“Just because I can take my duties on the go doesn’t mean I want to leave Rouge behind! Let’s clear this quickly so we can go home.”
The CPU Candidate of Protonia and Rouge’s younger sister. A rising star in Gamindustri, her recent debut proved that she can seamlessly handle heavy-duty tasks on the move, sharply boosting her nation’s shares. Even though she is highly independent and can travel anywhere, her intense mutual love for Rouge makes her a bit of a homebody. She is fiercely protective of her older sister and won’t hesitate to swing her axe at anyone who interrupts their alone time.
Story
The Verification Program
Ruby arrives at the newly discovered “Greenlight Ruins.” Her mission is simple: run through the dungeon, test the monster difficulty, and officially tag it as “Safe for Play” for lower-level adventurers. She takes a deep breath, readies her heavy battle axe, and notes how smoothly she’s running today. “I’ll finish this at a solid sixty frames per second and get right back to Rouge,” she promises herself. Stepping boldly through the rusted, ivy-covered gates, she pulls up a holographic checklist to begin logging the area’s data. A small pack of low-level glitch-slimes attempts an early ambush, but she effortlessly cleaves through them with a single, fluid swing of her weapon, barely breaking her stride. Supremely confident in her current specs, she bypasses the initial safe zones and ventures deeper into the damp, glowing corridors, determined to clear the entire zone in record time.
Seamless Performance
Ruby pushes into the first few floors. She encounters a pack of Pixel Dogoos and effortlessly dispatches them. She reflects on how much she enjoys her mobility—being a handheld Candidate means she isn’t tethered to the Basilicom. Still, the quiet dungeon makes her feel a little lonely without her older sister’s constant doting. She briefly pauses to check her internal system temperature, finding it perfectly stable despite the rapid succession of heavy attacks she just executed. As she elegantly leaps through a series of trap-laden corridors, dodging tripwires with ease, she catches herself wishing Rouge were there to dramatically praise her agility. She quickly shakes off the affectionate distraction and refocuses on her task, gripping her axe tighter as the dungeon’s glowing moss transitions to an ominous shade of red to signal a high-risk zone.
Buggy Spawn Rates?
As Ruby goes deeper, things start getting strange. She enters the mid-boss room with her axe drawn, fully prepared for a grueling, heavy-duty fight, only to find a massive, horribly scorched crater and a few scattered low-tier items. She hums in confusion. “Is the spawn rate bugged? Or did the physics engine glitch the mid-boss through the floor?” She decides to note it in her bug report, casually scooping up the dropped loot while bypassing a remarkably pristine cardboard box sitting strangely in the corner of the ruined chamber. Assuming the sheer destruction was just an unoptimized asset-loading error, she rests her heavy weapon on her shoulder and keeps walking toward the lower levels, completely unaware of the trembling box behind her.
The Final Door
Ruby arrives at the giant, intricately carved door of the dungeon’s final boss, the heavy stone radiating a strangely intense heat. She pauses to do a quick internal systems check, confirming with satisfaction that she’s at full health and her EXE gauge is completely filled. She deeply misses the warmth of Rouge’s lap and the comfort of their shared couch, but taking down this final target means her verification run is officially complete and she can finally go home. Gripping her heavy axe tightly with both hands, she braces her boots against the floor and pushes the massive doors open over their rusted hinges, stepping confidently into the vast, shadow-filled arena to face whatever apex predator awaits her within.
The Reunion
Just as the massive dragon prepares to strike, intending to crush the Candidate with a devastating blow, the heavy stone ceiling of the boss room violently caves in. Rouge drops down like a fiery meteor in a massive flurry of dust and pulverized debris, swinging her gargantuan axe with enough force to completely deflect the beast’s attack and send it stumbling backward.
“ROUGE?!” Ruby shouts in sheer surprise, momentarily lowering her own weapon as the smoke clears to reveal the panting CPU.
“Did you really think I could survive an entire hour without you, my sweet little Ruby?!” Rouge cries dramatically, immediately dropping her heavy weapon to the floor with a loud clang to pull the bewildered Candidate into a tight, incredibly affectionate embrace. She affectionately nuzzles her sister’s cheek and frantically checks her for scratches, completely and utterly ignoring the massive, enraged dragon roaring furiously in the background as it attempts to recover from the ambush.
Boss? What Boss?
The colossal dragon, feeling deeply insulted that it is being utterly ignored in the center of its own boss room, inhales sharply and attempts to unleash a torrent of corrupted fire directly at the embracing siblings. Annoyed that their perfectly romantic reunion is being rudely interrupted by an aggroed enemy, Rouge and Ruby both snap their gazes toward the beast with matching glares of pure annoyance. In a blinding, synchronized flash of crimson binary code, the two seamlessly transform into their Processor units, Red Heart and Red Sister.
“You made me wait for my sister,” Red Heart growls.
“And you’re ruining our date,” Red Sister adds.
Leaping into the air in perfect, flawless unison, the two Goddesses execute a devastatingly synchronized double-axe EXE Drive, crossing their glowing weapons to unleash a massive shockwave that instantly and forcefully deletes the dragon from the server entirely. Without even bothering to wait for the victory animation to finish or checking the scorched crater for rare loot drops, the sisters simply power down and interlock their fingers. Holding hands, they jointly submit the clear data to the quest log and happily walk out of the collapsing dungeon together to go cuddle back on their couch, leaving the structural damage unfixed and the programming for “Project Three” delayed indefinitely.
Interactions
The Arrival of the “PC Threat”
Before Rouge and Ruby even make their official debut, the other four CPUs notice a terrifying anomaly on their Basilicom data monitors: all of their respective shares are dropping simultaneously. It’s not just a small market dip—it’s a massive hemorrhage that sends their Oracles into absolute hysterics. The root cause is quickly traced to an unprecedented, server-breaking phenomenon known as the legendary “Protonia Summer Sale.” Gamers across Lastation, Lowee, Leanbox, and Planeptune are suddenly emptying their wallets for ridiculously discounted digital games, completely ignoring the traditional brick-and-mortar console storefronts in favor of massive batch-downloads. Forced to momentarily set aside their usual bickering to confront this existential new threat to their economies, the four main CPUs and their Candidates hastily organize a heavily guarded emergency summit, fiercely demanding that the leaders of this mysterious new “Protonia” show themselves immediately.
Nepgear
The moment Ruby’s impressive hardware specs are casually mentioned during the summit, Nepgear goes into a state of total, unapologetic hardware-nerd euphoria. She immediately abandons her own sister’s side and starts bombarding the bewildered Candidate with a rapid-fire barrage of highly technical questions about her compatibility layers, custom OS, and thermal throttling limits. She practically shoves a notepad into Ruby’s face, begging to see her internal cooling architecture, much to the portable Candidate’s visible, albeit polite, annoyance.
Uni
Meanwhile, Uni immediately sparks a bitter, entirely one-sided rivalry with the newly minted Candidate. As Lastation’s famously sleek portable powerhouse, Uni is deeply offended by the fact that Ruby can apparently run full, heavy-duty AAA games natively on a handheld chassis without bursting into flames.
“So what if you can play home console games natively?! I bet your battery life is terrible!”
In response to the loud accusation, Ruby simply gives her a mocking, knowing smirk, fully aware that the Lastation Candidate is secretly super jealous of her overwhelmingly superior internal CPU specs.
Rom and Ram
Unbothered by the heavy political tension and hardware boasting filling the room, Rom and Ram excitedly approach the newcomer with entirely innocent intentions. They eagerly tug at the hem of Ruby’s outfit, just wanting to know if the portable Goddess has any fun, four-player co-op games installed on her hard drive. Before the older Goddesses can even finish their arguments about market shares, the mischievous twins successfully drag a slightly confused Ruby away to a corner of the room to start up a local multiplayer lobby.
The Protonia Perspective
The funniest part of the highly anticipated summit is that Rouge and Ruby fundamentally do not care about the ongoing Console War in the slightest. While the other Goddesses are fiercely stressing out about stabilizing their plummeting Shares and frantically waving around trade treaties, “The PC Master Race” duo remains entirely and comfortably relaxed in their plush chairs. Rouge views the other CPUs as children squabbling over a tiny slice of pie while she effectively owns the entire bakery. She doesn’t have an aggressive ego about her sheer market dominance; she just genuinely wants the boring political meeting to end as quickly as possible so she can take Ruby back home, log some co-op hours on their massive couch, and perhaps launch a surprise midweek publisher sale just to watch Noire and Blanc’s shares temporarily plummet again for her own private amusement. Eventually, after hours of one-sided negotiations, they establish a fragile working truce: Protonia gets to peacefully exist as an overarching, neutral superpower, solely on the strict condition that Rouge formally promises not to host a ninety-percent-off discount sale every single day of the week.