After her last clash in Celadon City ended in a near-humiliating defeat.
Lorelei had not lost heart. Instead, it had stirred an even stronger competitive streak in her.
She realized that the mysterious strategist hidden behind Team Rocket was an extremely difficult opponent.
Conventional military strikes and head-on clashes could hardly gain an advantage against his endless schemes.
So she changed the direction of her investigation.
She stopped fixating on finding Team Rocket's secret bases and instead set her sights on the source of their technology.
That mysterious backer who supplied them with technology ahead of its time.
Lorelei drew on every connection and resource she had as a member of the Elite Four.
After a period of covert investigation, she obtained an old-model Rainbow Game Console that Team Rocket had phased out, through a highly unusual channel, from an informant who specialized in reselling electronic scrap on the black market.
She immediately sent the seemingly unremarkable console to the headquarters of Silph Co. in Saffron City, the Pokémon League's foremost technology company.
She asked Silph Co.'s top team of technical experts to perform the most thorough physical-level reverse engineering possible on the console.
The experts carefully opened the console's casing.
When they saw the faintly glowing core chip inside, every one of them was stunned.
The chip's packaging process and internal circuit architecture bore no resemblance to any known technology of this era.
It seemed more like something made in the future.
The experts tried every method they could to crack the encryption algorithm inside the chip.
But all their efforts failed.
The complexity of that encryption algorithm far exceeded their understanding.
It was as though an elementary school student still learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division had suddenly been asked to solve a difficult calculus problem.
This astonishing