Pallet Town was less a town and more a rumour of one. A dozen houses, a windmill, fenced gardens gone a little wild, and up on the low hill a big white building with a red roof and solar panels catching the morning. The whole place smelled of cut grass and woodsmoke. A man on a porch lifted a hand at them as they passed, the way people wave at strangers only in places where strangers are an event.
Ren walked beside Adam with the unconscious Pidgey cradled in both arms like a very grumpy loaf of bread.
"You know you can't keep it like that," Adam said.
"I caught it."
"You knocked it out.."
"It's mine." She adjusted her grip. The Pidgey twitched, dreaming of vengeance. "I decided."
And that, Adam thought, is the entire Delacroix tradition in four words.
[ For what it is worth, Host, by every rule of this world she is correct. ]
Don't encourage her.
The Professor
Professor Oak's laboratory was warm and cluttered and smelled of coffee and old paper, which was reassuring; some things were the same in every world worth visiting. The professor himself was exactly as Adam half-remembered him, silver-haired, brown coat, the specific tired cheer of a man who had explained the same three things to frightened ten-year-olds every morning for thirty years.
He blinked at the two of them. Adults. Adults, one of whom was holding an unconscious wild Pidgey.
"You're... a little older than my usual clients," Oak said carefully.
"Late bloomers," Adam said.
"We'd like to register as trainers," Ren said, in the tone she used for things that were going to happen whether or not the other party agreed.
Oak recovered admirably. He always did. He walked them through it, licences and photographs and a form Ren filled out with the faint suspicion of someone who had signed a great many contracts and trusted none of them. He handed each of them a red device the size of a paperback.
"Pokédex," he said. "It records the Pokémon you meet, and it's your trainer ID." He gave each of them a small box. "Five Poké Balls to start you off. I'm afraid that's all I can give you today. If you'd come three days ago I could have set you up with a partner, but..." He sighed the sigh of a man remembering something loud. "I had three young trainers through here at once. The last one overslept, showed up in his pajamas, and left with a Pikachu. Tore off up Route 1 two days ago with half the town watching. Ash. Good heart. Terrible mornings."
Two days, Adam thought, and something in him settled into place like a key finding its lock. So that's exactly where we are. Day two. He's somewhere north of here right now getting savaged by that Pikachu.
"Two days," he said aloud, mild. "We'll try to catch up."
"Oh, you're not racing him?" Oak looked between them, and some professorial instinct sharpened behind the tired eyes. He'd handed out a lot of Pokédexes. He knew what a beginner looked like, and these two did not look like beginners. They looked capable somehow. "...No. No, I don't suppose you are."
Ren set the Pidgey on the counter. It flopped.
"How do I make it official," she said.
Oak, to his credit, only hesitated a second. "You... tap an empty ball to it, while it's weakened. Which it certainly is. May I ask how you—"
Ren tapped a ball to the Pidgey. Red light, a wobble, a click. The Pokédex in her hand chimed.
PIDGEY, the Tiny Bird Pokémon. Registered to trainer: R. Delacroix.
She looked at the ball in her palm with an expression Adam had only ever seen her wear over a good weapon.
"Huh," she said softly. "That's satisfying."
"That's the whole point," Adam said. "That's how they get you."
---
Outside, on the lab steps, Adam did the one thing he was allowed to do.
The special quest had been very clear. No active powers. No Veil, no Theft, none of it. Earn this world's rewards the honest way, like a normal trainer would. He'd made his peace with that on Route 1. But Sage was permitted a single, passive courtesy: she could look, and she could show him what she saw.
He let her look at the Pidgey.
[ SCAN — Pidgey (R. Delacroix) ] Potential: Green Flying Affinity: B Ability: Keen Eye (its accuracy can't be dulled) Speciality: Gale Instinct (minor — a natural feel for the wind) Compatible Treasures: Sharp Beak, Sky Plate shard (partial) Possible Route: standard → Pidgeot; with Sky Plate, a wind-rider variant
"Okay, explain, what's up?" Ren said, because of course she'd noticed him go still. She always noticed.
He explained. Sage could grade a Pokémon: how far it could grow, what it was secretly good at, what rare things it could become if fed the right treasures and trained the right way. A ceiling, in a colour. White at the bottom, then Green, Blue, Purple, Black, and, in theory, Divine at the top.
"So," Ren said slowly, and he watched the exact moment she stopped being on vacation and started being a Delacroix at an auction, "you can see which ones are worth catching. Before we catch them."
"I can see which ones are worth catching," he agreed. "Yours is a Green. Which is good. That's a genuinely promising bird."
"Green is the second one from the bottom."
"It's a very good second-from-the-bottom!"
"I want a Blue," Ren said. "At minimum."
[ I like her, Host. She has the correct attitude. ]
You are supposed to be on my side.
---
They needed money, and the way you got money here was almost insultingly simple. You beat people, and they paid you. Adam had spent two years in worlds where winning a fight got you a funeral to attend; the idea that here it got you enough for lunch and a room was going to take some adjusting.
The first challenger found them, which saved time. A kid of maybe twelve on the road out of town, cap on backwards, planted himself in their path with the specific swagger of someone who had won two whole battles.
"You're trainers, right? I can tell. Battle me! Two hundred says my Rattata wipes the floor."
Adam looked at Ren. Ren looked at the kid. The kid noticed, with dawning uncertainty, that neither of the tall calm adults in front of him seemed remotely worried.
"He's got a Rattata," Adam murmured. "You've got a concussed Pidgey. Flying beats Normal on engagement range, your bird can disengage vertically, and it's angry. Send it up, let it dive."
"I know how a bird works, Adam."
She sent the Pidgey out. The Pidgey, upon discovering it had been captured, unconscious, by these people, took its fury out entirely on the Rattata. It was over in about nine seconds. The kid handed over two hundred Pokédollars with the stunned reverence of someone who has witnessed a natural disaster and been billed for it.
"What's your secret," he breathed.
"I'd rather not talk about it," Adam said.
[ First income logged, Host. At this rate you will be able to afford dinner in roughly forty more concussions. ]
We're going to need a bigger revenue model.
---
They sat on a fence rail at the edge of Pallet with a paper bag of food bought with a child's tuition, and Adam laid it out for her, because Ren planned better than he did and he'd learned long ago to leave it to her.
Most of the monsters he actually wanted weren't in this region at all. The best of them were scattered across the whole world, one here, one an ocean away, one on a cold island. So they'd travel. Collect. Take their time and grow a team properly, the slow way, bonding over a year instead of a weekend, because for once they had enough time to explore and achieve the goals the peaceful way, mostly. And at the end of it, when the team was formed and the two of them knew it in their bones that they were ready, they'd come back here and take the eight badges and the tournament it all led to.
"So it's a long trip," Ren said. "With battles for money, and monsters we pick on purpose, and a big competition at the end."
"That's the whole of it." He caught himself. "That's the plan."
"And you can't use any of your tricks the whole time?" Ren asked.
"Not one."
She grinned, slow and wicked, the grin that would make an L7 reconsider their life choices. "But I can."
"You are not supposed to be excited about that."
"I'm going to be so much better at this than you," Ren said serenely, "and I can't wait to see your face when my team beats yours."
He laughed, and meant it, this world is going to be so much fun.
Then he saw the shadow move.
It was nothing. It was less than nothing. At the edge of the tree line, where his own long morning shadow stretched across the grass, something in the dark shifted, a shape sliding through his shadow and out the other side, there and gone before his eye could finish arriving.
He went very still.
Sage.
[ I saw it. ]
And?
[ The threat is minimal. I have checked four times. There is nothing there. ] A pause, the kind she did not do often. [ There should be nothing there, Host, but something moved anyway. ]
Adam looked at the ordinary trees, gentle, harmless grass, and felt the old familiar thing uncoil pleasantly in his chest, the thing that was not fear and had never been fear.
"What?" Ren said, watching his face change.
"Nothing yet," he said, and stood, and dusted the crumbs off his hands. "Come on. Viridian's north. Let's go be tourists."
Behind them the windmill turned. Ahead the road ran on, and somewhere along it, patient in the dark under everything, a shadow that had noticed him waited to be found.
AN: If we get to 300 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 500, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123