âbeing tohjoâs pet vigilanteâ hi hello again! howâs it going? and Can I ask abt geo!lanceâs vigilante career?? heâs so busyâ
hi hello! i hope you've been doing ok! :D
the general background of geo!lance's vigilante career is that while he was champion the first time, before blue and red came to the plateau, he was under fuego's control and thus was unable to actively interfere with team rocket (and to a degree, fuego isolated him from what was going on--fuego was, after all, a member of the group himself).
but while they were sorting out the chaos of blue and red both beating the league within hours of each other, lance sat down with blue to ask him if he wanted the elite four position, and in the discussion that resulted blue essentially asked "where were you? why didn't you help us?"
and lance being lance, he took this as a personal failing. and maybe he couldn't fix it by fighting rocket itself, but he could talk to the hoard of stolen pokemon the police were trying to return and figure out where their homes were. so his first self-assigned mission there was basically just taking pokemon back to their trainers, or the people they lived with, or in the cases of poaching, back to their home environments. he got involved w the ranger union at this stage, since they do a lot of similar work, although he never actually joined them.
(rangers being different in geo compared to the games; they're more park rangers who maintain the fence network and run search and rescue when it's necessary)
but also working so closely with the team returning hundreds of pokemon, he was also right there when incidents involving remnants of team rocket or people trying to take advantage of the power vacuum came up--so he'd just throw himself and his team at that without really being asked. the police force was at something like 25% its original strength because so many of them were arrested for being part of rocket or taking kickbacks from rocket, so nobody really stopped him. god knows there's no hands left to deal with this, especially since a lot of their best pokemon trainers were rockets too.
so for a while there he's just running around in the background and occasionally turning up with someone's missing pet or interrupting an attempted holdup with a precisely aimed hyper beam. red doesn't make him stop bc he thinks fuego's noninterference mandate was stupid and there's less work if there's two of them to respond to these types of issues.
about a year after the end of the RBY plot, red abdicates his position and takes off to mt silver because the constant press harassment gets too much, and blue turns the champion position down so it falls on lance to keep things running, and instead of like. taking it easy he throws himself 100% into banning corporal punishment like whips and choke chains for pokemon and personally kicking the ass of anyone who tried to oppose him on that. which was kind of the point his reputation as tohjo's pet vigilante solidified, because he'd earned a lot of good will helping out so many people and most people, generally, do not think beating animals is a good thing.
And he sort of takes a break once that is settled, largely just chasing up leads sent to him by the ranger union for a bit... at least until there's a sudden uptick in thefts and poaching in the greater tohjo region again. they don't know it's archer's rocket at first, it takes a couple years for anyone to start wearing the uniforms again, but lance goes hunting the moment he starts hearing about them skulking about again.
it's probably worth mentioning that the elite four during this time only occasionally join in--lance can justify working without paying himself, but he can't justify asking them for their time without paying them, and the full extent of what's going on is something that's not obvious even to him at the time.
but the fact that he is one guy trying to take care of everything is precisely why he can't take them out alone. archer is smart enough to split rocket into several smaller groups, which keeps lance bouncing around the greater tohjo region and gives the other groups more time to work without lance and his team crashing the party. so the main group working in johto escapes his notice until the lake of rage--because the radio signal's effect was too obvious to be hidden.
(there's definitely more minor skirmishes w rocket in johto, but it's largely gold and silver taking care of that, mostly silver. silver is VERY aggressively against rocket returning lol)
and after lance gets himself shot raiding a warehouse north of vermilion gold starts joining him on missions--notably, almost entirely in kanto. neither of them cotton onto what's going on there at the time. but when the radio tower incident occurs, the kanto division of rocket stages an attack on the lavender tower--a larger, flashier force meant to lure lance away from goldenrod so they can get their message out without him interfering. (unfortunately for them, gold is chilling in blackthorn at the time, so he's able to respond to that incident w silver's help lol)
and he doesn't really stop even after rocket gets broken up the second and final time, because he has problems. he can't say no to a sad kid who lost their meowth or leave an injustice unaddressed. even after he stops being active indigo champion someone can still call or text him some problem they're having and he'll be there in fifteen minutes on dragonite back to sort it out
