A Rocket: Maelstrom

I am a rocket, a member of the famous Team Rocket.

I am hated and feared. And yet, after all that is and was known (or thought to be known) about us, there is so very little that is really understood.

And so I write this.

Prologue

I was born before the Fall, when Team Rocket was merely gaining power, merely feared. My mother was a Jenny, but I wasn't fully one. My parents were distant but never cruel. Others, of course, could be.

We lived by the ocean. I loved the sea more than anything in the world. I got all my pokemon from the water. Ponds and lakes and streams were too calm. I also loved storms. My favorite thing in the world was watching a stormy sea, with the waves smashing into boats and the wind howling.

I caught a psyduck, tentacool, staru, magikarp, and seel. Later on my mother gave me an eevee that had been abandoned, and I evolved it into vaporeon.

I loved my family and my pokemon fiercely. As for the rest of the world, if they happened to drop dead I'd be happy.

My mother, when she first found out I had caught several pokemon and was training them, marched me to the police station and gave me hours of community service to complete. She then took my pokemon and refused to give them back until I had completed the forms and passed the tests necessary to get an underage trainer's license. For a Jenny, this was bending the rules. No normal Jenny would have done it, but no normal Jenny would have broken custom and married a regular man. My mother was, for a Jenny, incredibly emotional. She let her attachment to her child make her treat me differently then normal.

I avoided people, and they avoided me, the half-Jenny. The town I lived in was small and isolated. The world was falling to pieces around us, but I only really noticed it a few years before I went on a pokemon journey. My mother was the only one effected at first. No rockets would come to our quiet, average little town. Still, once I started to understand what the headlines said, I realized we were in trouble. Team Rocket attacked, and attacked, and attacked. The Jennies fell back, withdrew, retreated. In a thousand different ways people admitted that they were losing.

My mother was furious about this. She raved about the rocket Ice, who killed everyone who spoke out against Team Rocket or in some way came to their attention and trained the evil type. Ice was the strongest trainer ever. No one had beaten her ever. She got into the most heavily guarded fortress, killed someone, and got back out not only alive but uninjured and completely unnoticed. She stole anything Team Rocket wanted. My mother often called that rocket a demon.

She also talked about a rocket that trained fire pokemon, though that rocket wasn't well known enough for the name to be known. The fire trainer was the second strongest rocket known. That rocket stole pokemon, and again, no one could stop her.

My mother had been beaten by the fire trainer several times, and a few (a very, very few) of the other Jennies, the ones who had somehow lived through battling Ice, told her that Ice was a thousand times better then the fire trainer. It was my mother's greatest desire to catch them and bring them to justice. One night she had to go out and guard a warehouse full of powerful pokemon, one everyone was certain the fire trainer would attack. I knew my mother was going to do something there, but I didn't know what.

When she came back the next night, she looked awful. I had already found out what had happened from the papers. The infamous fire trainer had beaten them once again. But that wasn't what she was so upset about. She showed it to me.

A gun. My mother, the law abiding and enforcing Jenny, had a gun, an illegal thing. Seven of the bullets were gone. She told me that she had messed up the controls in the warehouse and brought in twenty of the strongest water pokemon she could find. She had also made it impossible to withdraw pokemon, just in case. The water pokemon were beaten in an instant, so she shot the fire trainer's pokemon and killed them, and then ran away in horror.