A/N: Sequel to the sequel of "Smooth Criminal", which was originally planned to be a one-shot, but I am mentally unable to keep it at that. More action-driven than the past parts, but, as usually, I'll try to keep the humor up.
J's family connections and her past relationship are made up.
About the timeline: Takes place a few weeks after "SC2", still during the DP series. Around DP 140. After the Regigigas episode, but before the Galactic arc.
Part I
The commodities a normal, seven-to-five job offers for the individual were obvious. Steady income, fixed working times, free weekends and even annual leave, in which you could paint the town red.
In case of a criminal employed at Team Rocket, you painted the town red with the blood of your enemies, of course.
Things look quite differently, though, when you are a free lancing criminal and have to scrape together your income and what you desire to pay your henchmen, if you paid them at all, all by yourself.
Jean Hunter, or Hunter J, as she liked to call herself for anonymity issues that had backfired oh so many times on her already, knew that all too well.
Now, the last weeks had been unusually lucrative even for her. After catching the giant Dragonite at Cerulean Sea with a secret league project whose blue prints had been given to her by somebody that she came to dub as her secret sweetheart, she had also almost managed to catch a Regigigas at Snowpoint Temple. If it hadn't been for these meddling kids who seemed to stalk her, she would have succeeded. Not that it mattered, anymore. Her client had paid in advance. His mistake.
That meant that, even though she had no concrete assignments, she was well situated in the meantime and could allow herself a short vacation in Sinnoh's South. All the while her henchmen were buckling and sweating under the harsh sun, as they were responsible for the ship's condition. She was merely there to control their handling, and occasionally punish them if they forgot to polish the windows.
All in all, she was pretty relaxed and that opened up the gates for an entirely different kind of musings. She thought back about her younger brother Zero, who had, if not helped, then at least not bumbled into her way when they had confronted their older brother Lawrence on behalf of the league, when the brainless maniac that he was had tried to capture the legendary bird trio of Johto. With the help of two of Johto's Elite trainers, William Bender and his girlfriend Karen, they had managed to defeat Lawrence and imprison him, resulting in another hefty monetary compensation for her. She supposed with all the money she had made in recent times, she could buy a house, settle down, maybe even look for a more legal job.
J snickered. Yeah right, and tomorrow, Lawrence opened up a star-rewarded jail restaurant.
She leaned back in her beach lounger, enjoying the harsh sun under her sunglasses, a tropical drink right at her side. She didn't plan for this to be a very long vacation, just a few days relaxing, calming the nerves.
She didn't expect her rest to be disturbed so abruptly and severely, though.
One of her henchmen approached her. She didn't even know his name- something Russian, maybe?- since she never bothered to learn their names, anyway. A cold, old "Hey you, asshole" was directive enough, and always found a recipient.
"Captain, I want to report to you that there's an uproar in Kanto."
J sighed and pushed the sunglasses back on her nose. "And why, my dear brainless failure of normal functioning, is that of my concern?"
The man gulped visibly, but there was something in this eyes that told J that he wasn't here to barely bother her, as her henchman usually tended to. This was something more serious.
"Well, captain…the uproar's origin's in Saffron."
J waited for him to elaborate, but when nothing happened, she straightened her back and sat up. "News already covering it?"
"Yes, madam."
"Get me a TV. I want to take a look myself."
She didn't really care how they managed to get hold of a TV in just about two minutes, nor how they managed to balance the device to the pool area, nor did she spend much thought to how they powered it up. All that mattered was that the- admittedly, small, TV soon showed pics that reminded her of the geeky monster movies her younger brother loved to watch.
Only that in fantasy, the dragons were green and not bright orange, and while they often preferred to destroy the biggest city in vicinity, they were stopped by the good guys before they could actually endanger human life.
This, however, was way too realistic for her taste.
Minutes went on as J silently watched the news reporter, more and more buzzwords arriving, until she read what she had been hoping to avoid deep inside.
"Gym leader currently missing."
J closed her eyes. She took a deep breath.
"Start the ship. Pack everything and everyone. Stock up on food, gas and weapons."
She opened her eyes. "We're going back to Kanto."
Scene Change
Going back in time and flying a few thousand miles North, we find ourselves in the office of your standard wanna-be Mafioso, who had no problem still paying total failures such as Jessie and James and their talking cat, and was himself certainly not above actions that would be risky at best, outright suicidal at worst.
And what he was planning on conducting now was something so entirely out of this world, that no one sane could even try to comprehend any reason for it, except simply megalomania.
It was one thing to try to take over Kanto's main commercial city. That even made a certain amount of sense. After all, all the money of the world was made, shuffled, spend and burned here, not explicitly in that order. Taking over Saffron basically meant taking over all of Kanto's economic power, and therefore, made sense.
Doing so with the help of an overgrown Dragon that destroyed buildings, willingly and rather most often, unwillingly by simply moving that huge butt with tail attached of it?
Did not make much sense.
After all, how much was all that money worth when you caused a breakdown of the financial market by crushing every bank and market that existed, along with quite a few stock brokers?
Not that these weren't replaceable, but they made an awful mess when squashed by Dragonite's feet.
Still, the head honcho of the Rockets did not care about all the collateral damage that his newest pet created by simply waltzing. He had by now, in all senses of the word, gone insane, and sadly, he was quite efficient and successful in it. He had somehow managed to carry the large Dragonite into the city without anyone noticing, had even duped the league by using an invention they had been working on to capture the large Pokemon (or, at least, he had paid someone else to do that for him), and, in the end, he had avoided the league's agents by tricking them. He had all the right to gloat to his underlings about his invincibility.
He had forgotten about one crucial detail, though.
Saffron possessed- or was possessed, rather, by one of the strongest gym leaders.
Who, at the moment of attack, had long since foreseen it and had decided to take matters into her own hands.
Which surely explained how she was fully absent from the board of play so far.
Scene Change
J had seen a lot of battle stages in her life. It came with being a high ranking criminal, she guessed, who took on fights with legendaries. It took a lot to impress her when it came to battle damage. She had seen whole forests burned down, she had seen lakes dried clean, with helpless fish Pokemon left to flap until the sun burned them into chips, hell, she had seen mountain caps being blasted off by angry Pokemon.
Still, seeing the damage done to the city she had visited less than half a year ago, under quite different circumstances, shocked her. It looked a bit as if an overgrown baby had decided to use the skyscrapers as its plaything, and turned them upside down to spill their filling out.
Which might actually have been the truth, now that she considered it.
Impressive, it truly was, for she remembered the Dragon to be hardly a tenth the height of most of Saffron's average skyscrapers.
Still, it helped that the Dragonite was capable of flight and of hyper beam. That certainly compensated for other shortcomings.
"Madam?" Her attention had been so captured by the Dragonite that she almost overheard the head commander. She shook her head rapidly to clear it out of the haze it had been caught it. She had seen the very same Pokemon just weeks ago, and nothing had changed that made it any more or any less interesting.
Except that it was now on a killing rampage, which might be relevant to her interest on several levels, actually.
"Madam? What are we supposed to do now?" Her head commander asked.
She would have slapped him for his rude question if not for the fact that he had a point. They were now in Saffron- or rather, as close to the city as they could without facing the danger of being noticed by either the Pokemon itself, or the several Rocket agents that were likely spread out over the areal.
Team Rocket had definitely pulled out the big guns to take over Saffron.
While it was definitely out of the usual for J to nick the Pokemon of a criminal organization, it was, she mused, in theory not all that different from taking a Pokemon from your average trainer. Only that the Pokemon itself was anything but average, and that made things complicated again.
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. She had succeeded in catching the Dragonite weeks ago, but only because she had used the most foolish possible way at her disposal, which had been dumping her own prototype of the Enormous Ball on its head and hoping that this misinterpreted tea bagging kind of improvised tactic worked. Which it had, obviously, since she had been able to transfer the Dragon to Team Rocket not much later, but that also meant that she had not found a suitable way of weakening the giant Pokemon. Relying on the league's techniques had made it too easy for her, which now came back to bit her back hard in the ass.
As did the fact that leaving overhasty hadn't been the best idea she'd had in the last days as well.
J shook her head. Dealing with the Dragonite was one thing, finding the gym leader another. And that other thing was, honestly, what had been her objective coming to the city, anyways. She could care less about how much property was unwillingly leveled. That was not her Pidgey.
Therefore, the intermediate goal seemed clear.
"We'll land, and I'll take the ATV to slap through the city to the gym. You'll stay behind, giving me rear cover in case the Dragonite notices. Don't hesitate to throw yourself in the fireline if it becomes necessary. You're replaceable, I'm not, and your paychecks won't cover themselves."
"Yes, captain!"
She didn't wait to see which henchman chose to be the first cannon fodder. Her cape wiping the floor around her ankles, she rushed to the car pool and waited for the descend.
Tearing through the streets of Saffron, J took note of her wise foresight to install the newest road map of the capital. Not that even that helped her in the rush hour that was caused by a giant monster attacking the city core and everyone else being sane and trying to go the other way to the outer skirts of the city, but it gave her a voice to snarl at whenever she was told by the annoying mechanic to turn around at the next opportunity.
"Got the best angle dozer far and wide doing the demolition for them, and their biggest concern is reconstructing the paving." She snarled, as she overtook a construction vehicle blocking the road in front of her. She didn't spare a thought about the unusual way the car was placed – usually, one did not park upside down, but instead, she waltzed right through the metal, mechanics and seats with her van. She grinned when she hit a hydrant on her way. "Who the hell designs these roads, anyway?" She snarled, failing to realize that she wasn't even using aforementioned roads anymore, but pretty much making her own way through downtown Saffron, entirely confusing the hell out of her satnav, which had obviously not been constructed in mind with free-thinking persons who took liberties with the definition of a road and declared literally everything a road that was not blocked by walls.
And even those were just bothersome obstacles that could easily be cracked by the right vehicle. Might made it right at its best.
"You didn't just tell me that I'm speeding, did you!?" She snarled at the obnoxious female voice of her satnav, very close to calcifying it before she realized that her device might not work on a machine.
Seconds later a red light momentarily blinded her.
"…I wasn't just fined for speeding, was I?" J sarcastically asked no one in particular, even though her satnav kept insisting that she should slow down. "I can slow down once I'm dead, you batshit thing!" She snarled, cutting a corner so hard she accidently ripped off half the wall. Which didn't add much to the overall damage, as the building seemed to be close to toppling over by simple grace of the Dragonite alone.
"Of course, the real challenge here is not finding the gym, but a parking lot…" J paused, before waltzing down a park bench. Best suitable replacement she could find in the meantime, and hey, she was in a parking space, right?
She took a glance outside before she jumped out of the van. She would have let Salamence or Drapion loose, but chances were high that the Dragonite would detect the two rival Pokemon, and attack them swiftly.
"Okay…gotta ask her later if the architect was eccentric, or plain drunk." She put a hand to her hip as she walked up to the gym. The first time she had been in Saffron, she hadn't had any time actually to do some sight-seeing- obviously, and hadn't been able to marvel at the wonder that was the umbrella-shaped psychic gym.
Gyms in Sinnoh tended to be less impressive, and less eccentric, although, sadly, the same couldn't be said about the corresponding gym leaders. That, J mused, was a rule of nature. No matter where you were, the gym leader was always the local freak who had lost his marbles a while ago.
But at least they were as modern as they could be. Automatic doors, anyone? When was the last time she had seen such a thing in a government sponsored building?
Actually, every Pokemon Center had automatic doors, but it wasn't as if J could just walk into your average Pokemon Center without expecting to be grounded by a dozen police officers moments later.
Given the state the whole city was in, she expected the gym to be in turmoil, with several people running like Torchics after their heads had been cut off, or the gym to be totally deserted. There was always the possibility that Team Rocket had been wise enough to do away with the pesky psychics as soon as they got the chance to do so, and that, J noticed angrily, made her stomach tight with something akin to fear.
But what she found, in the end, was neither a chaos nor a startling emptiness, but, if she hadn't known it to be different, what she expected to be an everyday business activity.
People training their strange powers, people training their strange powers with their Pokemon, people on lab coats experimenting on liquids that looked like they should only be consumed by one's enemies, and people typing away on laptops or reading thick books with determined faces. All in all, it was so calm, so average, so normal that she started to question her satnav. This could neither be a psychic gym, not a psychic gym in the middle of a dragon-powered Team Rocket invasion.
She might have been so entirely confused by the situation that it took her a few moments to notice that someone was standing besides her, politely coughing and waiting for her to regain her composure.
"Good day, m'lady. What might you be here, for?"
She blinked, and turned around, ready to snarl at whoever dared to 'lady' here when she wasn't even forty yet and barely thirty (well, barely thirty for three years by now, but who cares?), when she realized that the speaker was a man way older than her, and, even more important, he was a psychic as well, given the way his mobile gently floated next to his hand.
She stared blankly at the display of Telekineses, long enough for the man to scan her over and read her thoughts.
Like father, like daughter, after all.
"You're looking for Sabrina."
J blanched. "And what if I am?" She retorted lamely, fully knowing that it was useless arguing with someone who already knew about your intentions before you yourself even did.
The man sighed. "I know where she is, but…I am unsure if I should give away her location to you." He folded his arms over each other and looked sternly down at her.
J snarled angrily. This was really not the time for playing games with her! She could have turned him into stone, surely, but that wouldn't help her along. She didn't want to make a bad first impression on the employees of the gym. Not because that might shed her in a bad light in the eyes of Sabrina, that too, maybe, a little, the tiniest bit, but first and foremost, of course, she didn't want to anger any psychic, of course.
"And why would that be?" J asked sarcastically.
"Well, why should I trust you with this exclusive, confidential information?"
J would have sworn that her first reaction wasn't to shout 'Because she's my girlfriend', but to say that she wanted to rescue her, but somehow, her two intentions got mixed up on the way from brain to tongue, and what she blurted out in the end was: "Because I want to rescue my girlfriend."
J paused and hit her palm against her forehead. 'Way of you to go, old girl, way to go…'. Only to censor herself. 'Not that old…"
He took a deep breath, and looker her over more closely this time. J crossed her arms over each other as well, glaring in his direction. What right did he have to judge her for a sentence she had, obviously, just uttered accidently? Why did he feel the need to review her like an expensive piece of Kantonese Miltank meat before searing her from both sides?
"So, you want to rescue my daughter?"
Well, he was Sabrina's father, for starters.
J would have furiously denied that her face fell at this point and she gulped. But in all honestly, even a Hunter J fell her confidence sink in front of the man who turned out to be the father of her actually-slightly love interest.
"Yeah….?" She inquired meekly, trying to smile. For some reason, that would not work.
He continued to look down at her, eyes blazing slightly.
"Well, what if she does not want to be rescued?"
J would have rolled her eyes if not for, first, the indignity of such an action, and, second, that she didn't want to lose what little credibility she still had in front of this man.
"Excuse me, sir, but there's a giant Dragon outside eating your cohabitants alive, and the city looks as if it was used as a organ donor for the local brick producer, and you tell me the gym leader, who is officially missing, does not need help?"
She realized a moment too late that this implied Sabrina to be incompetent, but the words had already been blurted out.
The man seemed to roll his eyes. "Do you see us panicking?" He asked, slowly, as if talking to a retarded kid.
J, again, would have taken offense, but thanks to genetics and family connections, she was at his mercy.
No, she did not frantically want to stay on good terms with the man that was the father of her still-not-quite-admitted love interest, of course not.
"No, I don't, but…"
She never got to finish her sentence. Something shook the building, something that felt like an unnatural heavy and short-lived earthquake. J barely managed to hold her balance, while the man fell to his knee.
Moments later, J saw the front doors being blasted away by a Houndoom's solar beam, and heard screams of shock and fear all throughout the building.
"Care to repeat your question?" She asked sarcastically.
The man answered in just the same fashion. "Unless you have been just under a rock and did not get the memo, I think you got your answer there."
J had been ready to fight. Very much so. She supposed that it had been her good foresight to bring along her Pokemon, but then again, given the overall situation, it would have been foolish to waive them. She was dully aware of the fact that she was outnumbered, clearly so. Even with the dozens of gym trainers around, not all of them armed by Pokemon it seemed, they altogether were at a disadvantage simply brought upon by typing. Team Rocket had, of course, brought their Dark and Steel type Pokemon, which oh so happened to have an advantage against her half-dragon type Salamence and her half-poison type Drapion as well.
But all of these calculations were for the naught, either way, when something hit her from behind. She didn't even have time to register what it was before she tumbled over, arms pinned to her side by an electric ring, and suddenly, a volt bustled through her every muscle fiber and, as the cherry on top, someone had the guts to kick her with his dirty boots in the back of her head. She fell over, unconsciously.
Scene Change
Miles north of Saffron, close to the sea, a young man sipped his tea, legs crossed over each other, not a single crease visible in his cherry red suit. The man, green hair curly and short, looked up as his guest's attention suddenly drifted away from their urgent topic.
"As I have been saying, the ancient village worshipped a special kind of… M'lady, is there something bothering you?" He asked, not taking his eyes away from the freshly brewed mint tea imported from Johto.
The woman didn't answer him for a long time, just staring at the wall opposite of him as if expecting a portal to sudden open upon her glance.
Given who she was, this was not entirely impossible.
Finally, she stood up, putting her own white porcelain tea cup onto the coffee table. "Excuse me, Mr. Hatch. I will have to leave you for a while. There is something I need to do."
Scene Change
J had gone through her fair share of headaches all through her life. Some of them the consequence of partying a bit too hard after a successful capture, which usually ended with her trying to deal even worse pains to her henchmen. The noticeably smaller part of her headaches had been induced by head trauma, and she had been proud and fairly intend on keeping it that way, as every injury she suffered meant one less she had caused herself.
Regaining consciousness was a bit hard when it seemed as if gravity had not decided if it should return in full effect yet, and your surroundings were shaking like the insides of a snow globe, sans the actual snow.
Shaking her head proved to be an even more futile attempt, as all it did was making her vision swim even worse. The hunter winced and held onto the steel bars for support, realizing at the same time that she was, in fact, behind prison bars.
She groaned. She could have gone without a repetition of history for a while, very much so.
"So you're awake?" A young, shrill voice called out to her.
J blinked, trying to figure out who, in this mess of colors that was the room she was being held in against her will, was the speaker. After a moment, it became obvious, because no umbrella stand would wear a bobbling blond wig.
"No, I'm sleepwalking." She joked, rapidly blinking to clear her vision of the many stars that were killing the mood and her nerves.
The laugh that reached her ears afterwards was piercing and shrill, and felt like a spike right through her ear drums. "So you actually got a sense of humor there. That's unexpected, Rumor has it that you're quite the sour one, Miss Jean Hunter."
J tried to let her eyes focus long enough on the person in front of her to register details, but all she got was a swirly mess of features and colors.
"And after everything that has happened, I'm sure you have all the more reason to be…"
J snarled. "Glad to hear that my reputation still precedes me here…"
She may have not been able to put a name on the face of the banana-blond haired girl in front of her with the striking purple eyes, but the emblem that bore the single red letter had embedded itself so strongly into her memory that it would take more than a blow to the back of her head to make her forget it. To tell the truth, sometimes, she wished one blow or the other would have blasted these fractals of history out of her biography forever, but this kind of technology did not exist yet, and so, she had to live with it.
The laugh in front of her made her feel as if she was misused as a bell tongue. "Of course it does. Team Rocket never forgets."
J glared upwards. It had taken her a good five minutes, but with every passing second, she was able to differentiate more between background and foreground objects, and colors finally decided to assign themselves to the correct zone. Just as she had feared, the building she was in bore the traditional signs of belonging to the most well-known criminal organization of Kanto: Minimal design, maximum opportunities for agony, and a certain classic cheesiness displayed by purposefully perforated water pipes that caused a constant dripping classified to be mental torture.
All of that, though, did not scare J, or even fazed her much. Not only had she been through worse- Kanto's prisons came to mind, but she had dealt far more creative and efficient anguish, and felt therefore ready for nearly everything Team Rocket could throw at her.
Much more upsetting, in her mind, was the fact that all she was wearing was a thin nightgown she was most certain she had not been wearing before.
Slowly, she looked up at her supposed captor, who shrugged and grinned. "Well, what do you expect? Couldn't have let you keep all these pretty weapons, now could we? We don't want to make it too easy for you, do we?"
"Did you strip me down?" J asked, eyes wide open with shock.
The girl- barely a young woman, if J had to be honest, shrugged again, casually reclined against the faraway wall with crossed arms. "Sure."
"Are you perverted?" J asked, tongue pushed against her gum to keep herself from spitting foul words at the girl.
"Hm, might be, actually."
J took a deep breath, and cradled her head in her palm. So this was how low Team Rocket had sunken in the meantime?
"So, tell me…" J looked up to find the girl actually chewing bubblegum. There was a certain element to it that disgusted her, and it had nothing to do with the fact that the girl let spit flow all over her cheek as she obnoxiously bit through the pink blob.
"You know, in my days, Team Rocket was a organization for killers, assassins and executioners, and not bored high schoolers."
Her question was met with the roll of an eye. "Never judge a book by a cover, will you, old hag?"
J gnarled. She wasn't that old! Surely not old enough to be told off so coldly by this whippersnapper.
"Hey, don't give me that look! You could be my mom!" The girl rolled her eyes.
J mimicked hr gesture. "Only if I were an extreme case of a Lolita."
The way the girl's teeth glimmered made the hunter wonder if bleaching was legal at her age. "Who's to say you weren't?"
"You're one to tell…" J mumbled, unwilling to continue the verbal banter with the girl. Stripping her down casually and then accusing her of having an early puberty…
"Well, what do you want from me…would you rather have a guy, like, I dunno, Blatch, or Petrel, or, heaven forbid, Giovanni himself have you strip down?"
J rolled her eyes. "One by one…Butch finally joined for real?" He had been barely big enough to walk up the stairs on his own when she had last seen him, having the misfortune of being a toddler born into a Team Rocket family. "And does he still have that break of a voice that makes you want to ram a cane into your ear speculum? "
The girl grinned. "It got worse."
J groaned. "And Petrel's still alive? Fuck, I thought by now, someone would have blasted that shriveled pea of a brain of his out, or ripped this bastard's dick off. Isn't he long overdue some wipe-down?"
The girl shrugged. "You try to find that shape shifter when he does not want to be found. Knowing him, he could be hiding behind the tapestry of this room, and secretly be jerking off to our conversation. Or, alternatively, he already has as I took off your clothes."
J did not want to, but she couldn't help glancing at the walls. Hiding behind the tapestry would indeed be a challenge, as they were surrounded by plain cobble stone.
"And now, we come to the one million dollar question…Giovanni is still a thing?"
"Of course. What did you expect?"
"Someone to assassinate him, to be honest."
"Fat chance, lady. These days, no one gets close enough to home to even have the ghost of a chance."
J sighed. It had been too much of a hope to think that things had changed in a positive way. No, almost twenty years after her last brush with Team Rocket, it seemed the inner structure of the shady organization had not changed one bit.
And had, unfortunately, decreased in sanity as well.
"So now that we're over reminiscing about past times, care to tell me what I'm being held for her against my will? I can't remember actually interfering with your plans." Well not actively, at least, and not out in the open, either.
Unless Team Rocket took offense at her breaking the traffic laws of the city they were trying to conquer.
"And while we're at it, care to give me your name so I can call you a thing other than brat?"
"Well, if you have to call me anything, lady, then call me Domino."
J suppressed a groan. "Back in my days, you would have been kicked out of the team with a boot stuck in your ass for such a cheesy nickname, girl. Or executed with a butter knife, and that would have been the merciful option."
"Well, things change, Hunter J."
J certainly got the crack at her own alias, but found it to be at least less childish than a name borrowed from a mainstream spy movie.
"And as for why we captured you…well, we can't have anything or anyone disturbing our takeover of the city. You being there might mess things up." Domino tilted her head. "Especially since no seems to have a fucking idea as for why you were actually here. Tell me, I'm morbidly curious, what brought you back to the place you had just been imprisoned at almost half a year ago? Are you masochistic?"
'No, but madly enough to be in love with the gym leader', J would have almost answered, before realizing that, in context of Team Rocket, this might not only open up old wounds, but make her sound mad indeed.
For this was absolutely and totally untrue. She was not in love with the gym leader, clearly not. She just cared for her. A lot, apparently, since she had taken the risk of returning to Kanto when the danger that Team Rocket portrayed to her was immediate.
"You can't expect an uproar of that size not to attract other shady forces, girl. I was curious as to what you were actually trying to accomplish with the dragon that I, I might emphasize, captured."
"Do you want it back?" Domino asked, eyebrow raised, corkscrew curls bobbling.
"No!" J answered, just a bit too fast to be actually convincing. Even though it had indeed not been her idea to recapture the Dragonite. She deemed it pretty close to impossible, either way, but now that she thought clearly about it for a moment, there seemed to be no other way to stop the attack on Saffron than to eliminate the Pokemon one way or another.
Which, again, brought her to the question of why she was so eager to mess with Team Rocket's actions when her original plan had only included saving the psychic. A goal she hadn't come one step closer to fulfilling so far, she noted with a dull sigh. She still had no clue where Sabrina was hiding, other than that she seemed not to be in town, and that even her father had been unwilling to share information about her whereabouts. Not that she had given him any reason to trust her, either. Still, it would have been nice to be told if it was worth continuing to stay in Saffron, or if the psychic had long since abandoned the city.
A sudden whirring sound to her left answered her question in a most unexpected way.
Both J and Domino blinked at the sudden bright light that appeared to J's right, filling the small prison cell with an unearthly sanctity.
Given that the cell was barely big enough to contain one person, it certainly got crowded when a second person decided to rush in.
Domino was the first to regain her composure. "Sabrina? The fucking gym leader? Did you decide to let yourself be captured?" She asked, incredulously.
Sabrina would have answered in a similar way that this had certainly not been her intention, hadn't she been busy grabbing J's hand and teleporting them out as swiftly as she had come burglarizing in.
J landed unceremoniously on her butt, groaning as her spine dared to spear through her rear side. She felt close to naked without her jacket, her boots, and most of all, her equipment!
"Damn it!" She had just recently gotten the replacement calcification gun, and now it seemed as if she had lost that valuable weapon again!
She could have gone with no clothes, literally, as long as she was armed with something other than her wits and her sarcasm, as that was not going to shoot her enemies' heads off in a duel.
She supposed with a suppressed shudder that she could still flash them, in a sense, but that was not the kind of attack she felt she was good at utilizing.
Taking in her surroundings, she at first noticed the fresh sea water and the sound of waves breaking against stony cliffs. They weren't that many places in Kanto you could come close to the sea without tumbling off right into it, so the place they had ended up at was obvious. "We're in Cerulean." She said, actually to no one in particular, but Sabrina chose to correct her either way.
"Cerulean Cliff, actually."
She walked past J, in the direction of the only source of light J could see. A small hut, located next to an immense lighthouse, right on the cliff.
J blinked. She was no expert in Kanto's landscape, but some things had managed to reach her ears as well. "Isn't this where Bill Hatch, the Pokemon expert, lives?"
"That is accurate. I was visiting Mr. Hatch before I became aware of the fact that you needed my help…again." The psychic turned around, and J felt herself actually shrinking a bit under her dark stare.
"Hey, not my fault I was captured by Team Rocket. I had no idea they were trying to get rid of me as well." There was the slim chance she should have expected her interference to have that sort of effect, though.
The glare Sabrina gave her as she walked towards the shack felt as if it was burning holes through her gown and chest. "You should not have tried to interfere, Jean. That was a very stupid thing of you to do."
J shrugged helplessly. "Well, excuse me if I was only trying to save you, actually!"
"I had things under control. There was no need to come to my rescue. "
"Yeah, right, because you were obviously in town and keeping Team Rocket in check."
By now, J wasn't sure if the heat centering on her heart was actually a charade of mind, or an actual trick of powers executed by Sabrina. She had seen the psychic angered, but she had never so far been the target of that emotion, and it made her feel slightly uncomfortable. Especially since it seemed to be well within the range of Sabrina's abilities to roast her alive.
"As a matter of fact, I was trying to find a way to deal with the Dragonite when you came ambushing in. I would have been further along in my findings if it hadn't been for you, so yes, while I was not in town, I was certainly looking for ways to keep Team Rocket in check."
"Shouldn't be that hard, with your kind of power", J countered, still sour about being unarmed and momentarily forgetting about the danger she was getting herself in here.
For a moment, she might as well have been impaled on a spear, because that was how she felt like, and what Sabrina had likely intended with her glare.
"I am not omnipotent, and I do not resort to needless violence."
"You do know that the Team attacked the gym?"
"Yes, I do."
"And you do know that they likely took your dad as well- who I met, I might add, don't think I made the best first impression, just warning you…"
"Yes, I do know." She sounded irritated, but there was something else in her voice that J could not put her finger on.
"And hey, you know, it might be useful if I can actually get my gear back, my goggles, my gun, and my unsorted set of fifteen knives of different sizes and sharpnesses- that was a bargain buy, that thing…"
"I do know that you need your tools back, would you kindly stop patronizing!" Sabrina hissed suddenly with a sharp, sad undertone that J had failed to register so far. The hunter back away, gulping. She had not realized that the whole ordeal might worry the psychic after all. All things considered, it was her town, her colleagues and her family that was now in the grasp of Team Rocket.
J stopped. This hit home a lot closer than she had actually wanted it to.
"Sorry, I was just thinking…well, considering how easily you teleported onto my ship, and now inside of the headquarters, which might not even be where I remember it to be…" J shrugged helplessly. "I thought it should be just as easy for you to teleport back into it. Sorry for making that assumption."
Sabrina stopped. They were barely a few meters away from the cabin now, and J could hear tinkering and talking inside. She wondered if Bill was alone in there, or if he had more guests.
The psychic sighed. "I was able to teleport in because Team Rocket hadn't expected me to interfere yet. I have been fairly…neglectful of criminal activity in my city for the past years."
'And now this came back to bite you in the ass', J silently added, well aware of the bitterness of her statement, before she remembered that the psychic could read thoughts.
Again, Sabrina sighed. "Now that they know that I am interfering, their tactic will have changed. " She paused, looking up into the sky. "They have their ways of keeping me out, Jean. I am afraid that even if it was my immediate goal, I would not be able to teleport back into the headquarters again. They will have backed it up."
J thought back hard. "Dark Pokemon?" She concluded.
Sabrina answered with a nod.
"Before they were aware of my presence, they had miniscule defense at the headquarters. Enough to subdue my students and family, I'm afraid, but it was not enough to keep me out. But by now, they'll have brought in reinforcements, which will making entering the base much harder on second try."
J rolled her shoulders uncomfortably. Weeks ago, she would have insisted that she was out cold in that flimsy prison gown she wore, and she only moved her shoulders to get warm, but the realization that she was feeling something else was slowly creeping in. "I'm sorry."
Sabrina did not answer her. Instead, she went for the door, and nodded to J to follow her inside.
The psychic was in without so much as a knock on the door, and J followed her, not knowing what else to do, and hoping that Bill Hatch, the man who had been studying the Dragonite for the greater part of his life, could actually help them out.
End Part I