Nova knew perfectly well that there was no way he could move all of the eggs to the Layered Peaks Gym on his own. His largest backpack, the one built for carrying extra capacity, could only fit two Pokémon eggs safely. If he skipped the protective incubation slots and just crammed them in loose, he might manage five.
He had only caught a brief look inside Taylor's underground storage room, but from what he'd seen, there had to be at least a hundred eggs sitting in that cabinet. Even if he had Nidoking haul them back and forth with its oversized custom pack, it would still take four or five trips to empty that single cabinet.
If it came to that, Nova wouldn't have time for anything else for an entire month. Just being a delivery mule would wear him out completely.
So before he set off to handle this small errand his mentors had given him, he needed to squeeze some help out of the two old men who had finally patched things up with each other.
"You old goat, no, wait, Master, there's something I need to talk to you and Gilbert about," Nova said. "For this trip into the desert, the supplies and food for my whole team, plus my own gear, is already going to fill up most of my pack. If I actually find something worth bringing back and there's no room left for it, wouldn't that be a shame? So..."
This was a problem every Professional Trainer eventually ran into.
There was plenty worth discovering out in the Uninhabited Areas, but unless a large group banded together to form a proper expedition, one person's carrying capacity was never going to be enough. That was exactly why small teams couldn't push deep into unclaimed territory. Go too far without enough supplies, and they would run into shortages, or worse.
Even when someone did stumble onto something valuable, actually hauling it out was its own challenge. There was only so much a Trainer and their Pokémon partner could carry between them, no matter how badly they wanted to bring more home. As the old saying went, before you can get rich, you need a road. Without better transport, striking it big out in the wilds stayed a pipe dream for most people.
It wasn't just Nova's problem, either. Every alliance dealt with this, including the Norlandia Alliance itself. Wild stretches between major cities, like the Cengluan range between Sand River City and Harmony City, clearly had potential, but nobody had really developed them properly. When it came to the truly massive unclaimed regions, places like the Western Plateau or the far reaches of the Tamar Desert, only seasoned explorers like Aresdra's parents ever bothered pushing that far in.
Nova was not asking Mort and Gilbert to put together some dedicated supply crew for him. He just wanted one Pokémon whose whole job was hauling gear.
Growing up poor had a way of shrinking a person's imagination. Nova genuinely had no idea just how much wealth someone who had made it to Champion or Elite Four status could be sitting on.
Gilbert and Mort had only meant this desert errand as a bit of training, and neither expected Nova to actually dig up anything impressive out there. Hearing him hedge like this, they both figured the kid was just fishing for a handout again, same as always.
Which, fair enough, he deserved one anyway.
"Come to think of it, I really have been a lousy Master," Mort said. "Never managed to put much aside over the years. Well, here, take this. It's a spatial pack I've carried for forty years. You can use it for now."
"And don't turn your nose up at it just because it's old. Your Grandmaster bought this for me back when I was starting out. It's the real thing, top quality."
This was more than good. This was excellent.
Nova nearly thanked him on the spot before catching himself. The kind of technology packed into a spatial storage bag was so far beyond normal manufacturing that there wasn't even a proper retail market for it.
The Norlandia Alliance only produced a handful of these packs each year, somewhere between three and five, and every single one went straight to people at the very top. None of them ever reached ordinary buyers.
Even on the black market, where prices climbed absurdly high, these bags were the kind of thing nobody could actually purchase no matter how much they offered. They simply were not for sale at any price.
Once in a great while, a young Trainer who had earned the right to carry one of these packs would die somewhere out in a dangerous hidden ruin or unclaimed wilderness, and the pack would end up going to whoever found the body first. That was the only way one ever changed hands.
But if talented Trainers who never had to worry about logistics still ended up dying out there, that told you something about how dangerous those places really were. An ordinary Trainer would not even get the chance to loot the bag. More likely, they would end up as someone else's grim discovery instead. Surviving those places at all took serious luck.
So back when Nova had first left Harmony City, he had run into exactly this kind of supply problem and considered every option except a spatial pack, since getting one had never even seemed possible.
And here his cheap old Master had one lying around the whole time.
Well, no point being picky. New or old, once it was in Nova's hands, it was his.
Of the three people in the room, though, someone had strong objections to this whole scene of a master quietly handing down a treasure to his student.
"Are you trying to insult me?" Gilbert cut in. "Do you have any idea what the Layered Peaks Gym is? We've got more than a dozen gold mines in the family. If Nova walks out of here with some hand-me-down pack, people are going to say Gilbert doesn't know how to treat his own nephew properly, like some kind of miser."
"It has to be new. Keep your old one for yourself, old friend, something to remember your student by."
"And since Nova still doesn't have an official Trainer registration, we might as well handle everything at once. Let him pick up his Pokédex too, while we're at it. That will make it official that he belongs to the Layered Peaks Gym. Otherwise I won't rest easy. Someone's bound to try poaching him the moment they realize how talented he is."
Mort didn't mind Gilbert throwing money around, but the last part confused him. "Poaching? Poaching him to where, exactly?"
Gilbert laughed. "You really don't see it, do you? No matter how much the two of us dote on him, there's only so much we can offer. I hear the young lady from the Tucker family down in the southwest is quite the beauty. The Holmwood family over in River Delta City, and the Lennon family with their Ninetales line."
"Every one of those houses has a few pretty daughters lined up."
"If any of them try pulling him in through marriage, what exactly are we supposed to do about it?"
Mort's eyes went wide. "We stop it, that's what! Until his Alliance certification comes through properly, Nova isn't setting one foot outside the Layered Peaks Gym!"
Nova let out a frustrated laugh.
Of course. Same Master, same nonsense.
The two of them were a matched pair, a couple of shameless old flirts who couldn't hold a serious conversation for more than a minute before dragging it somewhere ridiculous.
Still, these two old bachelors were the only ones who actually treated him like something precious. Every one of those big established families had plenty of their own children to worry about first. Why would any of them waste a second glance on someone like Nova?