Making Game: CH 171 – Elite Four (Patreon)

A fresh breeze carried the first hints of spring across the rolling hills of Friton, melting the stubborn frost along the courtyard glass. Inside the Round Table Studio headquarters, the development floors had emptied out for a midday recess.

The central atrium was packed with employees gathered in a loose group, their eyes fixed on a massive volumetric display hovering above the floor. Twin Caliburn VR seats stood on a low riser near the edge of the platform, cradling two engineers who lay reclined in deep synchronization.

High above them, vibrant holographic projections brought an intense Pokémon clash to life. The crowd cheered, gasped, and tossed friendly taunts across the hall as the internal bracket moved into its quarter-finals.

This round pitted Zed from Production against Nardon from the Sound Department.

"Stop spamming Tackle, Zed!" Kasavin shouted from the second row, cupping both hands around his mouth. "Vary your attacks!"

Ross Dalle turned with an amused grin, resting his elbow on the back of his chair. "Whoa, Kas. I had no idea you were this passionate about competitive battling."

"Zed is the sole survivor carrying the torch for our entire wing," Kasavin retorted, gesturing dramatically toward the arena. "If he drops this set, Production is officially eliminated."

Logan Kim lounged on a low partition nearby, noisily slurping the sweet pearls of a chilled boba teebu through a wide straw. He swallowed, wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. "You might as well accept defeat right now, Kas. I'm taking one of those Elite Four slots, so don't let your hopes climb too high."

Kasavin offered a dry smirk. "I would love to see you actually try, Logan."

The internal tournament was organized around a clever initiative pitched by Bem. To mark the upcoming launch of the Caliburn VR seat, Round Table Studio planned to establish an official, developer-backed Elite Four within the game's competitive circuit. 

The champions crowned in today's company bracket would serve as the inaugural boss roster for the launch event. Players throughout the Accord who purchased the hardware would have the chance to challenge them, earning the right to seize the coveted mantle and hold the title for an entire year. 

Hopefully, the prospect of dethroning the actual creators provided a massive incentive for prospective buyers to invest in the new VR ecosystem.

In the center of the ring, Zed's companion landed a decisive elemental strike. The holographic scoreboard flared with gold light, signaling a knockout.

A loud cheer erupted from the Production cluster. Zed climbed out of the cradle. Nardon removed his sensory visor a second later. The two developers met at the edge of the stage, sharing a hearty handshake and a mutual exchange of "Good game" before stepping aside for the next pairing.

Three floors above the commotion, Ravli stood alone at the polished steel balustrade. He stared down at the glowing battle with vacant, hollow eyes. The weight of the metallic data puck in his pocket seemed to drag at his posture.

A sudden tap on his shoulder made him flinch.

"Why the long face?" Liseli asked, leaning against the rail beside him with an easy smile.

Ravli gasped, his hand darting to his chest. "Ah! Liseli. You scared the life out of me."

Down below, the crowd roared with laughter as another challenger took the stage.

Liseli tilted her head, studying his tired expression. "Seriously, what has gotten into you? You look like you are carrying the entire galaxy on your shoulders."

Ravli forced an awkward chuckle, rubbing the back of his neck to conceal his unease. "One of my daughters threw a fit this morning. I'm pretty sure I brought home the wrong Pokémon collection box."

Liseli let out a soft laugh. "Young girls can be remarkably stubborn about things like that."

Ravli sighed, leaning his forearms against the cool railing. "It doesn't make it any easier to process. Ever since I joined this studio, I've had genuine free time in the evenings. Perhaps she simply isn't accustomed to having me around the house so much."

Liseli turned her gaze back to the floor below, watching one of the systems programmers sweep through an opponent's defense with ruthless efficiency.

"Perhaps," Liseli replied gently. "Even so, I'm certain she will appreciate your presence far more as the years go by."

Ravli looked at the young Art Director, surprised by the sudden softness in her tone.

"While I know very little about being a parent," Liseli continued in a quiet murmur, "I certainly remember what it was like to be a little girl. You eventually learn to cherish the people you can no longer keep beside you."

She turned to him and offered a gentle, reassuring smile. Even so, a quiet shadow of sorrow lingered behind her bright eyes, carrying the distant ache of a home that had vanished long before she ever reached these stars.

Liseli pushed herself away from the polished railing with a slow, relaxed stretch. "Come on, let's head downstairs and join the rest of the crew."

She took several light steps toward the open staircase, then paused with one hand resting against the metallic bannister. She glanced back over her shoulder, her voice dropping into quiet sincerity.

"When in doubt, be honest. That was what my father told me."

She offered a gentle smile before turning to skip down the stairs, rejoining the lively crowd gathered in the sunlit hall below.

Ravli remained standing beside the third-floor balustrade, entirely frozen. The single word echoed in his thoughts. Was. The quiet sadness lingering behind her bright eyes made sudden, heartbreaking sense. 

Ravli slipped a trembling hand into his jacket pocket. His fingers brushed against the cold, angular rim of the universal data puck. He looked down at the floor, repeating her words in a breathless whisper.

"When in doubt, be honest."

…

Down on the ground floor, the final rounds of the tournament concluded amid deafening cheers and enthusiastic table-thumping. The inaugural Elite Four roster for the upcoming Caliburn VR launch event was officially decided, locking in four exceptionally talented champions:

Logan Kim with an overwhelming lineup featuring Dragonite, Gengar, Alakazam, Tyranitar, Metagross, and Swampert, built on relentless speed and devastating offensive pressure.

Zed with a stubborn defensive squad consisting of Snorlax, Blastoise, Heracross, Donphan, Salamence, and Magneton, designed to outlast and exhaust opponents through sheer durability.

Bem Lendu with a tactical strike team boasting Scizor, Gardevoir, Houndoom, Sceptile, Gyarados, and Aerodactyl, focused on high mobility and unpredictable coverage.

Sorai with a fluid, versatile lineup showcasing Milotic, Ninetales, Altaria, Flygon, Espeon, and Blaziken, catching challengers off guard with balanced elemental counters.

Arthur walked into the atrium holding a steaming mug of spiced roast teebu. He glanced up at the volumetric display, taking in the four crowned avatars and the surrounding bracket charts.

He let out an appreciative whistle, a broad smirk touching his face. "Well, well. That's one formidable Elite Four right there. Did everyone have fun?"

Liseli looked up from a lounge couch, her eyes bright. "Oh, you're back!"

A chorus of nods, raised cups, and laughter rippled through the gathered staff.

Kasavin smoothed down the collar of his shirt, shifting smoothly back into his professional demeanor. "So, how did the preliminary negotiations go on Sela?"

Arthur took a measured sip from his mug. "The screenplay still requires some narrative polishing passes to tighten the pacing of the Underworld lore, yet we reached a formal agreement with Director Zossare to begin casting auditions for Troy."

A wave of congratulatory cheers and applause washed through the atrium.

Bem shook his head in sheer disbelief. "I never would've guessed that a legendary director like Hain Zossare would step out of secluded retirement specifically to adapt the mythology from our game."

Raja stood beside the tournament podium, tapping his datapad against his forearm to restore order. "Before everyone gets swept up in movie glamour, keep your eyes on our schedule. Our top priority remains the Caliburn commercial rollout next month."

Liseli raised her hand with a mischievous grin. "Do we at least get reserved front-row seats for the red-carpet premiere?"

Arthur chuckled, shaking his head at her boundless enthusiasm. "The cameras haven't even arrived on location yet, Lin."

The entire room erupted into easy, warm laughter.

…

Light-years away, nestled inside his private workstation, Lockley sat staring intently at dual glowing monitors.

As the premier dataminer on the Avalon networks, Lockley spent most of his free evenings dissecting the internal architecture of any RTS Game. Lately, a fiery debate has taken over the community forums regarding a prominent stellarcaster named ShinySharly.

Sharly had recently wrapped up her shiny collection in the Johto remakes in a fraction of the time her earlier runs required. In her video guides, she revealed her personal method: breeding target species exclusively with a traded Ditto captured by a friend.

Skeptics on the forums had immediately pushed back, dismissing her results as confirmation bias, a lucky roll of random generation, or a streamer inventing good-luck rituals.

Lockley wanted to see whether the underlying assembly told a different story.

He dug through the decompiled code governing the day-care breeding calculations, isolating the exact subroutine that generated personality values for freshly generated eggs. After several hours of tracing execution paths, he found the hidden variable.

The game contained an intentional algorithmic check. Whenever the engine calculated an offspring's values, it compared the origin sector metadata between the two parent creatures. If the regional system tags originated from different geographic star clusters, the algorithm automatically triggered four additional reroll loops for the shiny threshold.

Breeding with an off-world partner increased the shiny probability by a full five times, reducing the baseline odds from one in 8,192 down to approximately one in 1,638.

Lockley pulled up the Avalon discussion board and drafted a comprehensive technical breakdown. He filled the post with disassembled memory offsets, hex addresses, and logical logic trees that looked completely unintelligible to anyone without a programming background.

The core message, however, was unmistakable.

Sharly's off-world breeding technique was an official, hardcoded mechanic running silently within the engine. Arthur had intentionally rewarded interstellar trading with extraordinary fortune, turning what players assumed was superstition into verifiable mathematical fact.

…

The live broadcast notification flashed across the Avalon streaming directory, drawing tens of thousands of viewers into ShinySharly's channel within seconds.

When her camera feed clicked on, a collective murmur rippled through the audience. The haggard, hollow-eyed exhaustion that had defined her appearances for the past six months had softened considerably. 

Developing a more reliable routine to ease the brutal grind of egg hatching had clearly allowed her to rest, eat proper meals, and regain her color. She sat before her studio microphone with a calm, steady posture, her eyes bright and clear.

"Good evening, everyone," Sharly began, leaning slightly toward the pickup. "I think you all know why we're going live tonight."

She let out a quiet breath, watching the text feed begin to churn. For weeks, public commentary channels and forum threads had bombarded her with relentless skepticism. Skeptics had accused her of faking her footage, editing capture archives, or quietly paying external contractors under the table to hatch eggs on secondary consoles.

Tonight, the mood in the chat underwent a complete reversal. The skeptics had done a total one-eighty after reading Lockley's technical report on the Avalon forums. Apologies, celebratory emotes, and links to the datamined thread flooded the screen.

"First and foremost," Sharly said, placing a hand over her heart, "I want to send an enormous thank you across the stars to Lockley. Datamining the actual assembly must have taken hours of meticulous work, and he laid out the truth for everyone to see."

She gave a small, self-deprecating laugh as she recounted the story behind her discovery.

"In all honesty, the whole thing started by complete accident. An online friend from an entirely different star cluster reached out because he desperately wanted a shiny starter I had hatched. We arranged a trade, and in return, he sent me a standard Ditto to help me breed a specific competitive line I wanted to build. As the days went on and I kept using that Ditto, shiny hatches kept appearing at an absurd rate. It felt uncanny."

Several longtime viewers chimed in to back her up:

>: "I was in the chat during that exact broadcast! She stared at the screen for two minutes straight when the second one hatched!">: "I remember that night. Everyone in the chat assumed she had simply tapped into an insane streak of good luck.">: "We witnessed history and thought it was just RNG."

"I had zero idea what the actual mathematics looked like beneath the surface," Sharly admitted, resting her elbows on the console with a wide, relieved smile. "Lockley proved that the game actually grants a full five-times bonus for partners from different star systems. Having that hard proof makes me feel so deeply, wonderfully vindicated."

She leaned back in her chair and let out a long, cathartic exhale.

The chat window erupted into absolute bedlam:

>: "THE SHARLY METHOD IS OFFICIALLY CANON!">: "Never doubt our unfixable girl ever again!">: "Her name shall be etched into the history books forever!">: "Updating all my breeding guides right this second with the Sharly Method tag!"

Sharly laughed aloud as she watched the chaotic flood of support. The petty doubts that had shadowed her work were washed away completely. From that evening forward, any trainer across the Accord who sought to hatch rare, shiny companions by pairing partners across stellar borders would speak her name, forever calling the technique the Sharly Method.

The community had grown accustomed to uncovering these hidden marvels on their own. Round Table Studio rarely published formal manuals or design manifestos detailing internal quirks. The developers tucked intricate, thoughtful systems deep inside their virtual worlds, allowing players to explore the boundaries, share theories, and build a living culture around their discoveries.

Far down in the comment section of Lockley's celebrated forum post, buried beneath thousands of celebratory remarks, a single query sat with only two quiet upvotes:

>MirageSeeker: "Lockley, whenever you have spare time, could you please look into the code and help me verify the phantom island on Route 130?"

It remained an unanswered riddle for another day, waiting for the curious to wander into the fog.

For the moment, the shiny hunting community focused entirely on celebrating together. A massive, decentralized trade wave swept through the communication networks. Trainers living on remote agrarian outposts exchanged messages with apartment dwellers in dense Core Rim capitals. 

People who had never once traveled beyond the gravity wells of their home planets were exchanging friendly greetings, sharing local stories, and adding unfamiliar star tags to their contact rosters.

They sent digital capsules across light-years of silent space, sharing their companions and forging genuine connections with total strangers across the vast dark of the galaxy.

…

Several weeks rolled past, carrying away the lingering chill of winter as early spring settled across the rolling meadows of Friton. Outside the Round Table Studio complex, the wide front plaza had been transformed into an open-air demonstration pavilion. A raised stage stood centered beneath the sky, flanked by towering structural columns that hummed with quiet power.

High above the pavilion floor, camera drones drifted in smooth formation. Raja paced the edge of the riser with a headset pressed to his ear, gesturing toward the sky as he adjusted angles.

"Keep drone three on the diagonal crane path," Raja called out into his comms. "Gawain, calibrate the ambient light compensation for the morning sun."

"Optical adjustments are already complete, Director Raja," Gawain answered through the earpiece, his digital voice crisp and unhurried. "All seven capture feeds are synchronized to within two milliseconds."

Over on the technical riser, Logan hunched over a heavy field console. Lines of network diagnostics flickered rapidly across his dual screens as he verified the outgoing data feeds.

"The streaming conduits are solid," Logan said, tapping a final command string into the board. "Every major relay from here to the Core Rim is locked into our primary."

Behind the velvet backdrop at the rear of the stage, Bem knelt beside two sleek, silver-trimmed chairs. He ran his palms across the contoured memory foam of the Caliburn VR seats, double-checking the auxiliary neural nodes and power couplings. Everything had to be flawless.

Every developer moving through the pavilion understood the gravity of this morning. Arthur stood quietly near the entrance doors, watching the crew coordinate the final details. This presentation represented far more than a simple product demonstration. It was a massive leap forward for the studio, a grand opening move into an entirely new medium of entertainment.

Liseli walked along the outer perimeter of the stage, holding an optical slate to inspect the volumetric holo-projectors embedded in the flooring. As the diagnostic sweep finished, her brow furrowed. She tapped the slate, looking up at the empty display mount on the left archway.

She turned toward the staging crew. "Sorai, where is the secondary title emitter? The left arch is completely dark."

Sorai looked up from a coil of fiber-optic cabling, blinking in surprise. "The left unit? I handed that projector to Ravli over an hour ago. He said he would calibrate the mounting bracket."

"Then where did Ravli go?" Liseli asked, glancing across the bustling platform.

Sorai gave an uncertain shrug. "I have no idea. I thought he was over by the sound boards."

Liseli let out a small breath and stepped off the riser. She searched behind the stage curtains, scanning the equipment racks until her eyes caught a dull metallic glimmer tucked away near the wrong side of the rear scaffolding. The projector sat on an auxiliary power crate, completely forgotten.

She picked up the emitter, carrying it back to the left archway and sliding it into the locking groove with a firm click. The projector flared to life, casting the golden crest of Round Table Studio into the air.

Liseli stepped back to admire the alignment, yet her eyes drifted toward the perimeter fence. Ravli was usually meticulous with his assigned tasks. For him to abandon equipment on the wrong side of the pavilion felt entirely out of character.

She wondered where he had disappeared to.

…

Light-years away, deep within the humid lower levels of Nexus Prime, Captain Verza Zal stopped in front of a tarnished alloy door.

The corridor smelled of ozone, stagnant water, and cheap engine grease. Verza stood motionless, her eyes tracing the scratched metal frame. This was the exact place where she had captured Ula several months ago.

More importantly, her preliminary investigation into the mysterious musician Percival had pointed back toward this identical sector. According to her old internal logs, she had once flagged an obscure young artist living in this very block because he had registered an instrumental composition under the title Skyfall.

Percival had later released a masterpiece by that same name. Yet the chronological record remained frustratingly contradictory. Percival's official public emergence occurred later, alongside the rise of Juno Park, while the young composer in this tenement had submitted his track months prior to any of those events.

Verza exhaled slowly. The bureaucratic chaos of the Nexus Prime riots had wiped the district Commons Laws registry, erasing lease records, biometric logs, and tenant archives. Finding concrete proof here was nearly impossible.

The door directly opposite creaked open on dry hinges.

An elderly woman leaned out of the gap, squinting through the dim halogen light at the tall, sharp-featured officer standing in the hall.

"Are you looking to rent that flat?" the old woman asked in a gravelly rasp.

Verza turned her head, keeping her expression neutral. "May I inquire about the previous tenant history for that room?"

The old woman scoffed, rolling her eyes as she began pulling her door shut. "If you aren't paying down credits to lease the space, bug off. I don't waste my breath on loiterers."

Before the latch could catch, Verza reached out and caught the door flat with her gloved palm. The metal stopped instantly, held motionless against the frame.

"I would reconsider that tone," Verza said, her voice dropping to a calm, icy register.

She tilted her left wrist, letting the sleeve of her coat draw back. The miniature holo-projector on her cuff cast a glowing silver insignia into the space between them, displaying the sharp, predatory crest of the Bureau of Stellar Order.

The old woman froze. The color drained from her wrinkled face in a heartbeat, and her hands began to tremble against the wood.

"I... I, I'm sorry, officer," the woman stammered, shrinking back into the hallway. "I had no idea."

Verza held her gaze. "The history of the previous tenant. Speak."

The landlady swallowed hard, clutching her faded robe tightly. "This is low level Nexus, ma'am. Nobody asks questions down here. We don't keep formal digital ledgers, and we don't demand background verifications. As long as someone transfers credits on the first day of the month, they get a key. That is the only rule we have."

Verza studied the woman for two silent seconds. The fear in the old woman's eyes was absolute. She genuinely possessed no useful information.

Verza tapped a brief command onto her wrist terminal, shutting down the holographic badge.

"Good luck," Verza said flatly.

She turned on her heel and strode down the rusted corridor. Behind her, heavy combat boots clattered against the metal flooring as a strike squad of white-armored legionnaires moved past her into the tenement. They began sweeping the empty apartment, dismantling the wall panels and pulling data caches from the conduit junctions to seize any lingering biological or physical evidence.

Verza walked away, her dark half-cape billowing behind her as she navigated the crowded central artery of the slum. Civilians shrank against the grimy walls, hurriedly parting to give the Bureau captain a wide berth.

Her jaw clenched in quiet irritation. The trail had run cold. If she wanted to uncover the true face behind Percival, she would have to search elsewhere.