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It’s easy to tell when something’s bothering Shigaraki. The way the boss seethes is childish, incessant, like he demands the entire world recognize his malcontent. Before she even enters the room, Magne sees his arms crossed through the window, fingers twitching as they grip his arms, and his feet up on the desk in front of him—and she knows that whatever’s on his mind is about to become her problem. She walks into his office with a business frown, closing the door behind her and moving to stand across from him.
She waits for him to take his feet off of his desk.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he narrows his eyes, voice hissing through his clenched teeth. “You,” he says. “I called you days ago.”
“I’ve been in Johto for the past two weeks. I came as fast as I could.”
He was the one who assigned her to help with the Goldenrod branch in the first place. He makes an irritated noise anyway, like she’s the one inconveniencing him, before continuing on. “You need to do something about your new recruit.”
Magne raises a brow. “New recruit?”
“Whoever it is has been wreaking havoc the whole time you’ve been gone, and it’s costing us a fortune. Do something about it.”
Her lips part for a question that she doesn’t ask. It’s been months since she last recruited anyone, and everyone from that group should have been long-since vetted. Had one of them shown their true colors once she was out of the region? She hides her confusion behind her sunglasses, pushing them up the bridge of her nose slowly.
“Understood,” she says. “I’ll take care of it.”
She doesn’t wait around before heading over to the R&D building. From the outside, it’s a hole-in-the-wall sort of place, the entrance hidden through a secret passage in an old bar. It’s only by going down the tunnel, walking through the labyrinthine halls and remembering exactly which of the teleportation pannels will take you further (and which will send you back to where you started) that one can find the laboratory. Many people have attempted to sneak their way in and steal the experimental technology, only to be found months later, starved to death in the endless hallways.
Magne, personally, knows the place like the back of her hand.
She speeds through the maze, her Magneton at hand. As soon as she steps off the final teleportation panel, she swings toward the door to the laboratory, orders hot in her throat. She feels the cool metal of the door handle brush against her fingers—
And then, with a massive sound like an angry Electrode, the door flies off its hinges.
She has to jump out of the way to dodge it. As soon as she lands, she rushes through the open doorframe, past the curtain of smoke. The room is filled with damage from the explosion, computers turned to rubble, craters in the floor and tables smouldering. Usually, there are people everywhere, researching this or that, and Magne searches for them amongst the debris littering the ground. All she finds is a single pink-haired girl, standing next to a hissing machine and scribbling quick notes on a piece of paper that appears to be half-ash. She’s dressed in an oil-smeared lab coat and goggles, the ends of her hair still smoking as she mutters to herself things that Magne can’t hear over the ringing in her ears.
She doesn’t even seem to notice Magne approaching until she’s right next to her. When she looks up, pushing the goggles up to her forehead to reveal piercing, amber eyes surrounded by rings of black soot, any words Magne might’ve spoken die in her throat.
She’s never seen this girl in her life.
What happened here, she means to ask, but what leaves her mouth is, “Who the hell are you?”
Spies are fairly common in Team Rocket. Given both the relative ease of joining and the illicit activities they don’t bother to hide, it isn’t all that unusual to find out that the person you recruited last week was a spy, or even that someone you’d known and trusted for years was one of the Pokemon League’s plants the whole time. So, they’d developed procedures for whenever they found one, starting with the interrogation. First Toga would go in to loosen the person up, followed by someone with a soft enough touch to play a Good Cop role, usually Magne.
It usually works pretty well, and they don’t have to go onto the next stage.
Today, however, things are not going according to protocol.
The second Toga steps in the room, the girl slips out of the ropes they’d bound her in and pulls a fresh, crisp resume from gods knows where. She stands so she can hand it to Toga, who is similarly baffled, and then allows herself to be tied back up as she goes through an empassioned self-introduction.
She introduces herself as Hatsume Mei, and within two minutes she’s managed to change the interrogation into a sales pitch. It starts with a complement on Toga’s outfit, then moves to her makeup, then to her nails. Her manicure looks so cute, but doesn’t she just hate it when the paint chips? If only there was some way to make the top coat last longer—but wait! As a matter of fact, Hatsume has something just for that! She’d originally invented it as a way to make sure her important slides lived through explosions, but it worked just as well for nails, keeping them preserved for weeks. Hatsume doesn’t usually give it away to people she’s just met, but she’s willing to make an exception for Toga, all for the low, low price of—
When Toga pops her head out of the room to ask if Magne has her wallet on her, she decides it’s time to call someone else.
Twice had come along with Toga to watch, so Magne has him go in next, but he doesn’t last much longer. It’s only a matter of time before he starts reaching for the money in his back pocket, and Magne has to pull him out before any further damage is done to Team Rocket’s reputation.
She calls other people after that. Spinner is a wash. Mr. Compress quickly loses sight of their goal in an effort to secure the spotlight for himself. Dabi never even shows up.
Magne knows that it would be simplest if she went in and did the interrogation herself, but she’s always preferred to play a more sisterly, understanding role during questioning, so she calls up her very last hope.
Giran.
Slippery guys like him have never been her type, so she doesn’t like calling him if she can avoid it. But the only higher-ups she hasn’t called yet are him and Shigaraki, and she doesn’t think her boss would take as kindly to the girl’s domineering attitude.
At first glance, Giran seems to do the best of the lot of them, if only for the fact that he’s enough of a salesman himself to dodge her pitches. When he leaves the interrogation room, he immediately pulls out a cigarette, though. He lights up with a sigh, taking a long drag before admitting, “Couldn’t get a read on her.”
Magne opens her mouth, but Giran continues before she can retort, gesturing to the Pokeball on his belt. “Partner couldn’t either, for that matter. Said that there was some kind of interference”
Ridiculous.
“You expect me to believe that this—” Magne glances down at the stack of resumes in her hand, frowning. “— supposed twenty-year-old is too complicated for you or your Abra to get a proper read on?” People training their minds against psychic attacks is something that she’s seen in movies, but never heard about in real life. It’s hard to imagine that this girl, who Magne doubts is even as old as she says she is, has managed to do it.
Evidently Giran shares this sentiment, as the next thing he asks is if they’ve taken away all of her Pokemon, which they have. They even took away the obnoxious talking cell phone she carried around, though they still aren’t sure if it’s a machine or a Pokemon yet.
Before she tells Giran he can go, she asks him, “So, what do you think? Is she a spy?”
“If she is, she’s not like any that I’ve ever interviewed before.”
Magne pushes past the non-answer, looking at him levelly. “What’s your opinion?”
He hesitates, and this is the part of Giran that she’s never liked. He dances around issues and refuses to speak in clear terms, even when it’s about something as important as a potential spy. There’s a moment where neither of them say a word, the gentle hiss of Giran’s cigarette the only thing filling the silence as Magne looks through the one-way glass to where Hatsume’s sitting. She’s hunched over, a hand propping up her head and a sullen, bored look on her face. She stares at the door, fingers rapping impatiently against the table while her foot taps a hole into the floor.
“If you want my opinion... I don’t think that she’s a spy.” Giving a straight answer seems to physically pain him, and he doesn’t elaborate, but that’s fine. Magne’s of the same opinion. The girl is too conspicuous, and she conducts herself like she has no awareness of the situation she’s in—or like she doesn’t care.
And that’s not to mention the explosions.
When Magne finally enters the interrogation room, she’s all business. No good cop, no bad cop, just a domineering expression and a set of questions to which she needs answers. Where her associates have failed, she thinks, is that they have allowed themselves to get too involved in Hatsume’s game of cat and mouse. So, she learns from their mistakes, stands tall and taut, and doesn’t respond when the girl perks up at the sight of her and says, “You must be my boss!”
Unperturbed, Hatsume continues, “I hope you’ve read my resume. I told them to give you a copy, and I think you’ll find—”
Magne doesn’t let her finish. She asks, “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
Hatsume gives her a confused smile, but Magne doesn’t elaborate, folding her arms in front of herself. After watching the girl talk circles around her associates, there’s something satisfying about seeing her squirm for an answer.
She thinks about it for a second before saying, “Well, I found that if you apply the Pokemon-storing technology that already exists in Pokeballs to inanimate objects and program in exactly what you want them to store, you can trade bulk for specificity. It makes it really easy to store just about anything you need, in whatever quantity you need it.” She slips out of her bindings effortlessly to show the sleeves of her jacket, pointing to an innocuous black button. “This is where I keep my resumes.”
Magne had told herself she wouldn’t respond, but the answer is so contrary to what she expected that she forgets, eyebrows rising. She doesn’t have time to ask what Hatsume’s going on about before she pushes the button and a sheet of paper appears in her hand with a tiny flash of red light.
“Here,” she says as she hands the resume over, and then places it on the table between them when Magne doesn’t move to take it. “Mostly I just use it to store tools, but ever since I transferred to this branch I’ve been keeping my resumes on me, too. Just in case.”
“Ever since you what ?”
“Ever since I transferred from Silph Co. to the Team Rocket branch.”
“This isn’t a branch of…” Magne takes a breath to center herself. She picks her words carefully. “You realize that Team Rocket is criminal organization.” It’s not a question.
She bats her eyelashes. “Now that you mention it, I did get that impression during the hostile takeover of my former place of occupation.”
It sounds like a joke, but Magne can’t for the life of her understand what’s meant to be funny about this situation. Maybe Hatsume has a death wish, she thinks. That would explain the explosions, at least.
As if sensing the confusion, Hatsume’s expression mellows slightly, her voice losing its manic edge as she elaborates, “When I worked at Silph Co., it was all about corporate policies and trying to fit through loopholes. After seeing your company’s working conditions first-hand during the takeover, I thought that it might suit my research better.”
Magne almost corrects her—because it’s not exactly accurate to call Team Rocket a company—but as far as criminal organizations go, it actually operates surprisingly similarly. She pauses, sizing the girl up. The sudden sincerity seems genuine, but Magne reminds herself that not even Giran had been able to pick up on her tells. She looks from Hatsume’s hopeful smile to the shiny black buttons on her sleeves and wonders how much of what she’s hearing is true.
“You really want to work here?” she asks, to which Hatsume nods decisively.
“Please hire me.”
And Magne guesses that she’s just as bad as the rest, because the thought is tempting. She pushes it back with another, more pertinent, question. “Why can’t our psychics read your mind?”
Hatsume blinks. “Oh, that? It’s because of this baby.” She reaches into her pocket to pull out a long, black pen, clicking it a few times. “It radiates a dark-type aura, perfect for protecting your intellectual properties.”
When Magne gives her a skeptical look, she just grins.
“If you’re curious, I made it by reproducing the reactive enzymes that Umbreon produce when they fend off attacks, which I then altered and synthesized using some cells I collected from a dit…” She stops herself, slapping a hand over her mouth. Magne, realizing she’d begun to lead forward, straightens herself back at once.
“Sorry,” she says. “Until I sign a contract, I can’t tell you any more than that.”
“We don’t do contracts here. It’s not that kind of organization.”
Even as she says this, Magne feels hesitant. It’s clear that Hatsume knows what she’s talking about. Although she’s still not entirely convinced that the girl was the one to have made both the pen and the buttons, if there’s the slightest chance that she’s responsible for them, it would be a huge oversight to let her slip from their fingers. All the more so if she’s coming to them willingly.
So, just as Hatsume’s expression begins to sour, Magne continues. “I can see if my boss would be willing make an acception, though. Considering the… circumstances.”
Shigaraki isn’t going to be happy, but when was he ever?
And, in the event that Hatsume isn’t all she claims to be, Magne decides that they can deal with that then.