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.

text | un: shinope

[killerapp]

huh looks like Camerons work

[illucesco]

it is. hi.

[killerapp]

wait are you serious

[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.]

[illucesco]

[Somewhere in the back of his head, he hears a cheery voice say something about shooting a catoblepas. With a camera! he’s reassured.

Noctis shakes his head, and the voice is gone as fast as it came. What the fuck, he thinks, alarmed.]

why do i feel like i know what a catoblepas is?

[scourgingstars]

Likely for the same reason I feel as though I know those locations.

You did not wholly imagine, but remembered them.

[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]

that’s

what are you talking about?

that’s not possible. how can you remember something you just dreamed up?

[scourgingstars]

I likely asked myself much the same once. The world is often far wider and stranger than it appears, I'm afraid.

[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.

[killerapp]

yeah wait until you run into the kitsune at Blue Fish. or start turning into a cat. or start being able to breath fire.

Yuuki Shinomiya. im with POKEGO

[illucesco]

there are what now at blue fish.

noctis cameron, but you knew that already. never heard of pokego before this very moment, though. is it an indie studio too?

[illucesco]

you’re telling me. someone’s just told me there’s kitsune in the park now. didn’t even think kitsune existed, let alone that they moved into the park.

who even are you, adagium? how do you know about catoblepas, about these landscapes i’ve only ever seen in dreams?

[killerapp]

kitsune. fox yokai. you missed the yokai attack in November.

and i wish. were a group of scientists and biologists and researchers who look into the spirit realm. im tech support.

[Someone has to be, after all.]

i make mobile apps in my spare time tho.

[illucesco]

must’ve been rough, with the earthquake on top of it all.

[Oh, Noct.]

the spirit realm. you’re really not kidding about this. okay then.

tell me about these apps, i wanna hear about them.

1/2

[scourgingstars]

[And now, now of all times being called by that name made his stomach twist, made his head burn with rage and disgust, Usurper, Accursed, Starscourge-]

[When darkness veils the world, the King of Light shall come.]

[The words were written out as though they had appeared of their own volition. Because consciously or not, he could give just one answer.]

[scourgingstars]

A man of no consequence.

[killerapp]

no the earthquake is just what normies thought happened.

[RIP

But Yuuki will just pull up and copy/paste his portfolio. On it there's a few Flappy Bird-level games that got really popular (and then the dev sold to someone else), a few Japan-only scheduling apps (that the dev sold to someone else), a few global scheduling apps (that the dev sold to someone else), and God's App, which is Yuuki's newest app, and the only one that he has not yet sold. It's another scheduling app, but it has more features like a horoscope and a "lucky reading", all dressed up to be ~mystical~.

Yuuki has no compunctions about using people's penchant for mysticism to get downloads, okay?]

game apps are harder to do solo.