2

The bowels of an unused warehouse served as the interview stage for new recruits. Seventeen potential grunts stood in a line, their pokemon beside them. It was a cold, late-Autumnal evening and more than one trainer was holding back shivers. An-lu made a note of this next to their names.

She didn't particularly enjoy the recruitment process; within the organisation, it was referred to as 'picking the fodder' and most if not all of the candidates would be rough, unitelligent thugs whose very lack of drive was what had drawn them towards the easy rewards the Rockets offered.

However, they were needed. With an organisation now halved between Johto and Kanto, the Rockets needed to fill out their ranks again and who better than the local bullies who, if nothing else, could at least offer some intelligence about the region?

An-lu's partner for the day, a meathead who called himself Jock, patrolled the line of candidates, trying to intimidate them with his glowering. Another three nameless grunts, conscious of their uniforms and newly brought in from Ecruteak, hung about the door.

"Alright," she said, startling Jock out of his staring. The teenager he'd been frowning at snorted. "We're going to have you pair up and battle. One-on-one and keep it within ten feet."

She pointed at each candidate and their partner and sent them off into their own space. Of course, the fair thing to do would have been to match them by their strength, but An-lu had not been made an under-exec because of her fairness.

The youngest boy with the scrawny rattata, for example, she gave to the street rough with his towering rhyperior. The rattata had no chance of winning and the boy himself looked much too pathetic to ever be of use to them but she wished to see how merciless the rough could be. Of all of them, he seemed the most promising.

She also set the punky-looking girl's bellossom against the donphan of the young man who had been eyeing her with great interest all afternoon. The girl clearly had no intentions towards him and stood with her hands planted firmly on her hips, booted legs apart. She sent her bellossom diving towards its opponent in a hurricane of slicing petals without a single word to him.

The male trainer, who was dressed in some semblance of a motorcycle gang with a leather jacket and gelled hair, swore as a stray petal opened a thin cut on his cheek.

"Fuck… roll out!" he called. His donphan stumbled over its own trunk.

"Sunny day," the girl commanded, tossing a pigtail back over her shoulder. "Solarbeam!"

Her bellossom spun into a burst of light and beautifully executed an immediate follow up attack, drowning the enemy donphan in such a bright beam that everyone turned from their own battles and shielded their eyes against it.

An-lu held her clipboard against her chest and clapped. The donphan was down without ever having moved, its trainer crouched over it, trying to get it back to its feet. The girl smiled almost demurely at An-lu.

"Tremendous," An-lu said. "Take a break for a moment. We'll put you up against someone else when they're done."

The girl gathered her bellossom up into her arms and watched the rest of the battles from a place against a wall, a cigarette sticking out of her mouth.

An-lu strolled over to the trainer with the rhyperior. The beast stood over 7 foot tall and had been calmly allowing the rattata to batter itself against its rock-hard armour while its owner looked away, bored. The rattata's owner was red in the face, shouting through tearful frustration.

Seeing An-lu watching, the older man concentrated more fully on the battle. "'Perior, headbutt."

The rhyperior lowered its head to meet the rattata's latest attack, who leapt towards its throat but instead rebounded off its iron-like skull and fell some distance away. An-lu heard its pained squeak.

The rhyperior's trainer was looking at her.

"Finish it," she said.

He blinked at his open-mouthed opponent and then his own pokemon, who had turned back to look at him. And then he shrugged. "Stomp."

The rhyperior raised its giant leg and brought it down firmly on the rattata as its young trainer threw himself forward. He was only just too slow; the rattata's body cracked wetly as he tried to pry his fingers underneath the rhyperior's foot to lift it up. An-lu had to call one of the grunts over to pull away the sobbing boy, a slight smile curling her thin lips. The rhyperior ground its opponent's remains into the ground.

She called a halt on another battle as a koffing sprayed out a cloud of noxious gas which then had to be flapped safely away from the other trainers by Jock's golbat. She inclined her head at him in a signal to get rid of the koffing's trainer, who had been too stupid to realise that poison gas was not a good move to use indoors.

One of the other female trainers appeared to be having problems with her half-evolved espeon. The girl looked to be in her mid-twenties and was tall but slim in a slightly awkward, coltish way with a curtain of light-blonde hair falling down her back. Her espeon had the opponent's ekans suspended in midair, weaving frantic figure-eights with its coils as it tried to escape.

The espeon was still growing out its ears and losing its thick, eevee's neck ruff but the gem on its forehead was glowing. An-lu vaguely recalled that that was the first thing an evolving espeon developed. Otherwise, its coat was an odd, murky shade somewhere between beige and lavender.

"Problems?" she asked, letting sarcasm tinge her voice.

The girl blushed. "N-no, she's just - uh, psybeam!"

The espeon twitched an ear at her.

"What are you doing?" Her opponent shouted. "Fight properly!"

The espeon looked at him and blinked slowly. The ekans hissed and spat.

The girl pulled in exasperation at her hair. "Espeon, c'mon!"

The was another crack, this one much sharper and louder than that of the rattata's, and the ekans went limp. The espeon dropped it to the floor and padded back over to its trainer, where it sat on its hindquarters and licked a forepaw.

Despite herself, An-lu was impressed. She had seen years of recruitment and had an eye for certain trainers. In this one she saw potential. Espeon were, by nature, inclined to not to battle outright; they confused their enemies and walked away. But here was one young enough to still have fighting spirit and here, too, was a trainer who was inexperienced and easy to mold. She would never rise far in their ranks but she did have a great capacity for guidance.

Once the battles were finished, An-lu had decided on those she would keep. The espeon's trainer was among them, as was the man with the rhyperior and the girl who had impressed her so against the donphan.

Those that would not be joining their organisation were paid off, as in the case of the ekan's trainer, or discretely told to move along like the rattata's. An-lu was good at her job; she always knew when to offer a carrot or wield the stick.