CH116 (480), Outstanding Work (1)

I came back to Rota after spending the month with my parents, who also put a pause on their own traveling so that they could spend some time with me. They had done the same when they came to visit me three months ago, but outside of our meetups, they were pretty much going around and getting into some fights.

Well, they called it traveling, but from the stories that they kept telling me during the break and our regular phone calls, I'd rather say that they were going around picking fights with a dash of exploration and adventure mixed in.

Still, I understood where they were coming from since I knew that they wanted to take part in their respective upcoming tournaments, so Mom and Dad were preparing for those tournaments by fighting strong trainers as well as wild Pokemon.

Heck, getting stronger by fighting was a tried and tested method that had long proven to work for tons of people, so it was not surprising that my parents chose to do it as well. I and probably most of them knew that fighting alone was not enough, but it certainly helped squeeze out everything there was to squeeze.

Especially if one had a rich enough accumulation to act as fertilizer for fast growth, which the Pokemon of my parents had thanks to all the training they did beforehand along with the grade-A supplements my parents provided. I'd know since those either came from me or were made according to recipes given to them by me.

Regardless, their "adventures" did work out for them since Dad's Drago ended up feeling ready for his breakthrough to the gold stage just two weeks ago. Drago shared that he no longer felt any kind of progress despite training very hard for more than three weeks, so they decided to move on to the next step.

Since this happened during the time we were all home, I got to witness his breakthrough to the gold stage along with his subsequent evolution to Dragonite. Now, between the two of them, Mom's Golbat was the only Pokemon that was not fully evolved.

Though, I was considering whether I should finally give Mom and Dad one of the Magikarp that had hatched inside Utopia's main space. There was a particular duo that was quite promising. Both had an additional full/standard affinity, but neither had become a variant from the get-go. Still, from their affinity, it was not too hard to guess who made up at least one part of their parents.

The female Magikarp had a poison affinity, so one would think that there was a high chance that Medusa/Gyarados was the mom, but I did not remember her being pregnant, so it was probably one of the others that ingested poison materials and/or preferred hanging around in Medusa's pond/lake. Well, either that or I somehow managed to miss a 3 to 4-month-long pregnancy period on Medusa's side.

Meanwhile, the male Magikarp had a dragon affinity, so chances were high that Ryujin was the dad. Still, on this side, the chance was there that it was Magidraco's kid, or that it was a coincidence based on the same reasoning as with the poison one.

Still, additional affinity aside, both Magikarp had deep blue potential, and both were only missing a little bit for their potential to reach light purple. Nonetheless, I had yet to decide whether I should hand them over to my parents or not.

It was just that they had shown no particular interest in adding any new Pokemon into their teams for now, so I was not sure if handing them an iron-stage Magikarp that would have to be trained from such a low starting point would be something they wanted.

Regardless, Dad had a fully evolved "pseudo-legendary" on his team now and we agreed that if I did not get a Dratini of my own within the next 10 years, then I'd get an egg from Drago. I had a few ideas in mind on how to get myself an outstanding member of that particular line, but this promise could act as a fail-safe in case my ideas did not pan out until then.

Anyway, I ended up coming back to Rota on Grouday of the semi-final week of my break since the final week finished up on Mewday. Nonetheless, I was planning to go back to the lab on Arcday since I saw no reason to start my work in the middle of the week.

I did not care about those two days of vacation all that much and I made sure to clear it up with Professor Varon first. She, for obvious reasons, did not mind my slightly early return.

Following my return to Varon Labs, I began implementing my plan. Starting from Arcday, I began to use my personal experience and the information stored in my super library to adjust the formulas they/we were using for the internal supplements step by step.

I planned to optimize them throughout the term and end up with formulas that were at least a few times better than the current ones. In private, I had already made sure that I could achieve that, so I had no problem actually implementing it.

Heck, I could actually pull out the finished products/formulas right now if I wanted to, but doing so would be stupid. No, I was going to stick to my plan and slowly lead the professor along with her team to my solution.

This way the result would be more acceptable even if such a great change in such a "short" period was still rather unbelievable. At least it was no longer in the range of "impossible". Also, while the efficacy increase was impressive, I held back a bit in-so-far, that I made the supplements perfect for the Buneary line, but less so for other species. I had to keep some things to myself for now after all.

Anyway, optimizing the internal supplements was my goal for this term. Next term I was hoping to do the same with the external supplements, covering both the internal and external side. Once the supplements had reached the efficacy I wanted, I would come up with/introduce a set of movements/training methods that would allow the Buneary line to absorb the energy/aura released by the supplements more efficiently.

I was sure that doing all that would allow me to raise the rate of the aura variant evolution to 100 out of 100 for those with some degree of aura affinity. As for those without any aura affinity at the start, I was estimating a rate of 90+ out of 100, which was already incredible.

At that point, the main target of Professor Varon's research could be considered complete, and I could go back to Oak Labs. As for an actual aura trigger capable of acting like an evolution stone, that was something Professor Varon would have to research without me over a long period of time. The same was true for any attempts at compressing the targeted evolution method even further than the period we were going to achieve by the end of my time here at Varon Labs.

Anyway, back to the present. Our team was mainly using 3 kinds of potions/tonics that acted as internal supplements. One potion used aura to speed up recovery speed and helped heal wear and tear. This one was obviously the kind of supplement used pre and post-training.

The second one focused on stamina rather than health but was mostly used in conjunction with the first one. Obviously, both could be used on their own as well. The last potion provided quite a lot of aura as an energy source to help recover energy loss, or for some energy boost which was useful for training as well.

There were a few more potions that were occasionally used as well, but these 3 were the most frequently consumed supplements as well as the ones with the biggest consumption volume, so I obviously chose to focus on them.

I decided to start with the health recovery potion before including the stamina one as well. I would then also include the energy potion. Once I started to involve the other formulas/potions, it would be kind of like working on all of them at once rather than just one, but doing this would let me alternate between them on occasion.

This would spread the progress between the three potions which would "slow" the individual progress down, which was what I wanted. 5 to 6 months for 3 formulas/potions sounded much better than just one for each. I had to be the first person who said that while meaning it.

Nonetheless, in that vein, I spent the first two weeks of the first month of this term focused on the health potion. At first, I began to tweak the amount of materials used during the production and noted down the results, before adding certain materials to the formula, out of which just one was what I really wanted to add.

The others were used as a cover, but I made sure that their addition would have no negative impact on the Pokemon that consumed the modified potion. After the tests, I eliminated the "useless" ones and was left with the one I actually wanted.

My actions naturally did not go unnoticed but Professor Varon let me do my thing after I explained what I was doing. Especially when I showed that I had managed to increase the potion's efficacy by around 8% in just 2 weeks. During the third week, I included the stamina potion in my revision effort.

When I did that, Professor Varon recommended that I focus on one of them instead of spreading my attention, but I persuaded her using stuff like "this allows me to switch between potions whenever I am stuck" and "opening my mind for other options while still working in the same field". In short, the "I'm stuck and looking for inspiration stick" along with the "cross-reference" one.

I spent close to 3 weeks on the stamina potion with the occasional brief jump to the health formula. These 3ish weeks resulted in an increase of effectiveness of 11% in the stamina potion, while the health one also got another 2% boost.

I felt that was a pretty good way to tie up the month, and Professor Varon as well as the others agreed with me. Still, with the arrival of the second month, and seeing how more than two weeks had passed since I included potion number 2, I decided to add the third potion into the mix as well.

I spent a week on it before moving back to the stamina potion for another week before returning to the energy potion for an additional two weeks. For the fifth/final week along with the first "three" weeks of the third month, I moved back to the beginning and focused on the health/recovery potion.

Speaking of the first "three" weeks of the new month, they proved to be rather interesting on a personal scale for me as well since all 4 Eevee advanced to the (high) bronze stage throughout the "three" weeks.

Well, I really only counted those as 2 weeks since the first week only consisted of Grouday, but theoretically/formally it counted as three weeks. The same was true for the final/sixth week of the month which happened to be an Arcday.

Regardless, I spent the next two weeks after all that alternating between the three formulas/potions, and after I reached the three months mark, their efficacy had risen by up to 70%, give or take a few percent depending on the formula/potion. That was definitely enough to prove my mettle to everyone at the lab.

Now that they knew that what I was doing was truly working, I was ready to spend the next 2 months doing some bigger adjustments to the current formulas/potions. This was necessary if I wanted to achieve the target of my plan, and the plan was to finish this term with each internal potion/formula being 2.5 to 3 times as potent while still being as bearable/ingestible as it used to be.

The original plan had been to go for a higher potency than that, but those were harder on the Pokemon, so I went with 2.5 to 3 times instead, which was still a rather outrageous increase considering that I was planning to raise the efficacy by another 80 to 130% within 2 months on top of the current 70%.

Nevertheless, drowning myself in formulas and potions as well as plans was not everything I did that weekend. Nope, I decided to visit Pallet City and went to the lab to pick up the next/third batch of Toedscool's younglings that had fulfilled the 18-month period I had previously set.

This was the second time since I moved to Rota that I did such a trip, and the last time was 4 months ago at the end of the second term. By keeping the trips to once every few months like this, I did not have to travel over at the end of each month, and some of the kids got to spend a few extra months at the lab. Plus, I spent pretty much the whole weekend at the plot I had at the lab so that the younglings I had previously picked up could spend some time with their parents.

Nonetheless, come Arcday, I was back in Rota for the final day/week of the month, and Mewday welcomed the new month, which was the fourth one of the 3rd term. The next one would be the 5th as well as the final month and would bring along some good old midterm exams, so I'd have to go back to Pallet City for the 2-week-long exam period.

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