(Victoria's PoV)

Emerging from my VR pod I stretched spending 4 hours in the pod doing game testing for Edmund was both fun and a bit taxing at the same time. The artificial sleep was not nearly as restful as natural one and I had spent a good chunk of my day before writing the manuscript for my next book.

Thankfully the results were good Star Legion Camp and Twilight Forest early game areas were about as polished as they could realistically get with Edmund's current skill level at area modeling according to him, and I am inclined to agree with that.

While he is no professional he is passable if barley when it came to the art aspect of game design. Where he really shines is coding which really should not come as a surprise to anybody that knew him. For example the Nyx boss fight he designed as his supposed final main story boss was as mechanically solid as one could get. The muti phase fight was tough yet fair but that might just be the case for herself and Edmund as they are the only ones that have fought Nyx and someone might find an easy way to cheese the fight.

The only current fault to the whole Nyx fight was that the goddess of night was still using the scaled up Geisha Matrons model from the original Magic Zodiac Online assets. Granted that was about to change as the starting areas were finished and Edmund can put back his focus on polishing her and the other minor loose ends before moving on to mid game content.

Making my way to the living room to relax on the sofa I saw Edmund coming down the stairs likely having finished his work day as soon as I left the pod. "Do you think its truly done?" Edmund asked visibly nervous. Apparently still as insecure about his creations as the teenage him. He could be calm about his creations but only when he did not truly care about them all that much.

Getting a loose strand of blond hair out of my face I giggled. "Honey you got the data from my last testing session nothing went wrong. I even went as far as trying to confuse the NPC's to see if I could see the cracks in your main AI integration for them. I found no discrepancies there as you should know. Everything's is fine."

"I know, I know but it has been months of hard on and off work do to having to jungle this and work. It feels surreal to even think that I have completed enough to even make a demo for the game. I still remember when I just returned home from work with a new half-baked plan and almost immediately ran in to a creative wall."

"I remember that you basically flew through the creation of Nyx but then you just kept flip flopping if the players should start in a capital city or some backwater village. It basically fell to me to plan out the lore and the layout of the early game map in the end." I patted the sofa cushion for him to sit next to me. "You had no idea about the Greek zodiac except that they were constellations."

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"Excuse me for not reading my horoscope religiously." He called out in mock annoyance but there was a small smile on his face. "Who could have guessed that the zodiac didn't come from a single myth and that crafting a story of them all involved would be so hard." For all he was great him just deciding to swap out one zodiac for another to be the games main theme without knowing much about the myths was exasperating.

"I do not read my horoscope religiously! I just knew a bit more about the subject do to my interest in literature. I just informed you that the zodiac constellations are a varied bunch and some of them aren't exactly shoe in for real divinity much less the kind one would need to fight Nyx." Honestly that was the biggest pain in planing out the main story of the game thus far. For example Aries is linked with the myth of the Golden Ram easy enough, Taurus was connected to the myth of Minotaur that's a bit harder, Cancer was simply the crab monster that was ordered to hinder Hercules by Hera that's harder, Virgo is associated with Demeter and Persephone and are basically already there and Aquarius was simply the guy that filled the drinking cup of Zeus a stretch to say the least for true divinity like that. And all of them are diverse like that made in the image of these people and monsters. "Truly things must be desperate if they are the patrons to our heroes."

At that he snorted. "Says the woman that came up with the lore that the majority of gods got treated like rag dolls by Nyx and the Zodiac got empowered to true divinity in a desperate gambit to fight her by the last remnants of Olympus that were barely holding things together at the time."

I leaned on his side. "As I said desperate. Anyways what are you going to do now that you have a playable if a bit short demo?"

"Small closed Alpha. I will host an actual server and ask a couple of friends from work to join the game at least for a little while. I can't wait for actual players." After that topic ran out we started to chat about other smaller things and eventually he dozed off on the sofa next to me.

It was very clear to see that he was exhausted. He was working full shifts at work and then poring the rest of his energy in to the game. It was a miracle that he hasn't burnt out. I try to help as much as I can but a couple of hours of games testing and story crafting hear and there isn't much compared to what he does daily.

I had thought to drag him away from the project to relax a couple of times but... It was nice to see Edmund passionate about something again as it has been so long. The last time he was anywhere as passionate as now was when he first applied for a coder position in 'Phantom Drive'. Hopefully this time the world will not grind down his dream in to nothing like last time.