Chapter Forty-Four - The Bug Boy

Bugsy became a gym leader to continue the family tradition, and because bugs were cool.

Sure, they didn't make him very popular with certain girls, but if those girls didn't appreciate his metapod, then they didn't deserve to be his vespiquen.

He giggled to himself as he looked over the day's paperwork. There was a fair amount of it to go over at the end of each day. Today had had three consecutive battles, which was about middling for this time of year. He'd only been a gym leader for two seasons now, but he could see that there was a pattern easily enough.

At the start there were all the local trainers from Azalea that came to challenge him. He knew almost all of them—if not by name, then by sight—from working at the local pokemon training school. Then, after the first week or so, trainers would start to trickle in from Violet City and eventually from Goldenrod. It took a while for trainers from elsewhere in Johto to make their way to his gym.

Right now, a few months into the circuit, the majority of the trainers he fought these days were on their third and fourth badges, mostly on their way to the east or west of the region. He knew that it was going to get a lot worse in a few months.

Not only was he the least-experienced of the gym leaders on the circuit, his type-speciality was... also relatively easy to counter for higher-tier teams. Almost every team at the seven and eight badge level had a pokemon or two that could fly, and Fire-type moves were pretty common. Rock-types were annoyingly common too.

Still, even if his higher-ranked winrate wasn't the best, he liked to pull out all the stops when that time of year rolled around. For now, it was time to train his pokemon.

A sad reality of being a bug-type specialist was that he had to get used to the idea that his friends wouldn't be with him forever. By that same token, it didn't take too much to train a Bug-type pokemon up to a pretty high standard.

He was looking forward to that kind of training tonight. There was a pair of wurmples that he'd caught at the National Bug-Catching championship last year who were both on the verge of evolving, that was going to change up his team composition a little! He had a set of moves he liked to teach to any pokemon stuck in a cocoon-phase, so he'd need to get around to that.

Which was why he was somewhat annoyed when the door to his office glowed faintly and opened on its own. A moment later a pokemon flitted into the room and landed on his desk, its wingbeats not even fluttering a single page. "Veno venomoth!"

"Huh?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

His venomoth twitched her head towards the doorway. "Ven!"

"Oh!" Bugsy jumped and ran out of the room, then he ran right back in and plucked a belt from the back of his seat and clicked it into place.

The gym was built around a single, large room that took up most of its footprint. This room was filled with trees, several ponds, and was covered in a glass roof with netted openings to let fresh air in. It was a humid space, with bushes along the sides of a footpath that directed trainers and visitors through the main floor of the gym and to the stadium at the far end.

Right now, in the hurry he was in, he simply jumped over the nearest bush and sprinted along the footpath. As he ran, Bugsy raised a pokeball and recalled some of his best pokemon. A scizor was picked up from a branch above, his yanmega from its perch atop a sleeping gloom (the grass-type being one of the gym's plant-like caretakers and Yanmega's close friend).

By the time he reached the exit, he had an elite team around his hip, which was probably for the best because there was an Officer Jenny by the door next to a non-descript man in a suit and tie. The only markings he wore was a small pin with the league's logo on it.

"Hi! I heard that you needed me?" Bugsy asked. Venomoth landed on his head and he had to work to keep his posture straight.

"Gym Leader Bugsy," the officer said with a nod. "Glad you could make it so fast. There's been an incident."

"Oh?" he asked.

"Team Rocket were discovered loitering around Azalea, and some travelling trainers took it upon themselves to confront them," she said. The teal-haired woman didn't look impressed about that.

Bugsy winced. Team Rocket, near his town? That would look bad on him. Worse, they might have been preying on local trainers! "Are the trainers okay? Were their pokemon stolen?"

The officer relaxed. "No one was harmed. Well, maybe a few bruises. They managed to fight Team Rocket before the first officer arrived and assessed the situation."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I see," Bugsy said. He turned his attention to the league man next to the officer. The question there was obvious. What was the league doing about this?

"We teleported in some reinforcements," the man said. He still hadn't introduced himself and likely wouldn't. "Three Ace trainers. It wasn't necessary. The operation seems quite small, almost trivial."

"What were they up to?" he asked.

"No good," the officer said. "They were cutting off slowpoke tails, freezing them, and shipping them off for sale."

Bugsy gasped. That was awful! He was a native to Azalea, of course. He'd played with the local slowpoke before, had ridden them as a child. Once or twice he'd fought against some wild ones in playful spars to train up his first all-bug team, and he'd often run into them while on bug-catching adventures in the local area.

They weren't his type of pokemon, but that didn't mean he wanted to see any of them harmed. "Where are they?" he asked.

"Right now? Jail," the officer said with a smug smile. "We even captured a higher-ranking member, or what we suspect is one. Hard to tell with the Rockets. One of them is willing to speak, apparently."

"Great!" he said. "Where's this base of theirs?"

"The Slowpoke Well," the officer said. "Just outside of the city limits."

They started that way. The League official had a small black car parked out front, and while Bugsy rather enjoyed walking... well, cars were a bit faster. They sped through Azalea with Officer Jenny and her motorcycle leading the way. The entire time, Bugsy was on his Pokephone, giving instructions to his gym trainers and poking around to see if any news had gotten out. So far, not much had. It looked like the League wanted to keep this quiet for now.

When they arrived at the Slowpoke Well, Bugsy hopped out and started up the hill. That's where he found half a dozen officers, a whole swarm... wait, what was the term for a group of slowpoke? A gaggle? A lazy? A tired? He was certain he'd heard the right term before....

In any case, there were a lot of slowpoke in a cordoned off area being inspected by a trio of chansey and a single Pokemon Centre nurse. Things looked well in hand, even the very obvious League workers ferrying things in and out of the Well fit in.

Only three individuals stood out. "Who are they?" Bugsy asked Officer Jenny.

"Those are the trainers. Jazz Poison from Violet City, Broccoli Bunch from Earth City? Not sure on that one. And Tabitha Natsume, from Kanto."

Natsume, that rang a bell. "I'll go and check up with them," he said with a smile. "Is that okay, Officer?"

The officer nodded and smiled in return. "Of course."

Bugsy took a moment to make sure his clothes were on straight, then he surreptitiously checked his breath and fixed his hair. He blushed a little when he noticed Officer Jenny hiding a smile on seeing him but, well, he had to give a good first impression right?

"Alright Bugsy," he whispered just to himself. "The worst they can say is eww."

The girls looked up as he approached... is what he would have liked to say, but one of them had a head on him, and the other two weren't any shorter than he was. "Hi!" the one with the—were those lopunny ears on her head? An accessory?—said with a dazzling smile.

"Hello," he replied. "I'm Bugsy. I heard that you three took down Team Rocket for us?"

"And a fat load of good that was," the prickly-looking purple-haired one said. "Do you know when we're going to be let free? We're being treated like second-rate criminals here."

"As opposed to first-rate?" Lopunny-ears asked.

"First-rate criminals live in penthouses," was the reply.

This was not going how Bugsy had imagined. His mental image of this situation was more... him coming in all suavely to thank them for their good work, and then one thing would lead to another... and by the end of the day he'd be showing them his bug collection.

That's how his father said things worked, at least. His mom always rolled her eyes, but it had worked!

The blue-haired girl in the white dress (who was also very pretty, he noted, and tried not to note right after) stared at him. "I can't decide if your thoughts are impure or not, Gym Leader Bugsy. But in any case, it's a pleasure to meet you. My companion is correct, we are being treated poorly. Could you help us by expediting our release?"

"Uh, um, I mean... what?"

***