The transformation of Slumbering Town moved like the sea breeze along the western coast: quiet, steady, and impossible to stop once it had begun.
In half a month, under the combined effort of Unova craftsmen and their Pokémon, the dilapidated fishing port had become something unrecognizable.
Steam-powered machinery arrived at the harbor and filled it with purposeful noise. The narrow old docks were widened and reinforced until they could accommodate several large steamships at once.
Bunnelby and Machamp worked in tandem to lay wide, flat streets throughout the city, the surfaces clean and even. Along the roadways, cold-hardy trees transplanted from Unova carried a faint fragrance in the wind.
The damaged buildings were repaired and rebuilt. Outside the town's edge, on the vast stretch of previously useless land, people and Pokémon broke ground together.
Ground-type Pokémon turned the earth in broad, efficient sweeps. Farmers directed Tauros through the furrows. High-quality wheat seed went into the prepared soil. Oddish and Pansage moved through the rows, settling nutrients into the ground and accelerating growth through their natural abilities.
The people of Slumbering Town who had been living here through all of it stood at the edges of the fields and watched. He had not deceived them. The lord from Unova had done exactly what he said he would: helped them clear land, rebuild homes, and then given that land to the people who had worked it. That was real. That had actually happened.
As night fell, the city lord's mansion found itself buried under a growing pile of offerings from the townspeople. Eggs, vegetables, smoked sausages, bottles of local beer.
Chelsea stared at it. "Your Majesty, what do we do with all of this?"
Lucien smiled. "It's the goodwill of the people who live here. Accept it, Chelsea."
"Yes, Your Majesty!" Chelsea immediately called his people over to move everything into the storeroom.
The commoners who had been waiting to see what happened stood at a distance and watched the exchange, and a collective sigh of relief moved through the group. The lord had not rejected the gifts. He really was as they had thought. He really was that kind.
Though the renovation work was nearly complete, Lucien showed no sign of considering his role here finished. Every morning, he took Serperior out on patrol through the city. Some days he walked out to the farmland to talk with the farmers.
Other days he went to the fishing harbor and asked about the fishermen's lives. Occasionally he stopped at a street corner simply to watch the children playing around a Jigglypuff, the Pokémon humming softly while small hands reached up to touch it without any fear.
In half a month of living together, the Galar children who had once been too frightened to approach had turned these Pokémon into their closest companions.
Under Lucien's direct involvement, the city had grown into something genuinely alive.
But the quiet did not last uninterrupted.
One afternoon, several trading caravans from nearby cities came through the road toward Slumbering Town. The lead merchant, a broad man named Gus who had been running border routes for more than a decade, looked up at the town ahead and stopped his camel dead in its tracks.
"Have we taken a wrong turn?" his young attendant asked.
Gus said nothing, staring. Then he spotted a familiar face at the gate. One of the regular guards, a man named Boggs, was standing there with an expression of excited pride that Gus had never seen on him before.
"Boggs!" Gus pushed forward. "What in the world happened here?"
Boggs could barely contain himself. "All of this is His Majesty Lucien's doing!"
"His Majesty who?"
"The King of the Unova Kingdom, from across the sea! Our King imprisoned his trading fleet, and His Majesty Lucien came alone to Galar, faced the entire Corviknight army with a single Pokémon, and defeated them. King Paty had no choice but to cede Slumbering Town to Unova as settlement."
Gus and the merchants with him went still.
"Does that mean this town is no longer under Galar's authority?" someone said.
Boggs's expression shifted into something firm and entirely sincere. "We'd rather live under His Majesty Lucien than go back to what we had before."
Gus looked at the gate, looked at Boggs, and after a long pause, clicked his camel forward. "Take me inside."
The caravan passed through the gate, and one by one, every person in it lost the ability to speak.
The camels stopped on their own. The young attendants let their reins go slack.
This was not the Slumbering Town that Gus had been stopping at for ten years.
The road beneath the animals' feet was smooth, flat stone, not a pothole remaining, not a trace of the standing mud that had always made the old town feel sodden and grey.
The air carried cold flowers and clean wood rather than the smell of refuse.
The buildings on either side of the road were repaired, several of them newly built in brick and stone with clear glass in the windows. Under the eaves, people were laying fish and grain out to dry in the sun. The streets were busy, the kind of busy that felt purposeful rather than desperate.
Unova soldiers moved through the city in steady patrols, swords secured at their sides, not raising their voices at anyone they passed. The contrast with the Galar Royal Guards that every merchant on this route knew well was stark enough that several of the attendants simply stopped and stared.
In the town square, a market was in full operation. The people browsing it still wore rough, practical clothing, but their faces were different. Open. Unhurried. Genuinely interested in what was in front of them. And on the stalls, goods that none of them recognized: things that had come from Unova.
"Boss," the young attendant managed, his voice barely working, "is this actually Slumbering Town? Have we wandered into somewhere else?"
Gus didn't answer. He pulled his camel to the side of the road, found a fisherman tidying up his stall, and asked directly, his voice rough.
"What happened here? The Unova people came in and really didn't cause trouble? They gave land back? Distributed food?"
The fisherman straightened up and looked at him with the face of someone who had been waiting for exactly this question.
"Trouble? His Majesty Lucien and the Pokémon treated us better than our own family ever managed to." His voice carried the heat of genuine feeling. "Before, under the Galar King, we handed over seven-tenths of everything we caught or grew.
Miss a payment and you were taken for labor. Life was hard beyond describing. But now His Majesty Lucien has abolished the head tax and the grain tax entirely."
"Land divided and distributed, taxes abolished, free healing from Pokémon when you're sick, I never dared imagine a life like this," the fisherman said, gesturing toward a group of Chansey not far away who were treating a cluster of villagers.
The Chansey moved through them surrounded by soft pink healing energy, pressing gentle hands to injuries, and the people who had been wincing and covering their wounds were straightening up and bowing in gratitude before the treatment had even finished.
"And His Majesty has said that once the harbor construction is complete, he will open long-distance trade routes for us. Our fish and grain from Slumbering Town can be sold directly into the Unova Kingdom. We'll earn real money." The fisherman's voice had taken on the quality of someone describing something that still felt slightly impossible. His eyes, when he spoke of Lucien, held unguarded reverence.
"All of us here hope His Majesty stays. None of us want to go back to how things were."
Gus stood beside his camel and listened to all of it without speaking.
He had traveled trading routes across the north and south of Galar for more than a decade. He had never, in all that time, seen a ruler treat the lowest class of people with this kind of basic consideration, let alone distribute land to them, remove their tax burden, and invite Pokémon to live alongside them as partners rather than tools.
Things like that simply did not happen. Except that here, in front of him, they were happening.
The caravan members left their camels at the edge of the road and wandered through the city on foot, led by curiosity. They watched Unova craftsmen working alongside local carpenters on the new trading post.
They watched Pokémon carrying building materials alongside human laborers. They watched the faces of the residents of Slumbering Town: genuinely relaxed, genuinely smiling, in ways that Gus had not seen on the faces of common people in a very long time.
He walked to the harbor and stood looking at the wide, reinforced docks, the several Unova steamships moored neatly along the shore, the workers moving grain and farming tools and cloth off the ships in organized, steady columns.
He thought of what Boggs had said at the gate. We'd rather live under His Majesty Lucien.
Standing here, Gus understood it completely.
He stayed in Slumbering Town for two days. During that time, he completed his transactions with the Unova merchants over the furs and minerals and goods he had brought. The prices were fair. The process was clean. No pressure, no exploitation, no back-and-forth maneuvering.
Before he left, he bought several bags of the high-quality grain being produced in Slumbering Town's new fields and packed them with care for the journey home. He wanted his family to taste it.
As Gus's caravan crossed back onto the Galar mainland, the merchants talked the entire way, telling every town and settlement they passed through what they had seen.
"The western coast, Slumbering Town, it's like a different world entirely."
"The King of Unova has given them tax-free land, Pokémon helping with the work, free treatment when they're sick, enough food for everyone."
"The ordinary people there live better than the servants of noble houses."
The words spread quickly, faster than any official announcement could have traveled. In town after town across Galar, people who had been living under crushing taxes and persistent hunger heard what was happening in Slumbering Town, and something lit up in their eyes.
Some began packing their belongings. Families loaded what they could carry and started moving toward the western coast, looking for a place where the promises being described might actually be kept.
Word eventually reached the Galar Royal City.
In the council chamber, the atmosphere had gone tight and quiet. Paty IV sat on the throne with a report in his hand and an expression that made his ministers keep their eyes on the floor. The only sound in the room was careful breathing.
"Your Majesty, the story of Slumbering Town has spread across the entire Kingdom," an elderly minister said, stepping forward with visible effort. "People everywhere are moving toward it. If this continues, Galar will become impossible to govern."
"Lucien presents a friendly face while systematically pulling our people away from us," another minister added. "Your Majesty, give the order. Let us lead an army to retake Slumbering and drive the Unova people out."
"We absolutely cannot act rashly." A third minister moved forward to intercept the argument. "Slumbering Town is now a city full of people living in peace and stability. If we send troops, we won't just face protests: we will break the peace agreement with Unova and destroy what little goodwill remains.
And beyond that, Unova's military capacity is not something we can match. Lucien alone routed our Corviknight Legion. Our people already know what happened. If war breaks out now, the country will collapse from within before any enemy reaches the capital."
Paty IV said nothing. His fingers tapped the armrest of the throne in a slow, methodical rhythm.
He had known, when he signed the agreement, that ceding Slumbering Town was a loss. But he had calculated it as a minor one. A remote, neglected fishing port with no strategic value, offered up to satisfy an angry foreign king and preserve the peace.
He had not imagined that within a single month, that remote fishing port would be transformed into a prosperous, functioning community that was now drawing his own subjects away by the hundreds.
He had underestimated Lucien completely. He could admit that, at least to himself.
Retaking Slumbering Town was not a realistic option. Lucien had crushed the Corviknight army alone with one Pokémon. Now Lucien had the love of an entire city's population behind him, Unova soldiers garrisoned throughout it, and Pokémon capable of ending any military engagement before it properly began.
If Galar marched on Slumbering Town, the result would be military defeat and popular revolt simultaneously. The people whose hearts were already wavering would be lost entirely.
Paty IV sat very still on his throne and felt the particular cold of a man who has been outplayed without a single battle being fought.
Lucien's approach was more dangerous than any army. He had not conquered with weapons. He had simply treated people decently, and the people had done the rest themselves.
After a long silence, Paty IV spoke.
"Issue an order to all regions: taxes reduced by fifty percent immediately. Open the granaries and distribute grain to stabilize the population. No one is to be prevented from traveling freely." He paused. "And prepare a formal delegation to carry congratulations to Slumbering Town, acknowledging His Majesty Lucien's effective stewardship of the city."
He could only endure. He could only yield, for now, and wait.
Galar was no longer in a position to resist Unova. Paty IV understood that clearly. All he could do was watch, and adjust, and try to survive long enough to see whether the situation might eventually shift in his favor.
...
STONESZZ
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