Protonia
A sprawling cyberpunk-steampunk metropolis ruled by Rouge and Ruby — home of the legendary Protonia Summer Sale and the largest game library in Gamindustri.
Protonia is a self-proclaimed neutral superpower within Gamindustri and the only major nation that does not participate in the ongoing Console War. Rather than competing for physical hardware dominance, Protonia controls the digital distribution layer — a sprawling, always-online metropolis that hosts more games, more players, and more data traffic than any rival nation's storefront could dream of matching. Its influence is measured not in map territory but in simultaneous concurrent users.
The nation operates with a deceptively casual style of governance. Its two rulers are rarely found at their administrative terminals and are almost never on time for diplomatic engagements. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Protonia's market share remains structurally unassailable. The other CPUs have learned, through painful experience, that the surest way to destabilise their own economies is to provoke the nation into launching a sale.
Rulers
The Console Patron Unit of Protonia and the architect of the legendary Summer Sale. A devastating heavy-hitter in combat who channels her power through her massive axe and EXE Drive. Perpetually behind schedule on "Project Three" — a game the broader Gamindustri public has been awaiting for over a decade — due to an inability to remain separated from Ruby for more than approximately one hour.
Protonia's portable Candidate and the primary operator of the nation's Verification Programme — the system that officially rates dungeons and zones across Gamindustri for adventurer safety. Fully capable of handling heavy-duty tasks on the move without sacrificing performance, a fact that has generated considerable resentment from other nations' handheld Candidates. Deeply devoted to Rouge and inclined to finish any mission as quickly as possible in order to return home.
The Summer Sale
No single event in Gamindustri's recent history has caused as much economic disruption as the Protonia Summer Sale. Occurring with unpredictable timing and at Rouge's sole discretion, the Sale slashes prices across Protonia's digital storefront by margins ranging from fifty to ninety percent. The cascading effect on rival nations is immediate and severe: consumers across Lastation, Lowee, Leanbox, and Planeptune simultaneously abandon traditional retail storefronts in favour of mass digital downloads, sending Share values into freefall and driving Oracles into documented states of hysterics.
The Sale is not deployed as a weapon in any formal strategic sense. Rouge has been observed launching midweek discounts primarily for her own private amusement, to watch the reaction on Noire and Blanc's faces. The resulting diplomatic incident that forced the formation of Gamindustri's first cross-nation emergency summit ultimately concluded with a fragile truce: Protonia may continue to exist as a neutral superpower on the sole condition that Rouge does not run a ninety-percent-off sale every single day of the week. She agreed, but did not specify how she defines "every single day."
The Verification Programme
Protonia's primary civic service to Gamindustri at large is its Verification Programme — a systematic process by which Ruby personally runs dungeons, explores unstable zones, and stress-tests newly discovered areas to assign them an official safety rating. Ratings are issued in three tiers — Verified, Playable, and Unsupported — and are administered through the Verification Hub in the nation's capital.
In practice, the programme's data is considered the most reliable in Gamindustri, precisely because Ruby is running it at full performance specs rather than delegating it to lower-level scouts. Her verification reports are thorough, technically precise, and occasionally contain notations that are difficult to explain — including at least one Greenlight Ruins report that logged an empty mid-boss chamber, a massive scorched crater, and a stray cardboard box, filed collectively under "physics engine error."
Known Creatures
Small, amorphous data anomalies that manifest as corrupted blobs of flickering code. They move in packs and attempt ambush tactics, though their pathfinding is notoriously erratic. Ruby has dispatched entire packs with a single swing without breaking stride.
A Protonian variant of the common Dogoo, rendered in chunky low-resolution pixels. They retain the classic Dogoo's blobby, gelatinous form but flicker between visibility states, making them mildly annoying to target. Considered a reliable source of mid-tier loot drops.
A brutally difficult, data-corrupted entity that guards the final chambers of high-level dungeons. Its scales glow with ominous red warning indicators and it is rated well above the recommended level bracket for most verification zones. Notably immune to most conventional attack patterns — and deeply offended by being ignored mid-encounter.
Locations
A sprawling, high-tech cityscape that blends sleek cyberpunk architecture with heavy, industrial steampunk elements.
The skyscrapers look like massive, towering gaming PCs, complete with tempered glass siding and massive, slowly spinning cooling fans glowing with red and blue RGB lights. Thick, brass-colored pipes snake between the buildings, releasing bursts of white steam into the neon-lit sky. The sky itself is a twilight-blue, illuminated by massive holographic billboards advertising games. The overall color palette is a mix of sleek matte black, metallic silver, and vibrant red neon accents to match Rouge and Ruby.
The central hub where Rouge and Ruby reign, acting as the epicenter of Protonia's network.
A grand, monolithic structure that resembles a high-end, futuristic console or server tower, rising above the rest of the city. The building is primarily obsidian black with smooth, curved edges and glowing red circuitry lines running up its sides. Above the grand entrance is a massive, iconic, bright red physical "Valve" wheel. At the very top of the spire, a holographic projection of Protonia's emblem — a stylized linux penguin — rotates slowly in the air.
Unlike the formal, pristine offices of the other CPUs, Rouge and Ruby's main room is built entirely for comfort, gaming, and avoiding actual work.
A dimly lit, incredibly cozy room bathed in the soft glow of RGB light strips lining the baseboards and ceiling. One entire wall is a massive, seamless, curved screen displaying a paused video game. In the center of the room is an oversized, obscenely plush red velvet L-shaped sofa blanketed in pillows. Scattered around the room are towering, precarious stacks of physical game cases — Rouge's physically manifested "Backlog". In the corner sits a high-end, liquid-cooled PC rig bubbling with red fluid.
The physical manifestation of the digital storefront, bustling and slightly chaotic.
A vibrant, crowded, multi-tiered pedestrian shopping street. The sky above is crisscrossed with hanging holographic banners flashing with giant numbers like "−50%", "−75%", and "−90%". The storefronts range from massive, polished glass boutiques representing AAA titles to small, half-built stalls wrapped in "Early Access" construction tape. A few alleys are lit up in vibrant green neon — a nod to Steam Greenlight. Steam vents on the floor give the street a misty, bustling atmosphere.
Where adventurers — and Ruby — go to take on quests and check game stability.
An interior space that looks like a high-tech combination of a library and a server farm. Endless aisles of glowing, monolithic server racks stretch into the background. Instead of books, floating holographic cubes of data zip along glowing rails on the ceiling. In the center is a large, sleek reception desk with floating holographic screens displaying checkmarks and warning symbols — representing the Deck Verified system ratings: Verified, Playable, and Unsupported.
An overgrown, abandoned sector of Protonia's data network, serving as a lower-level dungeon.
An underground, cavernous facility filled with old, rusted PC towers stacked like ancient brick walls. Thick, black, vine-like ethernet cables hang from the ceiling, sparking with residual electricity. "Digital moss" — glowing green grid-lines — creeps up the metal walls. Pools of liquid cooling fluid lie on the floor like glowing blue subterranean lakes.
A crumbling, half-forgotten dungeon district once used to greenlight new content before the modern approval pipeline made it obsolete.
Rusted, ivy-covered gates lead into damp, moss-lit corridors where the glowing walls shift from a safe blue-green to a warning red as the zone difficulty escalates. Monster spawn rates are notoriously inconsistent — Ruby's verification reports list the Greenlight Ruins as one of the most frequently bugged dungeon zones in Protonia, with documented cases of entire mid-boss chambers being found scorched and empty for reasons her reports diplomatically attribute to "physics engine errors."