Chapter 36
(Ryan POV)
Floaroma on a quiet morning was almost too much.
Not in a bad way. Just a lot. The flowers were everywhere again, obviously, that hadn't changed overnight, but in the morning light they were somehow even more insistent about it, bright and deliberate, like the whole town had collectively decided that if you were going to commit to something you should really commit to it and then just kept going. I stood outside the Pokémon Center for a second and looked at all of it and genuinely didn't know how to feel. Pretty, yeah. Suspiciously pretty. The kind of pretty that makes you wonder what it's compensating for.
Nothing, probably. Sometimes places are just nice.
I let the team out near the edge of the market while the stalls were still being set up. No plan, no drills, no agenda just out, because they'd been in their balls for two days of walking and they deserved a morning that wasn't about anything.
Rhyhorn materialized and immediately started a slow methodical loop of the square, checking corners, investigating things with her horn. This was apparently just what she did when there was no immediate task. I watched her for a second and then decided not to think too hard about it because honestly it was kind of reassuring, the idea that Rhyhorn had her own system for assessing new spaces and it had nothing to do with me.
Deino came out and went completely still. Nose up, ears forward, processing. Floaroma hit him differently than cities did less noise, less people, more smell, and the smell was clearly a lot because he stood there for a full three minutes just reading the air before he wandered over to a flower bed and started investigating a large yellow bloom with the focused energy of someone conducting actual research.
"Don't eat it," I said.
He didn't look at me.
"Deino."
He looked at the flower. Then at me. Then back at the flower, like he was weighing his options.
"Please don't eat it."
He didn't eat it. He thought about it for a while longer though, just to let me know the decision had been his.
Prinplup came out, looked at the square, looked at the stalls, looked at Deino who was already investigating a flower bed with complete seriousness, and then just picked a bench and sat down on it like she'd been planning to do exactly that all along. Like the bench had been waiting for her specifically.
I sat down on the bench next to her and just sat there. Which sounds simple. It wasn't, actually. I hadn't really done it in a while, just existed somewhere without moving toward the next thing, and it took a few minutes before my brain stopped cycling through the list of what came next and just let the morning be a morning.
Prinplup glanced at me once. Said nothing. Went back to watching the market.
Yeah, I thought. Same.
The market was good in the way small town markets are good not spectacular, not trying to be, just exactly what it was and comfortable with that. Flowers, mostly. Cut flowers, potted flowers, seeds, things made from flowers, things that had a flower somewhere in their general vicinity. A few food stalls. A woman selling handmade Pokéball cases that were genuinely beautiful and I almost bought one for no reason except that they were nice to look at, which is honestly a valid reason, and then I remembered I had a budget and kept walking.
I got breakfast from a counter near the center of the market something wrapped in paper that the woman behind the counter described as "seasonal" which told me nothing, but it smelled incredible so I bought it anyway. It turned out to be better than it looked, which is the best possible outcome for market food. I ate it sitting on a low wall while Rhyhorn finished what I was now pretty sure was her fourth loop of the square and Deino moved on to his second flower bed.
The woman at the stall next to where I'd gotten food had been watching Deino for a while. I noticed her noticing, the way you notice when someone's curious but being polite about it, which in my experience means they're about thirty seconds away from asking.
She lasted about twenty.
"What is that?" she said, nodding toward Deino. "I've never seen anything like it."
"Deino," I said. "Dragon type. From Unova it's a region east of here, pretty far." I paused. "You probably haven't seen one before, they're not from Sinnoh."
"No," she agreed, watching him tilt his head at a flower. "How did you end up with one?"
"Long story." I looked at Deino. "Short version is he found me before I found him."
She seemed to like that answer. "Is he friendly?"
"To me, yeah. He's still working on everyone else." I watched him take one very careful sniff of a flower and then pull back like it had personally offended him. "He's getting better though."
"He looks like he's doing important work," she said, which honestly, accurate.
We stood there for a moment just watching him move to the next flower, apply the same rigorous sniff test, reach a verdict. The woman had one of those comfortable silences about her, the kind you got from spending years at a market stall talking to strangers and learning which conversations were worth having and which weren't.
"You heading north?" she said eventually.
"Yeah. Eterna eventually."
Her expression shifted just a small thing, not dramatic, but I'd learned to read small things. "Through the Windworks route."
"That's the plan."
She was quiet for a second, straightening something on her stall that didn't need straightening. "My nephew tried to get through three days ago. He had two badges, he's been traveling for months, he knows the routes." She paused. "League had the road blocked before you even got close to the facility. He said they turned back everyone, didn't matter how many badges you had or what you said."
I looked at her. "Did he say how many Galactic?"
"More than he expected." She said it like she'd been thinking about how to say it. "He said the news keeps calling it contained, keeps saying the league has it under control, but what he saw the number of people, the equipment they had set up it didn't look contained. It looked like they were settled in." She shrugged, the shrug of someone who'd decided there were things too big to do anything about so you just didn't look directly at them. "He's a careful kid. Not the type to exaggerate."
More than expected. Settled in.
I knew what was in that facility from the game Team Galactic, the generator, the owner locked inside, the whole thing. I knew how it ended. But there was a gap between knowing how something ended and standing in a flower market hearing that it was bigger than the news was saying, and that gap had a weight to it that I kept underestimating.
"Thanks for telling me," I said.
"You seem like you're going anyway," she said. Not a judgment. Just an observation.
"Yeah," I said. "I am."
She looked at me for a moment that particular look of someone deciding whether to say the next thing or not. Then she just nodded and went back to her stall. Which I respected. She'd said what was useful and left the rest alone.
Deino found me eventually, the way he always did when he'd finished investigating something and wanted to report back. He leaned against my leg and I put my hand on his head without thinking about it.
"Flower verdict?" I said.
"Dei dei." He made a sound that was somewhere between interested and uncertain, which probably meant complicated.
"Yeah," I said. "That tracks."
Rhyhorn had settled in a patch of sun on the far side of the square with the satisfied air of something that had completed all necessary assessments and was now officially off the clock. Prinplup was still on her bench. Still watching.
I sat there with Deino against my leg and let the morning do what it was going to do.
More than the news was saying. Settled in.
But the woman's nephew had two badges and knew the routes and the league had blocked the road before he'd even gotten close, and I had one badge and a team that was good but not invincible, and the gap between knowing how something ended in a game and walking into it in a world where things actually hurt was something I kept running into and kept being surprised by.
Not scared. Just honest about it. There's a difference.
I looked at Rhyhorn in her sun patch. At Prinplup on her bench. At Deino against my leg.
"We leave tomorrow morning," I said.
Deino made a small sound.
Rhyhorn's ear flicked from across the square.
Prinplup didn't react, but she'd heard. She always heard.
Tomorrow. Route 205. Whatever was actually waiting at the Windworks not the game version, the real version, the one where the league was blocking roads and a careful kid had turned back and the news was calling it contained when it apparently wasn't.
I finished the last of my breakfast, which was still really good, and let Floaroma keep smelling like flowers, and tried not to think too hard about what not scared but honest actually meant in practice.
Didn't entirely work.
But that was fine. Tomorrow was tomorrow.