On a round-the-Pokémon-world cruise, my boat stopped off in Ryme city and I noticed a distinct lack of Pokéballs and a significant number of large Pokémon freely roaming around AND working jobs! In a decently-dense populated city! Is it normal for such symbiotic cities to exist? Does this have anything to do with the absence of Pokéballs? I’m just in awe of how naturally the locals take it and surprised there hasn’t been a major incident.

Well … yes. Most cities are symbiotic like this. In most places, though, this has nothing to do with a lack of poké balls, as most tamed pokémon (including working ones) might not have ones that are carried visibly. It has more to do with the fact that we humans have lived symbiotically with pokémon for thousands of years, and consequently, we’ve built our society around them.

Of course, it often catches people from smaller towns and cities off-guard, as it seems that the smaller the settlement, the more reliant on human labor a community tends to be. From what I understand, this is largely because smaller settlements don’t often host projects that require an extraordinary number of workers and an extraordinarily tight deadline.