01 Nasty! Nasty!
Delilah lay in bed, trying to remember a dream. Her dress had been ripping on a deserted island, but she had ignored it and gone off looking for Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom...and then what...already it was becoming blurry at the edges...
She was about to fall back asleep on the rock-hard pokémon center bed when a gigantic crash and a sudden brightness startled her so much she gasped out loud.
"Oops!" giggled her roommate Gabrielle Varnham, who had opened the curtains and knocked their Pokégears off the table where they had been charging. "Sorry!"
"That's okay," Delilah mumbled, unsure if her words could be distinguished considering her current mental condition.
"Check out time is eleven o'clock, by the way," said Gabrielle. "Maybe it's time to move on, anyway! It's almost nine."
Delilah groaned and rubbed her face. She had planned to leave Azalea today, and head for Goldenrod, now that she had won a Hive Badge. At this moment, however, it sounded quite appealing to stay in bed—so what if she missed check out time, and ended up staying in Azalea another day...?
But then, she realized, there was plenty of reason not to stay in Azalea. After all, why was she so tired? Yes, she had had a soda last night in the Azalea Gym gift shop with the hyperactive ten-year-old prodigy gym leader, and, yes, she and Gabrielle had watched a History Channel special until three in the morning after spending too long at the grocery store, which was all quite good fun, so how could this pokémon journey dealie be any better...?
Well, maybe it could be better if anyone in the building ever stopped talking through the walls which were about as thick as a bookmark, or if the woman outside would stop screaming bloody murder which was clearly and audibly happening around her, or if the refrigerator didn't have to BOINK loudly and then buzz for several minutes at regular intervals, or if the bed had a mattress instead of what seemed to be stacked panels of drywall that creaked with every blink, BUT WHO'S COMPLAINING!
Really, though, she thought as she brushed her teeth, it wasn't so bad. After all, she had a cute little beanbag shaped like a politoed with beads for eyes from the Azalea Gym gift shop.
Oh yeah, and a Hive Badge.
"It was really a great battle, you and Bugsy," said Gabrielle in the cafeteria, eating banana pancakes that radiated waves of banana for miles around and made Delilah's breakfast taste like bananas.
"Oh," said Delilah. "Thanks." Since she didn't think it was very interesting, she attempted to alter the course of conversation: "Did you see those two babies when we went into the gym...?"
"No, I don't think I did..."
"They were both totally bald, with ears practically as big as their heads, and their faces...!"
She tried to imitate their faces, making Gabrielle laugh.
"Naturally," Delilah concluded, "they burst into tears at the sight of each other."
Gabrielle laughed again. "I'll never understand people taking their children to pokémon gyms with them," she said, shaking her head. "It's as bad as taking them to the movies..."
The truth was that Delilah didn't think pokémon battling was a very interesting conversation topic, indeed she found it quite boring if she wasn't battling herself. Gabrielle was collecting badges, too. They had been sharing their room in the pokémon center for a couple of weeks while their time training at the Azalea Gym overlapped.
Gabrielle told Delilah about a deep and interesting dream she had had about a wailord and then they said goodbye. En route to the trolley station Delilah passed the shop of Kurt Ferguson, the semi-famous poké ball craftsman. In order to turn out optimal revenue, the shop was of course placed in close proximity to the pokémon center and the Azalea Gym. Delilah had only caught one pokémon on her own, a sentret she named Snoops, and it was a rather irritating experience that she didn't really think she would ever want to repeat, but she decided to have a look in the shop anyway, because there was such a fuss about it and maybe Kurt Ferguson's poké balls were wonderful enough to make her change her mind.
So she stepped into the shop, after moving her politoed beanbag, letting it stick its head out of her purse a little so it could have some air. Kurt Ferguson's poké balls were very pretty, but also quite expensive, considering Delilah thought she would probably never actually use them. Unfortunately, besides Kurt Ferguson behind the counter and the little girl on the floor with a Barbie doll, Delilah was the only person in the store. It would be extremely awkward for her to leave without making a purchase.
She was preparing herself for a showdown between frugality and social discomfort when Kurt Ferguson asked her who she was. She told him her name and he said, "You want to buy some balls? Sorry, but that'll have to wait; we're closing a bit early today."
"Oh, okay," said Delilah.
"Do you know Team Rocket?" he asked, and then waved his hand dismissively. "Ah, don't worry. I'll tell you anyhow. Team Rocket's an evil gang that uses pokémon for their dirty work. They're supposed to have disbanded three years ago," he harrumphed as he changed the sign from "open" to "closed". "Anyway, they're at the well, cutting off slowpokes' tails for sale!"
He left quite abruptly, muttering to himself.
This explained a number of things. In addition to women with ugly babies in strollers, the Azalea Gym had been patronized over the weeks by an increasing number of strangely attractive European men with wandering gazes; Delilah and Gabrielle Varnham had continued to see this type of man around town, at the pokémon center or in shops, occasionally in a uniform with a high neck and shoulder pads and the letter R on the front. Because Team Rocket was supposed to have been broken up, they had assumed it was some kind of publicity stunt or something.
Once the two of them had gone together to the Slowpoke Well, a research reserve home to lots of endangered plants and wildlife, including its introduced population of slowpokes, and there had been a small altercation involving one of these men.
"Nothing is going on," he'd told them when Gabrielle asked. "It's unsafe to go in there, so I'm standing guard to make sure people don't wander in. Am I not a good Samaritan?"
He had been giving them a weird look, so they had left after that.
Team Rocket was a criminal organization, but beyond that Delilah didn't know much about it. What she knew even less about, however, was how to deal with being left with a stranger's young child. She wasn't sure if Kurt Ferguson was being horribly presumptuous leaving her there with his granddaughter Maisy or if he was maybe forgetful in old age—but if that were the case, why would he be left to watch her in the first place?
The sun was beginning its descent before Delilah was ready to assume any real responsibility.
She sighed as she closed the Velcro on a Barbie dress. Maisy was making her two favorite Barbies, Jacklyn and Christina, converse in poetry. But Maisy was eight, so her poetry was not very good.
"Jacklyn, your hair is awful. Um...it looks like a waffle," said Christina.
"I know," Jacklyn replied, bobbing up and down dramatically. "I get so mad when she makes my hair bad. I got so mad at her today that I fired her! Um...I don't know why I ever hired her."
"Hey, Maisy," said Delilah. "Um...do you know where your granddad is?"
"Yes, he's at Slowpoke Well," she said. "Team Rocket gets...gets...at the well."
So apparently this was a thing for Kurt. It had been a while and Delilah was getting uncomfortable. She wasn't sure what to do; should she go to the police? But Maisy was acting like this was pretty normal...should she just leave?
Maisy abandoned her dolls to pet Toast, Delilah's quilava, who had been lying on the ground with her head in Delilah's lap.
"So, um, does he do this kind of thing, like, a lot?"
Maisy shrugged uninterestedly and then laughed shrilly when Toast grabbed her hand with her front paws.
Delilah exhaled in boredom and frustration. Maybe she should just leave.
"Do you like cupcakes?" Maisy asked suddenly, and then added, "For goodness sakes?"
"Sure," said Delilah.
"Let's go across the street to get cupcakes," said Maisy. "But not Corn Flakes."
Across the street was a bakery. Maisy continued making primitive rhymes and Delilah, bitter at having spent four dollars for a cupcake that she only licked the frosting off of, wondered why her eight-year-old attention span hadn't already lost the fight with this form of "entertainment".
Delilah frequently found it helpful to look at her life as if it were an episode of an offbeat, irreverent sitcom, ostensibly allowing her to foresee the possibilities of impractical and uncomfortable situations. This did not, however, abate her frustrations when Maisy revealed to her that her mother was at home, in the back of the shop. Of course, that would just be typical. Whenever Delilah decided to be responsible, it was always the wrong decision. Delilah's decisions were always wrong it seemed.
"Well, she's going to think I abducted you," said Delilah. "Let's go back."
"Wait, there's a stitch in my side," said Maisy, stopping on the sidewalk. "I have not lied."
Delilah stopped and Maisy bent down to stretch. It wasn't that Delilah didn't like children, which she didn't, but she wasn't sure why they were so popular. She thought they were just sort of loud and needy and overrated.
"Bad things could happen to a person on a dark, deserted street like this." A long shadow stepped into the light of a streetlamp. "And at this time of night, there'd be no one around to see it."
"You know, bad things also happen to people who sneak up on people in the dark. What are you doing?"
"Lurking. What are you doing?"
"Just trying to make it to tomorrow without being assaulted on the street..."
Adam ignored her and watched Maisy rub her side under her ribcage. "What's that?" he asked. "Your sister?"
"She's my illegitimate child," said Delilah.
He made no reaction.
Being outside of her hometown, Cianwood, was occasionally a little shocking. There were so many kinds of people Delilah had never encountered before, like people who used the word "irregardless" unironically, or "poor people". (Cianwood wasn't the snobbiest community in Johto, but there was something to be said about a town where any homeless found by the police were escorted across the bridge to downtown Goldenrod.)
Judging by his tight vocabulary and his tighter Jean Paul Gaultier jeans, Adam didn't seem to be either of these, but nevertheless he was rather puzzling to Delilah. She had always allowed herself to think she was sort of funny, and her friends told her she was funny, but Adam called that to question with his total unwillingness to laugh at her jokes. She thought at first that it was perhaps because he was British and so something was lost in "translation", but then she found out he was just a jerk. He wasn't quite so bad at the very first, but as soon as she beat him at pokémon he had shown his true colors (black, mostly).
Maisy squealed deafeningly as Toast attacked her ankles.
"Be careful," warned Delilah, who didn't want to be sued. "Don't get her too excited." She liked to think that she trained her pokémon well enough that they could generally be trusted around other people, but nothing was ever certain, especially with kids.
"She won't burn me," Maisy insisted. "She won't turn me...on fire."
"I hope you're right," Delilah said half-truthfully.
"What are you doing?" Adam asked her. There was a note of slightly cynical boredom in Adam's voice, something a bit jaded, blasé.
"Nothing, really," she said, hoping she wouldn't have to reveal the amazingly incompetent details of the stupid day she had been having. "I'm taking Maisy back to her mother, at Kurt Ferguson's ball shop."
"Kurt Ferguson?" he said, looking at the shop across the street. "Maybe I'll come with you."
"Well, if you must, but Kurt's not there."
"What, is he the only one that works there?"
"Oh. Maybe not..."
It was closed, but Adam looked at poké balls anyway while Delilah found Maisy's mother, who of course didn't even know that she had been missing, and wove her tale of woe and ineptitude, to the mother's more-or-less ambivalence: "You didn't have to hang around, sweetie," she said. "I was here the whole time."
"Yeah...but I didn't know that," said Delilah, unsure how this point had been missed by her. "Nobody told me that. I thought she was by herself..."
After a while she gave up and left. Outside of the shop she bent down and scratched behind Toast's ears. She then went to pat her toy politoed to reassure it that it would be okay, but it wasn't okay. It was gone. She glanced in front of her and behind her and in various other different directions, but, considering all of the places where it could have gone missing, odds were quite slim that it would be there in her current vicinity, and it wasn't. She was a little bit disgruntled since she had not even had it for a full day, not even taking into account the fact that any purchase from a gym gift shop was almost certainly terrifically overpriced.
"So will you be going to Slowpoke Well?" Adam asked her.
"Why?"
"Because of Kurt Ferguson, and Team Rocket."
She shrugged. "It's none of my business..."
He looked at her weirdly. "You're not even interested?"
She scoffed with derisive confusion, or something. "I'm sure it's 'interesting'," she said, "but why would I go to Slowpoke Well with Kurt Ferguson and Team Rocket? What would I be doing there? If anything, I would call the police, but it's not like I have any good reason to anyway."
Adam was extremely intimidating. He was tall and good-looking and he had a leather jacket with three spikes on each epaulet. He kept looking at her, and it made her nervous. "Would you go, if I told you what to do?"
"What?"
"If I told you what to do," he repeated.
Theoretically she knew what these words meant but she had no idea what he was asking her. She stared at him, waiting for him to elaborate, and he stared at her, waiting for her to reply.
Apparently he had less patience than she did because after a while he turned and said, "Come on."
Adam seemed to know something that she didn't, so she went with him out of curiosity, recalling Toast to her poké ball.
As they got into his car he asked her, "Are you here for Azalea's badge?"
"Yeah, I got it yesterday."
"Are you collecting badges, so you can enter the championship tournament?"
She shrugged. "I don't know, maybe," she said. She didn't really want to very much and didn't think she probably would.
"So, what, then, are you trying to find yourself?"
She smirked. "I would hope I could look for something a bit more worthwhile," she said.
"Hm," he said, frowning, because laughing was beneath him.
So she didn't bother again for a while. Adam, who carried himself like a Trina music video, was startlingly handsome, with very striking pigmentation; he might have had a sort of Leyendecker dreamboat quality if not for his monolithic attitude problem. She asked him if he was part of a slowpoke rights activism group or something like that.
"No," he said. "I just hate Team Rocket."
"Oh, good! I feel better, knowing you're not doing this out of the kindness of your heart."
"Humph," he said.
"What do I have to do with this, anyway? I assume you're not keeping me around for my pleasant company."
"I could use you," he said. "You and your pokémon."
"'Use' me? For what?"
"What the fuck!" he said suddenly, honking the horn at a couple of boys on bicycles. The car swerved exaggeratedly and Delilah grabbed the handle growing out of the ceiling. "Why are you riding bikes at night!" Adam asked rhetorically.
Adam wasn't a bad driver, exactly; in fact, Delilah had to assume he was very, very good at it because otherwise they would surely have been killed already. When they got to Slowpoke Well it was quite dark and she asked him what exactly they were even doing because she still wasn't really sure.
"We're just going to mess it up a little," he said.
"What do you mean?" she said. "Why not just call the police, and let them do it? And anyway, what is Team Rocket even doing? I thought they were broken up? I mean, what are we messing up, exactly? What are they doing?"
"Look, Delilah." He turned his penetrating gaze on her; there was a hypnotic intensity in it, and she looked away. "You don't have to do this. But you came, didn't you?"
There were men collecting slowpokes in poké balls, which Adam said he would empty and replace. He pointed out one of the strangely attractive men, who was wearing a different style of uniform, and told her to engage him in a pokémon battle because "it would be embarrassing" when he lost. She thought this was rather petty, but maybe there was something she was missing that he hadn't explained to her; maybe there was a good reason for it. However she still felt very awkward about it.
Luckily she didn't have to approach him, because he saw her and did so first. "What do we have here?" he said, his hands on his hips.
"Um?" she said.
He looked at her, apparently awaiting an explanation.
"Just...exploring Slowpoke Well," she said, and gestured to the vague gang activity around her. In spite of Adam's rather conspicuous appearance nobody seemed to be fazed by it, so she wasn't sure why she was singled out. "What's going on?"
His face darkened slightly and he leaned closer to her. "I am often labeled," he said, "as the scariest and cruelest guy in Team Rocket..."
"Okay," she said.
"I strongly urge you not to interfere with our business," he said.
"Okay," she said. Maybe she would have been scared if the entire experience was not so surreal.
He released a zubat. Apparently this was a threat; perhaps he would order it to attack her. So she released Toast, and they battled.
It struck her suddenly as rather presumptuous of Adam to assume that she would win a match, because what would happen if she lost? Would he have his pokémon attack her or something, or threaten to do so, to chase her off?
She won anyway.
And it did embarrass him.
"I didn't see it coming," he said through gritted teeth.
"Um...if you don't mind my asking," she said, and pointed to the red R on his chest.
"Humph," he said, looking at it. "Team Rocket was indeed broken up three years ago. But we continued our activities underground."
"Oh."
Suddenly he grabbed her arm and began to drag her away. Naturally she was curious to know where she was being taken, but didn't ask, because she figured she would find out eventually.
It was an exit.
"A small obstacle like you won't be much of a problem for our mission," he said, pushing her out. "I advise you to be very afraid of what is to come." He stared intensely at her, daring her to defy him perhaps, but she didn't, and he turned and went back down the stairs.
"Whatever," she said, and turned around.
She wasn't sure where she was; he had not taken her to the main entrance/exit. There was a street, but she didn't know what street it was. She started to skirt the edges of the reserve when Adam found her again, and led her back to his car in the parking lot.
"Or maybe," he said, in the middle of abusing Team Rocket, "they try to tell you it's a 'social club'—yes, of course! Wide-shouldered black uniforms, with the 'club' insignia on the front. Yes, a club, a society, just like the Crips. Of course, it's suspicious, and the police tries to keep an eye on them, but it's all about this phony image, you know, pretending to be anything other than organised crime. Public relations, you know."
"Gee, no, mine are all private."
He frowned in acknowledgement of her joke. At least he understood her jokes, even if he didn't appreciate them.
"Where are we going?" she asked, realizing they were on the interstate.
"I have to lose this car," he said.
"Did you steal it?"
"No."
"Is it yours?"
"No."
"Okay, whatever."
She was sure there was a good reason for this, but she doubted he would tell her so she stopped asking. He went off the road at some point and when they stopped they were in what seemed to be a forest, which was strange, because Johto was mostly chaparral.
He turned off the engine and got out of the car, so she did too. He started looking around them for something.
She leaned into the car for her purse. Naturally this cued the ocean breeze which blew in and lifted her skirts up. It seemed like such a clichéd, contrived situation that she was skeptical of its actuality.
"...Did that really just happen."
She was hoping Adam would say "huh?" or "what?" or something along those lines. "Nobody saw anything," he assured her instead.
She was sort of embarrassed. She wasn't sure if this was because she could have just as easily worn pants or because she could have just as easily worn prettier underwear, but she thought it was probably the latter.
He stopped his searching and looked at her. "You beat him, didn't you?"
"Yeah," she said. "That's what you wanted, isn't it?"
In that moment, she wasn't sure if that really was what he had wanted.
"I mean, I did win," she said, "but don't you think it's kind of, like, I don't know, foolhardy, to assume that I would."
"You beat me before," he said, taking a poké ball off his belt and expanding it. "Let's see how good you are."
She thought this was a bit unfair. Their last match had been one-on-one, and he had had a type advantage, which was not strictly fair either. This time, it was three-on-three, which was more balanced, but she had just come from a match, so her pokémon were not at their full energy.
She won anyway.
She could tell he was pretty mad, but he seemed to be trying not to show it.
"You only won because my pokémon were weak," he said.
She shrugged, choosing not to remind him that she was the one whose pokémon had just come from battle.
"That goes for Team Rocket, too," he said. "They think they are big and tough as long as they are in a group. But get them alone, and they're weak."
"So, what?" she said. "You think Team Rocket's cowardly?"
"Oh, a gang isn't a coward," he said. "A gang is a strong, courageous unit, composed of cowards, too scared to do it alone."
She shrugged in impartial acknowledgement of this philosophy.
"I have no tolerance for weakness," he said, running his hand through his hair. Adam had Princess Ariel hair, long and lush and very red.
"And I suppose there's no weakness in male dandyism?"
He looked at her. His face was obscured by shadows, so she couldn't gauge his reaction; she figured it was probably his usual mixture of aloof hostility and sophisticated contempt, so she made a face of mingled amusement and apathy and hoped it was appropriate.
Suddenly he turned and continued into the dark. Delilah followed, still with no idea where they were.
She saw something move.
"Oh—my—GOD!"
Adam whipped around. "What?"
"A bug!"
"We're in a forest, Delilah! There will be bugs!"
"Oh, no...oh my God...I think that was an ariados...oh my Goddddd...I think it was...you don't think we'll have to sleep here, do you?"
"I won't," he said, looking around at the trees. Then, with a triumphant ah!, he waded past some bushes and re-emerged with a beautiful black street bike.
"Oh, wow!" she said as he put a leg over it. "Where did that come from?"
He pulled on a pair of bright yellow gloves as the motorcycle idled. "I got drunk and forgot it here."
"Oh. Well..." He put on his helmet. "Could...I have a ride?"
"No, I don't think so," he said.