Names: Lauren and Diego Author: Steffan Alun (sha3(at)aber.ac.uk) Appearance: Lauren is tall and thin with short brown hair and green eyes. Diego is very short and quite podgy, with messy red hair and blue-green eyes. They're both 23 years old. Backstory: At the age of six, Lauren and Diego made a silent agreement to be together forever. Twelve years later, they joined Team Rocket. For years, they spent their time taking common Pokémon from Johto to sell in Kanto, where they were rarer, and vice versa, taking advantage of the fact that there wasn't much interaction between the countries. Mainly, these were Pokémon found in Game Corner, which they sold for cheaper. Eventually, however, the two countries became more united, and since trainers could visit both pretty easily, their job became unprofitable. When interaction with Hoenn became an option in Kanto, Lauren and Diego were among the first to make their way there, so that they could sell common Johto Pokémon there. Unfortunately, their plans failed miserably since they happened to pick Pokémon which were also available in Hoenn. They made several trips back and forth between the countries, but their most recent trip to Hoenn left them stranded, since their boss realised that more money was being spent on their cruises than was being made from their smuggling. Since their only Pokéball from home was stolen from them, they're now having to explore Hoenn more thoroughly and capture some Hoenn Pokémon to send home. Their boss was recently replaced by a man named Eric, who is believed to be either a hardened criminal and former drug dealer, or an ex-referee of Pokémon tournaments. The mystery continues. Either way, he's nasty. Personality and Relationship: Diego has the ethical code of a typical Rocket grunt; breaking the law is fun and worthwhile. Lauren, on the other hand, prefers not to break the law unless it's completely necessary and actually makes things easier for the pair. This means that while Diego is the driving force behind their crimes, Lauren's bullying of him has prevented them from ending up in prison. Over the course of the last seventeen years, the longest stretch of time they've spent further apart than hearing distance has been forty-seven minutes, which was when Lauren left a music exam early at the age of fifteen. Pokémon: Diego has a Geodude named Destiny, who had formed a bond with a man in Kanto before being forced to Hoenn. Diego believes she's named Density, is very fond of her and hopes she'll grow to like him. Lauren wants to sell her. Lauren has a Gulpin which she caught on the spur of the moment, and at the time of writing, she has done nothing with it. Generally speaking, their only interest in Pokémon is for smuggling purposes, so they have no motivation to catch Pokémon that are harder to find or harder to capture. Goals: Their main ambition seems to be to build a reputation for themselves as notorious criminals, and their target is therefore to obtain Pokémon that could be valuable to some people (which is practically every Pokémon). As a side project, Lauren wants to evolve Destiny into a Graveler so that she'll sell for more money.