"A pity?"
"That's right. You want to know what happened? That Trainer went out to Sand Village — and was never seen again. No sign of him, no body, nothing."
"That dangerous?"
It was a fair reaction. Professional Trainers faced the highest mortality rate of any profession, braving harsh conditions and unpredictable wild Pokémon on a daily basis. When someone went missing in the field, the outcome was almost always the worst. Exceptions were rare.
But even by those standards, a simple job to chase off a colony of wild Pokémon near a settlement should not end with a Trainer vanishing without a trace.
"And that was only the beginning," Brant continued. "After the first Trainer disappeared, the League took it seriously and tracked down the man who posted the request. They pushed him to withdraw it. He refused. Six months later, another Trainer ignored all the warnings, took the job anyway, and — same result. Gone. No trace."
"The man who posted the request sounds suspicious," Nova said. "Did anyone look into him?"
"Of course they did. The League sent a full team of Security Officers out to Sand Village to question him directly. All he said was that his wife and daughter are buried out there, and he has no intention of ever leaving — let alone pulling the request."
"As for the missing Trainers, the only thing anyone knows is that they entered the stretch of desert where the Trapinch colony is active and never came back out."
Now Nova understood why the request had been sitting on the board untouched for years. Two Trainers were already listed as missing because of it. Whenever a third person showed interest, Brant talked them out of taking it.
League rules could be frustratingly rigid. Once a request was posted, staff were not permitted to remove it unless the person who posted it chose to withdraw it, or the poster was confirmed dead. Without that rule, Brant would have taken that notice down long ago.
"I still want to take it," Nova said. "Can you process the paperwork for me?"
Brant let out a short laugh. "You've got some nerve, kid. What's making you so eager to walk into something like that?"
What could Nova say? He could hardly admit he was trailing a member of the Original Team. The moment those words left his mouth, the old man would call the Security Officers.
Then something clicked.
Why did he even need to accept the request in the first place?
He had come to the Pokémon Center to find a lead on Taylor's whereabouts. That lead had pointed him toward Sand Village. He had what he needed. There was no reason to stay and process a hundred League Coin bounty he did not need.
The moment that thought settled, Nova put on the most agreeable expression he could manage.
Through the entirety of Brant's follow-up lecture — touching on themes of youth being wasted on the young, the importance of valuing one's life, and the recklessness of chasing dangerous jobs — Nova nodded along patiently. "You're right. I understand completely."
After extracting a firm promise that Nova would steer clear of any dangerous requests in the future, Brant seemed genuinely pleased. Sensible young Trainers were hard to come by these days. If only his own headstrong son had a fraction of this one's good judgment.
He waved Nova off and settled back into his recliner to resume watching his son's tournament footage.
Another young life steered away from trouble. A good day's work.
What Brant did not know was that the moment Nova stepped outside, he walked straight into an outdoor equipment shop, rented an off-road bike, and headed directly for Sand Village.
North of Forest City, the paved roads gave way to two last sandy ridges with faint, worn tracks running through them. Beyond those ridges began the southernmost edge of the Tamar Desert.
Ten years ago, Sand Village had sat comfortably dozens of kilometres away from that desert's reach. Now it lay deep inside it.
The wide-tyred rental bike struggled badly on loose sand, and Nova made a mental note that finding a suitable Pokémon to use as a mount was becoming less of an option and more of a necessity. Travel across this kind of terrain without one was exhausting.
Fortunately, the village was only about fifteen kilometres from the edge of Forest City. After four sweaty, grinding hours of riding, a cluster of crumbling structures finally came into view.
Years of abandonment and relentless desert winds had stripped most of the rooftops away. Sand had piled knee-deep inside every room, filling the buildings like empty containers. The whole place looked as though the desert had been slowly swallowing it, one storm at a time.
Nova circled the settlement cautiously. Out of all the structures, only one — a small hut on the eastern side — showed any signs of upkeep or habitation.
He parked the bike and released Corvisquire from its Poké Ball.
Nova was not ready to trust the man who had refused to leave. Taking precautions made sense. But he still needed the man's cooperation, and more importantly, his information. Sending out Nidoking would be a mistake — a Pokémon that large and imposing had a way of shutting a conversation down before it started.
Corvisquire was a better choice. It was sharp and quick-witted, able to read a situation and react accordingly.
Nova walked up to the hut and knocked.
No answer.
He knocked again, and kept knocking. Eventually, whoever was inside seemed to accept that the visitor was not going to leave, and a voice came from the other side of the door.
It was rough and hoarse — the kind of voice that comes from years of breathing desert air and very little else. The words were slow and unclear, worn down at the edges. If the man had said much more, Nova might have thought he was hearing a completely different language.
Long stretches without conversation had clearly taken a toll on the muscles needed to form proper speech.
It was, at least, proof that the man truly had stayed out here alone all this time.
"I'm a Professional Trainer passing through Forest City," Nova said. "I picked up your request at the Pokémon Center."
A long pause followed.
Then: "That's not right. The first two times, the Center called me in advance before a Trainer came out. There was no call this time. You didn't take that job through official channels."
Nova had to admit the man was sharper than expected.
"Your request has been on that board for a long time," Nova replied calmly. "How do you know the League hasn't updated its contact procedures since then? Things change."
That landed somewhere. The man had clearly operated on the assumption that the advance call was a fixed, permanent part of the process — that Trainers who showed up unannounced could not be legitimate. It was a reasonable assumption for someone who had not left this village or spoken to the outside world in years. A single offhand question was enough to plant doubt where there had been certainty.
After a long pause, the sound of shuffling came from inside. Then the door — crooked, half-rotted, hanging unevenly in its frame — was yanked open. One firm kick would have done the same job.
Afternoon sunlight spilled into the bare room beyond.
The two of them stood there, looking at each other in silence. The tension between them was thick and still — as though neither one was quite sure what the other's next move would be.