Okay, this is the closest-to-PG13 chapter I've ever written, but don't worry, nothing we haven't either seen in the Pokémon animé before and/or haven't seen in the 'Gym before. Plus this chapter's almost exclusively dedicated to Team Rocket. Can't go wrong there. Some of the stuff seems a bit stretched, but hey, Team Aqua's not consisting of the brightest minds in the world, you know? Slight usage of guns, but they aren't fired, and I figure if the Squirtle Squad episode can get away with that, I can too. Any physical violence is a lot more mild than the average Pokémon battle anyhow.
--------------------------------------------------
An Orthan-enhanced Dustox moping about the Darkwood gym—he was unsettlingly about a foot in the air at all times—was ample evidence to show why the two gym leaders, two sisters named Asuka and Tsubasa Hikari, were in no mood to battle. It had been a few days since Marril found Alex and Tschel again, so the two were used to the odd presence. The gym leaders obviously weren’t.
“Just take your badges and go,” Tsubasa, a girl dressed entirely in purple with short blonde hair, and the younger of the two, had said.
“We’ll, you know, say you fought us and won, and stuff,” Asuka, the older and more normally dressed of the two, had muttered.
Dustox hadn’t even been willing to talk to Marril, let alone Alex and Tschel.
“You’re gloating again,” Kenneth muttered resentfully.
Stein continued saying nothing.
“Oh shut up, you’re babbling.”
Stein leaned back in his chair and picked up some reports, determined to ignore Kenneth completely.
“I’ll have to report you to Giovanni for talking too much, you know.”
Stein put his feet up on his desk and started signing a few things with the papers against his leg.
Kenneth quickly slammed his hands down on Stein’s desk and shouted, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
“No you aren’t,” Stein said quietly.
Kenneth smiled a smile that said “gotcha”. One of Kenneth’s agents—in fact it was Agent Izumi, his best—had almost apprehended Professor Link, the rogue Professor and ex-Rocket scientist, but one of Stein’s men had been just a little bit quicker. The fact that the apprehension actually took place was due to Link’s overconfidence in his own security, and while Kenneth bore no personal animosity towards Stein over this issue, he took no shame in taking out his frustrations on the other Executive.
“For your next assignment, go capture that Tschel wretch,” Kenneth offered.
“No thank you,” Stein said. “I thought you’d know better than anyone that we only keep him listed as a major enemy to throw off our actual ones.”
Kenneth frowned. “No crap. I came up with that idea, dammit.”
Kenneth had also conveniently “forgotten” to forward that memo to everybody except Giovanni, so that the rest of Team Rocket would act assuming it was true, therefore adding to the illusion. Stein had figured it out quickly enough but had said nothing.
Kenneth quickly stood up stalk straight and said, “Now then, if you’ll excuse me, I’m a very busy man who absolutely must get back to painting his rutabagas a fresh shade of taupe.”
With no pause, he spun on his heel 540 degrees and goose-stepped out of Stein’s office. Stein blinked once, shrugged, and continued on as if nothing had happened.
Stein heard the chime of a new and urgent e-mail on his computer. Opening it, he felt a surge of dread. This wasn’t good at all.
Kenneth’s PDA took that moment to vibrate. He took it out of his pocket and read the e-mail that had just come in. It was from one of Stein’s agents, so his initial thought was to let Stein handle it.
However, after reading the thing through in its entirety, he decided that that would be a stupid idea.
Amateurs, Juliet thought. While she’d been knocked unconscious with what she assumed to be no witnesses around, and having woken up in what she assumed to be the back of a truck—Kenneth would comment on the cliché but Juliet preferred to think about how the “truck” might not even be one, simply an illusion to fool her—she assumed she was dealing with professionals.
Being left alone and still being in possession of her pokéballs upon waking up was just stupid of them. Her Sableye had hit the driver of the truck and it had gone off-road. Several Team Aqua agents were on her fairly quickly.
“Sneasel, Icy Wind!” Juliet shouted. The dark feline blew a small blizzard at one of the divisions of Team Aqua, knocking them over and freezing them to the ground.
“Feint Attack, Sneasel! Sableye, Confuse Ray!”
“Shield your eyes!” The Team Aqua commander shouted. This advice did nothing to block the feinting attack that struck the woman two agents to his left, but it did stop his entire division from submitting to confusion.
“Blizzard! Night Shade!” Juliet shouted, subconsciously backing away from the larger Aqua flank and blindly towards the smaller one.
The screaming sounds from being hit with large ice shards or spiritual energy were about the same, Juliet noticed. She wasn’t doing quite well enough, however. Of about twenty Aqua agents, she’d felled perhaps five for any appreciable length of time. She was above taking the simple way out and not caring about the safety of the Aqua agents, which she found to be hurting her position more than helping it.
“Feint Attack again, Sneasel!” Juliet shouted, pointing at an Aqua member who was shouting suspiciously into the palm of his hand.
Sneasel leapt as if a blur at the man and slammed into his arm. The man gave a short scream and dropped a small microphone that he was holding.
“So,” Juliet thought. “That’s what they’re doing. Just keeping me surrounded until their reinforcements get here. Explains why they don’t even have any Pokémon, let alone any good way to keep me here.”
“Both of you,” Juliet called out, “just attack at will! We need to get out of here fast!”
Both Sneasel and Sableye gave short affirmative hisses, and then started kayoing random Aqua members. Juliet decided that things were going too slowly and tried to help speed up the process, so she quickly stepped up to the nearest Aqua member and knocked him out with a swift blow to the neck.
Juliet was surprised that only then did Aqua think to fight back. Lack of brain cells on their part, she decided.
She ducked a blow aimed at the bridge of her nose and elbowed sharply up below one Aqua member’s ribcage. A sharp, stinging pain caught her on the back of her neck as one Aqua member hit her there hard. Stars exploded in front of her as she staggered.
Sneasel and Sableye abandoned their attacks upon seeing this and leapt to defend their trainer from the several Aqua members that were ganging up on her. Juliet wondered why they hadn’t done that from the start, despite the fact that it had saved her some beatings.
Juliet coughed as the last Aqua was knocked away and she was finally able to climb to her knees. “For amateurs,” she thought, “they really hit hard.”
Juliet nodded appreciatively at her two Pokémon. Her sense of victory was short-lived as she also saw many more Aqua members—and yet oddly enough also unarmed and without Pokémon—approaching on her.
“Executive Juliet of Team Rocket,” the new commander said to her as he helped the old one to stand up. It wasn’t a question.
Juliet nodded and attempted to give the man a death glare. However, she noticed something and couldn’t help laughing. Her ribs hurt as she laughed, but she ignored that.
An entire squad of armed Rockets had appeared from out of nowhere behind the Aqua force. While they didn’t carry themselves as field operatives used to direct confrontation—in fact, by their movements, Juliet figured that they were covert operatives by nature—their weapons were trained on the Aqua members.
“What the…?” The Aqua commanders both wondered aloud. “Team Rocket doesn’t use guns…”
Agent Izumi—Juliet recognised her as one of Kenneth’s best operatives—showed no respect towards the Aqua commanders by not taking the time to dignify their question with a response.
“Shut up and come with us,” Izumi said tersely.
One of the Aqua agents, a young red-haired man whose face was of the sort stereotypically belonging to a man of little intelligence, harrumphed spitefully and spat at Izumi.
Izumi simply wiped the spit off her face coolly, then slowly turned her head toward the agent beside her and nodded.
The other agent struck the Aqua man in the stomach with the barrel of his gun. The Aqua man fell hard with a soft moan.
Juliet, who had gotten to her feet and recalled her two Pokémon, limped towards Izumi. “What’s one of Kenneth’s squads doing here?”
“Following orders,” Izumi said frankly.
A Gengar coming out of the ground in front of Izumi piqued everyone’s interest. Machamps and Golems surrounding them followed the ghost.
“What now?” Juliet asked, dropping to her knees from her pain and exhaustion.
“Looks like Stein’s Pokémon-combat division,” Izumi said, eyeing the new Rockets commanding the small army. “They’re a bit late it seems.”
“Can we… get back, by any chance?” Juliet asked.
Izumi looked at the Executive. Juliet was definitely the sort of woman who didn’t do well in a fistfight, although Executives weren’t known for hand-to-hand prowess. She noticed all too late that she was regarding Juliet with the contempt of a field operative disdainfully looking upon a deskbound commanding officer falter in a simple field exercise. Juliet definitely noticed this, since despite her bruises and other minor injuries, she was able to give Izumi an extremely gold gaze.
Izumi turned her head to her operatives and waved them out. “We’re going.”
Juliet stood up and tried to keep pace, but Izumi and her operatives didn’t wait up for her as they escorted the Aquas away.
“That was nice of them,” A deep voice said from behind Juliet.
Juliet looked behind her. The speaker was a physically imposing black man in a standard white uniform. Not a high-ranking man, but not a low-ranking one either. He was definitely in charge of the six or seven Rocket trainers that had arrived as backup, however, because of the way he was standing around them. A Machamp was by his side; obviously he was its trainer.
“Mind if I get a ride with you folk?” Juliet asked experimentally. She was indeed able of getting back to civilisation on her own, although it wasn’t a prospect she was fond of looking forward to.
The black man nodded and extended his hand, which Juliet shook. “Name’s Adair,” he said.
Juliet nodded politely. Introducing herself would have been pointless.
“Our transportation is about a kilometre and a half this way,” Adair said as he led Juliet in a south-southeast direction. “Helicopters. We had to land them at a distance so Aqua wouldn’t get tipped off.”
Juliet felt like adding to the conversation, but was unable to think of any intelligent comment to add before she boarded one of the unmarked Team Rocket helicopters.
“Mind dropping me off in Rueni?” Juliet asked as she boarded.
“Fine, fine,” Adair nodded. “Did you get that, pilot?”
“Heard her just fine,” came a thickly accented Irish voice from the cockpit.
“We could drop you off right at your base,” Adair offered as he turned back to Juliet.
Juliet scoffed. “No thank you. I like to at least think that it’s a secret base.”
“Suit yourself.”
--------------------------------------------------
Yay, we're done another chapter for this week, folks. Next chapter goes up when it goes up. Just goes to show you not to mess with Team Rocket and that if you do they'll accidentally send two divisions your way fast.
--------------------------------------------------
An Orthan-enhanced Dustox moping about the Darkwood gym—he was unsettlingly about a foot in the air at all times—was ample evidence to show why the two gym leaders, two sisters named Asuka and Tsubasa Hikari, were in no mood to battle. It had been a few days since Marril found Alex and Tschel again, so the two were used to the odd presence. The gym leaders obviously weren’t.
“Just take your badges and go,” Tsubasa, a girl dressed entirely in purple with short blonde hair, and the younger of the two, had said.
“We’ll, you know, say you fought us and won, and stuff,” Asuka, the older and more normally dressed of the two, had muttered.
Dustox hadn’t even been willing to talk to Marril, let alone Alex and Tschel.
“You’re gloating again,” Kenneth muttered resentfully.
Stein continued saying nothing.
“Oh shut up, you’re babbling.”
Stein leaned back in his chair and picked up some reports, determined to ignore Kenneth completely.
“I’ll have to report you to Giovanni for talking too much, you know.”
Stein put his feet up on his desk and started signing a few things with the papers against his leg.
Kenneth quickly slammed his hands down on Stein’s desk and shouted, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
“No you aren’t,” Stein said quietly.
Kenneth smiled a smile that said “gotcha”. One of Kenneth’s agents—in fact it was Agent Izumi, his best—had almost apprehended Professor Link, the rogue Professor and ex-Rocket scientist, but one of Stein’s men had been just a little bit quicker. The fact that the apprehension actually took place was due to Link’s overconfidence in his own security, and while Kenneth bore no personal animosity towards Stein over this issue, he took no shame in taking out his frustrations on the other Executive.
“For your next assignment, go capture that Tschel wretch,” Kenneth offered.
“No thank you,” Stein said. “I thought you’d know better than anyone that we only keep him listed as a major enemy to throw off our actual ones.”
Kenneth frowned. “No crap. I came up with that idea, dammit.”
Kenneth had also conveniently “forgotten” to forward that memo to everybody except Giovanni, so that the rest of Team Rocket would act assuming it was true, therefore adding to the illusion. Stein had figured it out quickly enough but had said nothing.
Kenneth quickly stood up stalk straight and said, “Now then, if you’ll excuse me, I’m a very busy man who absolutely must get back to painting his rutabagas a fresh shade of taupe.”
With no pause, he spun on his heel 540 degrees and goose-stepped out of Stein’s office. Stein blinked once, shrugged, and continued on as if nothing had happened.
Stein heard the chime of a new and urgent e-mail on his computer. Opening it, he felt a surge of dread. This wasn’t good at all.
Kenneth’s PDA took that moment to vibrate. He took it out of his pocket and read the e-mail that had just come in. It was from one of Stein’s agents, so his initial thought was to let Stein handle it.
However, after reading the thing through in its entirety, he decided that that would be a stupid idea.
Amateurs, Juliet thought. While she’d been knocked unconscious with what she assumed to be no witnesses around, and having woken up in what she assumed to be the back of a truck—Kenneth would comment on the cliché but Juliet preferred to think about how the “truck” might not even be one, simply an illusion to fool her—she assumed she was dealing with professionals.
Being left alone and still being in possession of her pokéballs upon waking up was just stupid of them. Her Sableye had hit the driver of the truck and it had gone off-road. Several Team Aqua agents were on her fairly quickly.
“Sneasel, Icy Wind!” Juliet shouted. The dark feline blew a small blizzard at one of the divisions of Team Aqua, knocking them over and freezing them to the ground.
“Feint Attack, Sneasel! Sableye, Confuse Ray!”
“Shield your eyes!” The Team Aqua commander shouted. This advice did nothing to block the feinting attack that struck the woman two agents to his left, but it did stop his entire division from submitting to confusion.
“Blizzard! Night Shade!” Juliet shouted, subconsciously backing away from the larger Aqua flank and blindly towards the smaller one.
The screaming sounds from being hit with large ice shards or spiritual energy were about the same, Juliet noticed. She wasn’t doing quite well enough, however. Of about twenty Aqua agents, she’d felled perhaps five for any appreciable length of time. She was above taking the simple way out and not caring about the safety of the Aqua agents, which she found to be hurting her position more than helping it.
“Feint Attack again, Sneasel!” Juliet shouted, pointing at an Aqua member who was shouting suspiciously into the palm of his hand.
Sneasel leapt as if a blur at the man and slammed into his arm. The man gave a short scream and dropped a small microphone that he was holding.
“So,” Juliet thought. “That’s what they’re doing. Just keeping me surrounded until their reinforcements get here. Explains why they don’t even have any Pokémon, let alone any good way to keep me here.”
“Both of you,” Juliet called out, “just attack at will! We need to get out of here fast!”
Both Sneasel and Sableye gave short affirmative hisses, and then started kayoing random Aqua members. Juliet decided that things were going too slowly and tried to help speed up the process, so she quickly stepped up to the nearest Aqua member and knocked him out with a swift blow to the neck.
Juliet was surprised that only then did Aqua think to fight back. Lack of brain cells on their part, she decided.
She ducked a blow aimed at the bridge of her nose and elbowed sharply up below one Aqua member’s ribcage. A sharp, stinging pain caught her on the back of her neck as one Aqua member hit her there hard. Stars exploded in front of her as she staggered.
Sneasel and Sableye abandoned their attacks upon seeing this and leapt to defend their trainer from the several Aqua members that were ganging up on her. Juliet wondered why they hadn’t done that from the start, despite the fact that it had saved her some beatings.
Juliet coughed as the last Aqua was knocked away and she was finally able to climb to her knees. “For amateurs,” she thought, “they really hit hard.”
Juliet nodded appreciatively at her two Pokémon. Her sense of victory was short-lived as she also saw many more Aqua members—and yet oddly enough also unarmed and without Pokémon—approaching on her.
“Executive Juliet of Team Rocket,” the new commander said to her as he helped the old one to stand up. It wasn’t a question.
Juliet nodded and attempted to give the man a death glare. However, she noticed something and couldn’t help laughing. Her ribs hurt as she laughed, but she ignored that.
An entire squad of armed Rockets had appeared from out of nowhere behind the Aqua force. While they didn’t carry themselves as field operatives used to direct confrontation—in fact, by their movements, Juliet figured that they were covert operatives by nature—their weapons were trained on the Aqua members.
“What the…?” The Aqua commanders both wondered aloud. “Team Rocket doesn’t use guns…”
Agent Izumi—Juliet recognised her as one of Kenneth’s best operatives—showed no respect towards the Aqua commanders by not taking the time to dignify their question with a response.
“Shut up and come with us,” Izumi said tersely.
One of the Aqua agents, a young red-haired man whose face was of the sort stereotypically belonging to a man of little intelligence, harrumphed spitefully and spat at Izumi.
Izumi simply wiped the spit off her face coolly, then slowly turned her head toward the agent beside her and nodded.
The other agent struck the Aqua man in the stomach with the barrel of his gun. The Aqua man fell hard with a soft moan.
Juliet, who had gotten to her feet and recalled her two Pokémon, limped towards Izumi. “What’s one of Kenneth’s squads doing here?”
“Following orders,” Izumi said frankly.
A Gengar coming out of the ground in front of Izumi piqued everyone’s interest. Machamps and Golems surrounding them followed the ghost.
“What now?” Juliet asked, dropping to her knees from her pain and exhaustion.
“Looks like Stein’s Pokémon-combat division,” Izumi said, eyeing the new Rockets commanding the small army. “They’re a bit late it seems.”
“Can we… get back, by any chance?” Juliet asked.
Izumi looked at the Executive. Juliet was definitely the sort of woman who didn’t do well in a fistfight, although Executives weren’t known for hand-to-hand prowess. She noticed all too late that she was regarding Juliet with the contempt of a field operative disdainfully looking upon a deskbound commanding officer falter in a simple field exercise. Juliet definitely noticed this, since despite her bruises and other minor injuries, she was able to give Izumi an extremely gold gaze.
Izumi turned her head to her operatives and waved them out. “We’re going.”
Juliet stood up and tried to keep pace, but Izumi and her operatives didn’t wait up for her as they escorted the Aquas away.
“That was nice of them,” A deep voice said from behind Juliet.
Juliet looked behind her. The speaker was a physically imposing black man in a standard white uniform. Not a high-ranking man, but not a low-ranking one either. He was definitely in charge of the six or seven Rocket trainers that had arrived as backup, however, because of the way he was standing around them. A Machamp was by his side; obviously he was its trainer.
“Mind if I get a ride with you folk?” Juliet asked experimentally. She was indeed able of getting back to civilisation on her own, although it wasn’t a prospect she was fond of looking forward to.
The black man nodded and extended his hand, which Juliet shook. “Name’s Adair,” he said.
Juliet nodded politely. Introducing herself would have been pointless.
“Our transportation is about a kilometre and a half this way,” Adair said as he led Juliet in a south-southeast direction. “Helicopters. We had to land them at a distance so Aqua wouldn’t get tipped off.”
Juliet felt like adding to the conversation, but was unable to think of any intelligent comment to add before she boarded one of the unmarked Team Rocket helicopters.
“Mind dropping me off in Rueni?” Juliet asked as she boarded.
“Fine, fine,” Adair nodded. “Did you get that, pilot?”
“Heard her just fine,” came a thickly accented Irish voice from the cockpit.
“We could drop you off right at your base,” Adair offered as he turned back to Juliet.
Juliet scoffed. “No thank you. I like to at least think that it’s a secret base.”
“Suit yourself.”
--------------------------------------------------
Yay, we're done another chapter for this week, folks. Next chapter goes up when it goes up. Just goes to show you not to mess with Team Rocket and that if you do they'll accidentally send two divisions your way fast.