[FIN] Cash-in-Hand

[Gwennythe]

Cash.
It wasn't one of Lin's favourite things, but it often turned out to be a necessity.
The world was turned in favour of trainers- registered trainers- and so Lin, unregistered as he was, found himself exploring as many options as he could think of in a quest for a little more legal tender; both legal and not so much, though he'd never really thought of himself as a criminal.

Today, though, was a day for honest work.
An advertisement had managed to catch his eye and he'd managed to get himself a little work, helping to clear a long-neglected yard for someone who had just moved into a previously abandoned property.

The elderly couple who'd placed the ad' were nice enough, if a little bit... out of touch with the world, he supposed.
They were kind, but he doubted they'd pay as well as they imagined they were.
Still, at least it was better than working for someone on the opposite end of the scale, even if he had to refuse cups of tea a little much.

Jeeves seemed to be enjoying himself; the grass type was happily using his vines to remove dead bracken from a hedge that looked long-choked.  

[Suudonym]

Ryuko wasn't a stranger to picking up temporary work at this point, though this was the first time she'd looked into the matter in the unfamiliar region of Kodo. She was glad to find that it was pretty much as straightforward as it had been in Kanto: find an ad, follow up, and show up on time. Unfortunately, the last point was one that she missed by a bit - not by much, but enough to warrant apologizing (she'd ditched her cellphone for cash once the service had been cut, so precision timekeeping was a bit of a challenge in recent times). What was frustrating was knowing that there was another hire who had already arrived and started, putting her in the undesirable position of having to apologize to them as well, and so it was with a frown that she proceeded through to the yard. Indeed, there was already somebody there.

"Uh, hey," she called awkwardly, surveying the area. Yeah, this place was a wreck, all right. "I guess you're on this job too? Sorry I'm late." Bleh, there. Addressing the red bug-type at her side, she jerked her head towards the flowerbed along the perimeter of the foundation, bordered with bricks and choked with weeds. The Scizor acknowledged her meaning and followed her forward. Seemed as good a place as any to start, since it looked like the hedges were being handled.  

[Gwennythe]

Lin currently had his arm thrust into the hedge, trying to pull out some brambles himself, despite the fact that his pokémon was doing the same job, apparently without worrying too much over thorns... Or perhaps having just forgotten they were there.

Snivy and human both turned their heads as Ryuko announced herself, the former giving a sweeping glance across girl and Scizor and offering a slightly formal bow, the latter giving a less formal, rather more enthusiastic form of greeting.

"Oh, well, hello miss! A pleasure to be working alongside a beautiful lady!" His eyes then found the Scizor and his gaze seemed to brighten a touch more.
"Oh wow. Nice to meet you both, actually! Haven't met many of those."
He pulled his hand from the brambles, while Jeeves rolled his eyes, walking to approach his co-worker.  

[Suudonym]

She paused, raising an eyebrow, and gave her eventual response in a flat tone, "...Uh huh. Nice to meet you too." 'Beautiful lady,' huh. This guy sure was a piece of work.

The Scizor, despite his inability to speak in reply, was more sociable than his trainer, bowing slightly in greeting. "That so?" Ryuko replied, willing to indulge in a polite amount of conversation. She gestured to the Snivy, "Where I'm from, those are even rarer though."  

[Gwennythe]

"Lin." He offered his name, along with his... somewhat scratched-up hand, in greeting.
"Oh? Jeeves has been with me for years... I don't know if his kind is all that rare around here- I've seen a few though. Scizor, right? Bug type. I like them. Where are you from?"

Jeeves seemed to appreciate the bow from the Scizor, pausing in what he was doing for just a moment to tilt his head toward the boy and roll his eyes in apology at the bug pokémon.  

[Suudonym]

She responded in kind to the offered hand as well as to the introduction, giving her own, "Ryuko." She nodded her confirmation and gave her answer, "We're from Kanto. Haven't been around these parts long enough to know what counts as common or not yet." Truthfully speaking, of course, she wasn't even all that familiar with Kanto's population - she hadn't paid a lot of attention to the whole trainer culture.

Senketsu nodded his head in sympathetic understanding; his own partner was behaving for the time being, but he apologized preemptively for the temper she had yet to show.  

[Gwennythe]

"Kanto? That's..." Which one was that? The well known one? He was pretty sure... "That's where most of the League stuff comes from right?"  

[Suudonym]

"Mm..." She ran her fingers through her hair contemplatively. "I guess? I know the League is a big deal there, but I'm not all that involved with it. East of Johto, south of Sinnoh... It's where the Indigo Plateau is, if you're into all that trainer stuff."  

[Gwennythe]

"Eeh... Not really." Lin admitted with a shrug. "But the League's all over here lately. I just wondered if it was the same there or worse."

He began to walk back toward the hedges, while Jeeves was already continuing with clearing up.
"Y'know, with all the Rocket stuff? Suddenly trainer centers and league people all over..."  

[Suudonym]

"I don't know enough about Kodo to make the comparison," she said, leaning down to tug at the weeds that proliferated the garden. The statement with which Lin followed up, however, gave her a moment of pause, her expression cool. "Team Rocket started out in Kanto," she replied, "but the most recent incident the region had with them was apparently more related to Kodo than to Kanto. They haven't been a problem over there in ages - or so the story goes."  

[Gwennythe]

Well... neither did he, probably, Lin supposed.
A year of being out and about, give or take a few months, and he still wasn't entirely up on everything about his home region... It was just so much bigger than just Sandalwood...

Still, that was very interesting.
"Huh... So, they started in Kanto? But aren't a problem? They got... kicked out? Any idea how? From that story? I've never heard it... They've been here as long as I can remember, I think..."  

[Suudonym]

"Oh yeah," she affirmed, "it's the kind of thing they teach in history classes, even." Not that she'd paid much attention to history class, but she remembered enough about the lessons to know to look into it when Team Rocket had suddenly become of interest to her. "Apparently a League trainer took them down singlehandedly. The story goes that the guy beat their boss in a pokemon battle and appealed to his trainer side or something, and their boss decided to disband the organization." She plucked the weeds at their bases, accumulating a small pile beside her. "They regrouped next door in Johto, but they didn't have a boss, so the League dismantled them pretty easily. As far as I know, that was the last the area heard from them."  

[Gwennythe]

"Huh." That sounded... unlikely.
"Is this actual history or just, um, what they teach? I... can't say I ever had a history class." The boy talked, but as he worked now, putting some effort into yanking out a particularly stubborn bramble.
"Either way, that doesn't seem to be something to work here. Every single time we almost get them, they're a damned step ahead... Would be nice if it were that simple though."  

[Suudonym]

She shrugged. "I assume it's real. Dunno why they'd lie about it, considering how totally useless it makes the regional police seem, but I guess it could be League propaganda or something." Trainer culture was stressed so much in Kanto that it honestly wouldn't have surprised her much.

"From what I've heard about them in Kodo, here they're a lot more like, you know... actual criminals," she commented. "During the Kanto takeover, they were kind of tame. One-on-one pokemon battles, all according to the rules, and if you beat them then they backed off. I'm guessing their new boss actually has a backbone."  

[Gwennythe]

"Huh... Well, might be true if they were like that." Lin looked perplexed. What an odd idea. "If they were like that here we'd have them beaten by now and long gone... They're more like... like some kind of terrorist organization here. Big, organised, well funded... The League moved in in the last few years because of them but you know I can't tell if that's made it better or worse? Now there are two big organised groups of people making life difficult."
For him, anyway; he was probably fairly certain most of his friends wouldn't have felt the same way.

Jeeves gave Lin a sharp look, just in case he was 'saying too much'. The pokémon was never sure just what would get the boy in trouble next.