video + text; un: midnightfishing

[illucesco]

WHO: Noctis Lucis Caelum Cameron and you!
WHERE: posting this from his cozy Midtown apartment.
WHEN: 4:46 AM on January 5th.
WHAT: time to show off a fishing game.
WARNINGS: possible mentions of parental death and grief and bad coping mechanisms. fish pictures in the links provided.

[Sometime in the early, early morning, before sunrise, a new video post hits the network. Unlike most video posts, however, this one is clearly not real: instead, it's a sloppily-made game trailer, the camera slowly panning across a variety of lovingly-rendered landscapes, from a beautiful coastline to a peaceful reservoir in a forest to a somewhat foggy lake at nighttime. Then the camera pans to a cartoonishly-rendered young man with a little crown on his head, at odds with his puffer jacket and otherwise casual get-up, drifting past on a little rowboat with a fishing rod in his hand.

For a few seconds, all seems peaceful. Then his fishing line jerks, and the little fisher prince sits up fast (with an exclamation point popping into existence over his head) and starts to frantically reel in a fish. He reels with all his might, the boat swaying dangerously as he does so, and then pulls the rod back and—voila! A big fish flies out of the water, and the scene freezes in the midst of this triumph as the title fades in beside the little prince:

Fishing Fantasy.

After the trailer ends, there's just some text right underneath it that reads:]

ama about my new fishing game. wasn't going to reveal it until march when i'd gotten the mechanics down better, but this app wouldn't get off my work computer until i posted something so. hi.

Comments

un: adagium

[scourgingstars]

[What. What the fuck. What the absolute infernal hell was going on here and why did Ardyn have such a terrible headache right now? It wasn't the unholy hour of night, that was nothing new. But something here was so agonizingly familiar and yet foreign, landscapes filtered through eternity twice over and barely remembered as a result.]

those landscapes, where did you

i feel as though i've seen them before

[illucesco]

[Yeah, well, Noctis is also having a headache staring at this username that just came in. It—might be because it’s so damn late at night that it’s already the next morning, Noctis is familiar with those headaches. It might be that.

He doesn’t think so. Something about that username…]

probably? i went off some existing landscapes as inspiration—the coastline’s somewhat borrowed from a cape cod beach and the lake’s inspired by one of the great lakes. but mostly i just made them up.

where’d you get that username?

[scourgingstars]

[For possibly the first time, Ardyn paused to look at what he'd put in as a username without any real consideration back in October. His native language in this life; a word for a parable, proverb, cliché. Something remarked upon and often dismissed as trite.]

[...Was that all it was? Why had he considered that a name in the first place?]

I don't remember.

[illucesco]

well, it sounds latin to me. what, you think about the roman empire all the time or something?

[That would explain it. His own parents had bonded over the Romans, especially their language, and had chosen Noctis’s name because they liked the sound of the word. His father had—

Noctis swallows a lump in his throat, at the thought of his father.]

have you ever been to the great lakes? good fishing there.

[scourgingstars]

Something like that.

[Said the one who had probably seen Pompeii burn and absentmindedly wondered why it rang with that same distant familiarity of another world's end.]

I've never been one for fishing, myself. Hate staying still for some reason, always have.

[illucesco]

used to know someone you’d get along with great, then.

[When he’d gone and sorted through his father’s books, figured out what to keep and what to send to a secondhand bookstore, there’d been a lot of historical nonfiction around the Romans. Noctis had picked one up by accident, flipped through it, seen his mother’s name scribbled on the inside.

He hasn’t managed to finish sorting through those books just yet.]

yeah, i get that. not everyone’s got the patience for fishing. probably that’s the biggest problem i’m having with this game, how to make standing still and waiting for a bite exciting.

[scourgingstars]

[His head was pounding with the force of immeasurable curses behind it--a forgotten name, a voice laden with sympathy he could not quite recall the sound of, and all of it revolting for no reason Ardyn could yet pin down. Why now--who was he even talking to, and why did some part of him scream in familiar hatred for an unfamiliar target?]

Background chocobos. Maybe some wandering catoblepas.

[Truthfully, he was barely even thinking about what he was saying; just trying to keep up appearances of sanity until he could make something in his head click correctly.]

text | un: shinope

[killerapp]

huh looks like Camerons work

[illucesco]

it is. hi.

[killerapp]

wait are you serious

[illucesco]

yep.

we were gonna announce this game later in the year. first one for our new company after what happened last year.

[killerapp]

holy shit. id heard about the layoffs but not that you were making your own company.

btw the apps stuck. welcome to the bullshit

[illucesco]

yeah, the layoffs were rough, but a friend and i figured out that between us we could pool our money together and start up a new, smaller company. so here we are.

sorta figured. doesn’t seem that bad yet aside from the giant tower.

text, at a somewhat saner time of morning

[thewarriorqueen]

You just found a suspicious app and the first thing you do is post about a game on it?

text; once he wakes up

[illucesco]

seemed the easiest way to get it to stop interrupting me in the middle of work. and i’d get to drum up interest ahead of the march announcement.

[thewarriorqueen]

When you say in the middle of working you mean in the middle of the night?

Not to mention I thought one the first things to avoid malware was NOT to give in to whatever it wanted you to do.

[illucesco]

i’m a game dev. it’s not my first all-nighter.

worked out okay so far.

[thewarriorqueen]

You know doing stuff like that a lot will ruin your health, right?

[illucesco]

hasn’t killed me yet.

text; un: blade

[unreachableside]

Is there a demo out? This looks good.

Could use something to do with my hands.

[illucesco]

not yet. it’s a work in progress still—we weren’t planning to announce it until march, but. well. the app wouldn’t leave my work computer.

still working on the locations. and making sure the prince doesn’t clip through the boat.

[unreachableside]

App won't leave your devices no matter what you post. Sorry to break it to you. Being on this app means you have magic sensitivity, or something. I had magic before I got the app, but sometimes normal people roll in too. Or people from other worlds.

I have ten laptops and if I booted all of them up right now, they'd all have the app.

I'll play this game when it comes out though. Bet on it.

[illucesco]

figured that out, but hey, at least it's letting me work now.

people from other worlds? what, like aliens?

thanks. that means a lot.

[unreachableside]

No. More like other dimensions.

You probably haven't realized it yet, but you're going to start remembering things that never happened. Things that happened to someone else.

They're real. They happened in your past life. Your soul remembers.

I was reborn in this world. Someone close to me wasn't. Instead, she... got dragged through a portal... I'm not the same person she took care of, but I have his memories. She doesn't mind.

[illucesco]

I think that might be happening already. Someone's told me that the backgrounds for this game look...very familiar, to them.

I don't know a lot about my past life, but I think—he'd seen some shit. [This is an understatement, though Noctis doesn't know that yet.] I want to find out more, but at the same time, it's strange. How do you hold a life so different from yours in your head?

Huh. Lucky you. I'm not sure how I'd respond to someone from another world who knew my past life.