The move itself turned out to be straightforward.
Most of Aresdra's personal belongings had already been transferred to her school dormitory over time, and everything large in the apartment — the furniture, the shelving, the kitchen fixtures — all belonged to the landlady anyway. What remained was a modest collection of everyday items for the two of them. Nova packed them up, called a moving company, and was done within the hour.
Two Machoke from the moving company loaded the boxes and bags onto the truck with the easy efficiency of Pokémon built for exactly this kind of work. Nova rode in the passenger seat with the Egg incubator balanced carefully on his lap, keeping a hand on it around every corner. The driver was quiet and focused, but the two Machoke were another story — chatty and enthusiastic, they kept up a running commentary for most of the drive. When they arrived and helped carry everything inside, Nova thanked them properly and gave each of them a vanilla ice cream.
The May heat was already beginning to build in Harmony City. For both people and Pokémon, something cold after physical work was exactly right.
Getting settled didn't take long. The house came fully equipped — appliances, furniture, everything a new occupant needed. The landlady had deliberately left many areas of the three-story villa untouched, leaving room for whoever moved in to put their own mark on the space. Nova left most of it alone. He was someone who could live comfortably in a small room and not think much of it. The blank walls and empty shelves could wait until Aresdra saw the place — she'd have opinions about how it should look, and he was happy to let her take the lead on that.
The more immediate concern was his Pokémon.
One of the main reasons Nova had chosen this particular house — beyond its proximity to Aresdra's school — was the land that came with it. The front yard was modest, not unlike the small lawns he had seen in old films from his previous life, pleasant but unremarkable.
The backyard was something else entirely.
On paper it was described as a standard residential plot, roughly the size of a small sports field. But two kilometres behind the house, a low range of hills marked the edge of the settled area, and between the back fence and those hills stretched a wide band of completely undeveloped wasteland. As long as Nova cleared it himself, there was nothing stopping him from claiming it as extended outdoor space. Nobody would say a word. Land in this part of the Norlandia Alliance was worth so little that people simply didn't fight over empty scrub.
Once that space was opened up, his larger Pokémon would finally have somewhere to move around properly. The thought of Nidoking being able to stretch its legs without knocking something over was genuinely appealing.
Nova hired a compact excavator and took his team out for what he decided to call a land-clearing expedition.
There was, predictably, a catch.
The landlady had warned him about it before the sale was finalised. The wasteland behind the property had been left untouched by the previous tenants for a reason — clearing neglected land almost always meant dealing with whatever wild Pokémon had moved in. In this case, the answer was Rattata. Quite a lot of them, apparently, and bold enough to regularly come into the yard itself.
The landlady had even tried living in the villa herself at one point, but the Rattata had made it unbearable. Her Purugly — a Level 40 Pokémon that had reached that level entirely through years of exceptional food and very little physical effort — had proven less than useful. Its preferred strategy involved using Swagger, which succeeded mainly in making the Rattata angrier and more destructive. It was, at the end of the day, a well-fed house cat that had never been asked to actually fight.
She had brought in two or three teams of trainers to clear the problem. None of them had solved it. Eventually she had given up on the property entirely, which was part of why it had sat unsold for so long.
Nova was not about to be driven out of his own backyard by a colony of Normal-type rodents.
He sent out Growlithe first.
The pup was only Level 10, but it had the instincts of a working dog and took to the task immediately. Nova asked it to find the nest. Growlithe put its nose to the ground and began moving through the tall grass — hopping over rocks, doubling back, sniffing at patches of disturbed earth. It looked at first like pure playful energy, the kind of bounding enthusiasm that made it hard to tell whether anything purposeful was happening. Then it stopped, circled a particular spot twice, and looked back at Nova with clear intent.
Growl!
The nest was a large earthen mound several dozen metres back in the wasteland. At its base, a burrow entrance wide enough for two people to crouch through had been dug out. Nova and Growlithe crept into the nearby bushes and watched for a few minutes. Rattata came and went steadily — small purple shapes darting in and out at regular intervals.
Nova's instinct told him there was something bigger inside. He sent Growlithe in as a decoy.
Growlithe was delighted. The Rattata scattered the moment it approached, sprinting in every direction across the open ground. Growlithe gave chase with obvious enthusiasm, tail spinning, completely unbothered by the fact that it was outnumbered ten to one. The Rattata were fast, but Growlithe was faster and seemed to find the whole exercise entertaining.
The Rattata, for their part, did not find it entertaining at all. One by one they retreated back into the burrow.
A few minutes passed. Then the ground around the entrance shifted, and two large yellow shapes crawled out into the open.
They were Raticate — fully grown, nearly a metre tall, moving with the slow confidence of Pokémon that were used to being the most dangerous thing in the area. These were the parents. The source of why the Rattata colony had felt comfortable enough to harass the yard at all, and why every previous attempt to clear them had fallen short. A standard Meowth wouldn't have stood a chance. Even a well-trained Persian would have had to work for it.
The two Raticate emerged, spotted Growlithe sitting in the grass a few metres away, and stopped.
Growlithe was not behaving the way they expected. It was sitting calmly, tail brushing back and forth across the grass, watching them with an expression that could only be described as pleased with itself.
The Raticate exchanged a look.
Then the light changed. A large shadow fell across the entrance to the burrow — and across the Raticate, and across most of the surrounding grass. Something very big was standing behind them.
Nidoking looked down. Ni... NIDO.
The Raticate looked up.
"Arno," Nova called out, "take it easy — we just want to move them along, so don't—" He watched Nidoking's arm begin to move. "Actually, fine. Do whatever feels right."
Nidoking raised one arm and used Sludge Bomb — deliberately holding back its Sheer Force Ability, allowing the Poison effect to activate fully. The dense, Poison-laced mud clumps detonated on impact, releasing a rolling cloud of purple toxic gas. It was precise and it was thorough. Both Raticate were down after a single exchange, and the Rattata that had gathered at the edges of the burrow to watch were caught in the spreading gas and knocked out where they stood.
Nova recalled Nidoking and surveyed the results.
Growlithe trotted back over and sat beside him, tail wagging steadily, looking deeply self-satisfied.
Growl!
"You just watched," Nova said.
Growl. Growl.
He sighed, recalled Growlithe as well, and pulled out his phone to arrange for someone to relocate the colony safely before the excavator arrived.