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I’m reviewing the first chapter of this fic for our review exchange! (I will be reading more of it soon, don’t worry.)
We start with a first person pov, belonging to a scientist named Cassandra. While I’m more familiar with third person pov due to it being more common in fics, I do like first person a lot as well.
Cassandra receives a message from her rival Antoine, warning her of the dangers that can be associated with artificial pokemon. I completely understand Antoine’s worries, especially considering the mention of the Aether Foundation.
She then receives another message, this time from a sender called Neo-A-Life. It seems we know what the fic’s title means now, neat! The message tells about the possibility of creating her own Porygon. Considering the mention of Celadon City, I have a suspicion that Emily may be a member of Team Rocket. My suspicion is this way because of the members of Team Rocket residing in Celadon City’s game corner in the games.
We then meet Cassandra’s partner pokemon, Magnezone! Magnezone is introduced pretty well, I enjoyed the descriptions of his mechanical body.
Cassandra then arrives at the Celadon Department Store. This makes me believe that Cassandra’s home seems to be somewhere in the Kanto region, possibly in Saffron City as it is located close to Celadon City.
Overall, I liked this chapter! It gives the reader interest to read more of the fic. I also enjoyed how we get to see Cassandra’s motivations to create her own Porygon.
I will now be reviewing the second chapter for our review exchange!
This time, we start with Emily’s point of view. Emily seems to be intrigued by Cassandra and her interest in researching Porygon. Also, it is made clear that Porygon research isn’t something most people are interested in, except for Cassandra and Emily.
Emily meets Cassandra, and the two have a small conversation where they introduce themselves to each other and discuss Porygon research.
Emily then introduces the idea of customized Porygon that can be any type, which I find quite interesting. She then reveals that she has access to the source code of Porygon, apparently obtained from a former scientist who was a friend of hers.
I do have suspicion of this somehow being connected to Team Rocket. I do completely understand that I am making assumptions about something I don’t yet know for sure, but I do feel like it’s a possibility.
Emily also mentions her dad Michael LeVant, who I predict might have a role in the story. Though I understand that it might be too early to assume things.
We then have a scene of Emily and Cassandra going shopping. It is also shown that Emily has a Clefable as her pokemon.
I also enjoy the detail of Porygon2 being originally planned to go to space, it’s a nice detail mentioned in the pokedex entries!
Overall, the chapter was a fun introduction to Emily in a way that also showed more of the duo’s motivations!
I really enjoyed this fic, it really conveys well a person living in the pokemon world, where having a pokemon and interacting with them is the most normal thing.
Also, lowkey they all have mad scientist Vibes lol
“Good morning, everyone. We’ve done incredible work on synthesizing a Porygon from the source code, but we’re not here to make the same Porygon Silph made. Our entire value proposition is in customizing Porygon. Our next goal is a Porygon with custom typing.”
There was an anxious energy at the table. The high from generating the Porygon had crested. Cassandra was seated next to me, and I could tell she was itching to move forward with more work on the Porygon.
Antonio frowned. “Should we really be going for that first? Why not something like custom moves?”
“Because,” said Cassandra, leaning over, “we know that there’s already code somewhere in the source that controls Porygon’s typing. Conversion is a move Silph made for Porygon to copy typing. It’ll be a lot easier to piggyback off that than to try to figure out how to get Sky Uppercut on a Porygon.”
Kumiko was taking notes diligently. “So we need to extract whatever code governs Porygon’s type change in Conversion, and then inject our own custom typing logic to keep it permanent. It’s gonna involve some refactoring, but it sounds do-able.”
“I’m thinking of doing Fire-type as our first custom type,” continued Cassandra. “We have your Arcanine right here to investigate how Porygon’s Conversion works. Tri Attack uses fire, ice, and lightning; maybe there’s probably something fire-related in the code.”
“And investors,” I added, “will love it. Nothing flashier than a Fire type.”
Speaking of fire, our burn rate was through the roof. We needed money fast or we’d be out of a place in a few months. I had discussed this last night with Cassandra and watched the parallel lines between her brows deepen the more I explained how much we needed to land more investment. She asked what she could do, and all I could tell her was to make a custom Porygon happen. My job was to get the money. And not a word of this to Antonio or Kumiko; they’d head for the hills if they found out. She agreed to keep this mum for the moment.
Cassandra drummed her fingers on the desk. “So Antonio, we need to research materials we might need for a permanent fire base. Right now Porygon can change type, but it reverts to Normal after a while. We need something substantial to keep it in that fire state from the beginning.”
Antonio nodded. “I’d like to run some tests on Porygon having copied Fire typing as well. If,” he turned to Kumiko, “you’ll let me have your Arcanine out.”
“Arcanine is very polite; he’ll work with you,” said Kumiko.
Cassandra hesitated for a moment. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s a good idea to run tests on Porygon. Anything we can do to get us over this hurdle. Let’s cast Porygon to a Fire type.”
Kumiko snorted at that; some kind of programmer joke?
“Sounds like we all have our parts to play,” I said. “Let’s get to it.”
With that, we got up from the square desk in the corner of the main room and moved to our stations. I watched Cassandra slowly hand the Pokeball to Antonio after explaining to Porygon that “he needs to run some tests on you.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her when she walked back, “you’ll get Porygon back.”
“It’s just a creature,” she said.
It was funny watching her pretend like that Porygon wasn't special to her when she enjoyed hanging out with it under the guise of 'research.'
“It’s your first Porygon; you’re allowed to be a little sentimental about it.” I paused. “Not too sentimental though, because it is ultimately still the only one we’ve got and we gotta run tests on it. Getting that thing running was expensive.”
“I’m aware of this fact,” she said, voice tight.
With Antonio, Arcanine, and Porygon in the other room, Cassandra and Kumiko continued their work on documenting the codebase and finding where the typing logic lived. I watched, feeling a bit helpless. I knew the high-level concepts behind the synthesis and the Porygon specs, but they were the ones who could actually make it happen. All I could do was try to find money to buy them enough time to do so.
By the end of the day, Antonio approached me with a list of reagents for me to approve. I sighed at the cost of these. I'd have to trim a few months to two months.
Kumiko must have heard my sigh because she turned around and assured me that she had already begun work on refactoring the code to make it less tightly coupled anyway. “It won’t take too long,” she promised. She then turned back and muttered to Cassandra about something in the codebase.
There was no further work for me in the lab, and I retreated into my office to perform the unglamorous work of selling investors on a product that didn’t exist yet. Calling it an office was overselling it - it was smaller than the room Cassandra lived in, with nothing but a work desk and a small couch.
I checked my emails to see if anyone was interested. Nothing. Voice mail? Nothing. I ran my hands over my eyes. Of course we couldn’t get them by telling them we’d just made a Pokemon no different than any other you can buy from a breeder. My head rolled over the back of my office chair. I sat there for a minute when my phone began to ring. I picked it up quickly only to see it was my father, the one investor I did not want to hear from. I mentally prepared myself as I accepted the call.
“Hey daddy,” I said.
“Pumpkin, how have you been?” His tenor voice rang clear over the air.
“Oh, just working things out. We synthesized a Porygon. Things are looking real good.”
“That’s re-markable, sweetheart,” he said, drawing out the second syllable. “Well, we’ve been riding the gravy train over here. Your older brothers are fitting just fine into the company. Larry’s really innovative.”
“Wow,” I said, staring at the ceiling.
“Have you gotten any investors yet?”
“Well,” I said, “once we have the custom Porygon, we’ll have a minimum viable produc-”
“So no.”
I bit my tongue and said nothing.
“Keep at it, sugar, I’m sure things will go well. What?” Someone I couldn’t hear was talking to him. “It’s Emily. You wanna talk to… okay, I’m putting your brother on the phone.”
“Emily!” Larry’s voice was low and resonant. “You’ve missed so much here. We’re really sticking it to Devon this quarter.”
“Lovely,” I said. “I knew they had it coming.”
“What’s going on with your startup, what is it you do again?”
“Pokemon Synthesis.”
“Yeah, what’s with that?”
It was a wonder Larry could innovate anything when he could barely remember anything I’ve ever explained to him. “We’ve got Porygon generated.”
“It took you this long? You can’t tell me it took so long to find the ‘run’ button.”
I grabbed a pen on the desk and began to stab it forcefully into a sheet of paper.
“The Porygon is stable. And we’re already moving to the next step.”
“Sure, sure. Hey sis, I gotta go, catch you later. Good luck!” Larry hung up the phone.
My phone slid into my purse. They didn’t understand what I was doing. Even my father, the man whose money I was lighting on fire to pay for the lights, seemed to think this was a vanity project. I guess that’s what NEO-A-LIFE was to him, just another way to spoil his youngest daughter.
I clicked on Clefable’s ball and let her out. Her smirk told me she had an idea what was going on.
“Dad called.”
She frowned like that was obvious.
“He’s oblivious and Larry’s a jerk. Some things never change.”
She held up three tiny claws.
“John? He wasn’t there. Doubt it matters to him.”
“Fable,” she said, warning me not to get into my familiar rant about how my family didn’t get my vision.
“I know. I know. Eyes on the prize. Just, ugh. They’re so smarmy. And mom doesn’t even ask about NEO-A-LIFE; she acts like it’s a surprise every time I bring it up.”
She hopped onto the bench and punched her open palm with her fist. I had to laugh. “No, violence is not the answer this time, either.” I paused. “We can take a battle break, though. Want to head to one of the routes by the city? I’m sure there’s someone we can mop the floor with. I can’t exactly make much progress with the way things are going here.”
She did a backflip, a look of determination on her face. I recalled her and excused myself from the office.
Two foolish trainers later, I came back to minor updates: Antonio told me he’d run multiple analyses on Porygon in the fire state. “We should set our eyes to improving not just our synthetic capabilities, but our analytic ones as well. There were some tests I really wanted to run, but we’d need new equipment.” He handed me a binder. “I summarized everything in these binders. Cassandra has a copy,” he said, anticipating my question.
Cassandra and Kumiko had gone some way to extracting type-related logic. “The issue is,” Kumiko began, and then continued in a stream of programming babble that I was in no mood to hear. “So we’ve got the beginning of what we’ll need to run synthesis tests.”
All I kept hearing was that we needed more work, more time, more money. I told them all they were doing a great job and to keep working, but when I shut the lights off that night and pulled the covers over the bench, I felt heavy. As I stared at the ceiling, I told myself that it was natural to run into issues this early. It was only the first day of our new research direction.
A few days later, we had some updates. “Good morning,” said Cassandra as we prepared our first coffees. “We’re ready for a synthesis attempt.”
“I was gonna ask for good news only; glad my telepathy’s finally kicking in.” I took a sip. “What’s stopping us?”
“Besides Kumiko and Antonio not being here yet? Well, we’re just waiting on the materials.”
“They’re arriving this morning.”
She smiled. “Excellent!” She ripped open two packets of sugar and dumped them into her coffee, stirred vigorously, and then dumped three creams in. “Nothing better than morning coffee, huh?”
“Great stuff,” I said.
“I don’t get how you can drink it like that. This coffee is so bitter.”
“It’s the most affordable coffee we could get,” I shrugged. “And I’m used to it.”
Antonio came in first, ever dutiful, ever silent. All we ever got from him was a curt greeting before he headed to the machinery. Some days he even skipped the coffee. He worried me a little.
I got a call that the materials were ready and summoned Antonio and Cassandra to help me unload. We unceremoniously hauled the boxes through the silent hallways. My biceps ached; it had been a while since I kept up with my exercise routine and my arms begged me to release the weight. I put them down as soon as I crossed the threshold to our office and shook my arms out. Cassandra came in a minute later, similarly struggling with the load. Antonio didn’t seem to break a sweat at all.
And it was at that moment that Kumiko arrived. “Oh yes, we got the stuff!” she said, skipping any niceties. “We’re gonna do the synthesis attempt today, right?”
Cassandra nodded, still recovering from the boxes. She made some kind of hand gesture that suggested that she wanted Antonio and Kumiko to take care of actually unpacking, and bolted for the lady's room to drink water and hide from too much human interaction.
Once everything had been set up and Cassandra had been properly hydrated, we began the next attempt. An excruciating hour passed before the new Porygon came into the world. It had barely opened its eyes and begun floating before I motioned for Antonio to test its type. He ran a type scanning rod over the Porygon, one used by traveling researchers for documenting new Pokemon. His shoulders tensed as he read the result.
“Normal type.” His thick brows bunched up as he looked from the Porygon to the display. “It didn’t work.”
“Are we sure that rod works?” I asked.
“It's worked every other time we've used it to check that Porygon's Conversion swapped types. Ultimately, they're not perfect, but-”
“So it could be a Fire type.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
I put my hands on my hips. “We need to be sure. Let’s get it in a battle.”
Cassandra didn’t say anything. She stared at the hovering Porygon, dejected. Antonio’s gaze was unfocused, aimed at the floor for whatever reason, and Kumiko just drummed her fingers on a chair. I felt frustration climb my spine looking at this collective passivity.
“What are you guys waiting for? Come on, let’s get a type check on this one. Does anyone here have a Water move, Ground?”
Antonio’s head snapped up. “Mimikyu knows Shadow Sneak. That’s a Ghost type. If it works on Porygon…”
“...then it’s not a Normal type,” finished Cassandra. “And if nothing happens, then it’s a Normal.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Okay, we’re not going to do a battle test near all this expensive equipment… You know what, let’s just head to my office really quickly.”
I pushed my desk to the corner to try to give Mimikyu as much space as it could to make her move. Cassandra held the Porygon and laid it down at the center of the room. She gave one of her typical explanations to the Porygon, which had woken up and begun floating calmly.
Antonio released his Mimikyu, which materialized in front of Porygon. Mimikyu approached Porygon curiously, but Antonio shook his head. “Just need a quick move from you, Mimikyu. Shadow Sneak.”
Mimikyu’s shadow extended to cover Porygon and overflowed over its body. She sank into the black disk and emerged behind it, striking at it - but her body passed through Porygon.
My fists tightened.
I took a deep breath before continuing. “Well, we’ve got a clear test for the Normal type. We’re going to figure out what went wrong and we’re going to get that Fire type.”
It was late and morale was low, so I told everyone to go home and think about what they were going to do the next day to make this work. I didn’t bother rearranging the furniture when I got to sleep.
Another week passed with no progress. Kumiko told me they were sure they’d figured it out halfway through the week, but another synthesis attempt failed to make the Fire Porygon.
Cassandra was sleeping poorly. I could hear her at night, the door opening to get water from the water fountain in the hallway. Sometimes she would pace in the main room. Sometimes I’d head out to go to the bathroom and see her silhouette lined with cool blue screen light against her workstation.
We spoke one morning and she had a fevered look in her eye. “I have an idea of what’s going wrong. I’m not going to run anything yet, but I gotta run this past Antonio.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly, “I need you to triple check anything you do before you run another synthesis attempt. These aren’t cheap. Run it past Kumiko, too.”
Her forehead wrinkled a touch at that. I felt my own anger rise in return. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and tell her that I couldn’t give a Mudbray’s behind whatever one-sided competition she had going on with Kumiko. Her delicacy protected her - I couldn’t risk her not running on all cylinders - and my prudence won out.
She was already putting the pedal to the metal. She’d head out around dinner and come back with a stack of books from the Saffron University Library. I scanned the spines when she was out to the bathroom one evening - scientific books on the constitution of the Fire type, a dissertation on type-switching in Castform, Porygon, and Genesect. Whenever I asked her how progress was going, she simply said she was working and not to interrupt her.
And then we had an unexpected setback - the machine broke. We had attempted a synthesis when the centrifuge suddenly stopped. Antonio diagnosed the broken piece and sent another order for it. It was near midnight when I was putting together all the costs we had and I saw our spreadsheet tip over into the red. No, no, no. What if I cut their salaries? What if I didn't buy any more coffee? I wasn't even paying myself and Cassandra any more than we needed to stay alive and work. Was there a place with lower rent? No, but the moving costs... I changed and rearranged numbers until I no longer was sure what anything meant anymore. Only one thought hammered in my head - we needed a cash infusion as soon as possible, or we'd be unable to pay rent. I felt the walls closing in on us, pictured the liquidation sale, Cassandra scrambling to get her old job back, the final chance for Porygon's return slipping away forever.
It was in that moment that I emailed one of the leads and said we had created a Fire type Porygon.
-
The first thing I did after a night of restless sleep was to check my phone for e-mails, praying for a red numbered badge. Among my unreads, I saw the email preview I needed to see: ‘Dear Emily, we would love to see…’
I fell back on the couch with tears in my eyes. A break. Finally, a break. Some Pokemon of fortune had taken pity on us and stopped the clock just as it was about to hit midnight. Stuff it, Larry.
When I saw Cassandra for our daily coffee, I could barely hold back my excitement.
“Good news. An investor is interested in checking out our work.”
Her eyes lit up. “Seriously? That’s incredible! Who is it?”
“Fushigidane Ventures. It’s a boutique seed fund that invests in speculative Pokemon technology.”
“What does any of that mean?”
“They’re willing to work with us at very early stages of development.”
Cassandra nodded. “Well, whatever they do, this is absolutely awesome. I’m glad someone’s starting to see the vision.”
“Yeah, we have a meeting to show them and everything. We just need to have a Fire Porygon by next week,” I finished. “They’re very excited to see it.”
“What?” Her face fell.
I held eye contact with her, saying nothing.
“Emily, how could you promise something like that? We have no clue how close we are to something like that.”
“You know we’re running out of money. We have three options. We make a Fire Porygon. We fake a Fire Porygon. We run out of money and pack our bags.”
She looked completely aghast. “I can’t promise we can make that… I…” She tented her palms around her mouth. “This is bad.”
“You’re right,” I said, “this is bad. We need something that works.”
“You should have told me before you did that,” she said.
“There’s no time to deliberate about this. Any time we have needs to go towards Fire Porygon.” I looked her at directly. “Cassandra, you’re the Porygon expert. We need a breakthrough, or we’re finished.”
She didn’t say anything. She pinched the bridge of her nose, grabbed her coffee, and headed to her workstation, where she spent the rest of the day working quietly. Late in the afternoon, she called Antonio aside and they discussed something. He put in a request for a certain type of reagent, and I asked if this one was actually going to work. “Cassandra’s certain.”
I tried to focus on preparing a presentation for Fushigidane Ventures, but I felt too wired to concentrate. Cassandra didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. I knew it was because she was working, and she was angry at me for… what? Being decisive? Buying us time? There wasn’t some secret third option where we would survive if we didn’t have a Fire Porygon. And if we were going to make a Fire Porygon, then I may as well set up a meeting now and not waste more time with scheduling nonsense afterwards.
We were reaching the end of the week. Every day I marked off on my calendar brought us closer to our meeting and I was biting my nails to the quick. My nail beds were an utter mess when one beautiful morning Cassandra broke her silence to tell me the new reagent had arrived and we were ready for a synthesis attempt.
“I know what was wrong with the previous ones. We were chasing false leads with duplicated typing logic and the reagents weren’t righ-”
“No autopsy yet - let’s get started right away.”
We prepared for yet another synthesis attempt. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles and before she put her gloves on, she wiped at her eyes intently to get rid of any sleep.
I asked Kumiko quietly if she thought this was seriously going to work.
“I don’t know about that reagent stuff,” she shrugged. “Cassandra seemed to do a ton of work on the repo at night. I reviewed it and it looks good to me.”
I nodded as I turned back to the machine. We waited for another Porygon generation, and the resulting creature. I felt my heart quicken when I saw it emerge - I could have sworn it had a slightly warmer tint to it than the typical cool-toned shades Porygon have.
Antonio reached for the rod and paused before he ran it. He double checked the settings, and then ran it over the Porygon. “We have Fire,” he said.
My pulse quickened and Kumiko squealed in excitement, but Cassandra shook her head before we could celebrate. “Do the Mimikyu test,” she said. “Let’s be sure.”
My room was still in the same jumbled condition as it was when we’d done the first test. Antonio’s Mimikyu took its place across from this Porygon and melted into shadow. She rose from behind and struck Porygon - a good, proper blow that sent it over a few inches.
“We don’t have Normal,” I confirmed.
“WE DON’T HAVE NORMAL! WE DON'T HAVE NORMAL!” yelled Kumiko, and Antonio, for once, broke his composure and joined her in celebration. I wanted to cry from relief, but I joined in the chant.
“Team, Cassandra busted her ass to figure out why our Porygon wasn’t working. It wasn’t easy, but thanks to her, we’ve caught fire.”
“Great job, Ca- oh, she’s gone,” said Kumiko.
I looked around and she was, indeed, gone.
Kumiko ran over to the Porygon and lifted it up. “I don’t know if I’m crazy, but I swear this one’s warmer! Antonio, hold it!” She passed it over to Antonio, who awkwardly cradled the angular duck. “Tell Cass to come feel it, this thing’s warm!”
I told Kumiko I’d go fetch her. I figured she was hiding in her favorite hiding place and headed out our office down the long, dank hallway that led to the women’s bathroom. I found her by the sink, reading something on her phone.
I suddenly felt at a loss for words, and all I could say was, “Kumiko says the Porygon is warm.”
“Astounding.”
We said nothing. She stayed on her phone. I washed my hands out of a compulsive desire to do something with them.
“It’s… the investors are going to love this. I have others besides Fushigidane Ventures to reach out to.”
“What’s stopping you? You’ve already reached out to one.”
Her strained nonchalance did not convince me nothing was wrong. “Look,” I said. “I still think it was the right thing to take a risk. But… I should have told you beforehand.”
She looked up from her phone. “I think you should have, being that we’re supposed to be co-founders.”
“You’re right to be angry at me.”
“I’m not angry.”
“We need to be able to trust each other. If we suspect each other on this team, then this is going to fail with or without funding. I was doing triage when I sent that email, but there’s no reason I couldn’t have told you before. I’m used to acting on my own. But I’m not on my own anymore. And… I regret acting without telling you.”
“Look, I get why you did it. And in the spirit of honesty, it makes me uncomfortable. Not just that you did it without me, but that you lied to them. But I’m not going to pretend that I had any other solution. Just… from now on, I expect to be involved in all these decisions. I don’t know about this world like you do, but you agreed to make me your co-founder, not just your tech lead, so I should have a say."
I nodded. I hadn’t seen this side of her before, that was willing to stand up for something other than the honor of the Porygon project. I’d half expected some lecture on why lying is always wrong and we must always tell the truth, even when it would sink us. But then again, she agreed to keep the truth about our precarious funding from Kumiko and Antonio until we had no other choice. Was I underestimating her?
“Well, do you want to head back? They’re playing hot potato with the Porygon in the lab.”
She pocketed her phone. “Of course!”
As we walked down the windowless hallway back to the office, she said one last thing: “The investors better love this thing.”
Cassandra hesitated for a moment. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s a good idea to run tests on Porygon. Anything we can do to get us over this hurdle. Let’s cast Porygon to a Fire type.”
Kumiko snorted at that; some kind of programmer joke?
For those who do not program - converting a variable of one type to another type is called "casting." Cassandra's making a pun that Kumiko would naturally understand but flies over Emily's head.
“Fushigidane Ventures. It’s a boutique seed fund that invests in speculative Pokemon technology.”
Fushigidane is the Japanese name for Bulbasaur, which is "the Seed Pokemon." I thought it would be a great mascot for seed funds, heh heh.
I did not plan giving Antonio a Ghost type to test Porygon's Normal type; I literally just scrolled through Pokemon available in Paldea and saw Mimikyu and went "yeah, sure." Pure serendipity that it worked out for the type check moment, which I was very excited about.
And down and down they go through the slippery slope is done.
Also, I knew Emily had that SuperVillain energy in her, like ranting about showing the world that she isn't to be underestimated is mad scientist 101.
Also, I am enjoying how Emily and Cassandra seem to be growing closer, working as confidantes of one another. Even if not gonna lie it looks like they are lowkey making each other worse lol.
Overall I really enjoyed the chapter, and I am excited to see the boardroom scene that will happen in the next chapters, hopefuly they get that Funding!
Hooray! I'm glad Cassandra got a big win here, and she figured out how to make the fire typing work. I think she needed a success after failing to make the first Porygon and I'm happy for her.
What happened to the other Porygon synthesized for the project that were normal? I almost feel a little bad for them. Such is business though I guess. I think it's such an interesting pokemon, Porygon. It's a computer program and yet sort of alive. But evidently mostly a program to the researchers since they were unbothered by synthesizing the two test Porygon.
Perhaps they can be distributed later. Also FirePory being warmer is very cute.
I love all the bits of science and tech we get, like the type checking rod. That's such a neat idea, and feels very plausible. Also the woes of a startup. Machines breaking, cramped offices and trying to convince investors. I do not envy Emily.
Also we're getting a little glimpse of what feels like logical ruthlessnes almost from Emily? She's certainly not above a little white lie. Honestly it's understandable. Seems to be how businesses are run in general. Almost expected.
I feel for Cassandra though, they are supposed to be partners and she wants to be included. I bet after failing on the initial synthesis + the issue with the fire type one she feels left out of what was meant to sort of be a passion project.
I really like how you capture the very human ways people miscommunicate and talk past each other. Emily doesn't think any lesser of Cassandra but she's probably worried all the same.
Now they just need to show their product off to an investor. I'm sure it will probably all go perfectly smoothly from here on out, right? Right?
