Author's Note: Special thanks to Tangent128 and Venia Silente from Serebii Forums and
@Dragonfree for beta reading this chapter.
Part 2 - $ source /etc/Extraneous.Variables█
11 month(s), 29 day(s), 21 hour(s), 28 minute(s), 9 second(s) to deadline
One tense meeting later and the development of
Capsule Monsters AGB officially kicked off, a release name shelved off to sometime after more crucial deliverables such as a playable build were finished. After the meeting cleared out, it came time for Keita and his Corphish to depart the makeshift conference room for their lodgings. Much like the entrance, the lobby, and the conference room he’d already seen at this “Cove Lily Motel”, there was not a hint of grandeur to his surroundings on the walk over to his room.
The garish, peeling paint and weathered shingles on the roof did little to spruce up the building’s dated architecture, and the occasional patches of rust on the metal railing of the semi-exposed hallway that the rooms had been built along similarly didn’t help. Beyond the cosmetic imperfections, the fact that its owners still relied on metal keys to lock the rooms was just another sign the motel hadn’t been renovated recently. At the ground level, there was a deserted puddle of a pool surrounded by some sun-faded patio furniture downstairs that Bracket eyed in between pinches at the base of the second floor railing. The Corphish’s amusement and curiosity entirely failing to transmit over to his unimpressed trainer.
"
This is going to be our home for the next 12 months?"
Keita sighed and slipped his room key in, twisting it to the right and, after a short struggle, hearing a dull click as the door unlocked. The sound of Keita’s fight with the door caught his Corphish's attention as Bracket turned up to see Keita with his hand on the doorknob.
"Guess we'd better see who our two roommates are…"
Keita walked into a small hallway and was immediately struck by the relative size of the room. The first thing he noticed was that the place had been laid out as a suite, clearly meant for customers that planned on staying for an extended period of time. The second was the fact that a good deal of the room’s free space had been taken up by added desks. On them various papers, PC towers, and bulky and boxy monitors were strewn about, along with oblong handheld devices tethered to squat white boxes with ribbon cables that the man presumed were the devkits.
Keita’s examination of the suite was interrupted by a small voice squeaking, as he and his Corphish saw a small, mostly-blue mouse with rounded ears bouncing in on a tail orb roughly the same size as its body. There was a moment between the man's Corphish and the surprise Azurill as the two cautiously sized each other up, leaving Keita to stop and wonder to himself where the little Normal-type’s trainer might be.
Before he could raise his voice to speak, Keita’s questions were answered by the sound of approaching footsteps from the room and an older man with bluish-black hair entering the hallway. When the two met each other's gaze, the first thing that struck Keita’s mind was his counterpart had probably worked at the firm for a good while… or at least his age certainly made him
look the part.
"Oh, hello! Are you that programmer who's sharing the room?"
Keita blinked back in surprise, as he hadn’t anticipated that he would be paired with roommates that were visibly older than him, much less ones that wouldn’t be sharing tasks with him. Additionally, the papers on the man's desk and the contents of a boxy monitor on it, although ruining an otherwise unimpeded view of the sea, seemed to be unusually colorful, to which the young man spoke up, "Yeah, that’s right. I’m Keita from the new team. And you're…?"
"Why, your maestro of turning ink and paper concept sketches into sprites, of course. I'm Satoshi from the graphics design team," the roommate responded.
With that mystery cleared up, the young man briefly caught a glance of the blue mouse cautiously nearing his Corphish. Bracket had not quite devoted his attention to the Azurill and was cautiously clicking his pincers, clearly sharing his trainer's curiosity for the mouse’s purpose here.
"And the Azurill?"
"She’s a bit of a newer friend I made out here,” the graphics artist answered. “You could say that she's become a bit of a muse. And what about you? Bring anyone along to fit the role?"
Bracket took the opportunity to cut in and answer the artist with a sharp chitter, waving a pincer cheerily at the man at the other end of the doorway.
"Yeah, I did, actually. That’d be my Corphish, Bracket."
No sooner than Keita’s words had left his mouth, Bracket scuttled forward in an attempt to nip at the mysterious orb attached to the blue mouse. The Azurill, narrowly dodging the Corphish's grip, squeaked and bounded up onto a counter in the other room. Keita quickly tugged his Corphish back, and after an awkward pause, sheepishly attempted to excuse his Pokémon's behavior.
"Sorry about that, Bracket's just a bit feisty."
"I can
see that," the artist grumbled.
Keita attempted to clear the air with small talk, only to notice that there were three beds set out in the suite. Now that he remembered it, he could’ve sworn that in orientation, it’d been mentioned that...
"Weren't we supposed to have three people in this room?” he asked. “So then who's our other roommate?"
"You didn't already know?"
Keita heard the door open again, and as he turned, Satoshi motioned over his shoulder and said, "It's the guy in charge of this entire project."
Much to Keita's horror, it truly was the blond-haired speaker from the debriefing. The young programmer's face rapidly drained of color as it began to sink in that he would be spending a full year in the same room as the project's leader, with him hovering over his shoulder to scrutinize every little potential snag and pass it directly on to his immediate superiors.
Keita attempted to put on a brave, if obviously blanching, face and hesitantly put out an arm to offer a handshake to his senior.
"Er… n-nice to meet you, sir."
The Director for his part seemed to not be wholly unfazed by Keita’s discomfort as he reciprocated his handshake. All the while, a small teal Pokémon with a protuberance coming from its head, two arms on the sides of its face, and a black tail marched in with a commanding air headed over towards the Corphish.
"While I'm sure you were expecting someone a bit lower on the ladder to be rooming with you, I hope that it helps take some of the edge off of the experience,” the Director said with a wry smile. “After all, I don't bite."
It was at that exact moment that the teal Pokémon in the background let out an abrupt cry. All eyes in the room turned to see Bracket playfully grabbing one of the Wynaut's arms with his pincers, and the teal Pokémon abruptly slamming the Corphish into a wall to break free.
As the stunned crustacean hastily retreated behind his owner, Keita became acutely aware that the Director was leveling a withering glare over towards him.
"Apologies sir,” he insisted. “I
swear that he's normally better behaved."
10 month(s), 20 day(s), 12 hour(s), 45 minute(s), 49 second(s) to deadline
Keita’s work typically consisted of a series of two-week cycles, in which the final product of a functional game to be sold to customers was inched towards little by little. Each cycle, new objectives were decided on, and then implemented to build out more and more of the games’ engine and its underlying logic.
There was a good deal of group conferencing, crude whiteboard sketches attempting to visualize logical flows for data and events, and division of tasks among Keita and his fellow programmers. However, in the end, the bulk of the work consisted of typing out text to be added to an agglomeration of computer code in a development environment and watching varying messages flash in a terminal. From there, the source code would be forced through the compiler, and all Keita could do was watch as the program turned his little snippets of text into instructions to be interpreted by one piece of hardware or another.
Indeed, even before the first cycle started up, Keita already knew that the process which was so fundamental to his craft probably would have struck an average passerby as less interesting to watch than the Taillow preening itself on his window balcony at that very moment. The man pored over some text in his terminal, pawing at his head in confusion over a stubborn bug when he noticed his Corphish tugging at the back of his pant leg.
"Oh. Hey Bracket… did you come to help me find out what’s going wrong with this callback?"
Bracket visibly paused at his trainer’s question. After all, what his trainer seemed to be doing appeared rather unremarkable, while his tone of voice sounded strangely playful. The Corphish, perhaps against his better judgment, humored his trainer’s request and gave a cheerful call as he awaited whatever his trainer had on his mind.
"Heh… I suppose it couldn't hurt to describe what I'm working on."
The programmer stooped down and lifted his charge up onto the desk, where the contents of a text editor were visible on his monitor.
Code:
///////////////////////////////////////////
void init_menu_callback(menu_evt * event) {
if (event -> active == TRUE) {
menu_type = event -> subtype_ID;
render_menu(menu_type);
lock_map_controls();
} else {
unlock_map_controls();
}
}
///////////////////////////////////////////
"So this is the block that handles how the callback for the menu works,” Keita explained. “I'm pretty sure that this logic is correct, but the error messages say that something's coming from here. Basically, every time that the game detects that there’s a menu event, it updates a global static variable with the new type of menu, and then it uses it to-"
Keita trailed off into a brief silence as he noticed that the entire time, Bracket had not made a sound, but was eyeing the screen blankly.
"You didn't understand a word that I just said, did you?"
Bracket responded with a call that Keita could have sworn had a sheepish tone to it.
"Of course. Uhm… Should I use one of the dev kits to demonstrate?"
The Corphish then decided that perhaps it would be better to leave his trainer alone until he was less preoccupied with work and cheerfully scuttled off to go pester Satoshi's Azurill and the Director's Wynaut in the other room of the suite.
"Yeah, I didn't think that would help much either. I guess I'm on my own here," Keita sighed.
9 month(s), 1 day(s), 18 hour(s), 15 minute(s), 57 second(s) to deadline
Keita’s craft was one characterized by fits and starts of productivity, much as a writer finds himself oscillating between near-total lack of accomplishment on one day and great progress on the next. Alas, this day was of the former sort as the programmer attempted to puzzle out a strange error message from the compiler.
"Bah…"
Keita noticed that Satoshi, while on his way out from the room with his Azurill, seemed to hesitate as a faint sound from outside occasionally reverberated. After a moment watching the graphics artist linger, Keita in light of his lack of progress decided to give his mind a short break to go see what his coworker was looking at. On his way to the door, he was joined by Bracket, who had taken the opportunity to free himself from an attempt by the Director’s Wynaut to badger him into parting with an Oran Berry.
"Hmm? Did you see something out there, Satoshi?"
There, Keita looked down towards the motel’s unimpressive pool and saw a brown and green sauropod with what appeared to be a clump of yellow fruit attached to the base of its neck walking about in circles. The creature would periodically look about and call out, seemingly expecting a response from something.
"Is that little Tropius
still pacing around the pool?"
"Eh?"
"You didn't see her this morning? She was pacing around and calling out just like this
then, too."
As the Tropius continued her ritual, it dawned on Keita that the Pokémon seemed rather disoriented, as if she had gotten lost and wasn’t sure where to go. His attention lingered on the young Grass-type for a moment, and he couldn't help but feel some pity for her as she paced about.
"She’s been doing this
since the morning?” he asked. “Where have the hotel staff
been during all of this and why haven't they brought her to her trainer?"
The graphics artist said nothing, before shaking his head back with a sigh.
"I'm certain it will sort itself out, Keita. Just leave her be."
As the graphics artist and his charge departed, Keita watched the Tropius for a little longer before returning to his post. After all, Satoshi was a senior coworker, and if
he was convinced the matter would blow over, there was no sense in making waves over it.
9 month(s), 1 day(s), 10 hour(s), 58 minute(s), 12 second(s) to deadline
That evening, Keita found himself making a run over to a convenience store to pick up some small snacks and a few drinks after a long meeting with his fellow programmers. The twilight trek back with Bracket and his purchases from the store was an underwhelming end to an underwhelming day, with the only excitement that he’d encountered thus far on his journey being a few local children engaging in an impromptu stunt competition with Acro Bikes right when he’d started his journey back to the motel from the convenience store.
The programmer made his way back through the motel lobby, and then back out into the open-air hallway. There, on his way to the stairs, he chanced to run into the graphics artist from his room.
"Heading back so soon?” Satoshi asked. “I'm surprised you're not off at one of the after-hours socials."
"Meh, I had a little more work to finish up-"
Keita trailed off after his attention turned towards the motel pool, where saw that the Tropius he and Satoshi had spotted at around noon was still there. She was no longer pacing about as she had earlier in the day and appeared visibly exhausted and distraught. Every now and then, she would crane her head upward towards the sky, seemingly waiting in anticipation for something or someone that kept failing to come. The pair’s Corphish and Azurill stopped and similarly looked through the bars of the hallway’s railing, as the two Pokemon and their trainers couldn't help but trade pitying looks with each other for the poor creature.
"Her trainer
still hasn't come to pick her up after all this time?" Satoshi murmured.
"It feels strange that someone would just misplace a Pokémon that big,” Keita mused to himself. “Maybe she should spend the night with us."
The graphics artist turned his head back to his junior coworker. While his face betrayed obvious discomfort with the Grass-type’s plight, even then he couldn’t help but hesitate over the suggestion.
"I don't know… taking in a Pokémon that we don't have a Poké Ball for?” Satoshi asked. “In a room full of computers and devkits?"
"I'm sure that we'll be able to manage."
With his mind made up, Keita walked over to the gate to the motel pool and undid it. The young man strode forward onto the pool concrete with his crustacean in tow, and called out to the young Tropius as he approached.
"Hey!"
The creature instinctively got to her feet, and began to backpedal nervously, beating her four leafy wings a bit and fanning them out to try and make herself look larger. The programmer noticed that one of them seemed to be stiff and moving slower, if lacking external signs of injury. Perhaps the Tropius had sprained it from overwork, or clipped it against a hard object while her caretakers were out.
Still, Keita knew better than to try and force another trainer's Pokémon into an encounter it was uncomfortable with, and hesitated a moment. After looking down at his bag from the convenience story, he dug out a soft drink and approached the creature with a noticeable berth. The programmer stooped down and undid the top of the drink, before presenting it to the Grass-type as Bracket waved to the young Tropius with a congenial chitter.
"Come on, don't be shy… you want a better place to sleep tonight than on that hard pool concrete, don't you?"
The Tropius paused for a moment, and then slowly approached the man before seizing the soft drink with her mouth and beginning to drink its contents. The Grass-type's guard had been lowered, and she lowered her wings, seemingly soothed as the programmer gave her long neck a cautious pat.
"Heh. See, we're not so scary, right?"
9 month(s), 1 day(s), 7 hour(s), 14 minute(s), 43 second(s) to deadline
Later that night, Keita backed away from his keyboard, deciding to leave his after-hours battle with the current sprint’s tasks aside and take them up again at a better hour. He turned over his shoulder, where the Tropius from the pool gawked around curiously at the room’s furniture and the various monitors and electronic equipment strewn about it, much as she had when he and Satoshi brought her in. The programmer heard the door to the suite unlock, and he looked over just in time to see the Director come in through the hallway, who at once noticed the young Tropius and raised a brow.
"Ah. Caught a local companion for your Corphish?"
"Er… Technically, I didn't. I found her down by the pool,” Keita sheepishly admitted. “I left a call for the front desk to ask around for her trainer, but I hadn’t heard anything back yet."
The comment caused Satoshi to look up from some papers he was sketching on, an uneasy look spread all over his face; his Azurill seemed to pick up on it as the Pokémon shrank into a corner in response.
"Right, about that...” the graphics artist began. “According to the front desk, the Tropius is apparently a female stranded from a herd that flew through about a day ago."
Keita blanched and stiffened up, wondering to himself if he had misheard his colleague's words.
"Wait,
what?"
"You didn't know? Tropius can fly,” Satoshi explained. “I mean, they have to exploit updrafts and glide for most of it, but they can cover some decent distance while airborne."
"So then… this Tropius doesn't
have a trainer?", the Director asked as his eyes narrowed into a deepening scowl.
The graphics artist hesitated for a long moment, before speaking up with a grudging sigh.
"It doesn't sound like it, no."
Keita and Satoshi traded looks with each other as the Director buried his face into an open palm. All the while, the Tropius carried on poring over the equipment in the room as Bracket sidled up, blissfully unaware of the conversation between the three trainers. Keita blanched as a sinking expression settled over his face, while his senior colleague shot back a small glare reminding him that their present embarrassment was completely avoidable.
"You brought a
wild Pokémon into our room?" the Director fumed before turning his attention to the graphics artist, "And
you didn't stop him?"
"Well, I didn't
know she was a wild Pokémon!” Keita protested. “And she's been really well behaved all this time!"
Just then that uneasy quiet in the room was broken by a sharp cry from the Tropius. Keita whirled around and saw that Bracket had latched onto one of the Tropius' wings, causing her to dash about wildly trying to knock him free.
After upending some furniture, she eventually succeeded at dislodging the Corphish after swatting him into the side of the bulky monitor at Keita’s workstation. The screen fell from the desk to the floor with a loud crash as the glass tube inside imploded and spewed shards onto the carpet. Back at the other side of the desk, the Tropius hastily retreated to the side of the programmer baying as Bracket hissed back indignantly at the new stranger and her overreaction to what was merely a friendly nip.
"Probably not the best timing there," Satoshi whispered. Keita gulped, turning back to the now-seething Director, who quite obviously had had enough of the chaos in the room.
"That monitor's coming out of your paycheck. Either get a Pokéball for her or else get her
out of here!" he barked at the junior programmer.
"Ulp. Yes, sir."
