Chapter 42: Taking Care of Business Pt. 2

(A/N: Well the gap between chapters was shorter this time… I guess… still a really long gap which is my bad. Working full time has been pretty busy for me and I just haven't felt the inspiration to write the story until now. I'm hoping that the release of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in July gives me more storytelling inspiration. The anime season is about to end and there were a lot of shows that were surprisingly good like Birdie Wing, Ya boi Kongming, and Darwin's game among the ones I expected to be good. Maybe the new season of anime will also help out with some inspiration but until then I'll do what I can about getting inspired. The other life event I had recently was I got a cat! She's a Bengal mix and I named her Poyo, she's laying by my keyboard as I type this chapter up.)

General

People spend a lot of their lives with a façade on. This isn't a fresh revelation or a particularly original thought, but in the case of Platina, this was something she was especially used to using.

Public events for the family, random reporters asking her questions when she was out and about, even when she was exploring Sinnoh as a trainer and coordinator, the Berlitz name came up more often than she'd have liked.

Today as she approached the Team Neo Headquarters, she had the unfamiliar feeling creep upon her. For once, she wanted the current façade she was wearing to never end. Through some twist of fate, she was going to a public event with Red in an officially sanctioned manner as a couple.

Ignoring the elephant in the room of their relationship all being a charade to help the mission go uninterrupted, Platina really wish she could enjoy this situation longer.

Unfortunately for her, the walk towards the HQ didn't last forever, and they eventually reached the entrance.

Near the entrance, there were fancy cars parked on the steps to the place. Red could see a steady stream of well-dressed looking socialites being escorted out of their cars by chauffeurs.

Suddenly, he realized that he wasn't particularly dressed for the occasion. To him, Platina looked good in anything and her current outfit with a black blouse, pink miniskirt, and scarf looked relatively more fitting than his usual clothes.

"Should we go back and rent some clothing? It looks like we're quite underdressed here."

Platina looked at Red and then it dawned on her that she hadn't ever explained this nuance to him.

"Ah, I forgot! If we had to dress up to go to the event then my parents would have prepared things for us way ahead of time."

Red thought this explanation was reasonable but he still wasn't sure why the Berlitz parents were okay with Red and Platina going to this event and representing the Berlitz's in their usual trainer outfits.

"The trick is, when your social standing is on the level of the Berlitz family, you can wear whatever you want to events like this and everyone will accept it. Meanwhile the rising families, or future stars who get invited to events like this do need to dress up as much as possible because they need to show their respect for the organizers and the more established people there. It's actually an easy way to understand the different tiers of famous people at an event."

Platina said this like she had known this information her whole life. Meanwhile for Red, who had only dressed up for Kanto League Champion events was barely sure how to dress up to the level of the event. Now he was learning that dressing down was a showing of actually being important.

Noticing that Red was looking a little down about being unknowledgeable about high society Platina gave him a little bit of reassurance.

"This tradition was something that was popularized by Bill from Kanto. When he came up with modern Pokemon storage system, his prestige around the world was so high that he was being invited to all kinds of events. He would only attend those events in a regular dress shirt and tie with dress pants that he wore all the time in his lab. Eventually as modern Poketech became more and more ubiquitous in everyday life, those at the higher levels of society started to emulate his habit of dressing however he felt and now it's become a sort of new tradition."

Red, having met Bill early on in his adventures, didn't realize that Bill had become such a big deal in the Pokémon world. Red didn't pay that much attention to social pokemedia and was friends with Bill so he didn't realize how big of a star Bill was in the Pokemon world.

Red felt a lot better about his state of dress at this point and mentally made a note to pay Platina back for looking out for him later.

The pair made their way up the steps towards the old Team Galactic HQ, and at the entrance the guard/bouncer looked at the two, nodded at Platina, and said "right this way Ms. Berlitz."

Platina thanked him for his work and the couple entered into a hallway with a reception desk and multiple well-dressed receptionists guiding VIPs to the banquet room.

It would seem like the bouncer had alerted someone since it took less than 5 seconds for someone to identify Platina at the entrance and come over to offer assistance.

"Hello Ms. Berlitz, it's good to see that you made it here. Is there anything we can help you with today?"

"Ah hello there, we should be good today. Just let the venue know that my parents won't be coming today so my… my date and I will be representing the Berlitz family."

The receptionist was likely a veteran at her job as she barely reacted at the bombshell Platina dropped here, and just politely nodded and said that she would convey the message to the organizers.

In the meanwhile she guided them towards the banquet room which was to the left of the main entrance.

Platina leaned towards Red and whispered in his ear as they were walking "this place looks nothing like the old Team Galactic HQ, even though this is probably just one of Team Neo's buildings, they must have crazy amounts of money to afford this level of renovations."

The receptionist couldn't hear what Platina was talking about and only assumed that it was the usual young lovers sharing some sweet nothings with each other.

Red nodded at Platina's observation but simultaneously found himself blushing a bit as her warm breath tickled his ears.

He wasn't sure what to make of this but before he could process it even further, they found themselves in a massive banquet room.

It was close to double the size of a indoor gymnasium and had many rows of seats in the middle with dining tables surrounding three sides of it.

Servers walked back and forth offering food for guests as well as helping fulfill small requests.

Red felt overwhelmed by the scale of the event but he still remembered that now that they were here, it was time to get ready for the infiltration.

He took Platina's hand (they had agreed beforehand to do things like this while in the public eye) and took her out of the banquet room to one of the hallways so they could contact the other team.

Platina had, of course, forgotten this way the plan as she lost her composure from holding hands with him.

"H-how lewd…" she thought half seriously as she had no experience with physical contact with boys despite her previous adventures.

She got her wits about her when they were out in the hallway and Red had pulled out his phone to call Blue.

Red had made sure to check his surroundings to make sure no one was eavesdropping, there was so much noise in the banquet room that it was unlikely that anything they talked about could be overheard.

Nonetheless, he decided to send his message in a less straightforward manner just in case.

"Is everyone in position on your end Blue?"

"We're almost ready on our end, I'll send you a message when we've infiltrated their backdoor. We're currently narrowing down where the backdoor entrance is."

"Alright I'll be looking forward to your message, let us know if you need any help on your end!"

"Wait Red, before you go, I just wanted to check… uhh for the sake of the mission. Have you guys done any couple-like stuff yet?"

"Oh no need to be worried, we held hands and Platina declared that I was her date to the guard. We should be perfectly seen (disguised) as a couple in the eyes of the public right now."

Red seemed excited that they were doing their job properly on his end.

Meanwhile on Blue's end, while this wasn't the worst case scenario, she was still vexed that Platina was already stealing a march on all of them with these kinds of activities. She hadn't even gotten to do stuff like this on the practice date they had before.

Still, it was the premise of the infiltration so she couldn't complain too much at this point, she would be getting even on the relationship progress front later on for sure.

On her end of the mission, the rest of the dexholder's team were narrowing down which warehouse had the backdoor entrance into Team Neo's base. They had already gone through what was roughly 70% of the warehouses in the yard and nothing out of the ordinary was seen so far besides less containers than usual, probably due to a supply chain issue that was affecting the Sinnoh region as well as other regions.

Thanks to the lack of containers though, the area was less obstructed with people and shipping containers than usual, and they were able to do their search much quicker than usual.

Eventually they stumbled upon a warehouse that looked different from the other ones.

For one, even though it was after hours, there were a couple of workers who were milling about in the warehouse.

To add on to the suspicious atmosphere, there was a door that looked out of place in the warehouse, with two workers standing on either side of the door. And what looked to be a keypad peeking out from behind one of the workers.

Sapphire looked fired up and wanted to engage right away but Yellow held her back and reminded her about trying not to cause too much of a commotion right away. Battling was probably inevitable, but ideally they wanted to do this in a way that wouldn't give Team Neo the chance to sound the alarm.

Lisia stepped up to the plate here as they had planned. She gave the most enticing look she could to the group of workers that were milling about away from the door.

"Hey there… I'm really lost and was hoping to find the contest hall around here. I have my beauty contest to compete in soon and really really can't miss it."

As expected, the Team Neo grunts there fell for the trap in comically simple fashion and they fell over themselves to show her towards the hall.

Originally Lisia was only supposed to bait one or two of them away, but it turned out that the grunts couldn't decide among themselves who was going to show her the way, so it ended up being that 6/8 of the grunts were showing her the way.

Korrina had volunteered to go with Lisia to make sure she was safe and the grunts didn't do anything unsavory. So this left the two grunts who were guarding the door, alone in the warehouse waiting for their fellow grunts to come back.

As to why the main force of grunts had abandoned their post during the middle of an important night for their team. This was more a result of the centralization of power at the upper levels of the organization. The admins at Team Neo didn't want their plans to leak out so they had avoided telling the grunts too much about what days were important and weren't important. So even though the financier banquet was happening at the main building, it didn't seem like the backdoor needed more guarding than usual on the grunt's side.

This was a result of many of the teams that had merged into Team Neo, having experienced their plans being foiled because a defeated grunt would just randomly spill the beans on the important details of the plan. This resulted in the consolidated Team Neo being extra conservative with giving lower level members too much information.

To their chagrin, this would bite them in the butt when it came to today's events.

The remaining two guards were bored out of their minds as watching the door was one of the worst jobs in the organization, and they had drawn the short straw tonight.

Even worse, a super popular idol that both of them had seen before, had randomly stumbled upon their little warehouse and was now being wooed by their teammates while they couldn't win brownie points with a beautiful idol.

"Sigh… Joe, I really wish we could have interesting things happen to us here, why do the other guys always get to see some action."

One grunt sighed aloud.

"Oh, you'll be seeing some action tonight, but I don't think it's exactly what you were hoping for."

Blue's voice rang through the warehouse as an ice beam attack from Blasty hit both of the grunts and froze them below the head level.

(A/N: I'll be taking some time off to play Xenoblade 3 when it releases, hopefully I can get inspired and also write some more for this story before/or by then. Besides that I'm also looking forward to that new pokemon game this holiday season, maybe there'll be a direct at the end of June to give us some details. Although usually Pokemon Directs are their own separate thing so a general direct probably wouldn't mention Pokemon anyway. I've also been thinking about watching some of the Pokemon (2019) anime. It seems like Ash is actually keeping his competency between seasons so the adventures might actually be worth watching. I'd especially like to see old travel partners come meet him again. See y'all in the next chap!)