Box Buster

Tipper knew that those ‘Deposit Boxes’ Kecleon Market got for their locations were still in the process of entering a phased rollout, but he still hadn’t expected a hulking vault that was taller than him to show up right next to his shop. It had been painted a deep shade of burgundy with gilded trim along its edges, and sported a pair of circles set between spikes jutting out of the lid’s peak that gave it an appearance vaguely reminiscent of a pair of eyes and horns.

It reminded him a bit of a Kangaskhan who ran a Storage Shop back in Baram Town, even if he wasn’t really sure that a box without any shopkeeper to guide things would really be a good surrogate.

He glanced down and double-checked a small sheet of paper that came with the Deposit Box upon its arrival as he puzzled over the large knob in the center. Dad was supposed to have sent his batch of goods for the shop through the Deposit Box, but now he needed to figure out how on earth to get to its contents.

“To access your account’s storage, enter your Friend Code through the knob in the center prior to twisting the handle…”

Tipper studied the Deposit Box’s circular handle, where sure enough, the central circle was raised slightly with numbers engraved in intervals of ten between dotted lines. Dad had apparently already set up a storage account on his end of things, so now he just needed to enter the code. The Kecleon looked down at the sheet and the numbers that had been written down on them, and figured that those lines must’ve been for the numbers in between the intervals. He carefully twisted the knob until they matched their numbers, a few clicks to the left, and then back to the right, and then back left again…

CLICK!

Tipper blinked and tested the rotating handle, which incredibly, moved back and forth smoothly. He pulled it counterclockwise, watching as the heavy-looking lid propped itself open and…

“Ah!”

He found that the inside was packed full of various odds and ends. Seeds, Wonder Orbs, even the occasional accessory or garment. There was even a small partition inside that was filled with Poké coins. So these things were able to be used to store money in them.

He’d heard various rumors about the consortium that had set these Deposit Boxes up: that prominent bankers and storage keepers had financed their creation in the search of more secure vaults for their establishments, that they had been built based on designs reverse engineered from those abandoned sites on the Air Continent which were rumored to be of human origin.

He didn’t know how true any of those stories were, but he could already tell that this box was going to be a lifesaver. Why he wasn’t sure if he’d ever need to visit a traditional Bank or Storage Shop again after this!

CRASH!

Tipper jolted up with a sharp yelp as the ground shook, and turned towards the Box Buster’s shop across the road. He’d occasionally hear the sound of splintering wood or cries coming from it on prior days, but he didn’t remember them ever being this forceful.

“Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Tipper flinched as a bellowing cry and another deafening crash rang out, forceful enough to make the front of his shop shudder. A second crash came, and then yet another. Tipper hung his mouth open in disbelief and closed the lid to the Deposit Box as he made his way over to the front counter of the Box Buster’s shop.

“What on earth is going on out there-?”

“Oh hey!”

Tipper looked up and saw a gray-and-blue scaled figure hurrying out from the back of the shop, brushing a few loose splinters that had clung to his horns. The Rock-type’s eyes lit up, before he made it to the counter and gave a cheerful wave.

“Oh, you must be the new guy! Pleasure finally meeting you!” he said. “I’m Rampardos! The Box Buster!”

Tipper tilted his head and looked past the shop with a puzzled frown.

“You… seem to be quite busy today.”

“Yup! I got a bulk order from a traveling Exploration Team that had built up a bunch of chests they’d found on their missions,” Rampardos replied. “There’s some really neat stuff in their boxes, too! The last one I broke open had an Insomniscope in it!”

That must’ve been quite a team to find something like that lying around. Though Tipper was starting to get a bit uneasy about this ‘bunch’ of chests that Rampardos mentioned…

“Uh… just how many boxes did this team bring to you again?” the Kecleon asked.

“I honestly lost count after the thirtieth or so, but between them and the chests that normally come in, I’ll probably be at ’em all week!”

Wonderful. As if Tipper didn’t already have enough headaches to worry about in between getting a shop running in the middle of nowhere. Though would Rampardos’ shop even physically survive an entire week being bashed up like that?

“Not that I’m one to normally tell others how to do their jobs, but don’t you think you’re throwing your head around a little too hard, Rampardos?” he asked. “From the racket you were making, I thought that you were busting up your shop.“

“Nah, these walls can take a bit of punishment,” Rampardos insisted. “I had ’em built in mind for taking a bit of abuse.”

Tipper stared for a moment and hung his mouth open. Surely Rampardos had to get tired of this later in the day and slow down eventually… right?

“… If you say so.”

Tipper drifted off and made his way back to his shop by the square, and along the way, the crashing started ringing out from Rampardos’ shop again. He tried to ignore it and went back to the Deposit Box. He re-entered the combination to prop the lid back open and he grabbed a blue orb with droplets in it.

CRASH!

The ground abruptly shook from a stronger-than-normal blow as the Rainy Orb slipped from his grasp and shattered against the ground. Tipper looked up, as small clouds began to gather much as if a Rain Dance had been cast, as droplets began to patter against his scales.

They flushed a ruddy shade, and he pinched his brow as the racket from Rampardos’ shop kept dragging on.

“Ugh. This is going to be a really long week….”

---

The rest of the day went along much as Tipper had dreaded. As did the day after. And the day after that. Every moment when the Kecleon thought that things had settled down to relative quiet, a sharp crash or shout or worse still, a small tremor would come from the Box Buster’s shop. Everything about managing the shop had turned into an ongoing battle during that time:

Fighting to keep customers from getting scared off by the racket. Fighting to keep his wares from getting knocked off their shelves. Fighting to break the falls of the ones that did with wads of cloth for cushioning.

And of course, fighting to keep his own sanity from the constant din coming from across the street.

And then on the fourth day, things abruptly stopped. At first Tipper thought that Rampardos must’ve gotten through his bulk order early, but the day was just eerily silent from his shop. Asking around town revealed that the Box Buster had unexpectedly been off work for the day, and the Kecleon shrugged the matter off before turning in for the day at night.

It was now the morning of the fifth day since Rampardos started his ‘bulk order’, and as Tipper stocked the wares for the day, he noticed that once again, the Box Buster shop was quiet.

“That’s the second day in a row that Rampardos hasn’t been working. I hope he’s alright…”

A low grunt came from the direction of the town entrance and Tipper immediately grimaced at the sight. Rampardos was back, as good a sign that yesterday’s quiet was now over. Tipper hung his head with a low sigh, only to pause after noticing his Rock-type neighbor was laden down with a peculiar cargo.

“… Wooden planks?”

He blinked, but his eyes weren’t deceiving him, and for a second, Rampardos looked more like an aspiring carpenter than a Box Buster. The Rock-type made his way to the back of his shop and set the planks down to clear aside some ruined chests, before dragging the wood in. An envelope slipped the dinosaur’s grasp on the way over, as it got caught up in the wind and drifted along the lane.

“Rampardos, wait!”

The door shut before Tipper could say anything and for a moment, he thought to let the letter just sit there. Rampardos would surely come back to get it if it were important, after all. The Kecleon turned his attention back to his wares, as he heard the first few Pokémon start entering the plaza bright and early in the morning.

He felt the wind against his scales and faintly heard paper fluttering. Tipper turned his head, where much to his astonishment he saw the envelope blowing along, already most of the way over to the pond by his shop.

He sighed, before hurrying out from behind the counter.

“Oh, for crying out loud.”

He knew that it was still early in the morning, but did nobody else in this town seriously care enough to stop a runaway envelope? He hurriedly slipped out the shop’s side entrance and darted into the square, all but diving to snatch the envelope out of the air before it blew into the pool.

Tipper tightened his grasp on the envelope and breathed a sigh of relief, before he looked down at the Footprint Runes where the recipient information was supposed to be. There was the expected ‘Rampardos of Post Town’ and ‘Box Buster Shop’ on it, but curiously, there was an additional line above them all.

“‘Galton from Mistville’?”

Tipper cocked a brow. Did Rampardos have a partner who helped run his shop? Though where on earth was ‘Mistville’? Since he’d never heard any of his customers mention such a place. He turned and hurried along the path for the Box Buster’s. When he reached the counter, he heard the plonk of wooden planks jostling each other ring out from the backroom, as the Rock-type’s silhouette moved to and fro inside.

“Rampardos!”

Tipper watched as Rampardos turned and sidled out from inside his shop, before he raising the envelope and slid it over past the counter.

“You dropped this on your way in,” the Kecleon said. “If I’d gone after it just a bit later, I’d be fishing it out of the pond by the Swanna House right now.”

The Box Buster stiffened up as an embarrassed grimace came over his face.

“Oh! Er, sorry about the trouble! I’ll just be taking that…”

The Rock-type took the letter and hastily tucked it away under the counter. Perhaps Tipper should’ve left things there, but he couldn’t help but wonder about that extra line on the envelope above the recipient’s address.

“I didn’t know that you had a partner for your shop, even if I’m surprised he’d just put one of his personal names on it for the world to see,” Tipper said. “Though where on earth is ‘Mistville’ on this continent anyways?”

The Box Buster blinked in reply, before giving a sheepish paw at the back at his head.

“Er… well, that’s actually my name that I use with close friends and family, even if it’s technically read a bit differently than that,” he explained. “Here on Mist, it’s convention to read Footprint Runes which are part of such names in the Old Language. So that’d be ‘Galton Di Brumezia’, or ‘Galton from Noe Town’ in plain speech.”

Tipper suddenly felt a lot dumber. He supposed he himself had experience with similar letters back on Air, even if the convention for personal names was a bit different. It was convention to just put such names right after the species name written in Air’s own Old Language. Sometimes the names would sound the same as they did in plain speech like ‘Pikachu Ichi’ or ‘Nidoking Sakaki’, while with others like ‘Bippa Haru’ or ‘Nyula Hiro’, one could tell how one was supposed to read them just based off the runes in front of the name.

“Right, I suppose there’s times when the Pokémon back home sometimes read Footprint Runes in our own Old Language, too,” Tipper said. “Even if I can’t say that anyone there has a name like yours…“

The Kecleon shook his head. Part of him was admittedly curious as to where ‘Galton’ came from as a name. At least at home, it wasn’t unheard of for Pokémon to go through multiple personal names in life as they evolved or their life circumstances changed. All the better to avoid being stuck with some embarrassment of a name one had as a hatchling like ‘Boo-Boo’ well into old age.

Though who on earth had even sent this thing if they knew Rampardos so well?

“Though what’s the story of the letter anyways?” he asked. “I didn’t think that Pokémon here on Mist were so casual about intimately addressing strangers.”

“Oh, it’s from my son,” Rampardos answered. “He works on an Exploration Team in a town towards the northern end of the highway that runs past town.”

The Box Buster trailed off and turned away, giving an uneasy paw at his shoulder.

“I… actually moved out here to Post Town to try to be a bit closer to him. He doesn’t get the chance to come back to Noe Town a whole lot.”

Tipper fell quiet at Rampardos’ response. He had a feeling that there was more to the story that Rampardos wasn’t telling him, but he opted not to press the matter. He also hadn’t realized that there were other Pokémon out here in Post Town who’d been plucked from big and bustling towns. Did Rampardos ever have doubts or regrets like him about coming here? Especially when he came from a place that had quite literally been reaching for the skies in recent years…

“I see. Do… you ever miss it?” the Kecleon asked. “Noe Town, that is? Since I was under the impression that it was a much bigger and livelier place than this.”

“Oh, it is. But the slower pace of life here’s not necessarily a bad thing,” the Box Buster replied. “It’s nice to have more space to work with. And there’s fewer Pokémon complaining about the noise my box busting makes or the wreckage of the chests piling up between runs to throw them out.”

Tipper supposed that was one way to tell that Rampardos also made quite a racket at his old shop. Though he still didn’t understand why Rampardos had abruptly stopped working a couple days ago. With how hard he’d been busting boxes up until yesterday, Rampardos certainly didn’t seem like the type who’d slack off from work…

“I’d imagine, though I’d actually been getting kinda used to it before you stopped,” Tipper said. “Were you taking a break from work?”

“Something like that,” Rampardos replied. “Though say, Kecleon. You’re living at the Swanna House at the moment, right?”

“Yeah? Why do you ask?”

The Box Buster turned back towards his shop, before pawing at his head with a sheepish grin.

“Do you happen to know if Gurdurr’s been taking any more carpentry orders lately?” the Rock-type asked. “I… might’ve busted the shop up a bit too much, and it’s been keeping me from being able to do my job.”

Well. That would explain a thing or two about why things had been so quiet lately. Tipper thought back to the last time he’d seen Gurdurr in the Swanna House’s Juice Bar. He was ornery as usual back then and questionably sober, and gave off the sort of vibe that just screamed that giving him business was a bad idea.

Tipper shook his head back, before lowering his head with a tired sigh.

“I’ll ask Swanna about it, but don’t hold your breath,” he said. “I’d personally recommend asking some friends of yours from Noe Town if they can come over to help you.”

“Er… right.” Rampardos nodded. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Tipper headed off from Rampardos’ shop and off for the Swanna House. He doubted that the Signora would have any quick fixes to offer for the Box Buster’s shop, but he supposed he wouldn’t complain about there being a bit more peace and quiet for a while.

That, and a part of him figured that he ought to talk to Rampardos a little more often.