Chapter 6 – Into Town (Part 2)
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The bell above the general store door chimed as it swung shut behind him.
For a moment, David just stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the brightness, the weight of the sacks settling on his shoulders and the backpack pressing between his shoulder blades.
Then he noticed the three teenagers.
They were clustered by the water trough across the street, doing that waiting, but not waiting, not-waiting, which meant they'd been waiting quite a while.
One, a sandy-haired boy in a backwards cap, kicked at the dirt with his boot, a Poké Ball clipped proudly at his belt. A girl with a dark ponytail and a faded hoodie bounced a Poké Ball from hand to hand, nerves written plainly across her face. The third boy, taller, leaned against the trough's post, arms folded, a Hoothoot perched on his shoulder, one eye half-open.
As soon as he stepped out, all three sets of eyes snapped to him, then hurriedly tried to pretend they hadn't.
"Uh," the boy in the cap said. "Hey. You're…Ryder, right?"
"I was last time I checked," David said. "David's fine."
The girl elbowed him. "Told you," She muttered, not quietly.
The tall boy just watched, guarded, while his Hoothoot blinked slowly, giving David a long, measuring look.
"I'm Len," the cap boy blurted. "This is Mira. That's Tom."
Mira gave him a small nod full of barely contained electricity. Tom lifted his chin in the universal teenage greeting of 'I care, but I will never admit how much.'
"Nice to meet you," David said. "You three trainers?"
"Yeah," Mira said quickly. "Well. We're starting. We've got partners, and we do local battles, and, um…" Her gaze flicked to the Poké Balls at his belt. "We saw you on TV. A lot."
"We're not asking for a match," Len added hastily. "We're not that dumb."
Tom made a very small noise that might have been; I'd risk it.
"We were just wondering if maybe…" Mira's fingers twisted in the hem of her hoodie. "If you're staying…are you gonna open a Gym? Or a training place? Or…?"
They looked at him like he'd stepped out of a poster.
He thought of the half-cleared orchard, the stream that still needed shoring, the stone pile currently offending Nidoking.
"Right now," he said, "I'm opening a farm."
"A farm?" Len echoed, like he'd said, spaceship.
"Stonebrook Acres," David said. "Out on the east road. My grandfather's place."
Mira's eyes widened. "That's yours? With all the old berry trees and the field that floods sometimes?"
"Yeah," he said. "It's…a mess. I'm trying to make it less of one."
He saw the disappointment flicker.
"I'm going to need help," he said. "Not yet. I have to make sure half the property isn't a health hazard first. But once the berry trees are under control and the fences aren't death traps, I'll need hands for harvest. People who don't panic when a Pokémon brushes up against them. People who can listen."
Len straightened. "We can listen," he said.
"Sometimes," Mira muttered.
Hoothoot made a derisive little hoot.
"I'll put a notice up when I'm ready," David said. "It'll probably say something like 'Seasonal work, low pay, you will get filthy, occasional supervised training as hazard compensation.' If that sounds like fun, we'll talk."
Mira practically vibrated. "For real?"
"For real," he said. "I'm not going back to the League. But I'm not going to let everything I learned rot in my head either."
Len chewed on that, then blurted, "You're not going back? Like…ever?"
The safe answer hovered. I'm taking time. Never say never.
"No," David said. "I'm not."
Len's face fell for half a second, then reshaped itself around that new world. Mira's eyes softened into something more like respect than awe. Tom nodded once, as if that matched what he'd already decided.
"Guess that means we're stuck with Cynthia," Mira said.
"Could do worse," David replied.
"Couldn't do much better," Tom added.
Hoothoot blinked very slowly, which David took as agreement.
He hitched Sack One higher on his right shoulder and Sack Two on his left, feeling the straps of the backpack bite in.
"I should get this home before my team decides fence posts are food," he said. "Nice meeting you three."
"You too," Len said.
"Bye!" Mira added, too loud.
Tom lifted two fingers.
David had taken a few steps when Mira blurted, "Can we come watch?"
He paused, turned back.
"When you're fixing things," she said, words tumbling over each other. "At the farm. We won't get in the way. I just—" she flailed.
Len groaned quietly. Tom watched David for his reaction.
He thought about three teenagers sitting on a fence watching him hack at dead branches and argue with the drainage.
"You stay outside the fences unless I say otherwise," he said. "You don't touch tools or gates. If one of my Pokémon tells you to move, you move. Deal?"
"Yes," Mira said immediately.
"Yeah," Len echoed.
Tom nodded once.
"Then…sometimes," David said. "Not every day. But you can come watch."
They lit up like someone had flipped a switch.
He escaped before anyone asked for autographs.
Nurse Joy looked up. For a second, her expression was simply polite. Then recognition landed.
"David," she said. "Well. That answers that rumour."
"Hey, Joy," he said.
She came around the counter, hands on her hips, and gave him a look that combined professional assessment with older-sister exasperation.
"You look tired," she pronounced. "But not League tired. That's an improvement."
"Farm tired," he said. "Different brand."
"I heard about your grandfather," she said, voice gentler. "And Stonebrook Acres. I was worried some company would snap it up and pave half the valley."
"Not if I can help it," he replied.
She nodded, approving, then flicked her gaze to his belt. "Everyone okay?"
"So far," he said. "They're working hard, but I'm not pushing them. I figured I'd stock up on potions and status stuff before I do something stupid like poke a Beedrill nest in the orchard."
"At least you recognise the word 'stupid' now," she said. "That's growth."
She helped him pick out a small selection: a couple of Potions, Antidotes, Burn Heals, a pair of Revives. He added them carefully to the backpack, tucking the medicine case between wrapped cheese and coffee.
As she rang things up, she glanced at her terminal.
"Your ID still flags ex-Champion," she said. "Priority assistance. If something goes wrong out there—injury, wild Pokémon incident—you call. You don't decide to be noble and wait until you think it's 'bad enough.'"
He met her eyes.
"I won't," he said.
"Good," she said. "Cynthia would probably kill me if I let you bleed out in an orchard after all the trouble, she went through stealing your title. And she doesn't even know I exist."
He snorted. "She didn't steal it. I handed it over."
"Try telling the commentators that," Joy said lightly. "Last week they were replaying your final match again. Whole segment about 'the prodigal Champion hiding on some little farm out in the sticks.' You made half the waiting room late for their appointments."
His heartbeat did that annoying skip again, but he lifted a shoulder.
"Figured I'd let her keep the spotlight," he said.
"Spotlight's not all it's cracked up to be," Joy replied. "Screens don't show what it does to people. If you're going to break yourself now, at least let it be on something that grows back."
She handed over his small bag of medicines and the receipt.
"Don't vanish again," she added, softer. "We're used to seeing you on the news. I'd rather see you in here buying Antidotes than as a headline."
"I'll try not to," he said.
Outside, the sun had climbed higher, sharpening shadows. The sacks on his shoulders felt heavier now—feed, flour, wire, tools—and the backpack was a solid, warm weight against his back.
He walked through town, nodding to a couple of people who nodded back, and kept going until the houses thinned and the hedges took over.
When the last rooftop finally dropped behind a low rise, and the only witnesses were a few Starly and a far-off flock of Spearow, David let out a slow breath and unclipped a familiar Poké Ball.
"Alright," he said quietly. "Time to share the load."
He tossed the ball up. Red light burst, then shrank into Flygon's long, sleek form. She hovered at his shoulder height for a moment, humming, lenses whirring as she glanced over the sacks and backpack.
"High and gentle," David said. "And—hang on."
He set Sack Two—the one with wire, nails, seed, soap, and the hoe handle—down on the grass and dug into one of the side pockets of his backpack. A coil of sturdy rope came out, the kind every travelling trainer accumulated without quite remembering where it originated.
He looped the rope around Sack Two, tying a snug harness with a knot he'd learned from a Rock-climbing guide years ago. Two short "handles" sat at the top, just right for a set of careful claws.
Flygon watched, amused, tail swaying.
"Lightest of the two," he said, tightening the last knot. "Wire and tools, not feed. Think you can manage?"
Flygon trilled, dipped in the air, and hooked her foreclaws through the rope handles. She lifted experimentally; the sack rose without strain, dangling neatly beneath her.
"Show-off," David said, but his shoulders already felt better with only the one sack on his right and the backpack on his back. "High and gentle, remember. We don't need rumours about a rogue Flygon dropping soap on people's Tauros."
She chirped again and climbed, keeping the sack steady beneath her as she settled into a lazy, high loop above the road, shadow drifting over the dirt ahead of him.
Stonebrook Acres came into view over the last rise. The lean fences and scrappy yard looked the same at first glance, but his eyes picked out differences now: the subtle darkening where they'd opened the stream and the soil had stayed wet, the gleam of the new pond, the rough-cut gaps in the orchard where dead trees had come down.
Gliscor drifted above the yard in lazy patrol loops. Krookodile lay just inside the open gate like some smug, scaly watchdog. The stone pile on the slope behind the house looked…less like a heap and more like a low, tiered wall.
Flygon swooped down in a controlled arc as he reached the gate, lowering Sack Two gently onto the packed earth just inside it before releasing the rope and gaining height again.
As David stepped through, Krookodile's head came up. His nostrils flared. His gaze immediately tracked to the sacks.
"Don't even start," David said. "This has to last longer than one enthusiastic lunch."
He let Sack One slide off his shoulder with a grunt of relief and set the backpack down beside it. Flygon landed nearby, folding her wings neatly.
Swampert appeared, shook once, and immediately homed in on the scent of fresh feed. Excadrill surfaced from the edge of the slope, nose dusted with soil. Nidoking was standing beside the stone pile, arms folded, trying very hard to look like he hadn't been waiting to be noticed.
David stopped.
The pile was still a pile, but it now had structure.
"Well, look at that," he said.
Nidoking's chest puffed out half an inch. Excadrill chittered, satisfaction in every line of his body.
David walked over, ran a hand along one of the lower stones, giving it a testing shove. It didn't budge.
"Nice work," he said. "That looks like it might not kill me when I'm not looking. I'm impressed."
Nidoking grunted, trying—and failing—to hide his pleased rumble. Excadrill did a little hop and disappeared underground again, popping back up on the far side of the pile, already fussing at another seam.
Gliscor swooped lower, eyeing the sacks.
"Yes, there's soap in there too," David told him. "Yes, you are going to discover what it is. No, hanging on the ceiling doesn't make you immune to hygiene."
Gliscor recoiled dramatically, tail flailing.
They spent the next hour unpacking and stowing: feed into bins in the old feed room, flour and basics into the pantry, nails and screws into neatly labelled jars on a shelf that hadn't seen that kind of organisation in years, fence wire stored high and safe, seed bag lined up by the back door ready for spreading. David propped the new hoe handle against the old, cracked one and eyed them both, deciding to give his back one more day of pain before tackling the swap.
Only when everyone had eaten a proper second breakfast, and the worst of the mud was scraped off boots and claws, did he sit down at the kitchen table with his notebook again.
On a fresh page, he wrote, in big block letters:
STONEBROOK – PHASES
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