>>56705473Iirc Pewter is actually described as an old fashioned town.
So your three towns are an ass crack so valueless even as a port as to have nothing but a retired professor.
A bumpkin mountain town with a geology museum as its standout feature
A place people pass through on their way to the league, pressed into the armpit of a forest full of poisonous bugs, so out of the way and underscruitinized that the local mob boss put up his front there.
There is no overland access between this section of Kanto and anywhere else, your only routes are through mountains (Mt. Moon, Diglett Tunnel, Victory Road), and sea route without a port.
Technically, Mt. Moon isn't even accessible from the Cerulean side, but, I'll chalk that up to gameplay, not lore.
Diglett tunnel is unmaintained on the Kanto side, while it is made readily accessible on the Vermillion side, meaning the non-port beach that connects only to an island considered secluded enough to do highly secret biological and genetic experiments on is the "best" access route.
There is no proof of any economic power of this section of Kanto; its only significant actors are all trying to avoid wider society. Other areas of Kanto have prepared walkways and paved roads, significant infrastructure investment such as raised and subterranean walkways, and notable economic actors at play, especially concentrated around the Saffron cross.
The Pewter-Viridian-Pallet sector of Kanto is, by all accounts, an impoverished, underdeveloped isolation zone that not only seems to have failed to even attempt to bridge this connection with either the rest of Kanto or Johto, but seems to actively be directed in ways to enforce this isolationism.
