Nekou Lalume

* Current day
* Past, by Matori
* Unova

**Nekou Lalume**, also known as **Nekou Langley**, is a major protagonist in the *Operation GEAR* series. She is a member of Team Rocket who dreams of living in comfort, and initially joins Matt's group to repay a debt incurred during the events of *The Firestorm Rebellion*. Within Team Rocket, she is identified as **Agent 013** and is the leader of the Razor Claw Squad.

She has another personality deep within her mind known as **Alter-Nekou**, which causes her to undergo a monstrous physical transformation when it takes control.

## History

Much of Nekou's early life remains unknown. She has few, if any, memories prior to finding herself on the streets of Mahogany Town in Johto at the age of fourteen. She stole food to survive, which led to her first encounter with Team Rocket when she robbed the shop being used as a cover for their base; this was also the first time she ate a Rage Candy Bar, leading to her addiction to them in the present day. Team Rocket captured her, and she was brought before their boss Giovanni; given the opportunity to pay back her debt, she was inducted into Team Rocket at the standard rank of Grunt.

Her time as a Grunt was not a happy one. Unable to assert herself, she tried to shrink into the background to remain unseen, ate very little, and grew sickly as a result. This eventually led to an incident where her other self took control for the first time in response to another Grunt bullying her and violently attacked him, causing him fatal injuries. By the time she regained consciousness, she had been placed into containment in an isolation tank in Dr. Zager's laboratory until what would be done with her was determined. She spent a long time alone in the tank, during which her other self spoke to her and introduced itself, conversing with her through her mind. This period of isolation caused her a great deal of trauma, leading her to become obsessed with living her life to the fullest and left her utterly terrified of death.

Eventually, she was released to the custody of Ariana Lalume, a Team Rocket Executive, who took her in as an adoptive mother figure. Nekou quickly grew immensely attached to Ariana, who she came to identify as "Maman." Ariana taught her how to live her life more for herself, and Nekou slowly began recovering under her care. They eventually began going out on missions together, the first being to spy on Team Galactic's activity at the Veilstone Game Corner. She aquired her first Pokémon during this time, a Sneasel with genetically enhanced intelligence that had escaped from a Team Rocket laboratory, who she nicknamed Marie.

Once Nekou had sufficiently stabilized and recovered, she was placed in command of her own unit under Ariana's observation, so she could be a more productive Team Rocket member without conflicting with other members who couldn't get along with her. Given the choice of who to recruit into this unit, she selected shy analyst Ada, former actor Trevor Hastings, and botanist Professor Rosalie to join it, dubbing it the Razor Claw Squad in tribute to Marie. Having risen in rank, she chose the designation "Agent 013" for herself, amused by the number's usual link to bad luck.

The Razor Claw Squad was assigned a mission by Stacia to travel to the Unova region and infiltrate the Nacrene City museum to gather intelligence on a powerful artifact with the potential to help Team Rocket conquer the world. For this infiltration, Nekou assumed the alias of "Jane Hammond," who was supposedly a researcher from Malie University in the Alola region. She was shown a Meteonite by museum director Lenora, gathering information that other members of Team Rocket would use later on to steal and replace the sample in the museum's possession. A short time later, she gained permission for a second infiltration, this time of the Antimony Research Lab, where a public function announcing research on the Meteonite's properties was to be held. She approached and pretended to seduce Colress Antimony, the son of labratory directors Faba and Wicke, as the Jane Hammond character so Rosalie could remotely copy his mainframe access card. Once this task was complete, she disabled Colress using a dose of Stun Spore and left him in a coat room while she departed the party. Jessie, James and Meowth covertly broke into the laboratory wing of the facility, which was left unguarded due to all its personnel being at the function, and used the stolen credentials to download the lab's database. Nekou then rejoined the rest of the Razor Claw Squad at the Driftveil Luxury Suites hotel, where they had established a base of operations, to wait while Giovanni, Dr. Zager and Pierce carried out the final stages of the mission in the Desert Resort and Castelia City. When Team Plasma attacked them in Castelia City, Giovanni, Zager and Pierce retreated from Unova, but contacted the Razor Claw Squad and picked them up on their way out.

Nekou was part of Team Rocket's attack on the Battle Frontier's inaugural tournament at the Indigo Plateau in *The Firestorm Rebellion*. Prior to the operation, she encountered Matt Chiaki and Olivia Mistbloom, taking an immediate liking to the latter while stealing money from the former to buy herself a feast; while she bought the food to satisfy her own hunger, she also used it as an excuse to monitor the activity in the stadium building while other Team Rocket members carried out the actual attack. Matt eventually discovered her theft and confronted her over it, leading to her joining his group, supposedly as a bodyguard, to pay the debt back. By the conclusion of *The Victory Star of Fate*, her superiors, aware of Matt's connections to Polaris through Mercury, quietly assigned her to stay and monitor him as Team Rocket prepared to go to war with the cult.

Over the course of *The Angel of Reckoning*, she grew closer to Matt, Olivia and the others she traveled with. Her bond with Olivia grew into a sisterly one, while despite starting out with a playfully antagonistic relationship with Matt, she slowly came to have a deeper friendship with him. As Ariana's illness worsened, Nekou became unstable and increasingly found herself turning to Matt for emotional support.

The wake of Operation Atlas marked a signficant turn in her character. Having been badly wounded in a fight with the Shadow Triad, she succumbed to Alter-Nekou and allowed her other self to take control, leaving her traumatized once the switch reverted. Over the next week, as she recovered from her injuries in HR-E on the way to Olivine City, she found Matt's copy of *The Prince and the Soul-Heart* and spent a day reading it. This tale profoundly resonated with her, leading her to begin getting closer to Matt as she wanted to understand him better. Growing increasingly lonely and distressed, she snuck into his sofa bed in HR-E's cockpit, where she confided in him her nightmares of being chased on the streets of Lumiose City despite never having been to the Kalos region. Matt made a promise to her that once Polaris was stopped they would travel to Lumiose to make better memories there, initially prompting Nekou to angrily call herself a monster but soon become receptive to his efforts to connect with her. She then began routinely sleeping next to him, over the following days informing him that a stone in his possession was actually a Salamencite and confiding in him her belief that the screaming woman she regularly dreams of might be her real mother. Nekou also helped Anabel Mistbloom find the drive to join their traveling group in the wake of Polaris's hijacking of FlareNet's inaugural broadcast.

In *The Iron Maiden*, Nekou was forced to reveal her ties to Team Rocket to the others, due to Olivia needing treatment for a seizure that Rosalie could provide. Over the course of the following chapters, this led to increased tensions among the group as they debated whether or not Nekou could still be trusted. For her part, Nekou insisted that she would never let anyone harm Olivia, while Anabel remained wary and Matt seemed to still have some level of faith in her. Later, while Matt went to challenge Ethan at the Battle Submarine, Nekou set out with her teammates on Operation Dreadnought, a mission to steal data and Pokémon from Polaris's Adenosine Base. This mission climaxed in a showdown pitting her and Ariana against Colress and Jeunes, in which Ariana suffered terrible injuries. In turn, Nekou harnessed Alter-Nekou's power and destroyed the Mirage Mewtwo responsible, only to discover that Colress and Jeunes were not present at all, but instead transmitting themselves there from another facility, the Guanosine Base. Ariana, too injured to make it back to Olivine City, sacrificed herself to destroy the Adenosine Base, while Nekou was evacuated aboard Team Rocket's helicopter, devastated by her beloved mother figure's death.

The loss of Ariana sent Nekou into an even more destabilized state, and over the course of *Emotions Come, I Don't Know Why*, she began to suffer a nervous breakdown. Drinking even more heavily than usual, she eventually sent Marie to bring Matt - who had been devastated himself by information gleaned from Ethan in *Eternal Flame* - to her room in the abandoned hotel Team Rocket was using as a base. Their conversation started off awkwardly, and when Matt gave her the Mimikyu doll he had purchased as a gift from the Olivine Thrifty Megamart earlier, she forcefully asserted it to be one of her "precious things" due to the fact he'd given it to her. This overt emotion led him to conclude that he was seeing her true self. Nekou requested that he play cards with her, admitting that she was lonely and just wanted someone to keep her company. They spent a fair deal of time playing, with both drinking and trying to make small talk so they could avoid dealing with the real issues bothering them. That reticence did not last forever. Matt eventually opened up about the events aboard the Battle Submarine, and doing so broke the ice between them, leading them to open up to each other more than they ever had before. Drunk and emotional, Nekou cracked and acted on her feelings for him, and in their shared state of grief, they admitted their mutual attraction and spent the night together.

The next morning, Nekou tried to come to terms with what had happened between them, an issue not helped by Alter-Nekou's presence taunting her. Unable to process her emotions, she fled, first going to gorge herself at Olivine Café before leaving with the rest of Team Rocket to investigate the appearance of Genesect near the Lake of Rage. When Team Rocket and Matt's group aligned to face Genesect, its controller, the cybernetically-enhanced trainer RB-3, shot her with poison darts that suppressed her abilities and captured her for Colress to experiment on. Deep in the Guanosine Base, Colress locked her in a tank similar to the one she had been imprisoned within in the past, discovering something strange about her genetic makeup as he began his tests. The similarity to her previous captivity caused her trauma to flare up, leaving her susceptible to Alter-Nekou's influence. She experienced a series of flashbacks to what seemed to be her childhood, where she was kept in a cold, sparsely furnished room and forced to study materials far beyond those appropriate for her apparent age, was injected with a serum that caused her body to burn, and had her back slashed by a researcher's Binacle. The overwhelming trauma caused her to succumb to Alter-Nekou and undergo a fuller transformation than before, and with Alter-Nekou in control of her body, she broke out of the tank and went on a rampage. By the time Matt's group and Ada reached the lab to rescue her, she had already destroyed it and violently attacked Colress. In response, Colress reactivated RB-3 and Genesect to recapture her. Memories from Nekou's life prompted Alter-Nekou to next attack Archer, but Genesect intervened, allowing Archer to escape as Alter-Nekou fought the cyborg Pokémon. After Matt caught Genesect to stop its rampage, he and Olivia were able to break through to Nekou's true self, freeing her from Alter-Nekou's control. Though relieved to see them, she was overcome with shame for her actions while under Alter-Nekou's influence.

## Pokémon

Lenore's known moves are Pluck, Thief, Thunder Wave and Attract, and her ability is Super Luck.

## Relation to Canon

Nekou is an original character who does not have a canon counterpart. However, in *Team Rocket VS. Team Plasma: Best Wishes From the Past*, she is added to the storyline of *Pokémon the Series: Black & White* and plays a role in several canon events. Her most explicit crossover into canon comes in a scene from episode 14, *A Night in the Nacrene City Museum!*. In this episode, the group of Ash Ketchum, Iris and Cilan arrive in Nacrene City and discuss what they will do there in front of an art gallery. A black-haired woman wearing a black sun hat and pink dress can be seen speaking on a phone in the gallery's entrance in this scene; the *Operation GEAR* series canon depicts this woman as Nekou.

## Trivia

* Nekou's surname, Lalume, comes from the Edgar Allan Poe story *Ulalume*.
* The nicknames Nekou gives to her Pokémon are almost universally Poe references as well:
	+ Marie, her Sneasel, is named after *The Mystery of Marie Rogêt*.
	+ Camille, her Zorua, is named after Camille L'Espanaye from *Murders in the Rue Morgue*.
	+ Edgar, her Duskull, is named after Edgar Allan Poe himself.
	+ Madeline, her Pumpkaboo, is named after Madeline from *The Fall of the House of Usher*.
	+ Lenore, her Murkrow, is named after Poe's poem of the same name.
	+ Dalian, her Gothorita, is the only one not named for a work by Poe or anything otherwise related to him. She is named after the protagonist of the same name from *The Mystic Archives of Dantalian*.
* Nekou's alias for the Unova mission, Jane Hammond, is a reference to the character of John Hammond from the novel and film *Jurassic Park*.
* Both pairs of glasses Nekou has been seen wearing are worn by Mari Illustrious Makinami in the *Rebuild of Evangelion* film series.
* Nekou's trench coat outfit she first acquires in Goldenrod City in *The Angel of Reckoning* is a combination of the Trench Coat Dress from the *Pokémon X and Y* video games and Giovanni's outfit from *HeartGold and SoulSilver* and *Black 2 and White 2*.
* Nekou's Sneasel, Marie, is referred to as a "data Sneasel" by her in *Emotions Come, I Don't Know Why*. This is a reference to the character Ein in *Cowboy Bebop*, who is referred to as a "data dog." Both also have artificially enhanced intelligence given to them by scientific experiments they escaped from before being taken in by a main character.