Part 2

I could hear James murmuring “Oh no, no, not that kid, not that Pikachu, not a gyarados…”

I told Sabrina we were going to need to discuss this in private. Unlike Giovanni, she couldn’t force us to go on this mission but she could fire us. There weren’t a lot of jobs out there for people with a police record as long as ours is.

James started arguing as soon as we got back to our apartment. “I thought we were going to leave them alone! That was the big advantage of not working for Gio anymore.”

“James, we have to do this. Sabrina wouldn’t ask us to if she didn’t have a good reason.”

Meowth spoke up. “Misty’s been kind of friendly to you, couldn’t you do something with that?”

“Misty gave us Pikachu in an emergency, this is different. Besides, she’s probably interested in that gyarados herself,” I said. “If they could be reasoned with, Sabrina would have told us that. But it’s true, they might not suspect anything from us now.”

James sighed. “That’s what bothers me the most. It was one thing when we tried to steal their Pokemon all the time, now I feel guilty about it.”

I looked at James. “You aren’t the least bit angry at them after all they’ve done to us? I’m still pretty angry that Brock tried to steal my Growlithe.”

James said, “Well, I’m not going to pretend to be anybody’s buddy and tell them we’re good guys so we can steal a pokemon from them, that’s too much for me.”

That struck me as too much too. Someday we might need them to really trust us. But even though I didn’t hate the twerps anymore I wasn’t about to feel too guilty over this assignment.

However, I hate to look hard-hearted in front of James. Of all people, he knows my soft side the best, but I know he suspects sometimes that I don’t care about anything. Even with marriage I wasn’t sure how much I was going to be able to relax my guard.

“Fine, James. We’ll do it the old way. Maybe even dig up some disguises.”

James looked startled. “I’m not wearing that nurse’s outfit again and you can’t make me!”

Meowth spoke up. “It doesn’t matter, they never recognized you no matter what you did.”

“They never failed to send us blasting off, either!” said James. “But I’ll do this. Even I want to know what it’s like to win against the twerps for once. If we can!”

“I’ll think up a plan, James, and you can help me. Meanwhile, you decide where you want to go on our honeymoon.”

We decided the most important thing was to get Pikachu away from Ash. It was the Pikachu who had beaten us nearly every time. Once we had Pikachu he could probably be reasoned with, since we had worked together before. He had even refused to attack once when he knew it was wrong. Or if we absolutely had to we could send him back to Sabrina’s gym until the whole mess was over. Even I didn’t want to steal him anymore. But we had tried to capture Pikachu so many times and failed, what could we do differently now?

Sabrina wasn’t as rich as Giovanni, but she had lots of connections, and she could arrange for materials for disguises and the use of buildings and vehicles. With enough plans and back-up plans, this might even be fun.

“Hey, James!” I said. “The twerps are hanging out in a fun resort town with a beach and the whole bit. What do you say we steal their pokemon and then have our honeymoon there?”

James giggled. “Won’t the police be after us?”

“Sabrina’s got some connections, they won’t be looking for us.”

“What doesn’t she just have them do this then?” he muttered.

“Nobody’s connections are that good. Anyway, that wouldn’t be as much fun!”

I tickled him then, and he grabbed me and tickled me back, and we were quite distracted for a few minutes until Sabrina called us up to finalize our travel plans. Sometimes I just don’t like her.

When we got to town we decided to check into one big motel room to save money. There would be time for marriage and honeymooning after we got rid of Meowth and his friend Meo who had tagged along. She seemed nice, but since she didn’t talk we really didn’t know her. I assigned her a role in the mission anyway; she seemed reliable enough.

Rather than attack them all at once, we decided to do this in stages. Our first stage would be to catch Pikachu.

First, James and I got some official looking uniforms and clipboards. We considered putting temporary dye in our hair but that was too disgusting so we settled for tucking our hair under our hats. Then we set off in search of the twerps.

Ash, Misty, and Brock were standing around in front of the Pokemon center. We went and stood on either side of Ash. He had Pikachu on his shoulder as always.

“You’ll need to come with us, Mr. Ketchum,” I said.

“Important Pokemon business, for top trainers only,” said James.

Misty and Brock began to follow us, as we had predicted. I turned around and looked at them over my glasses. “And just who are you two?”

“I’m an accomplished water Pokemon trainer and a gym leader,” spat Misty.

“I’m a gym leader too,” whined Brock.

“Both gym leaders, what an amazing coincidence…” I turned to Ash. “I’m afraid your friends will have to wait while you accompany us to our office. This really is very important private business!”

Ash turned to his friends. “I’ll be right back!” he said.

“We won’t be waiting,” snapped Misty, and she and Brock walked off to sulk. This was turning out to be fairly easy after all.

We led Ash around the corner and into the entranceway of an office building. Meowth and Meo ran out the door, grabbed Pikachu (they were wearing rubber gloves), and stuffed him in a bag. We all ran through the door and slammed it in Ash’s face.

Now comes the part where we would usually stop to laugh at Ash and get caught. Instead, we kept running, went through the back of the building, and headed straight for the hotel.

When we got there, we were confronted with the problem of how to get Pikachu out of the bag without being thundershocked into the next continent. Finally Meowth and Meo dumped him into the shower stall. He almost melted the glass door off before he tired himself out. Then Meowth began to try to explain to him that we had no plans to send him to the Boss and in fact we were going to send him back to Ash.

Evidently Pikachu had trouble believing this, despite having cooperated with us in the past. I guess shoving him in a bag like that was bound to created mistrust, but even I couldn’t think of a scam that would have made Ash hand Pikachu over to strangers.

Meowth’s side of the conversation was the only one we could understand and it went like this:

“No, really, it’s true.”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“No, that was Jesse and James who lied… well, OK, a bunch of times.”

“Now there’s no need to call me that.”

“Leave James’s mother out of this!”

Finally they were able to exchange a few coherent sentences.

Meowth came out with the following announcement from Pikachu:

“Basically, Pikachu thinks you’re the lowest forms of life in the world. But the psychic gyarados scares him spitless, and he thinks it could really kill all of them without even knowing what happened. He’s willing to cooperate even with us if we’re going to get rid of it without really hurting Ash. He won’t attack Ash or his friends or their Pokemon no matter what, but he can wait out the whole mess in this motel room. And he wants food. I keep thinking I heard that wrong somehow; he said he wanted three bottles of ketchup.”