October 28th

A Blastoise and an Ampharos stared each other down on a wide, open battlefield. If a Hydro Pump or a Thunder Shock couldn't kill, their looks surely could. The crowd of thousands in the grandstands cheered madly, waiting tensely for one pokémon or the other to make a move. Behind the pokémon, two young men stood tall and firm, lips twitching and aching to fire off a command as buckets of sweat dripped down their foreheads.

"And the battle begins with a fizzle as our two opponents wait for the other to make a move!" the commentator announced as loudly and wildly as the cheers from the audience.

Finally, one of the trainers cracked. "Blastoise, use Rain Dance!" he cried.

A small, yet thunderous rain cloud formed and tumbled in the air above the water pokémon's head. The Blastoise roared as rain drops splattered over his body. A faint blue aura began to glow around him.

From the lowest row in the grandstands, right at eye level with the battlefield, a red-haired man nodded and grunted impressively. "That was a smart move, right there," he said.

Next to him, a giant of a man stared down at him with leering, curious eyes. "Why's tha'?"

"Simple, really," shouted the red-haired man over the raucous audience. "The kid with the Blastoise knows that he's screwed against an electric type. With a water-boosting move like Rain Dance, he'll at least have a fighting chance." He turned to the bigger man and smiled. "You should know about that, Surge."

The giant grunted and folded his arms curtly. "Being the champion never made you an all-knowing genius with type matchups."

"Never said it did," said the man with a forced chuckle. "I was just proving a point."

Surge sighed, but the roars of the crowd grew louder. The Ampharos launched a blinding Thunderbolt straight for the Blastoise and lit up the entire stadium. The water-type curled up in its shell halfway before the bolt hit it straight in the chest. Blastoise hit the ground with a thud before slowly rising on its feet, much to the fervor in the grandstands.

"I'm getting' the feeling that you didn't invite me to watch the tournament to lecture me on third-grade science, Lance," Surge said, his eyes still wandering from the battlefield.

He grinned. "If I wanted to meet up for anything other than watching a battle, I would've just called you."

They both sat in nervous silence, pretending to show interest in the battle. Lance began to fidget in his seat uncomfortably to no end, and he barely noticed when the Ampharos went down in a massive tidal wave. His thumbs pricked at his hands until they broke skin. Surge sat stoically, watching an Arbok burst from a Poké Ball.

Lance threw quick looks around his shoulder. High ranking League officials and a few foreign gym leaders took up the rest of the front row of the stadium, but everyone's eyes were glued to the battle, their ears muted and shut off from the wild cheering, let alone a private conversation.

"I think Team Rocket's up to something," Lance said suddenly, throwing a quick, firm glance at Surge.

He nearly burst into laughter. "They've been dead and buried for years, Lance! Why the hell would they –"

"I think they're militarizing," said Lance. "There have been too many robberies and deals going around for comfort. Crime's never gone up so high, or so fast."

Another sigh, then more awkward silence. The battle on the field waged on as both pokémon clashed head-on in the middle, each blow sparking another wild cheer or chant in the crowd.

"You're crazy," Surge finally muttered. "There's no way that—"

"I'm going in tomorrow to investigate. Surge, I think they're planning something that we can't plan for in any way unless we infiltrate them and find out what's going on." Lance leaned close into Surge's ear, speaking in almost a low, but stern mumble.

"You mean unless you infiltrate them," Surge retorted. "There's no way in hell I'm risking my life because you might have a hunch that something might happen with Team Rocket."

"I've done it before, Lieutenant. And you should be a bit more willing as a G-Men leader."

"Do you even know where the hell their base is?" asked Surge. "And who might be running the group? I mean, Giovanni died with Team Rocket!"

Blastoise fell to the ground unconscious, and the chants and jeers of the crowd grew unbearable. Lance had to shout into Surge's ear from just inches away. "They used to operate out of Celadon! I'm betting that they're still there under new leadership!"

Surge scoffed and shook his head. "I'm not with you on this one, sir!"

"Why the hell not? Don't you wanna figure out what they're—"

"Damnit, Lance! They're not doing shit! They're dead! And they ain't comin' back, either!"

Lance cursed under his breath and stood, pointing an accusatory finger at his partner. "As commander of the G-Men, I reserve all right to launch an investigation on any criminal activity, organized crime no less. I don't give a damn what you think about it, either."

Without another word, Lance started up the stairs toward the stadium's exit, ignoring Surge's pleas for him to sit his ass back down. Star-struck spectators broke their attention from the battle to beg Lance for an autograph as he walked up, but a firm wave of the hand shooed them away. He flung the door open and jogged across the concourse, hearing the crowd die down with each step he took. But as he reached the entrance to the parking lot, he could hear the crowd react once more to a fainted pokémon.

A chilly October wind blew through the dark, dreary night sky. Lance shivered as his cape billowed behind him, but his confident, composed stride maintained itself. Thoughts of Team Rocket, of infiltrating their base for the eighteenth or nineteenth time almost made him walk past his parking spot, where a cherry red motorcycle stood firmly on its kickstand.

He couldn't hear himself grumbling under the chaotic screams and cheers from the stadium. Even the engine on his motorcycle sounded like the purr of a Meowth in a raging hurricane. Lance sighed in content when he drove from the parking lot, and the smooth, rhythmic churning of the engine on the bare highway drowned everything else out.

Lance thought of his Dragonite, resting in its Poké Ball on the desk in his bedroom. Usually, he'd bring him to the matches, partly for transportation to and from the stadium and partly to get him out of the house every once in a while. But tonight, on official G-Men business, his partner had to stay behind.

Whirrings above made him look up. The sounds of a helicopter's blades whispered, but the nighttime sky was clear. Lance grunted and kept driving.

A few sparse streetlights were all that lit up the four-lane highway. The post-match traffic wouldn't hit for another half an hour, so Lance could blaze down the road as fast as he liked – but he still kept the seventy mile an hour speed limit. Behind him, his cape whistled madly in the flowing wind, a wave of red and black blending into the night.

An orange light from a ROAD WORK AHEAD sign glared in Lance's eye, and he squinted a bit, almost losing his grip on the motorcycle's handlebars. Sweat began to drip down his forehead and clung to his lower chin before droplets flew onto the road and into oblivion.

The twenty-minute drive to his house from the stadium in Viridian City felt like an eternity and a half. After the fight with Surge, his warm, relaxing bed seemed light years away. His eyes began to droop, his grip on the handlebars loosened…

A bright red "R" flashed across his mind, and he jolted awake as his motorcycle cut across a lane. The nervous spasms that shot through his muscles almost made him crash into the metal railing at the side of the road. He panted and drove back to the center of the road, his hands squeezing the handlebars with moist hands.

"Shit. . ." he breathed under his breath. "I just need to get to bed."

The corner of his eyes focused on the beacon of lights that surrounded a distant power plant. Even from miles and miles away, the generators and smoke stacks still lit up like christmas trees on the horizon. Lance kept one eye focused on the lights, the other focused on the road. He zigzagged through the lane dividers and slowly sped up. The needle on his speedometer slowly crept to "75."

A few of the lights on the edge of his vision danced away. Lance thought nothing of it until more of the lights burned out. His foot pumped the brakes when the first lights that disappeared returned.

His motorcycle came to a stop, and he squinted toward the power plant. He tried to keep a mental count of the lights he could make out, but so many of them kept blinking off and on that he could barely get to ten. It looked like a tiny, distant switchboard, with all of its knobs and gears and blinking lights, although these lights shouldn't have been.

"The hell. . ." Lance sighed. He slowly dug for the Poké Gear in his pocket and scrolled through his contact's list, punching the listing for Lt. Surge.

"Yeah?" Surge loudly answered after four rings.

Lance held the device a foot away from his ear – the rampant, victorious cheers from Surge's end blasted through the earpiece. "Surge, it's Lance. Do you know what's going on with your plant over by Viridian?"

He could hear Surge's muffled groans of frustration. "Nothin' that I know of. Why?"

"All of the lights on the exterior are going haywire. Can you have someone check them out? I don't like the look of it." Lance never broke his gaze from the flickering lights.

"Yeah, I guess," said Surge. "But I haven't gotten any other calls from the area's operatives about any outages."

"Look into it and let me know what's going on," Lance said before clasping the Poké Gear shut. Grumbling under his breath, he shot one final glance toward the power plant. The lights' blinking seemed to have slowed to an intermittent dim.

He sped off onto the highway without looking back, even though he could feel each blinking light burning into his skull.

Five minutes later, he took the exit off the highway, and the purring of the engine slowly died as the motorcycle rolled into a dim, narrow, winding driveway. The soft whispers of the nighttime bugs around him echoed harmoniously across the air, and soon even the motorcycle's roar went out with a whimper under the chirps and clicks of the nocturnal. A light on the cycle's front guided Lance across his lengthy driveway and to his mansion.

Even in the dead of night, the white marble monster of a house gleamed in the moon's reflection. A thicket of vines sprawled across the façade, unkempt and untrimmed. Lance sighed; he'd have to hire someone to take care of that if he couldn't find the time himself.

He leapt off of his motorcycle and rolled it into the garage. The dust that clung to the walls and ceilings made him cough until his face turned blue.

His front door creaked open, and he stepped in the doorway, fumbling for the light switch. The foyer lit up majestically, making him squint against the brightness. He kicked his boots off and jogged up the wide, carpeted staircase and into his bedroom.

He fought the impulse to collapse onto his bed with eyes closed shut – sleep could wait a little longer. With a sigh, he unclasped his cape and let it drop in the open doorway. Across from him, a laptop screen shone dimly, its login page displayed. Lance opened a drawer inside his desk and picked through his six poké balls to find the one labelled "DRAGONITE."

The dragon pokémon emerged from its ball in a light so bright that Lance had to look away completely. Its massive body took up half of the entire bedroom, its tail resting floppily on Lance's bed.

"Hey, buddy," Lance muttered. "Go out and fly for a bit. You need a stretch."

Dragonite nodded and, after Lance opened his bedside, wall-to-wall window, flew out with its wings flapping strong. Lance grinned and turned to his closet.

Pearly white walls and linens instantly made him regret his choice of decorum; the bright whites could keep a Slakoth awake at two in the morning. He opened up his closet and fumbled without a light into the deepest recess he could reach into. His hand grabbed hold of a tightly folded bundle, and Lance knew he had what he looked for – his Team Rocket uniform.

Each time he looked at it sent a shot of dread through him. He couldn't even remember the last time he had to wear it, but that same feeling of regret greeted him like an old friend. His fingers coursed through the gray fabric methodically; he could feel the lump of the cap inside the bundle. The blood red "R" on the chest became too much to look at, and he tossed it onto a corner of his bed.

It'd be hell wearing that again, becoming one of them.

He fought his angst with a yawn and hopped over to his laptop, sitting down on a decrepit, leather desk chair. It creaked nastily and made him wince. For a moment, he wondered if he could build a new house if this one were to fall to the ground. Or at least a new desk chair that didn't make so much noise.

The monitor asked for Lance's login credentials after he wiggled the mouse. He keyed in:

USERNAME: luxfordelb

PASSWORD: 2d0r5g6n

His browser popped on the screen, and he clicked open his email. The nightly ritual of thumbing through each fan letter, business document, G-Men recruitment application, or any other email felt like an overdose of codeine. Lance's eyelids grew heavy after just six messages – a personal best.

As he read on, he teetered dangerously on the cusp of slumber. Only the lingering thought of Team Rocket kept him from going under . . . and he didn't even know why.

"You've done this before," he muttered to himself after clicking "Delete" on a fangirl's love-struck manifesto. "So why do I have a bad feeling about all of this?" he thought.

A bar on the screen flashed suddenly, and a four-tone jingle blasted through the speakers. Lance squinted and read the text: INCOMING CALL: CLAIR LUXFORDE. He smirked and clicked the green "Accept" button.

Clair's head of wavy blue hair blew up to fill the entire monitor. Her piercing indigo eyes seemed to radiate from the screen and right into Lance's nerves, as if she were actually in his bedroom, staring him down. He shivered at the thought of that.

Behind her, a Dragonair lay silkily across her bed, staring intently at the camera. Both he and Clair grinned slyly. "It's been a while, Lance!"

Lance chuckled mid-yawn and rubbed the back of his head. "I've been busy," he said with a sigh. "You know what it's like."

"All too well." Clair raised her eyebrows and looked back at her Dragonair. "I think he's close to evolving. Should be any day, now."

Her words floated right into his ear and out the other before Lance could register that she was talking. He blinked a few times and frowned. "Whuzzat?" he asked.

Clair stared at him for a few seconds. A new glimpse of anxiety flashed in her eyes, and her complexion changed in an instant. Her skin paled, her eyebrows reached all the way to Mt. Silver. "Everything okay?"

He gulped and stared down at his bloodied hands, picking at the long-dried maroon splotches. Here Clair was, Lance's one person to turn to as family, his only person that he ever opened up about anything to. And all Lance could do was sigh. Should he spill it about Team Rocket to her, when nothing may very well be happening at all?

"Yeah, I'm fine," he said with a false smile. "Just kinda tired."

Clair frowned her deep, condescending, big-cousin frown. "You sure you're not overworked? Being the champion and all can't –"

"It's Team Rocket," Lance blurted.

A tense moment of awkward silence permeated between them. He wanted to punch himself, and go through hell just to rewind time and never say what he just said. You moron, he thought!

"Are. . . are you sure?" Clair stammered.

"No. No, I'm not sure," Lance said, sighing again. "But things have been getting worse here in Kanto. Armed robberies, black market deals, raids on armories for god's sake!"

"So why can't it all be pinned back to Team Rocket?" asked Clair.

"Because Team Rocket collapsed over three years ago. You know that, Clair. Whatever's going on is all untraced. We have no leads, no suspects, no clues on anything at all. I think that, if these are the Rockets, they're working completely off the radar, unlike last time."

She nodded. "So, are you gonna try and investigate?"

"Of course I am! Why wouldn't I?" Lance argued.

"Because you're sweating right now, Lance. And my little cousin never sweats."

He brought his hand to his forehead and rubbed the moistness through his fingertips. Dammit, she was right. He hated when she was right.

"I just. . . have a really bad feeling about this," Lance sighed. "Something doesn't feel right."

"What's the worst that's gonna happen, though? You're not gonna get hurt doing it," Clair said, "you're too smart for that."

"I don't hear compliments out of you all that often."

Clair smirked. "My little cos' needs to hear them every now and again."

He laughed, and watched Dragonite's dim figure flying back to his window. "For the only family I've got, I don't think I could ask for better."

What should've been a smug quip from Clair turned into a jumble of sharp sound bites. Lance turned back to the screen and frowned at the frozen image of Clair in a half-smile, her eyes unblinking.

"Clair?" Lance said, tapping on the monitor.

Her face disappeared, and everything blinked out. The screen, the lights above him, his whole world went dark. Even the chandelier in the foyer died with an audible pop.

"Damnit," he whispered to himself. Dragonite appeared at the window and landed at Lance's bedside gracefully, curling himself at the end for rest. He looked around the darkened room and glanced at his trainer curiously.

Lance sighed and collapsed into bed. "No power tonight, buddy," he said. "Maybe it'll be back tomorrow."

Exhaustion overcame him before he could say good night, and under his thick, cotton covers he began to sweat once more.