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"TO ANY FRIENDLY FORCES who may receive this message:

     "I'm very glad this fell into your hands and not those of someone else. If, however, you (the person or persons who are reading this) are an individual or individuals not of the 'friendly forces' variety, then please, promptly do all three of the following--preferably in numerical order:

     1. Fold this document in half, roll it into a narrow cylinder and shove it up your ass.
     2. Ram your head repeatedly into the nearest vertical-standing structure you can find, until you loose sentience
        (I recommend something made of brick, metal, concrete or some combination of any of these three).
     3. Wait for one of us to find what's left of you.

     Preferably, do something NOW. This message is set to spontaneously self-combust 24,317 seconds after you begin reading it (Oh no! Holy crap!! Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!! Uh, let's see here... 24,317 divided by 60...).

     Now, where was I? Oh, yes!

     At the moment I write this text, I'm sitting in a nondescript vehicle, with my laptop, doing my best to hide from the things that hunt me. I also have, on my person, a day-ago-dead cellphone (Motorola branded; I'm trying to charge it right now), a JP2-T1 with a half-drained battery, two spare batteries, a pen with glow in the dark ink, and an empty 45 oz. M&Ms bag (yummy). I'm looking out the window right now, making sure the coast is clear, and just wondering--in a bewildered, depressed sort of way--about everything that has happened to me during these past two days. I know that sentence doesn't tell you guys much of anything important, but I'm tired, and I kind of like to just ramble sometimes, maybe pretend I'm this hotshot sci-fi writer who's cranking out his next action novel or something completely moronic like that. So, I'll probably sound a little disorganized, and you'll probably feel a little disoriented, which is how I feel right now to tell you the truth. At any rate, I have a feeling my time here could be pretty short, and I'd hate to be snuffed out before I get a chance to leave some kind of account behind. It's all so crazy, I honestly don't know where to begin. So I'll just start from the beginning, or somewhere close to it..."





     ...And?




...And the rest of that message is classified material. Sorry, chaps.

Hello there.

     I am Elite Agent 0004; code name, Leon Placid, but you can just call me Leo. That silly little bit up there that you read before this: that was me, and those were the opening paragraphs to a rather important message I sent to my superiors two-and-a-half months, in fact, before this one I'm typing up right now. It's kind of funny really, because my situation in this case isn't much different. However, I've an extended allotment of time on my hands this go around, which is very good, because I have two weeks worth of crucial information to divulge, which is significantly more, both in volume and importance of content, than a mere, hastily (and, might I add, rather tastelessly) thrown-together rant about a mere couple of days. The fact that I actually came a hair shy of death during those two days was, I think, the highlight of that whole episode anyway. But it's no longer pertinent, and with the conclusion of this latest mission of mine, it will twice have been topped. The details of this latest mission of mine... Well, I can't help but reveal a lot of them in here. To whom it concerns: you guys have to know all this stuff and you have to know it's really coming from me. And of course, to Commander Griffin: Sir, if you wish to string me up later for anything I say in here--for that, and for being an ass and letting this latest in a string of unfortunate missions go to shit--you can do that. Honestly, I'm not sure which I fear most: getting my behind busted by high command, or getting it hacked up by some seriously pissed-off TR and Shadow goonies. Anyway, just in case this message falls into enemy hands (and gets decoded into a decipherable format), I will, for the remainder of this lengthy, half-novel, half-official-report, half-sarcastic-detailing-and-digressing-from-explanation-of-how-the-hell-things-got-screwed-up-this-time; for the remainder of this document, I will speak in somewhat vague and ambiguous terms concerning dire strategic info, especially in relation to that which is heart-and-soul vital to the organization for which I work, which they should know like the back of their hands by now anyway, and which no one outside should know to any degree at all. So, again, to any friends who might be reading this, from here on out, you should all be able to know what I'm talking about. I'll tell everyone that much. And I'll continue now.

     My predicament started with a simple routine assignment from head command. My task was to check up on some intelligence work our agents were doing in the CHINA branch of our infrastructure. That mission was brief, and on the whole, it went very well. While I was on location, however, we got a very important lead and, because I was present and deemed to be useful for the job, I was reflexively assigned with our resident team of covert operatives. Our mission was to intercept a lucrative exchange between two narcotics dealers, and to take them both into custody. We had moles in their networks, which had been planted some time ago, and it was from this source that we got wind of their up-coming transaction. At any rate, our mission was successful: we busted the whole deal and took both our targets home in handcuffs. To our credit, there were no casualties. Forgive me a snide grin, but that's our work for you, especially where normal human beings are concerned. We do fill our annual quota for busting drug lords, and that quota isn't small. However, such affiliates of the underworld are not my organization's primary concern. We're really interested in criminals of a more notorious, sometimes supernatural origin, whose intent is more along the lines of world dominion or desolation, as oppose to a first interest in trafficking some big-dollar narcotics. So, there was really just one reason we were even interested at all in the two dope-dealing informants we apprehended that day: It seemed they knew an individual of such heinous reputation--someone by the name of Giovanni Genovese--and they knew him personally.

     Concerning this Genovese person: First, we don't really know his last name, just his first. No matter what country he's done his business in or who he's worked with, he's at least always stuck with "Giovanni" as his first name, which hasn't really helped much. Apparently, there's been a plethora of Giovanni's out there who've made their living on the wrong side of the law. The only difference between those guys and this guy is that those guys don't do near the amount of mass detestation this Giovanni does or at such a well-planned, methodically, intricately, wickedly ingenious level. To date, we've gotten very close to catching him. Most all the little Giovanni's I referred to earlier have been apprehended and cleared by the organization I work for. There's just one who's consistently given us the slip and continued to put out the same kind of mind-blowing insanity that serves him as both masterpiece and signature I don't need to mention all the good operatives we've lost in the hunt for Giovanni Genovese. Also, as a side-note: We suspect Genovese is his real last name because he uses it with almost as much frequency as he does his first, and he only seems to use it with higher-level accomplices. The majority of those we've succeeded in apprehending (the pair of drug lords I mentioned earlier were our latest in the bag), and the ones we've failed to capture have turned up dead as a lump of swiss cheese, with about as many holes in them. Still, it's been an exceptionally tough chase, and Mr. Genovese has proven an extremely hard person to actually run into. None of my colleagues are sure they've even met this Giovanni in person. Several of us have consistently been on his trail at one point or another, interchanging the lead role as circumstance and high command have dictated. We've gotten closer than anyone else, and I guess a few of us got too close. At any rate, I'm going to be the latest casualty if I don't play my cards right. Which brings me back to my little story.

     After acquiring our new informants, we were able to learn a whole lot of useful information, especially regarding the work these two did with Giovanni's primary crime organization. I don't know why they cooperated so well with us. Actually, they both seemed kind of relieved to be off the streets and in our bunker. That made me curious, and a little suspicious. Still the information they gave was all we had. We questioned them separately--always--and they were housed in different rooms. At any rate, after a while of piecing their separate strings of information with each other, and with stuff we already knew from a schmorgusboard of other sources (many of them work from our own field operatives' archives) we were able to discern the truth in what they told us--and some of our agents are just intuitive with that kind of stuff anyway. So, we learned a lot. But more important than anything else, we learned where Genovese was--or more accurately, where he was going to be.

     Giovanni planned to meet with some of his operatives on the twenty-fifth of September, in St. Petersburg, Germany. I don't remember what day that was exactly--maybe a Monday, but it feels like it might've been a weekend; maybe Friday or Saturday (incidentally, nine-twenty-five also happens to be my little brother's birthday, but more on that when I get a chance...). We knew where our quarry would be and when, and we had to move fast. I got emergency clearance for pursuit of our new target, Giovanni Genovese, from Commander Griffin, who's headed this entire operation from the beginning. He and the guys back home would take care of the paper work and meet us in Berlin on the twenty-sixth. Our plan was to have the target in custody by then; our backup plan was that if we didn't, Griffin and his team would help us get him. We didn't exactly know why Genovese was going to be in St. Petersburg; our informants said he was meeting with someone important to the organized crime entity known as Team Rocket, which we know Giovanni runs and funds generously. This was very intriguing. From what I've learned via colleagues, and also from what I've witnessed firsthand, TR operations deal with all things pokémon-related: They do genetic research and engineering, combat testing and training, and most lucrative of all, abduction and trafficking of unique and/or highly trained pokémon, alive, dead, whole or in pieces. Team Rocket, it seems, started out as a strictly research-based operation, but it has since grown into a very diverse organization. Its projects are very well funded, its facilities equipped with cutting edge technology, and its research and business divisions are protected by a force of professional military, who also happen to be Team Rocket's terrorist agents. We've had to engage TR's armed personnel on several occasions I'd say their training hasn't proved our equal yet, but the technology and talent they employ is nothing to laugh at. Like I intoned earlier in this message, we've lost a number of highly competent individuals to these thugs. And they've progressively gotten better; or more accurately, they've gotten more aggressive in their use of armed force and more daring in their overall level of criminal activity. In retrospect, I see how our global operations have consistently become more and more concerned--preoccupied, even--with the movements of Giovanni's Team Rocket exploits. They have really become a major thorn in our side. And despite their rising level of hostile activity and our subsequent encounters with and cataloging data on their operational characteristics, it hasn't become any easier to predict their precise movements. We discovered and invaded their base on Pokémon Island about two years ago. Giovanni had been there, meeting with all the executive-level operatives from all branches of TR, and that had been our last opportunity to capture him. Somehow, he got wind of our coming, and all the key players we were hoping to capture there got away with all the critical information we needed from them. We fought a long, two-day battle trying to clear out TR military, but we got virtually nothing for our efforts. The command center was already gutted by the time we secured it. And it was also rigged to self-destruct. The result of this fiasco was the actual loss of an agent who came directly from our organization's Elite ranks (Will, 0045; former member of the Indigo League's Elite Four). He and his team of pokémon went in alone to investigate. For the record, he had insisted on doing it that way. He was always like that. And it finally cost him his life.


     You know, looking back, I still feel like I should have stopped him. I feel like I should have just systematically deported everyone off the whole damn island and gone in myself. I should have known. I should have seen it coming; I don't have two sharingan eyes in my head for nothing!

     And I also know it's stupid of me to think like that.

     The day after, there were headlines world-wide talking about some big amazing explosion that went off four-and-a-half miles above the Pokémon Island Archipelago. It was so big, experts were saying the explosion was probably nuclear. Well, that was Team Rocket's control center. Our analysis team gave us confirmation: Will and his pokémon buddies teleported that hunk of junk up there right before it detonated. It probably would've sunk the region we found it in if he hadn't. So, because of Will, millions of presumably innocent, certainly unsuspecting people were serendipitously saved.


     And now that I feel all better about it, I'm going to move on.


     So, again, that was two years ago. Since failing to capture Giovanni or any of his key operatives at their former headquarters on Pokémon Island, our organization has aggressively pursued every lead we could get our hands on. If Giovanni had been hard to find before, he was near impossible now. Information was amazingly scarce. Times were rough. We mostly got material for the wastebaskets, shredders and recycling bins. Getting people who would talk was the hardest part. We tried being strategic and selective, but eventually, we just started bringing in everybody--even those moronic, self-absorbed felons who do nothing but go on and on about the details of their own heists, rapes, murders, money launderings, and abusive childhoods. The results were the same everywhere: when it came to Team Rocket's Boss, nobody wanted to say a thing. It was ridiculous. Still, after much persistent digging, we did manage to un-earth some valuable information...about a gold mine in Mexico, that everyone thought was empty, but that our informant insisted was still "full o'dat sparklin' shit! Yer jus' gotter dig some thousand feet deeper!" So we did. He was right. Now we own the land and it's a valuable source of income... LIKE WE DON'T ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH OF THOSE!! Oh my freakin' gosh! What did that have to do with Giovanni Genovese? I wanted to knock that old fool into next week!

     So, needless to say, most of our hard-earned "leads" turned out to be complete bullshit. But we kept on the trail. Since January of this year, I've been part of a multi-member team of specialized agents from within our organization and other law-enforcing agencies from around the globe--part of a larger network of such international teams, each assigned to work with multiple autonomous agencies and organizations who have agreed to cooperate with us from Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Eurasia, North and South America, and other less-populous regions (heck, we even have someone keeping tabs on both poles, for what that may be worth). At any rate, as a unit, our one goal was to identify and apprehend the criminal mastermind known as Giovanni Genovese. Since our critical finding of his base on Pokémon Island, we needed to find where his other base, or bases, were. From the information we had, or the all-too-strategic lack thereof, we had every good reason to believe that he, and his organizations--Team Rocket in particular--were still operating at full capacity. More disturbing, we also had cause to speculate on what his next endeavors might be. In fact, two months ago, we stumbled across one of them. He had this crazy-balls plan to open various key ports into the Astral Plain, with the specific intent of allowing certain hostile, demonic beings to take solid form and enter Earth, with little doubt about what they'd do if they did. We were able to put a stop to that, fortunately. Unfortunately, we lost two more agents doing it: 0025, Agatha Vale, and 0086, Lorelei Monticello, respectively.


     Just to throw in my two cents right here: That whole episode really disturbs me. Agatha and Lorelei were also former members of Indigo's Elite Four. If I include Will in the statistics, this means we've lost three Elite agents within the past two years, all of them recruited from the same place, with no other casualties from our ranks in between. Three former Indigo League Elite Four, gone, in a row--none of them specifically targeted; they all just happened to die while trying to stop Giovanni. Load of crap. I'd pull Koga and Bruno off their Team Rocket hunt in Japan and Korea. Bring 'em home and send someone else who isn't so allergic to Giovanni's brand of untimely death!


     Anyway, just my thoughts on that.


     In the hunt for Giovanni, we'd been watching several other major players in the wider world of international crime. We eventually learned that two of them in particular had direct dealings with agents of Team Rocket, to whom they sold pokémon and an occasional component for the odd weapon of mass destruction. With each other, they sold narcotics. These individuals were the two drug dealers I apprehended with our CHINA team operatives. Although we had reason to believe either one or both of them had been a part of a few direct dealings with Giovanni himself, it was just incredible that we got the tip on this meeting in St. Petersburg out of them. We didn't know how long that meeting in St. Pete's would last, and considering the elusive nature of our target himself, we moved to gain control of this rare opportunity to finally take him in. It was September twenty-third when we got our new information, so we didn't have much time.

     Nevertheless, we needed to finish putting all the separate bits of puzzling data we had into a semi-decipherable picture. According to some intelligence gathering my global network team did earlier this year, we suspected that several important TR operatives were also high-ranking pokémon trainers who competed regularly in all the major tournaments that are held every year, worldwide. One of these competitions was being held in St. Petersburg, September 24th through October 1st. Realizing this, we got a list of the competitors. From that, we were able to identify four individuals as suspected TR members, all of them going by their most seldom used aliases, a fact that further solidified in my mind that their leader would indeed be coming over for a little visit. It did bother me that all four seemed to be affiliated with Team Rocket, which meant this might be a bigger operation than I previously suspected. However, if all four were meeting with Giovanni, then that might make it just that much easier to find him. Anyway, it gave us some confirmation. We were more sure than ever that our narcotic-dealing informants hadn't lied.

     With permission granted from head command, I assembled a small team of CHINA ops and headed out the same night we finally had all this down. I chose to use our own organization's transportation. We needed secrecy and speed, and the good 'ol invisible airline would give us both, getting us to St. Petersburg before break of day. It was probable that our primary target would be in the city only very briefly to meet with his subordinate (or subordinates), coming and going the same day. However, he might have come earlier, unbeknownst to anyone other than himself, perhaps to scout out the general vicinity for himself, which, according to my notes on the man, is not altogether unlike him. As elusive and hard to gain access to as he is, it seems Giovanni likes to handle many things personally, meaning he likes to be physically on location and in that level of direct contact with his working operatives while they do their missions. If that is in fact his nature, then I was hoping to take advantage of it this time around. We were at enough disadvantages already anyway, considering how much time we didn’t have anymore to prepare for this. Our only chance was to follow each of our four suspected TR henchmen and hope one of them led us to Giovanni. So, before arriving in St. Petersburg, I called up our EURO team and had them tap into the St. Petersburg stadium's mainframe and thereby gain direct access to all the real-time information about every event and every match that would be happening during the competition, which would help us keep tabs on our suspects, as far as they were on or off the arena floor, or even part of the competitions at all. Their world ranking gave us reason to believe all four would see these games through the preliminary rounds, which meant they might stick around for a while, even after meeting with Giovanni, which would work out very nicely. There were a few other networks over there that we needed to gain a connection with. With the free resident EURO Elite agent in St. Petersburg who ranked level with me, I was able to put half of her team on getting those connections taken care of . As it was, we knew each other well from some previous assignments, which was to my liking, but it troubled me that our EURO division could only spare one agent for an opportunity of this magnitude. My partner had to inform me about that. It seems the entire EURO network has been having unbelievable troubles of its own these days, to the degree that we couldn’t get enough assets free to take care of the Giovanni case themselves, which they would have otherwise and just as soon saved me the trip over from Asia. Believe it or not, we do have several other cases going that are at least as important on the global scale of things as the Genovese operation. Can’t be helped. But I digress. Back to St. Petersburg: One of the last things I did before I left was dig up some good field operatives I knew over in St. Pete's, connect them with my partner's team, and put them on the streets tracking our four suspects. So when one called in with a positive ID on the suspect he was looking for, we were less than an hour into the real chase. I told him to get their residence info and I'd talk to him when I got there.

     By the time our information lines were set with the stadium, and a few other sources, I estimated that we had somewhere between twenty-four to twenty-eight hours left to identify and apprehend our target, and that was about the time my colleagues and I from team CHINA walked through the doors of our EURO colleagues' temporary operation headquarters. With our combined network operatives still tapping all other pertinent information lines, I switched my attention to my trackers. Within another hour of my arrival, they had all four TR suspects live on our screens. I met briefly with my partner and her administrators, had them stay in charge of our base of operations (because I suck at that kind of stuff and can’t stand watching all the action from a monitor anyway), integrated my various CHINA ops amongst the resident EURO team, grabbed my gear and a new cellphone, left the building, rented a car from some little place down the street, stuck my gizmos in the cigarette lighter, turned everything on and hit the streets. I had all my field operatives report to me, picked the suspect closest to my present location and took the lead position on that tracking team. Within five minutes, I was pulling into a dark, nondescript alleyway, and I had our first target in sight.

     The chase was officially on.


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