November 16th
The last two days started and ended with affirmations.
"The Rocket Empire is operating out of Mahogany," Lance said to himself, first thing after opening his eyes and last thing before falling asleep. He wouldn't be running himself ragged to make the cross-regional trip to the town if it weren't for them.
The third day dawned as he woke from last night's camping spot - a hollowed-out, rotted tree. "The Rocket Empire is operating out of Mahogany. Tyson Mitchell is in Mahogany."
His muscles croaked from strain as he stretched one leg, then the other, on a nearby stump, to get his blood flowing again.
"They're most likely keeping POWs nearby." He trekked a few hundred feet to a nearby creek, washing out his mouth and face. "And whatever it is they're doing, or planning, you're going to find a way to stop it."
The water in the creek stilled, giving Lance a rippled look at his reflection.
"And you're gonna find Clair, too."
He repeated his affirmations twice daily, as if he'd forget his mission if he didn't. Still, he repeated to himself daily the one he believed the most, day in and day out:
"Yellow is safe in Violet Town."
Dragonite emerged from his Poke Ball, yawning weakly. His expectant eyes turned to Lance.
"Go take a quick warm-up flight," Lance said, stifling his own yawn. "Back in five minutes? And then I'll feed you a quick breakfast?"
The pokemon nodded, bounding off in a windstorm of browned leaves that died as quickly as it blew to life.
Lance took the few minutes he had alone to gather his bearings. They spent very little time flying anywhere near semblances of civilization; so much as as a streetlight sent them flying in the opposite direction.
He located the rising sun, hiding behind decaying tree branches and the few remaining leaves of autumn. His right hand pointed towards the sun, his left perpendicular.
"So that's north," he muttered.
Above all, they kept flying north. Mahogany was more or less a straight shot north from Violet Town. As long as they kept flying that direction, they were bound to get somewhere. The nearby telephone wire, accompanied by a narrow dirt road, proved as much.
Dragonite flew back into sight, tumbling through the landing and nearly knocking Lance over.
"Easy, buddy!" he said weakly. "Can't say I don't appreciate the enthusiasm." Lance fished a pair of dried biscuits and the last of the dried beef from his bag. "Eat up, buddy. We've got our work cut out for us today."
The dragon took the food from Lance's outstretched arms, gulping it down in two bites before sticking his head into the creek, lapping up water in between quick breaths of air.
"You remember two years ago, when the Mahogany Public Library invited me out to speak at that event on stranger danger?" Lance asked Dragonite, adjusting the straps on his boots. "We're checking that place out today."
Dragonite paused in the middle of gulping water, giving his trainer a quizzical look.
Lance chuckled, withdrawing the yellowing plastic phone from his bag. "I took this from Wilton and Gertrude's for a reason. If we can try and connect it there to get in touch with the G-Men, then we can potentially call in reinforcements before we try to infiltrate Rocket's HQ."
The pokemon wiped his chin, dripping moisture back onto the earth. His wings flapped idly, though slowed from the soreness of flying for days.
His trainer noticed with a grin. "We'll stay on foot today. We've only got a mile or so to the library. Maybe a mile and a half if we only stick to the woods. Deal?"
Dragonite cheered, breaking into a small dance that nearly knocked Lance over into the dirt.
Their morning journey passed without incident. Small clumps of snow crunched under Lance's boots, discolored from browned leaves that still lay across their path. Except for the early chirpings of Pidgey hunting for their morning breakfast, the world sat still but for the two of them.
The trek was a slow one. Lance and Dragonite were well fed, if not perpetually famished from flying under cover, so they took no hesitation in taking their time through the morning as they climbed over the occasional fallen branch, or veered off of their veiled walking path to conceal their presence.
Over an hour passed before aged red brick stood out from the dull brown of the forest. Lance remembered it for the plume of smoke from its chimney, its warmth inviting those outside to a warm book and a plush chair.
Now, the building stood cold and decrepit and barren.
Ripples of broken glass crackled under his boots as he approached the library's back window. The blown out glass spread dozens of feet from the building, twinkling ominously under a sunrise that faded from orange to yellow.
With a bracing breath, Lance hoisted himself through the window, landing in a crouch that swirled up a cloud of dust. He inhaled deeply, adjusting himself back onto his feet - the place smelled of stale paper and a hint of burned metal.
"Dragonite, let's have you come inside, if you can," he said. In a flash of light, he returned his pokemon to its poke ball before calling him back out inside the library. "I'd rather have you scope out the place here with me than wait outside on your own."
He took a few steps into what appeared to be a periodical section. Bookshelves three times taller than Dragonite towered over, with torn and burned pages scattered at their feet under the diminishing glass. A fair number of books still sat on the shelf, their spines scarred with ash.
"You think a fire broke through here?" Lance asked. "It seems strange that all these books burned, but the place is still standing."
He knelt to inspect the ashy glass, rustling it between his fingers. Some of it curved awkwardly, like pieces of a vial or a pipe.
"Or that some of these books didn't really burn at all."
A distant thunk echoed from across the building. Lance stood in a flash, ducking behind a bookshelf.
"Dragonite, do a quick fly-around and make sure we're alone here."
"Gaaaa!" the pokemon flew into the air, whipping out of sight around a bookshelf's corner with a trail of black and white fluttering behind him.
His ears pulsed, straining to hear anything or anyone nearby. Another thunk broke after a minute, only to usher in more silence. The rushing blood in his ears grew to a crashing roar until he heard Dragonite's wings whoosh a handful of shelves down.
The pokemon landed, standing with a shake of his head.
"No one?" Lance asked. "Strange. Let's hope it was a book falling off of a shelf."
He tiptoed from shelf to shelf, peering across each one before walking its length. The periodicals turned into fiction, which turned into children's books, but each one only carried silence and darkness where the few functioning lights didn't glow.
"Hello?" He called, wincing at the sound of his own voice bouncing across each shelf. Still, no one returned the call.
With a sigh, he turned to Dragonite. "All right, I guess it's really just us, then. But keep your ears up, alright? This would be a bad time for an ambush."
"Drrrrr nite!"
They found their way towards a large lobby in the entrance. A bronze globe, resting on a pedestal with a circle of desks surrounding it, was blackened from smoke under bright pink streaks of paint. Its thin surface was torn in several spots, and Lance could see the library's front doors through the ripped patches of metal.
"Whoever was here...they didn't really care much for books, did they?"
Lance threw himself over the main desk, crawling under the surface to examine the electrical ports.
"Power outlet...wireless router...aha!" Lance cheered when his fingers ran across a small rectangular slot for landline phones.
He removed his bag from his shoulder, fishing the phone from Wilton's basement out. Lining the ports up together, he inserted the phone's plug in, feeling a soft click of finality.
"Please," he said to himself, sneaking a quick look above the desk for even more insurance that no one was watching, "Please let this work…"
He unshelled the phone, placed it to his ear, and let the dial tone carry the weight from his shoulders.
"We're in business, Dragonite!" he said. "I knew this would work!"
As Dragonite growled enthusiastically, Lance's fingers ghosted over the dialpad, trembling with uncertainty, before dialing the only number he could bring himself to dial.
"Thank you for calling Celadon Dep-"
Lance pushed the "1" key with entirely too much force.
"If you're inquiring-"
He punched the same key again.
"If you're-"
"One four four nine three. Vespiquen override indigo delta."
The dial tone returned. Lance's breath shuddered, and the cold air of the library rendered a mist with each exhale.
From the other end of the line, a low click. "...yes?"
"Algernon?"
The gruff voice on the other end of the line sighed. "Are you safe? Are you on a burner phone?"
"Public line," he said. "Took an old landline and hooked it up to a library's port. Algernon, are you…"
"Safe?" the elder G-Man answered for him. "Physically, yes. The G-Men aren't able to say the same."
"As in the rest of the Indigo sector, or the organization itself?"
"...yes. Lance, they've hit us from just about every angle possible. We've had to move away from base to a backup rendezvous point, and even then we were compromised after they got to Johto. Myself and a few other agents are the only ones left on call."
Lance held the phone against his chest for a moment, if only to catch his breath. "You mean there isn't an organized effort to try and take the League back?"
"We don't have an organized anything. It's impossible to assemble a counter-insurgence when you can't get in contact with your agents, right? Any G-Man I've been able to speak with is either on the run like you, or has been unreachable after the first few days of the invasion. That's maybe ten people total between the two regions. I've been sitting and praying that more are able to dial this line without being traced."
The champion sighed. "Well, maybe ten is all we need, right? I'm near their Johto operations in Mahogany Town, and if we can-"
"That's not possible," Algernon cut off. "We are so scattered, and so few, that arranging a secret brunch, much less a secret ambush on Team Rocket, is going to be impossible. I couldn't even begin to recommend that you even think about doing that solo."
They both fell silent.
"You're not planning on launching a solo ambush, are you?" Algernon said.
"I have to. It's the only shot we have."
More silence. Lance thought he heard a stifled groan. Above his hiding spot under the desk, Dragonite yawned as he kept his head peered out the broken windows.
"Lance, I am speaking to you now as your commander. You are not to take any action against the Empire that would-"
"Algernon!"
"-put yourself in danger, do you hear me? That is an order."
"We can't," Lance paused again to sigh in exasperation before continuing, "we can't keep them from expanding any more than they already have! We owe it to the regions that we serve to do something, don't we? Otherwise we're just letting the Empire win!"
"I am going to say this as plainly as I can, Lance, and I do not say this lightly," Algernon bluntly said. "This is not an issue of 'letting them win.' They have already won. Sure, there are a few agents here and there across the region, and the local police forces in each town are doing what they can to maintain safety, but that's about all they can do."
Lance fell short of words - even then, he couldn't possibly find anything to rise to what Algernon had laid down for him.
"You want my honest, sincere advice? Lance, you're strong enough to leave the region. Get the hell out of Johto without tipping off whatever security is keeping people in. The Empire's got the borders shut down tight, but maybe you can break out somehow on the Southern end, towards Hoenn. You'll have a much better chance of that than trying to take them out from the inside of their stronghold."
"Algernon, I-"
"What you're proposing is a suicide mission, and I will not approve it. If you can get to Hoenn, and let Steven know everything that's been going on, then all the better. We haven't been able to reach anybody outside of Tohjo."
A twinge in Lance's foot forced him to crawl from under the desk, seething with anger as he stood, bones creaking from stiffness. The phone clattered from his hand, and he struggled to pick it back up as he quickly glanced around, ensuring he was still alone.
"Are you there, still?" he heard Algernon say as he placed the receiver to his ear.
"Yeah, I'm here. I'm sorry, Algernon. I'm afraid I'll have to disobey your orders for once. I'm going to Mahogany."
He slammed the phone down as he heard Algernon's protests cut short, leaving the library dead in its silence once more.
With a breath, he realized, for the first time since the invasion, the direness of his task. One Champion and his partner pokemon against two regions' worth of Team Rocket to dismantle from the inside.
"Our work's cut out for us this time, bud," Lance said to Dragonite. He looked over to find his pokemon asleep in the bath of sunlight from one of the main windows by the entrance.
He sighed. Apart from the few hours of sleep they allowed themselves each night, they hardly had time to rest. Why deny them that now, in the comfort of what passed for shelter these days?
"Alright. Just for a few more hours," he told himself, ducking under the desk once more. He bunched up his cape roughly across his head to make a poor excuse for a pillow, body curled in to muster any warmth he could.
He ran through the multitude of scenarios of how he was going to try and get into what waited for him in Mahogany. Each time, he only got so far. Find a Grunt on the outskirts of town, ambush him for his uniform, sneak into the facility, try and find some trace of Tyson...and then what?
Lance, on his own, wasn't sure how taking down Tyson would solve anything. If he could bring the whole building down, that might get him somewhere, but that'd take more than just him and Dragonite. If he could convince Algernon to send just a few G-Men-
"After you directly disobeyed his orders?" Lance reminded himself. "Really great move there, Champion."
But if he could find someone in Mahogany to help him? Or detour to Blackthorn and find-
"Clair," his mind and heart stopped. "Oh Arceus, I forgot about-"
He scrambled to pick up the phone again, frantically dialing her number. The dial tone returned, pulsing in and out, not that Lance could hear over the pounding of blood in his ears.
The tone never ended. It kept on for minutes, long after Lance knew any chance of Clair picking up had passed.
"You're gonna find Clair," Lance affirmed. "If she picks up, you'll find her. If she doesn't pick up, you'll find her."
Still, he held the phone with a white-knuckled grip, even as the droning tone lulled him off into an unintended sleep...
A cacophony of low barking voices under the chiming of broken glass woke him up. He could hear the high-pitched whirr of Dragonite's hyper beam, and the crumbling of stone and brick that followed.
He stood from under the desk, finding himself face-to-face with six armed Rocket grunts, Dragonite struggling to stand behind them.
"Dragonite!" Lance cried. He began to rush towards them, but the clicking of each grunt's gun towards him stopped him in his tracks. Slipping on the dusted tile, he veered off behind a nearby bookshelf as colored shards of metal whizzed past his head.
His hands flew over his head for cover, squinting as one of the bullets clunked across the floor, landing at his feet. Squinting to inspect it, he found a sizzling orange liquid contained inside the...bullet? Syringe?
The shooting turned into footsteps - low, thundering footsteps, overlapping in multitudes. Lance scrambled to his feet, hiding behind an overturned door that'd been torn off its hinges. The grunts walked past each aisle, muttering to each other in their search - increasing in volume at first, before they moved towards the rear of the library.
"I gotta get to Dragonite," he whispered to himself, peering from behind the door. The grunts had all cleared, scattering throughout the library. He couldn't see a single one.
He breathed deeply, sucking all the oxygen he could into his lungs before closing off his throat. He crept out from under the door, peeking one more time from behind the shelf before darting for the crumbled entrance.
Dragonite lay under a pile of rent brick and wiring, struggling to stand. A thin line of blood ran from his mouth, which flickered dimly from a Hyper Beam he couldn't find the strength to materialize.
"Oh, buddy," Lance muttered, kneeling at his side. He inspected his pokemon, and found three of the orange syringes lodged in his belly.
"It's okay, bud," he said. "You're gonna be A-OK."
He patted himself down quickly, cursing when he couldn't find what he was looking for on his person. "I'm gonna get your poke ball from my bag, and get us out of here."
"Droooooo," the pokemon weakly agreed.
Lance stole a glance over his shoulder; the Rockets were still out of sight, poking through the rear of the library most likely. He darted back inside, his footsteps quick, yet scattered as he dodged the larger glass shards across the floor. He reached the desk, throwing himself over its wooden surface-
A piercing pain stung through his chest, and he faltered the landing, crashing into the ground. He stood on woozy feet, and he only half-realized that another orange syringe had emptied itself right near his heart before another found his shoulder.
"Direct hits, both of them!" a voice shouted from behind an overturned table. Lance glared across the library - what he could make out through blurring vision, anyways - and made out a grunt, huddled behind the table, rifle pointed straight for him.
He shook off whatever dizziness he could, grabbing for the bag, before his legs gave out from under him. His breath began to lapse, and steadying himself on his hands and knees bore just as much success.
Two of the grunts surrounded him as a third wrangled his arms behind his back. The champion raised his head sluggishly, slurring his words at the grey-vested man towering over him.
"T...tys…?"
Tyson smirked, kneeling down to look Lance in the eye. "Hey, champ. It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"I think this is it, sir!" called another grunt. He held the landline phone Lance had used in one hand, his tattered bag in the other.
Another smirk from Tyson. "Lance here didn't think we could find him somehow with that. Especially after dialing a publicly listed regional number for minutes straight. Right, champ?"
Lance was physically incapable of words. Even though feeling in his limbs had dissolved, he could feel blood and drool pooling in his mouth. The sensation of prickling numbness from the drug competed with the dead weight of defeat settling in his stomach.
Tyson stood, motioning for the grunts to carry Lance away. "Well, at least we don't have to take ya far."
He flew into blackness as a fresh score of men approached Dragonite.
A/N: Special thanks to PhoenixLyric, as always, for beta reading this chapter!