eschaton to inherit the work of Team Spiral because I have worked closely with Professor Willow in the past, I have a great deal of respect for her, and I trust in her ability to redeem Team Spiral's legacy and carry on my work.  Because of our close working relationship, and because I have chosen Team Eschaton to absorb Team Spiral, I know suspicion will fall on her.  I want to state categorically that nobody outside of Team Spiral has ever had any knowledge of or complicity in any of my crimes.  For this reason I am distributing all of the information I am giving to Team Eschaton among a select number of other Teams, organizations, and private investigators, so that their multiple independent reviews of the evidence can corroborate this."

"This tape is not my full confession and does not contain all of the details of Team Spiral's illicit activities.  I and my cooperative Spiral Administrators have prepared paper and electronic documentation regarding the full extent of my crimes to be distributed alongside this tape.  Rather, I intend for this tape to be an overview of what I have done before and during my time leading Team Spiral, and more importantly why I chose to do it, and why I am now choosing to confess.  I believe the story of my life as I intend to present it here informs my confession and the concessions I am asking for in my plea bargain."

"I was raised by my mother, a woman named Sibyl.  At the age of ten I took my first chosen name, Kobold, and like many children I set out on a Journey.  With distance from my mother I was able to reflect on our relationship, and the way she raised me.  She taught me to divide the world very cleanly into good and evil people, and that good people found doing evil unthinkable; and she attempted to make evil unthinkable to me.  She did not succeed.  I grew up hating myself, though at the time I conceptualized it as a noble and romantic struggle."

"On my own, out from under my mother's thumb and with nothing to fear from her, I decided to experiment with embracing what I understood as my status as an inherently evil person.  It was..."

Here he hesitates, or seems to hesitate, for the first time.

"...liberating, and... exhilarating.  To survive my childhood with Sybil I became skilled in acting, lying, and emotional manipulation, and I used these skills in the wider world to make the people around me believe I was their friend, or that I loved them.  Each person that I manipulated into feeling warmly towards me felt like proving my mother wrong, that I could be both evil and self-actualized, and in turn felt like proving that she was wrong to have hurt me - or perhaps I should say that it felt like I was proving she had not succeeded in breaking me, or turning me into something like her."

"I spent a great deal of time associating goodness with fear, and evil with liberation.  To protect these associations I built up an understanding in my mind of goodness as a prison, and embracing evil as the only path to escape from that prison.  This allowed me to continue viewing all ethical theories and restraints with contempt."

"As I grew older and learned more of the world, it became clear to me that all civilization was under threat."

"Pokemon need to fight.  Without battle they go mad.  From the smallest germ to the greatest walking forest, or most terrible sea-dragon, they share this characteristic.  The most vastly powerful legendary and mythical Pokemon in the world can only have this need fulfilled by attacking cities.  Now, with the opening of the Rift, such creatures are growing in number.  More attacks come every year.  More of them end in destroyed cities."

"Understanding these facts and holding the attitude I held toward being a good person, I came to a decision.  The version of it that I was aware of and held in my conscious mind was that I would do whatever was necessary to save the world.  The truth of it was that I became resolved to prove that evil could save the world where good could not.  This was my impetus for founding Team Spiral."

"We began legitimately, researching Pokemon evolution, biology, and genetics.  We cultivated a reputation of trustworthiness by being trustworthy until we were established in the public eye.  Once I had secured public trust, funding, and enough discretion to operate covertly in order to keep our research out of the hands of rogue Teams like Rocket and Sigil, I began to pivot Spiral's mission.  I used our covert facilities to research the creation of new Pokemon.  Some of the results of these experiments, such as Ditto and some of the Porygon line, are public knowledge.  We presented their creation as difficult, but possible in principle to accomplish within the bounds of law and morality.  In reality, we did not have the knowledge or equipment to create Ditto without first creating many stillborn Pokemon, or sickly creatures that died in agony within hours or days."

"Once we had done it once, it became easier and less ethically costly to repeat the feat.  However, I was determined to push the frontiers of science as far as they would go, at any cost.  Building on the Relic Institute's research into fossil reanimation, I searched for a way to convert the remains of dead Pokemon into more powerful ghost-types.  Eventually we discovered a way to convert the remains of slaughtered Clefable into rarer, more dangerous fully evolved Gengar.  Research into evolution stones led us to develop a modified moon stone that would mutate the Nidoran lines into powerful and monstrous forms.  My determination to push the Porygon line's evolution farther led me and my people to transform many healthy Porygon2 into the more powerful but unstable PorygonZ, and many others did not survive the process at all.  I attempted to arrest the evolution of the Slakoth line in its middle phase, which is formidable in battle but not meant to exist for long without evolving into Slaking.  These are not all of Team Spiral's criminal experiments, but they are a representative sample."

"None of these discoveries were ever made public.  My intention had been to present them as a fait accompli once it became clear that existing forces and institutions could not defend against the escalating threat of the Ultra Beasts and other Legendary Pokemon."

"As Team Spiral grew, we began to cooperate and share resources with Team Eschaton.  In this capacity I met Eschaton Leader Willow.  In some ways she reminded me of my mother; she had a similar manner and a similar dedication to goodness.  But as I came to know her better I began to perceive ways in which she was very different."

"She did not regard evil as unthinkable.  It seemed to me that one of her most deeply held values is that no thought should be beyond thinking.  In the beginning of our relationship I understood her as deeply constrained, in the way that I understood all good people as constrained.  There were things she would not do, as there were things that my mother would not do.  But - in meetings in which we collaborated, especially with other members of our respective organizations, it became clear to me that there was no thought she would not think, and no proposal she would not calmly and - "

He pauses, again.

" - sensitively, weigh the consequences of.  She weighed those consequences differently than I would, and rejected ideas I would have accepted - although the false face I showed her would not have accepted most of them.  But it was clear to me that she was weighing the consequences, in a way that my mother would have refused to, in her place."

He is silent, for a few moments.  Opening his mouth, as if to speak, but pausing, tilting his head slowly and ever-so-slightly to one side, teasing apart the thing he is going to say next as it rests ready on the tip of his tongue.

"I will not say," he says, finally, "that we became friends.  The face I wore when I spoke with Professor Willow was not my true face. It was carefully crafted and maintained, on my part, to present a false image of my thoughts and my values, and of my actions and intentions as Spiral Leader.  She made overtures of friendship towards me, and I used them as levers to secure my relationship with her and quell her potential suspicions.  I manipulated her, and I did not allow her to know me as a person."

"However, she allowed me to know her."

"She spoke of her own childhood.  It - in some ways resembled mine.  Her parents were - not flawed in the way that I now understand my mother to be flawed, or much less so.  But the people in her life were sometimes unnerved at her willingness to - suggest violating taboos, as solutions to societal and civilizational problems."

"I should say at this point that Team Eschaton is old, much older than Team Spiral, and that it can be difficult to conceive of how daring and even alarming many of its practices would have seemed in the time of its founding.  I was not alive then, but this theme recurred in the stories she told me of her childhood.  The patience and compassion that Eschaton prisons extend to violent offenders, in the name of rehabilitation, would in decades past have been seen as apologia for their crimes.  Modern husbandry of Slowpoke for their tails seems unremarkable, but before Team Eschaton introduced the practice there was a rigid taboo in almost all regions against the consumption of meat, even obtained without harm to the Pokemon.  Even anti-senescence treatments were once controversial."

"Coming to understand Professor Willow... shook my understanding of good and evil.  She was very devoted to being a good person, and yet she possessed qualities that I nurtured and valued in myself, and that I associated with the rejection of goodness."

"At the same time, those Spiral projects which I chose to reveal to the public proved beneficial.  Ditto and the Porygon line are both powerful and versatile Pokemon, and the opinion of many commentators - which I agree with - is that their presence has been a decisive factor in several recent large-scale Battles to protect major cities.  Their ability to be bred quickly has increased the number of battle-ready Trainers we have in reserve, and their ability to quickly adapt to new opponents or changing battlefield conditions has also been a boon."

Another moment, several moments, of silence.

"For almost all of my life I have regarded my secrets as a source of strength and pride.  My ability to convince people that I was a good person made me feel powerful and safe.  But..."

"...when the public... viewed Team Spiral as I had wanted it to be viewed..."

He hesitates again.  Closes his eyes, steadies himself.

"I created a false persona, a false Professor Yew, which I wore like a mask.  It was this persona, not my true self, that I caused people to respect and admire and even love.  That those people did not know what I was behind the mask felt like an accomplishment.  But... I created Team Spiral to protect the world.  When it seemed that I had started to achieve that goal - it created an emotional through-line, between my true self and the people around me, which bypassed the false Professor Yew I created.  People admired me for the work I had done to protect the world.  It was... the first time, in a very long time... that I was the object of admiration, of positive emotions, for... something that was not wholly a lie."

"It was not something I had done with the intention of currying favor, or of binding a victim to me emotionally.  It was... a fragment of my true self, glimpsed behind the mask, that people loved and adored for - for something very nearly what it truly was."

His breathing is quite steady, during these next few moments of silence.

"But it was a lie.  It was more true than anything I had shown to the world in many years, but it was still a lie.  How many of the people celebrating the accomplishments of Team Spiral would have done so, had they known what evils I committed to achieve them?"

"It - affected me, deeply, more deeply than I had expected it to, to be respected and adored for a part of myself I had not carefully sculpted to garner respect and adoration.  Making myself loved-for-falsehoods intentionally was gratifying.  But being loved for this truth that was - tainted - compromised - by further truths, that I had kept hidden, was the first time in a very long time that keeping secrets felt painful."