“I see...” Tetsuya remarked. “Your solution for the prompt is very direct.”
“The path we take is none other than the royal road!” Mirei declared. “We have no need for petty tricks!”
“But I’m a pretty messed up guy,” Tetsuya reminded her. “That just makes me wanna tell you that it’s boring because there isn’t any twist.”
“B-Boredom and fun have nothing to do with how we interpret the prompts!” Mirei protested.
“Huh? You know this is a game, right? Don’t you think its fun-factor is important?”
“Th-That is a mere sophism!”
“It’s not a sophism,” Tetsuya told her coldly. “Like I told you, I’m just saying whatever I want. Well, whatever. It’s not like your way of thinking is wrong, either. This ‘royal road’ of yours feels more like a tidy little alleyway, but I’ll admit that it’s pretty.” With that last remark, Tetsuya decided he was finished with Kongouin’s critique. “Alright,” he said, closing the game. “Here’s the very last one. Meikun, you’re up.”
“Y-Yes!” Nanaka replied with a wavering voice.
“But, man...” Tetsuya began to grumble but caught himself. “Well, whatever.”
Kai knew where he was coming from. The cause of his concern was probably the app’s icon. It was a white speech bubble surrounded by green, with the word LIKE typeset in the middle. Being only a single letter off from LIME, it was hard to tell the difference at a glance—in fact, the icon had been an exact copy of LIME until late into development, where the team figured they ought to at least change one letter.
“...Hm?” Tetsuya mumbled.
Kai knew where his confusion came from, too. Tetsuya had tapped on the icon and was probably wondering why the app wasn’t opening. The truth was that the app was designed to display a smartphone’s home screen the first time it was launched. It was the usual display, lined with icons, with the time, cell power, wi-fi signal, and battery percentage listed along the top.
However, after three seconds or so of confusion, a pop-up notification appeared. It contained a brief notice that everyone had seen before: ‘New message available.’
When Tetsuya tapped the notification, he was taken to the chat window where the only thing he was asked to input was his name. The girl’s text plainly read, ‘Are you awake?’ The audience could tell she was a girl thanks to Eru’s artwork, which was sitting in the icon slot.
Instead of a keyboard, tapping on the message window at the bottom yielded a set of multiple-choice stamps that read, ‘Good morning,’ ‘It’s noon,’ and ‘I’m sleeping.’ The rest was simple. The player selected one of the options and conversed with her. Every decision changed some back-end parameters, which then changed the way the user interacted with the girl.
For example, she might switch from using the user’s last name to their first name. The player might figure out her interests through her peculiar preference in stamps. The user’s options might change from ‘I’m sleeping’ to a more casual ‘Zzz.’ The girl might send pictures or videos. All of this culminated in their relationship changing and the gap between them closing.
With absolutely no experience writing a proper story, Kai had ultimately been forced to open the drawers of his own mind. The happy, itchy feeling in his heart when Nanaka first called his name and the unforgettable smile on her face when he reciprocated in kind; he took the precious memories locked in his heart and crammed as many of them into the game as he could.
That was all there was to it. Honestly, Kai felt like he couldn’t even call his work a “story,” as it was merely a reproduction of his experiences with Nanaka. He wouldn’t be able to defend himself against anyone who said as much, but this was the only thing he could drag out of his soul. If it wasn’t enough to get the message through, then there was nothing more that he could have done. After all, that’s how brilliantly these fragments of memory shone to him.
After the chatting continued for a while and certain flags were set, the girl finally brought up the topic of fireworks. There were scenarios where the user invited her and others where the girl invited the user that varied according to past interactions, but either way, in the end, the phone began ringing.
The only thing displayed was her name and the call time.
“Are you awake?” Aina’s voice repeated the same words that the game began with. Her timbre was ticklish to the ear. There were different lines based on the user’s previous choices, but ultimately all the voice work was restricted to this one scene.
“Are you really okay with this?” It was only natural that Aina had raised her concerns during development. She’d pouted, clearly unhappy with how things had played out. “Why not make more use of Aya’s 2D to 3D tech? It’s crazy good, right? We could make that the main dish, like a video app or something. Can’t we just do what we’re doing now, but change the focus to video-calls?”
Her doubts had been well-founded, as the software Aya had come up with was a teensy bit baffling. Kai couldn’t just not use it, though, so he’d included it for the videos that the character sent, though there weren’t many of them.
A logical counterpoint would have been to say that the ridiculously advanced technology also required an equally ridiculous amount of art assets. There was only so much they could do in the short time they had... But that wasn’t the answer Kai had given.
The trigger for this plan had been Kai’s correspondence with Nanaka. Aya’s program might have been the way to go, quality-wise. But he had the feeling that it would stray from the epiphanic moment that brought him here. All he had been able to offer was the vague explanation that, “I’m not trying to convey a feeling you can see.”
“...I see,” Aina had replied shortly. “Well, I’m fine with that. If that’s the answer you came up with after racking your brain as our planner, then I’ll believe in you. Just you watch: I’ll show you what I’ve got with a single word.”
Aina hadn’t seemed totally convinced, but the fact that she believed in him led Kai to harden his own resolve. Her words may have been the anchor that kept him grounded till the end.
Finally, the game concluded when the girl sent a picture of herself with fireworks in the sky behind her.
“............Hrmm...” Hifumi Tetsuya folded his arms, knocked his head back toward the ceiling, and let out a low, beastlike groan.
Is he on the fence for our results? Kai wondered. In this competition, critique wasn’t the only thing Tetsuya had to offer: he needed to choose a winner between Meikun’s app and Kongouin’s. He had to decide whose app was more excellent, whose was more suited for victory. It was plain for all to see that the two works had gone in completely different directions, so it was no wonder he was confused. Kai wouldn’t have been able to come to a conclusion at all.
What is he going to—
In the middle of Kai’s thought, Tetsuya snapped his head back down and announced, “Meikun High wins.”
The brevity of his delivery dumbfounded Kai with shock to the point that he momentarily had trouble understanding what had been said.
Meikun High... That’s our school.
Wins... That denotes victory.
We... won. He said we won.
Nanaka had simultaneously gone through the same train of thought. Kai turned up to catch her gaze and saw that both her eyes and mouth were wide open in surprise, and realized that his face probably looked the same. We did it! he wanted to exclaim, but an angry, spear-like howl cut through the air, aimed directly toward the podium.
“I cannot accept this...!!!” Kongouin Mirei declared, snapping her fan shut and pointing its tip directly at Tetsuya, in order to pierce him with her animosity.
“...Well, I figured as much,” he said, scratching the back of his head. He let out a profoundly annoyed sigh and pointed his resentful gaze toward—Kai, for whatever reason. Kai locked eyes with Tetsuya before he even had a chance to look around and make sure the comment was being aimed at him.
“Meikun High,” Tetsuya said.
“Yes?!” Nanaka practically jumped as she answered.
“Ah, not you. The boy sitting next to you,” he clarified. “You.”
“Y-Yes...?” Kai rose to his feet.
“Yeah, you,” Tetsuya nodded. With a devilish grin, he said, “This has got to be foul play. What, did you want to pull off a once-in-a-lifetime self-destruction?”
“U-Um,” Kai stammered, “I don’t understand.”
“Huh? You were the one that made this plan, right?”
“Yes,” Kai admitted. “But, um... How did you know it was me?”
“No way... You’re telling me you didn’t do this on purpose?” Tetsuya asked incredulously.
On... purpose? Kai wondered. He had no idea what was being said to him, or why he was being called out, or even how Tetsuya had figured out that it was his plan. With so many questions, Kai’s processing power was reaching its limit. He glanced over at Nanaka, but that only led them to tilt their heads in confusion together. I don’t get it.
Seeing their reaction, Hifumi Tetsuya exploded into laughter. There was no performance here; he was in hysterics. With his hands on his sides, he desperately wheezed for air. “Wow, that’s terrible!” he cried. “Alright, consider this the price you pay for winning. Get ready, kid.”
Kai couldn’t have nodded along if he wanted to. What was he meant to get ready for? He considered the possibility that he’d done something wrong, but in that case Meikun wouldn’t have won the contest.
“You, what’s your name?”
“Sh-Shiraseki Kai, sir.”
“Kai, eh? Lemme ask: did you get your crush’s LIME contact, happily chat away with her, do a little dance when she sent you a picture, and then get invited out to go see some fireworks?”
“...............Huh?” Kai asked, dumbfounded.
“What I’m saying—ah God, this is embarrassing,” Tetsuya briefly paused to mutter to himself. “What I’m saying is that this game is basically a love letter to the girl you like.”
When truly frightened, humans tend to turn away from reality. In Kai’s case, a bunch of pointless things ran across his mind. On the last day of their development, Nanaka’s head had kept dipping up and down as she nodded off due to their all-nighters, and Kai thought that had been very cute. Aina had been pouting at her lack of work. Aya and Eru had been acting like children, kicking at one another from underneath the table, and he had tried (and failed) to pacify them, but that caused Nanaka to laugh. The tangential memories drifted to mind, one by one.