The shelling had started again, which was really annoying James as he couldn't hear Grange Hill over the noise. Plus the walls were starting to collapse on the bunker, which was a wee bit of a pisser.

Jessie ran in backwards, firing machine guns as she went and screaming a war cry.

"There! That should keep the enemy back a while longer! I caught them infiltrating us!"

"Jess, you just came out of our canteen, where all our soldiers were."


"Ah." She frowned. "Who is the enemy anyway?"

James shrugged.

"This is a dream sequence, isn't it. The writer couldn't think of a good opening, so he just dumped us in the middle of something, wrote himself into a corner and is now turning it into a dream sequence." Jessie pointed her gun vaguely in the direction of the heavens and fired. "You bumbag! You better start the plot proper or I'm coming up there and ripping off-"

James woke up with a start, thus saving the writer from unnecessary surgery.

Something didn't seem quite right to the young Rocket. For a start, this didn't appear to be his bed or his room, and someone appeared to have left biscuit crumbs on the sheets. Confused, he turned over and saw a large pair of breasts in the bed next to him, which turned out to be attached to a sleeping drunken Professor Ivy.

…OK, there's a logical explanation for this. There's a logical explanation for everything, with the possible exception of the Pokemon Chronicles theme song.

He quietly looked under the covers and was relieved to find himself still fully clothed. Admittedly it was in an Officer Jenny's clothes, which raised more questions than it answered, but at least it proved he'd been fully dressed when he'd gotten into bed and thus something extremely sordid & bizarre hadn't happened with Ivy and he didn't have to set fire to his groin out of shame & betrayal.

He turned over to the other side of the bed and saw Emerald sleeping next to him, which was quite surprising because he was a Japanese manga character who wasn't even supposed to exist in the show.

James got out of bed, gingerly stepped around the minefield of discarded beer cans and the occasional rogue sandwich, and tried to remember why he was at Professor Ivy's lab and not Hoenn. He checked himself to see if he had any clues, but found only the home-made tattoo on his chest saying "John G owes me five quid".

Meowth was playing Monopoly with Ash and several other Pokemon when James walked in. Ash was currently reading a Community Chest card.

"You've won second prize in a beauty contest. Have Pikachu viciously Thundershock Meowth."

"Hey!" Meowth turned to James. "Jimmy, da twerp's cheatin'!"

James checked. "Sorry Meowth, but that's exactly what the card says. It says it in Biro over the top of the text and in Ash's handwriting, but that's still what it says." He paused. "Ash, what are you doing here?"

"There was a distracting Macguffin I needed to pick up for a Character of the Week here, which just happened to occur at the same time as your evil scheme."

"Again? This is getting ridiculous. By the by, why are you half naked?"

"One of my buttons fell off, so I decided this means my clothes were members of Team Rocket and I set fire to them." Ash shook his head. "That's the last time I'm coming to one of Ivy's parties…"

But James had staggered on, trying to find some clue of why he was here. He found no answers from Jessie, fast asleep but still managing to play GTA3 on Ivy's computer despite that. (Jessie had managed to get the lowest score in the history of the Earth and her character had been blasted off by a Pikachu, even though that had never been programmed into the game) Eventually, he reasoned that they must've come to steal something to do with Ivy's research, so he quickly opened the door to Ivy's lab and looked in.

A hundred clones of Brock looked back at him from a hundred test tubes, all speaking as one.

"We are the legion of the Beast."

James grunted and shut the door again. "I'd often wondered what happened to Brock here."

Meowth wandered over, slightly burnt. "Well, da twerp landed on one of my hotels, declared dere was a Team Rocket plot involved and had me Thundershocked. Guess dat means I'm out of da game."

"Meowth, why did we come to Ivy's place and why did we get so drunk I can't remember?"

"We came coz of da rumours of a hideous, blobby new Pokemon on Orange Island, but it turned out just ta be Tracey sunbathing on his vacation. Da drinkin'… I remember her sayin' something about needin' to get us sloshed so she could steal tissue samples from us without as noticing."

"I was wondering where my Kleenex's had gone to. So, how do we get back to Hoenn?"

"Ah, don't worry. I figure da twerp is going to blast us off all da way dere any minute now."

There came a cry of "Team Rocket are breathing oxygen! PIKACHU, THUNDERBOLT!" and everything turned painful.

-

From out of the Hoenn woods it came, a small black truck heading towards a large crater. The driver got out, looked at the hideous bloody mess that had once been Team Rocket, and dumped a load of fertiliser on it.

A few minutes later, Team Rocket grew out of the ground, fully regenerated.

"Thanks again, Dave!" said Jessie. "If not for your glorious Grow-Anyfin fertiliser, we would've crashed and burned long ago like Hearsay! Here's the usual payment." Jessie said the last bit while forging Cassidy's signature onto a cheque.

"Well, that's the messy business of being renewed after a blast-off out of the way – so, do we continue on our journey to the next city?" asked James.

"No, the animators haven't gotten around the drawing that setting yet. We best stick to the woods, they can just re-use the same old backgrounds."

"Da twerps still ain't got here yet, we got time ta grab some Pokemon for da boss before they do."

"Oooo, goody! Can the plan involve cross-dressing?"

"Not every plan needs to involve you cross-dressing," said Jessie.

James pouted. "Can I do it anyway?"

"Sure, knock yourself out."

-

"I was hoping there'd be a better plan than this," said James.

"There's nothing wrong with a simple spot of fishing," said Jessie. "It's relaxing, dignified and it's well-known to result in Pokemon being caught."

"Yes, but why do I have to be the bait?"

"You're crossdressing, we're in a rural area, conservative country folk live in rural areas and lynch crossdressers – we just wait until all the local redneck Water Pokemon show up to eviscerate you where you float, and then Meowth dumps depth charges on them! We get a whole new load of Pokemon, and also lunch!"

"The hook is digging into an unmentionable place."

Eventually Team Rocket had to give up the plan, realising it had many flaws. The really big flaw was that they were fishing in a really stagnant pond that no Pokemon could possibly live in.

-

It was becoming clear that they weren't going to be catching anything today. They'd seriously made an attempt at catching a few Pidgeys, but the tiny birds had completely thrashed Serviper and after that Team Rocket were just too embarrassed to continue.

"Where did it all go wrong?" moaned Meowth.

"When the Johto series had millions of filler episodes and really slow forward progress, boring the fans into submission and making many desert in droves, thus not being around to watch when stuff actually did start happening," said James.

"I meant with our lives. Remember in our early days? We were da best and brightest team around! Right up until we first met da twoips-"

"That was an absolutely atrocious attempt at phonetic spelling of the word 'twerps', Meowth."

"-dere was nothin' dat stood in our way," said Meowth, ignoring the criticism of his spelling.

"Yeah, I remember," said Jessie, a wistful look on our face. "That diamond heist we were involved in, that was great…"

"Ms Red, what are you doing!"


"Just torturing Officer Jenny for information by slicing her ear off with a razor while Stuck In The Middle Of You plays, sir!"

"But she's a corrupt cop on our side! I specifically told you that!"

"Well, it was just in case."

"That never happened," said James, looking up at the last five sentences with disdain. "You don't even have a razor. You just borrow mine without asking and then never clean it afterwards."

"OK, so it was all an elaborate fiction, but either way we used to be great! We managed to survive all those hard months of training…"

Drill-Sergeant Viper smacked Jessie in the face with a Magikarp. "You will never be able to steal Pokemon!"

"YES I WILL!" she yelled backed.

Smack. "You will never be able to steal Pokemon!"

"YES I WILL!"

Smack. "You will never be able to steal Pokemon!"

"YES I WILL!"

"That really built character," said Jessie, smiling happily at Memory Lane.

"You only say that because you got hit by Magikarp for an hour; I got Sandshrew," said James, who could see the discarded heroin syringes all over the lane.

"Wh-How did I get here!" said Drill-Sergeant Viper, panicking. "This isn't the Pewter base! What happened to your Red Team uniforms!"

Jessie looked up, frowning. "It's really bad etiquette to wander out of flashbacks, you know. Go back to your own time-zone before you cause a paradox."

"Well, we can be great Rockets again!" roared James, climbing to his feet and looking like a defiant god (one of the handsome ones, not the Aztec ones with the snake heads). "I say we got out right now and find a Pokemon to pilfer!"

"AYE-AYE!" chorused the Rockets, rushing off into the forest and leaving Viper to fade out of the narrative.

"Being in this show is rubbish," said Viper as he began to vanish. "Everyone I know thinks it must be amazing to be on Pokemon, but you should see how little we get paid – and once you're a Pokemon character, you're unfit for anything else. You don't think Brock came back in the Hoenn eps out of choice, did you?"

-

"Explain to me again why the Boss would want that?" asked Jessie, pointing at a snoozing Snorlax in a clearing.

"It's simple!" said Meowth, going into another psychotic episode. "One day, da boss decides he wants ta take it easy and laze around – but how can he do that without beanbag chairs to sit on? Ya can't be lazy on formal wooden chairs. Dat's when he sees a Snorlax and realises he can use its blubbery belly as a substitute! Even better, he won't need ta get up to put da remains of his snacks in the bin, he'll just feed 'em to Snorlax! And then he'll say – for giving me this useful Snorlax, Meowth and his friends deserve big promotions and free holidays ta Scumthorpe!"

"I want to go to Amsterdam," said James.

"Team Rocket's on a tight budget dese days, Jimmy."

"Alright, here's what we'll do!" declared Jessie. "First, we'll construct a pit-trap and place some food on it to lure Snorlax in; after that, we take in on direct in a robot Cacnea and shoot it with liquid-nitrogen missiles, incapacitating in; then we resurrect it from the dead and-"

"We could just throw a Pokeball at it while it sleeps, Jess."

"Where's the artistry in that?"

Nevertheless, they'd gone on for six pages now; it was time to wrap things up. Team Rocket caught the Snorlax and transported it over the Viridian, and celebrated a job well done with a game of Neorealist Charades.

-

"Giovanni, sir, we just received a Pokemon from Hoenn."

He sighed. "Not another damn Snorlax to use as a beanbag chair."

"Should I dispose of it?"

"No, just put it in the pile with all the others."

-

" They're all asleep and nobody's watching, " said Serviper, having eased out of its Pokeball by the power of plot contrivance. " We should have a few hours before they wake up. "

" All right, " said Cacnea, putting his blue wig and James' shirt on, " but next time I get to roleplay as Jessie. "

" Pervert. "

-

He was back in a dream sequence. He was starting to get bored with them, except when they involved the guys from CSI in tutus. That had been a fun sequence.

"James."

In front of him, he could see the ghostly form of Lugia himself.

"A time of great darkness is coming. The Legions of the Egg are assembling as we speak. One must lead us."

In that brief moment, James realised that this something significant, something prophetic, and that he had to work out what they meant as the fate of the world rested on it.

"Oh, who cares," he said, and went back to the dream sequence with dancing Squirtles.

THE END

"We are the legion of the Beast."

"Damn it Brocks, you're getting your lyrics wrong again!" snarled Ivy, dressed in a random cobbling together of bits of plastic. "We're never going to get our version of Starlight Express finished at this rate! Team Rocket Clone, back me up here."

"Kill meeeeeeeeee…" moaned the hideous mishmash of all three Rockets, formed out of snotty tissues.

She sighed. She bet Oak never had this problem.

-

"Containment has been breached!" screamed Oak, diving for the floor, his lab coat torn and his face bloodied, his shotgun Ol' Shooty half empty. "Evacuate the whole lab – Ritchie has escaped again and he's trying to insert himself in a story! You! Writer! End this now before you damn yourself by giving Ritchie some screen-time at the expense of the more deserving characters!"

THE ENDIER-END