CH130 (494), 4th Term/External Supplement Optimization (1)

Once Professor Varon and the others had gotten the question regarding my Ursa papers out of their systems, I handed her the "work" I had done over the break in regard to the internal supplements, just like I had planned to do before the vacation even began. She was rather impressed when she saw that I had truly managed to raise the efficacy of all internal supplements by 200%.

Nonetheless, objectively, the results had to be verified and that was what we did during my first week back at the lab. While we were doing that, Professor Oak showed that he meant what he said. My papers were printed and published on Dialday in a special edition of not just one prominent science/Pokemon magazine but three of them.

During the weekend I was busy answering calls from my parents and a lot of friends as well as acquaintances, along with quite a few "strangers" that got my number. Well, they were strangers in the sense that I did not know them personally, but I knew who they were since they were rather prominent individuals in the science and/or trainer community.

Thankfully, by the end of Arcday, the wave stopped and I could finally stop talking to the phone. I had no problems with phone calls per se but having to deal with so many of them caused me to be a bit fed up.

Anyway, moving past the price of fame, by Mewday of week two of being back at the lab, Professor Varon was satisfied with the results that came out of the verification process and officially declared the internal supplement upgrade a complete success.

What that meant for me was that I could now move on to the external supplements, and just like I had planned to do before the break, I told Professor Varon that I had already started to work on the external supplements during my break once I finished with the internal ones.

She looked at me with a bit of disbelief when I shared that with her, but regained her calm rather quickly, especially when I told her that the efficacy increase for both the salves and the creams was only at around 30% for now. There were four in total that the lab staff worked with, two salves as well as creams each, and I had done some improvements on all four.

Still, disbelief or not, Professor Varon was rather happy when I presented her with the "latest" improved formulas for all 4 external supplements since it gave our group a "basis" to work on. Well, actually, she left me in charge of the group working on the improvement of the supplements, for obvious reasons, since she was still in charge of the whole project and thus quite busy dealing with everything.

I spent the next two weeks fully focused on further raising the potency of the four salve/cream formulas until something came up on Palkiday of week number four that diverted my attention for a bit. It happened sometime after lunch.

I, or rather my secondary thought process charged with keeping an eye on Utopia noticed that Kun/Azuraid suddenly broke out in jubilation. Upon checking out what was going on I/we learned that Kun had managed to advance to the (high) gold stage.

His success certainly put a smile on my face, and I told him we would celebrate once I was off of work. Still, I had a happy smile on my face for the rest of the day, which caused a few of my colleagues to ask what had me in such good spirits.

I simply told them that I felt as if today was a good day and that something good would happen. "Coincidentally" I ended up successfully raising the efficacy increase of one of the creams to 50% before clocking out for the day, making my previous words seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Once I was back home, I made my way inside Utopia, and just as I had promised, we celebrated Kun's success until way past dinner time. It was an hour before midnight before I chose to put an end to the party. The next morning I was back to work and dedicated 100% of my attention to the project. Well, at least 100% of my primary thought stream.

Anyway, the week passed and before I knew it we already had Dialday. It had been 4 weeks since I came back to Rota and about 6 weeks since I had last seen Jessie, so I thought that it was time to meet up again.

I called her that evening to ask her if she wanted to hang out tomorrow since I had the day off. Kyoday was part of the weekend after all. She agreed, so I ended up spending Kyoday hanging out in Pallet City. I had a lot of fun, and I was sure the same was true for Jessie as well, so I'd say that Kyoday ended up being a great day.

Grouday turned out to be a rather great day as well since I ended up finding out that Bruce/Golbat had managed to reach the regular parameter limit sometime during the week while doing the routine check-up. That meant that he had officially begun his limit-breaking phase, and Moka, Eggy, and I were quite proud of him.

The final week after that went by calmly and the new month began on Grouday, meaning that we were already in the second week of the new month when I went back to work on Arcday. Since I had already spent around a month fully focused on just the external supplement formulas, I decided that it was time to add something new, but still relevant to the mix.

External supplements were meant to be applied on Pokemon, in this case, the Buneary line, and the new subject I chose to add to my plate was "developing", or rather teaching since I already knew what worked and what didn't, massage techniques that worked perfectly in tandem with those salves to stimulate the Buneary line's body.

The end goal was to increase the effectiveness of external supplements. I was aiming to have the ultimate efficacy boost go from 200% to 300ish% once both the external supplements and the massage techniques were used in tandem.

Actually, that line of thinking made me think of creating an exercise routine that allowed the Buneary line members to better absorb the aura released by the internal supplements. However, I had to shelf that one for a while, at least until I was done with what I had on my plate right now.

Anyway, after I had made the decision to split my focus between the external supplements and the massage techniques, I began alternating between the two every few days, and the "first" two weeks passed by just like that. I was naturally disregarding the lone one-day week in the beginning.

Week number "three", or four if one wanted to be finicky, rolled in and it brought along quite the pleasant surprise. Luna/Clefable ended up advancing to the (high) gold stage on Mewday. Surprisingly, she was not the only one that ended up giving me such a pleasant surprise that month.

Optimus/Butterfree ended up following her example on Dialday of the following week, just three days before the new/5th month of 2184 began. With his advancement to the (high) gold stage, Optimus once again opened up the distance between himself and his fellow head minion Prime/Beedrill, who had only "caught up" only two months ago.

Optimus did not show it outwardly, but I knew that he was happy to have moved a step ahead of Prime once more. The two had specialized in different kinds of battle styles, with Prime having a slightly more offensive/heads-on style, while Optimus' style was more defensive/long-ranged to make use of his many powder moves.

Due to that, they had been rather head-to-head prowess-wise ever since Prime broke through to the gold stage but following Optimus' advancement to the (high) gold stage, the odds tilted back to Optimus' side.

I knew that to be a fact because Prime challenged Optimus to quite a few battles throughout the next three days before he was ready to accept that Optimus once more had an advantage over him. At the end of his challenge spree, Prime had lost 8 out of 13 fights and tied in one of them.

Everyone else certainly enjoyed the shows (fights) the two put on, and Parvati/Beedrill and Mothra/Butterfree did not hesitate to show who they were supporting. Their cheers certainly fired up both Prime and Optimus, ensuring that both gave their best during each fight.

Though, I had to say that Prime had the cheering/public advantage since his minion/subordinate Beedrill Corp cheered for him in a quite coordinated manner which had an impressive effect as far as loudness and impact were concerned.

Optimus' support from the Butterfree group on the other hand was much less coordinated so they were not as impactful as the Beedrill. Still, the whole thing gave me a football match kinda vibe where the fans of the two sides tried to outcheer the other.

Even though I said that the Beedrill had the crowd advantage, it was still entertaining to witness, and unlike what usually happened during such heated football games, there were no battles between the fans of the two sides since they knew that I, as the boss of everyone involved, did not tolerate something like that.

Anyway, Arcday was the last day of the 4th month, and apparently, Togetic did not want to let me finish the month without giving me another reason to be happy. Her advancement to the (high) bronze stage definitely let me close the 4th month on a high note.

On the lab side of things, I had "managed" to raise the total potency increase of all 4 external supplement formulas to somewhere between 73 and 77% depending on the formula. I was planning to raise that number to 110ish% during the upcoming month, before doing what I had done with the internal supplements, namely freely adjusting the formula.

Up until now, I had done my best to stick to the lab's "original" formula as much as possible as far as components were concerned. I only substituted three of the components and otherwise played with the ratios between the individual ingredients.

Yet, after this following month that would change since I planned to reach the 200% threshold before the term was over, and the only way I could do that was by doing bigger adjustments to the current formula.

I knew from my experience with the internal supplements, that things would be fine as long as the progress I/we made seemed to make sense. There simply had to be a "relatively plausible" course that could be followed/understood by others.

So far, I had made sure that I kept to those two conditions, and I was planning to do so during the next few months as well. That said, come Mewday I did my best to work towards the 110(ish)% goal I set for the end of the month.

By the end of the first week, all four formulas had surpassed the 80% threshold, and by the end of the second one, the percentage had risen to somewhere between 85% and 88% depending on the formula.

That was good enough progress, but the real good news came from my Pokemon, namely Charmeleon, who advanced to the (high) bronze stage on Giratiday of the third week. The happiest among us at the news was probably Osiris/Marowak, and he put up a dance performance for us during the celebration that evening.

Osiris had seen some of the performances that the Alolan Marowak put on with their flaming bone clubs, and he had taken this as his inspiration by substituting the ghostly fire with regular flames. The dance definitely still looked cool, even if the flame color was different, and no one disliked the performance he put on. In fact, the Spinda joined Osiris as his background dancers since that lot enjoyed nearly all forms of dance.

I was pretty sure that they would become quite popular if I made videos of the various dances/performances that the Spinda Quartet performed together with the others at Utopia such as Osiris.

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