Lavender Town.
Even in broad daylight, it looked dead.
Gray skies hung like wet cloth over jagged rooftops. The Pokémon Tower loomed at the edge of town, veiled in perpetual mist, its windows dark like empty eyes. As I stepped off the path and into the heart of the city, my Cobblemon system dimmed its UI flickering as if something else was trying to overwrite it.
System Alert: Node 5 Corruption > 92%
Caution: Reality-Virtual sync unstableEffects: Auditory hallucinations, false inputs, memory bleed
I didn't need the warning.
I already heard it.
A voice my own but wrong. Flat. Filtered like an NPC. "You're not supposed to exist," it said. "You're still in the pod."
Charmander no, Charbit walked beside me, its pixelated tail flickering in the haze. Kirlia held her head low, twitching, hearing things I couldn't.
This town wasn't haunted by Ghost-types.
It was haunted by code.
The Tower
Inside the Pokémon Tower, the air turned heavy.
The walls bled static. Gravestones flickered in and out of their blocky forms. My map couldn't lock onto my location.
Warning: Cognitive Overlap DetectedYour thoughts are not entirely your own here.
I kept climbing. Each floor looked more like a broken memory than a building. A playground. A hospital room. My room from the real world.
I blinked.
No. No, this wasn't real.
Then I saw her.
My mother sitting beside a hospital bed. My real one. She was older than I remembered. Crying. "He's not waking up," she whispered.
False Memory Construct DetectedDo not engage.
But I couldn't look away. I wanted to believe it.
Until the image twisted.
Her face peeled back like a glitching texture file. Behind it, a cold white mask with a single red eye.
ERROR ENTITY: "Whiteout" – Ghost of the Lost NodeForm: ???Purpose: Preserve the False World
The lights died.
Charbit snarled. Kirlia dropped to one knee, eyes locked onto something we couldn't see.
The Whiteout entity stepped forward, dragging the room into monochrome.
Boss Battle Initiated – Whiteout (Node Phantom, ??? Type)
BATTLE: Whiteout, Guardian of Node 5
Whiteout didn't attack in the usual sense. It whispered.
"You were happy in the real world once. Why fight to return?"
Suddenly, my vision blurred. I was standing in a warm house. Game consoles. Laughter. My childhood dog barking. Charbit stood still, confused his body glitching between Cobblemon and 3D render.
Kirlia used Mind SpikeEffect: Shatters Illusions
The world cracked. I saw Whiteout's real form a writhing digital shell stitched from a thousand lost save files, each screaming.
Charbit attacked next, launching Firewall Crash burning away part of its structure.
But Whiteout was fast.
It split the arena into two timelines.
In one, my team was dead.
In the other, I was just a hollow shell in a hospital bed, breathing through a tube.
System Override Triggered – Anchor Memory Accessed
I reached into the glitch into myself and chose.
I pulled both timelines into one.
Fusion Triggered – Kirlia is evolving...
New Form: Glitchlia (Psychic / ???)Special Ability: False Reflection – Creates clones from fractured memory data
With Glitchlia's army of mirrored clones and Charbit's data flames crashing against Whiteout's core, the entity finally broke splintering into corrupted screams and vanishing like fog at sunrise.
Node 5 StabilizedSystem Integrity: 98%Final Anchor Recovered
You are now fully synced with the Cobblemon System.
Final Path Unlocked: Sky Above Pallet Town – The Root Code Gate
I stood at the top of the tower, my breath visible in the stillness.
I knew now I wasn't just inside the Pokémon world.
I was inside a digital construct of it, built on the shattered framework of something much older. Something forgotten.
But I also knew this: I wasn't just a visitor anymore.
I was part of the system.
And something up there beyond even Pallet Town was waiting for me to climb.