Spiteful Murkrow
Busy Writing Stories I Want to Read
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
- Partners
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Part 1 - Adventure adventure = new Disaster();█
A man with short and vaguely green-tinted hair followed by an excited Corphish made his way down a metal catwalk from a ship to the ferry terminal it docked up against. He paused for a moment to take in his long-awaited destination in this balmy, strange new land. While dense, the town the ship had taken him to lacked the vertical height of larger seaside settlements he’d seen before in other regions such as Goldenrod City, and was a sea of mid-rises and tightly-clustered houses. East of the urban sprawl, the man could catch glimpses of a beach and sandbars with indistinct figures milling about on the sand and in the surf.
"So… this is Lilycove City, huh?"
The man's attention was diverted from the town beyond the dock by a light but sharp nip at his leg, which prompted him to turn his gaze down towards his Corphish that was attempting to drag him along towards the terminal building.
"Alright, alright! I'm coming, Bracket!"
The Corphish - named ‘Bracket’ by his trainer after one too many sleep-deprived nights - eagerly pulled the young man past the doors of the ferry terminal and deep into a sea of bodies. There, the man saw a passing boy accompanied by a white cloud-like sprite who gawked together at the tiny screen of a yellow device with a folding hinge. Bracket and his trainer carried along through the terminal, snaking their way along pathways lined with stanchions, and made their way down to a baggage claim where suitcases circled about on a conveyor belt.
The man’s attention drifted off as he waited for his baggage to appear, spotting a girl with a net and straw hat walked past accompanied by a yellow chitinous creature that warbled a crisp rhythm with black-and-green rhombal wings on the other end of the carousel. On a nearby seat, an older woman rested next to her luggage as she looked at what seemed to be a case filled with little badges with ribbons along with a purple creature with tiny eyes and cream lop-ears. The Corphish tugged sharply at his trainer’s pant leg, turning the man’s attention to a passing red suitcase labeled ‘Keita’ on the name tag that the man hastily snatched off the conveyor belt and dragged to the ground. After a moment to sigh in relief, Keita looked back down at the Corphish, the trainer’s mouth curling up in a small smile.
"Heh. Sure picked the right place for a tropical vacation, don't you think?"
The two quickly focused their attention on an approaching man in a lei, who cordially greeted Keita and his companion with a sunny "Welcome to Lilycove, where the land ends and the sea begins!"
Bracket tilted his head blankly, while his trainer amusedly guessed that the greeter was surely reciting the town's motto. It struck him as certainly appropriate, but…
"Heh, but isn't all of Hoenn a place where the land ends and the sea begins?"
Keita quickly noticed a dawning realization come over the face of greeter. One that indicated the man with the lei was deducing that he and his Corphish hailed from further afar than initially presumed.
"Oh? Not from here?” the greeter asked. “For a second, I was sure that since you have a Corphish…"
"Nah, he's my partner… and headache for customs," the younger man chuckled back.
"Well, I'd like to think that you two aren't any more of an invasive species than the normal crawdads and tourists around here," the greeter teased. "So keep your eyes open- I think you two will find that Hoenn's a land of surprises after you get a chance to look around a bit!"
"I'll keep that in mind," Keita chuckled back.
It was then that he noticed a worker holding a sign for a bus with an eye-shaped logo and two words underneath that he could just make out. While Keita’s blissfully illiterate Corphish maintained his cheerful demeanor, a cloud seemed to settle over the trainer.
"Though… getting a chance to look around might be a bit tougher than I'd like it to be."
Alas, as much as Keita wished he were there as a tourist, it wasn’t leisure that had brought him and his Corphish to this distant land.
The two had come to Hoenn for work, specifically to help develop computer software. A short bus ride later, Keita soon found himself and his Corphish in the common room of a motel that had been furnished with low tables and cushions for use as a makeshift conference room.
Idle chatter floated around in the background as Keita took a seat in the middle of the room and gaped up at a patch of blank wall that was lit up with text and images from projector slides. After a man with a head full of healthy-looking blond hair stepped up to the front, the room quieted as all eyes and ears in the room trained their attention towards the speaker. Given the speaker's relative age to most of the rest of the crowd, whether that color was natural, a trick of the lighting, or simply the product of liberally-applied hair dye was anyone's guess.
"Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome aboard to the dev team for the next generation of Capsule Monsters games."
Keita couldn't help but feel that this presentation was perhaps a bit less impressive than he had expected. After all, a dingy "Cove Lily Motel" was hardly the prestigious office environment that he thought he would be working in to help develop the third installment of a smash hit video game franchise. The blond-haired speaker continued on with his surprisingly dry introduction to developing video games, as Bracket started to pick up on his trainer’s disappointment and began to fidget restlessly.
"As I'm sure you all know, this is an exciting opportunity for all of us. When the first Capsule Monsters games were released, none of us ever anticipated that they'd bring such joy to children’s lives across our nation, much less across the world."
Video games, television shows, comic books, trading card games, an ill-fated musical production… perhaps it really would’ve been daft to have expected a series to become a phenomenon capable of moving a pile of merchandise and toys the size of Mt. Moon in just a few short years. Keita wondered if that success’ unexpectedness would explain the lack of ceremony to this debriefing as the speaker carried on.
"As Capsule Monsters now ranks among the world's largest multimedia franchises, it places some rather unique burdens upon our team in order to ensure that our fans are satisfied with the experiences we provide them."
The speaker seemed to pause reluctantly for a moment before continuing on with his speech, "Given the… erm… various hurdles that were encountered during the development of past games, senior management has decided that it made a bit more sense for our present project to follow a different paradigm than the ones we grew accustomed to in the past."
The speaker’s comment puzzled the young man. The earlier Capsule Monsters games had been fairly simplistic and developed for primitive machines. Then, the question was just what were these…
"Hurdles?"
Keita found himself answered by no shortage of takers, all of them more versed practitioners of his same trade.
"Surely you’ve heard the stories if you’re in this business. Why, the first games were glitchy messes that were prone to save corruption if you so much as surfed down the wrong patch of water!"
"And there was that whole flap about the localization office in Unova wanting to redraw all of the sprites to make them more 'audience appropriate'."
"Those blasted games almost put this house into the ground. We spent six years just getting it ready for the initial release! If it weren't for the help from our publisher, the other developer they tapped to help us out, and all the Eevee that they gave us to give away to shoo out people coming into our office in Celadon City, we'd probably all be making spreadsheets right now."
The direction of the speech began to stray a bit, as some arguments broke out among the audience and Bracket began to grow restive and attempted to scuttle off to pinch at a table leg. The speaker was not terribly enthused with the various interruptions, and hastily attempted to re-rail the debriefing.
"Ahem. While I see that we all seem to have a healthy knowledge of those past hurdles, as I was saying, it is the intent of the firm to advance beyond them-"
Which didn’t go quite as the speaker had hoped, as the young developer noticed that the chatter in the audience had actually grown louder as an increasingly-agitated Bracket was resisting Keita’s attempts to restrain him without resorting to drawing his Pokéball.
"Hey, I was there in the trenches developing the second Capsule Monsters games- we got through it with just four guys and a little outside help!"
"Having to bring in one of the board members from the firm that handles our merchandising and licensing after two years to refactor the source code is not a 'little outside help.'"
It was at that point that the speaker decided that he had had enough, and blurted out, "Would you all stop being a bunch of rude children and let me finish?!"
The blond-haired man’s outburst proved to be just the thing needed to deflate the uncontrolled chatter, and incredibly even helped to settle Keita's Corphish down.
"Anyways, that is why for this development cycle they are bringing the team responsible for our previous successes along. Bringing a team of people from all around the world is hard, yes, but we didn’t flinch from that challenge. For example we chose to host development in a place new for everyone-"
"Not me. I grew up in Petalburg," a lone voice protested.
"For almost everyone on the team," the speaker added in a somewhat irked tone. "We have been asked to develop these games for brand-new hardware that launches in a matter of months, and has a massive audience to cater to. So it seemed only fitting to choose a relatively new development venue to host a project with so much uncharted water to cover."
The speaker further qualified the challenge. "Make no mistake, this will not be an easy project to be a part of, regardless of whether or not you stay the course for it. There will be late nights, aggravating bugs to squish…"
Bracket gave a small cry at the speaker's last comment, and hastily retreated behind his trainer's legs. Keita chuckled a bit and patted the crustacean to reassure him. "Don't worry, he doesn't mean you. You're a crustacean, not a bug."
The speaker carried on, oblivious to the incident towards the middle of the room. "But I'm sure you'll also discover that there will be camaraderie, and that the bonds that you form during this project live on well past release. To top it all off, you will be handsomely rewarded for your work…"
Some murmurs went about the room after the topic of bonuses came up. After all, this was a prestigious project, so surely the reward for completing it promptly would be generous.
"If you can deliver on the concept and design work that has already been done for you and stick to the twelve-month timetable that the publisher has given us."
Almost immediately, there was an outcry from the other programmers in the room.
"Twelve months?!"
"Are you nuts?!"
"We didn’t even have a playable build in twelve months for the last set of games!"
Keita melted into his seat, as he began to get a sinking feeling that he had perhaps gotten himself further in over his head than he’d imagined. Bracket also seemed to share the same sentiment, as he pawed about with his claws and chittered uneasily.
"Some tropical vacation this is shaping up to be, huh?"
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