Cerulean City was quieter up here.
Cascade Row wasn't exactly residential, but it wasn't commercial either. It sat in a strange in-between zone—a spillover strip from the old League infrastructure grid, wedged between an abandoned gym annex and a converted research clinic. The buildings here were sturdier than most, built back when Gym Leaders coordinated regional defense from subterranean bunkers, not stadium stages.
It felt fitting, in a way. Instinct had always been the strange one—the yellow team, the oddballs, the unpredictable thinkers and battle philosophers. When the Go Teams rose to prominence during the height of the mobile surge, Valor and Mystic played the expected roles—offense and control. But Instinct had a different reputation.
They didn't chase power, or hoard data. They followed gut and bond, electricity and trust. That made them dangerous—but also made them human.
The League actually liked Instinct.
Respected them, even—especially in the field.
They weren't idealists. They were survivors.
And when things got ugly, it was Instinct trainers who stayed behind to hold the lines that broke.
She let out a breath and muttered, "Okay. We'll need an office… a clean power draw… server shielding… and furniture that isn't war surplus." She turned toward the still-sealed back wing, where signs of minor Gyarados damage cracked along one side of the reinforced ceiling. "Definitely soundproofing if I'm going to run anything remotely noisy in here."
Then her hand moved to her 3DS—stylized, tricked out, and retrofitted beyond anything a normal PokéGear mod shop would dare to touch.
It wasn't just for games. This was her vault.
She tapped the icon that opened the deep storage partition, and the screen flickered with a familiar animation: a rotating Team Instinct lightning bolt overlaid with data stream bars. The virtual drive had been hooked into the multiverse bleed once—long story—and it had... picked up a few things over time.
Her eyes narrowed. The virtual inventory rolled.
1 Bookshelf with misc books.
1 4070 5950X 128gb ram 12tb storage computer
1 5600x 96gb ram 54tb storage computer.
6 Monitors
2 TVs
1 Uniteruppred Power Backup bank
2 Dressers.
1 big desk 1 small desk
3 Laptops
2 Mini PCs
1 Steam Deck
Click to reveal more
Cyel blinked.
"…Okay. I really? Did it bring my entire bedroom and office?"
She could run a war from here. Or a revolution. Or—more realistically— I mean the pokemon world was on the verge of the internet, everything in that storage should overpower even some super computers from this world… Why not become the central hub for online?
Her thumb hovered over the deploy prompt.
"…Let's get to work."
====
"…Although now that I'm in a game, there isn't much point to gaming anymore."
Cyel leaned back in the heavy desk chair she'd just reassembled, flicking a loose strand of hair from her face as she looked around at her half-finished command center.
The core servers were humming. The 5950X rig was already crunching through an initial sweep of the Cerulean meshnet—what little there was left of it, anyway. Her monitors flicked between boot diagnostics, geospatial overlays, and something resembling a terminal chatboard she'd forked off for future use.
Connected
Cyel cracked her knuckles and pulled her keyboard closer, eyes scanning the lines of code populating her leftmost screen. Most of it was scraped from pre-existing open-source templates she'd hoarded over the years—bits of old phpBB forks, a secure message board originally meant for warzone NGOs, and a surprisingly stable plugin from a now-defunct ROM hacking community.
"Tehncial schools, Professor networks and League bureaucracy," she muttered. "Hard Data and poorly optomized file systems, awful for culture and conversation."
Cyel sits back and tapps on one of the mini PCs and watched the lights flicker in acknowledgment. The first node was online, but sluggish—Cerulean's infrastructure just wasn't built for this kind of traffic it was like early 90s level of network. She exhaled through her nose, half amused, half frustrated, then swiveled slightly in her chair and looked toward the stylized 3DS still resting on the far side of the desk.
"…This is why I wanted the Rotom," she muttered, pushing back and standing. "Not just for power efficiency, not just for automated scans. Real-time code generation. Modular intuition. Hell, even just having something that can update and adapt without me babysitting it."
She walked over, picked up the 3DS, and turned it over in her hands like she was inspecting an old artifact. "Do I have any Porygons, cause they'll have to do."
In Cyel's last life she was a hoarder that downloaded a lot of stuff from the internet archive, old tv shows and moves. The source code to old operating systems, and maybe introducing those to the world over time would be great… But first a commercial website to help spread knowledge and promote inter regional unity would be great.
It took a minute but there was 3 top tier IV level porygon on pokemon go 2 porygon 1s and 1 porygon 2 so, that would have to do.
"Right. You're lead dev now," she said, eyes narrowing with focused intent. "We're going to bootstrap an internet, and you're going to help me write the code to do it."
She paused, then grinned. "Try not to crash anything important."
Cyel flicked open a new terminal on one of the mini PCs and began issuing network tasks. The Porygon-1s were slower, their logic trees more primitive, but they were perfect for routine actions—file indexing, background scans, network mapping. One began crawling through the dormant Cerulean subnet, logging IP ghosts and half-abandoned node names from the old League communications grid. The other began parsing her archive of code snippets, plugins, and bootstrap libraries for compatibility.
With that Cyel took a nap.
=======
She woke up in the chair to the hum of her custom-built 5600X server was more than background noise—it was the sound of a foundation being laid for something big. With 96GB of RAM, a 12GB 3060 GPU, and 54 terabytes of scalable storage, the system wasn't just high-spec. It was a monster by this world's standards.
At the heart of the operation was her Porygon-2—sleek, efficient, and running deep-learning routines at a pace that put even chat GPT 4o to shame.
It was actively building the website itself, not just spitting out HTML and CSS, but dynamically crafting the entire stack: a lightweight forum system modular enough to scale across every route, region, and city in the known Poké-world. The framework was lean, lossless, and precise—designed to operate on both modern terminals and aging Pokétech used by rural trainers.
A look at terminal chat she forked off of teh server and on to her battlestation computer had posted a message,
Project: Pokenet:Online – Unified Forum System
Deployment Mode: Regional Mapping + Post-Enabled Infrastructure
Current Build Progress: 28%
Estimated Time to Functioning Launch: 1h 42m
Cyel laughed, the world of pokemon was about to be introduced to an online message board. An alot of interesting stuff was going to come of it.