Technically, Nova could have walked away from the two Raticate without a second thought, and no one would have held it against him.
Wild Pokémon near cities had to be managed. That was simply a fact of life in this world. If clearance crews didn't regularly push back the wild populations encroaching on the edges of towns, humans wouldn't be able to maintain settled communities at all. Casualties during those operations were accepted as unavoidable. Nobody filed complaints.
A Raticate, to be clear, was nothing like the small, harmless rodent Nova vaguely remembered from his previous world. The moment one of them decided to use its teeth in earnest, it wasn't just unpleasant — it was dangerous. The combination of powerful jaws and genuinely threatening fangs had put full-grown adults in serious situations. They weren't cute. They weren't harmless. Managing them was reasonable.
But Nova had come from a world without Pokémon, and something in him resisted leaving any living creature to fend for itself unnecessarily. If he left the two Raticate where they were, they might get eaten by a larger predator before they woke up, or they might recover and scatter into territory they weren't equipped to handle. Neither outcome sat right with him.
He called the Pokémon Exchange Centre.
Half an hour later, a staff member arrived, assessed the two Raticate, and offered four hundred League Coins for each. Because Nova had been dealing with a hazard directly adjacent to his own property, the transaction was entirely above board. The price was fair given the circumstances.
Raticate weren't in high demand — Rattata were common enough that anyone with patience could raise one to the same stage, and most buyers looking for a strong rodent-type weren't particularly interested in paying a premium for an adult they hadn't raised themselves. The two Nova had were healthy and well-developed, but that only helped so much.
The nest of Rattata inside the burrow was worth considerably less. After deducting the cost of the Poké Balls used, the staff offered two hundred League Coins for the lot. Nova accepted without argument. It covered expenses and resolved the situation cleanly. That was enough.
The staff packed the Pokémon into a set of standard red-and-white Poké Balls and left.
Nova hadn't cleared out every Rattata on the property — plenty had scattered into the surrounding area before he could reach them. But that was fine. Without a Raticate to organise and anchor the colony, the younger ones would develop a more cautious attitude toward the property fairly quickly. The ones that didn't would receive a different kind of education from the local Meowth population. Either way, the problem would resolve itself.
He borrowed an excavator and spent the morning levelling the ground in the main yard area. His plan was to scatter grass seed once the Grass-type Egg hatched, then use the new Pokémon's natural energy to accelerate growth until a proper lawn covered the whole space. The weeds that had taken over had grown nearly to chest height — Nidoking probably appreciated the cover, but Nova had no intention of letting his own backyard become a habitat.
The large mound of compacted earth near the back of the property was more of a problem. It was roughly ten metres high and clearly the remnant of some previous excavation or collapse that nobody had ever bothered to address. Nova didn't have a quick solution for it, so for the time being he had Nidoking use Earth Power to collapse the tunnel network underneath it and prevent anything from moving back in. Ni-DOKING! The ground shuddered as the move connected, and the loosened soil settled heavily.
Corviknight, meanwhile, had immediately claimed the mound as its own.
It wasn't hard to understand why. Aside from the roof of the new house and a hill roughly two kilometres away, the mound was the highest point in the immediate area. Birds naturally sought elevation, and Nova had made it clear that the roof was off-limits as a landing pad. That left the mound, and Corviknight had apparently decided this was a perfectly acceptable arrangement.
He couldn't argue with the logic. He could, however, note that a fully armoured Corviknight was not a small bird, and landing on the roof with any regularity would eventually cause structural damage that he really didn't want to pay for. The mound was the better option for everyone.
To make it a proper perch rather than just a pile of dirt, Nova spent close to two thousand League Coins on a heavy steel frame bolted into the mound's summit. It was tall, wide, and built to hold significant weight. Calling it a perch was generous — from a distance it looked more like an oversized gymnastics apparatus. Corviknight settled onto it with visible satisfaction. Corviknight. Nova decided that was good enough.
He continued working his way through the property. Pushing through the shrubs along the base of the mound, he found a stagnant pond on the far side that he hadn't known was there.
It wasn't fed by any stream. The pond existed because the ground behind the mound was uneven and pitted, and this particular hollow — roughly the size of a football pitch — happened to be the lowest point. Year after year, rainwater had gathered here with nowhere to go.
Harmony City sat at the edge of the Tamar Desert, but the rainfall difference between the city and the desert itself was enormous. Moisture flowing in from the Western Plateau passed through Dragon Fang Valley and into the Harmony City basin, producing local rainfall that dwarfed what the desert received. That reliable rainfall was what made Harmony City liveable. The Tamar Desert, cut off from that same moisture, remained an uninhabited wilderness that most people avoided entirely.
All that annual rainfall had been collecting in this hollow for years, and with no outlet, the water had long since stagnated. A faint but unpleasant smell drifted from the surface. Fortunately, the mound and the surrounding shrubs blocked most of it from reaching the house — if the wind had been coming from the other direction, the new property would have been significantly less appealing.
Nova was about to have Nidoking reshape the terrain with Earth Power and drain the hollow when something in the water caught his eye.
A single unblinking eye, surfacing slowly from the dark, murky depths.
He stopped.
He took a step closer.
The eye belonged to something sitting just beneath the surface — a dense, dark mass of purplish sludge, barely distinguishable from the water around it. It shifted sluggishly and blinked again.
A Grimer.
Of course, Nova thought.
He straightened up and reconsidered his approach. Grimer weren't like Rattata — they were genuinely useful, and most cities were glad to have them. Harmony City imported several dozen Grimer every year and released them into the sewer network, where they fed on accumulated waste and kept the drainage system clear. They were, in that specific environment, practically a public service.
The problem was that if a Grimer population wasn't managed, and if the pollution feeding them was rich enough, their numbers could multiply rapidly and become a serious Poison-type hazard. An unchecked Grimer outbreak in a city's water infrastructure was the kind of problem that took months to fix.
The pond had to go either way. Filling it properly would take more than a single afternoon's work.
For now, Nova caught the Grimer that had surfaced and checked the edges of the pond for any others. He planned to bring them to the municipal centre and see if they were wanted — with any luck, the city would cover the cost of the Poké Balls and possibly offer a small fee on top.
He packed up his tools as the light began to shift toward evening.
There was something else waiting for him tonight — something he had been planning carefully for several days now — and that was far more important than finishing the yard.