Jon didn’t feel quite ready to go out yet. So he reluctantly changed into the work uniform, a process that was only made more awkward because Sarahs wish for putting on a show made it impossible to hurry through it.
The office was pretty small, all in all, with just eight desks in total, set up in four pairs with the desks back to back. And six of them were already in use.
The men typing away at their computers were …bland. There was no other word for it. Black hair, average build, average face, boring suit. The one thing that’d make them stand out a little bit if Jon met them on the street was that they looked like boring Japanese office drones.
When he tried to talk to one of them he barely reacted. They looked up and gave some vague answer and went straight back going back to typing, which -on a closer look- turned out to be just hitting random keys that had no effect on the random gibberish appearing on screen. Graphs, piecharts, forms and excel-sheets opened and closed after a while without any rhyme and reason.
NPCs.
They were NPCs, Jon realized. These people(?) were just here because an office should have more than one person in it. Which didn’t make them any less creepy.
Jons own desk was the only one with a bit of personality: the figurine of a cartoonish frog/lizard-thing sat below the screen giving Jon a perpetual thumbs up and a cup full of pens as well as a notebook sat beside the keyboard. The front page of the notebook had a few scribbles of the reptile below the screen in various poses.
Jon almost laughed out loud when he booted up the PC and was confronted by a typical Hollywood-OS three seconds later. Only six overly large icons and no taskbar.
It took Jon a minute to figure out what he was supposed to do with it. Four of the six icons didn’t do anything useful: three of them played trailers for other Phantasm Corp games and the one labled ‘Work’ opened the same screensaver-ish mess all the NPCs were staring at. The email-icon showed only one item: A generic welcome-letter for new employees.
Just when Jon was worried they were expecting him to just hit random buttons for eight hours straight like the NPCs, he found that the last icon showing the ‘Akai Ito no Otome’-logo didn’t lead to another trailer but into an authentication-screen. After the computer had -somehow- verified that it was indeed Jon sitting at the keyboard the simplistic pseudo-desktop was replaced by a far more useful Admin-Mode.
After consulting the manual several times, Jon got to work. Which mostly consisted of filling out surveys about a broad range of topics most clearly geared towards making more appealing for players. Fashion advice to generate new outfits, hints how a phantasm-girl should react in a hypothetical situation, evaluating dating spots and many other topics.
There was also a support-chat where the administrators of the 1000 alpha-version of the game could ask colleagues for advice directly. Which , given the stones two mile limit, was pretty strange. But there really was a lively discussion going on in there.
Admin mode offered free access to the net, mostly so Jon could research whatever topic he was working on, and when he looked for Phantasm Corp he found a few dozen message boards, newspaper articles and sites dedicated to their games.
The company had been founded by a reclusive genius billionaire. Because of course it had. Nobody knew where she lived, or what she looked like, there were rumors that even her name Katsura Masakazu was just a pseudonym. She had been developing ways to ‘provide companionship’ , as the company site put it, for ages now. The first attempt had been VHS-girls, videos of a pretty woman or man that kinda sorta talked with the person in front of the screen the same way some kids-shows in the states did. And as technology marched on so did her products. Always a bit more lifelike than the competitors, but always more expensive too so Phantasm Corp had stayed a niche-player even among an already niche genre.
And apparently Jon was fluent in Japanese now.
It had actually taken him a minute to realize that most of the sites the search-engine dragged up, didn’t use the Latin alphabet. Which was kinda neat, but a bit creepy too.
But that discovery paled in comparison to Sarahs wish somehow creating an international company with offices in Japan, the U.S. and Europe.
