Tokyo: Oreimo

Makoto Takeda pushed up his glasses. "I was planning to join anyway, otherwise I wouldn't have gone out of my way to find a booth."

"Ayumi, what about you!" Tian Zhongxue turned to look at her. "You agreed, right? That's what you meant just now, isn't it!"

Ayumi took a deep breath and rearranged the flyers on the table into a stack, her movements a bit more forceful than usual.

"I have conditions."

"you say!"

"First, the project proposal and budget must be reviewed and approved by me before the project can officially start. You can't just decide to go ahead and do it on a whim, Chairman. Second, if I determine that a certain part is indeed impossible to do, even if you kneel down and beg me, it won't help."

"No problem!" Tian Zhongxue agreed quickly.

Seeing that he didn't take her warning seriously at all, Ayumi felt twice as helpless.

She pulled out the club's ledger from under the table, flipped to the last page, which was filled with detailed records of every income and expense of Dong COMI, from reprint fees to energy drinks that Tian Zhongxue bought at the convenience store.

“Aren’t we going to make games?” Ayumi closed the ledger and glanced at the president over her glasses. “From now on, every penny of the club’s expenses must be recorded, including the money you spend on energy drinks.”

"Huh?!"

"You said yourself that we should save money wherever we can."

"Hmm... okay."

......

When Ryosuke opened the door, the TV in the living room was already off.

He changed into slippers and went upstairs. When he passed Ling Nai's room, the door wasn't closed properly. Through the crack in the door, he could see that she was leaning over her desk, her left hand supporting her chin, and her right hand holding a pen, doing calculations on a draft paper.

Ryosuke raised his hand and knocked on the door frame.

"Enter."

Ryosuke pushed open the door and sat down in the chair behind her.

When the blonde girl saw him come in, she put her pen on the table, turned around, and said, "Why are you so late today? Isn't it only half a day at school?"

"The club was recruiting new members, and the president dragged me to hand out flyers."

"Handing out flyers?" Ling Nai raised an eyebrow, imagining Ryosuke standing on the roadside handing out flyers, and couldn't help but smile. "You? Standing on the roadside shouting slogans?"

"The one shouting slogans is the president," Ryosuke said, leaning back in his chair. "I'm in charge of handing them out."

"I knew it!" Ling Nai crossed her arms, looking like she knew it. "And then? Did you hire any new people this year?"

"There are several, one of whom happens to be from the School of Information Science and Engineering. He can program and has made his own AVG game."

Ling Nai blinked. "That's quite a coincidence."

"Yeah, and then the president got excited." Ryosuke's tone carried a hint of helpless laughter, "and announced on the spot that the manga club's next project was to create a galgame."

Ling Nai's expression changed from "I see" to "Here we go again."

"Making games?" She turned her chair around to face Ryosuke, crossed her legs, and said, "Those guys just finished Winter COMI, and they're already thinking about doing something new?"

"The president said he wants to strike while the iron is hot, and we just happen to have enough people. I'll write the script, Horiuchi will be in charge of the original animation, and the programming will be handed over to that newbie. You'll be in charge of guiding him."

"Me?" Ling Nai pointed to herself and pursed her lips. "I haven't even been accepted into Waseda University yet, how can I give guidance? Through the phone?"

“We’ll talk about it after your exams,” Ryosuke said. “Horikui can’t handle the key animation alone, so we’ll need your help. Besides, there’s a lot of preparation work to do before the project starts. Just the script and setting alone will keep us busy for a while.”

Ling Nai gave a soft hum, turned back to face the desk, picked up a pen but did not write anything immediately.

"Well... we'll talk about it after my exams." She tapped her pen twice on the draft paper, then turned her head. "Have you guys decided on the topic for this time?"

Ryosuke was somewhat surprised by the gaze directed at him.

He originally thought that Ling Nai would first ask "When can I participate?" or "Can Horiuchi handle it?", but to his surprise, the first thing she asked was about the subject matter.

"It's not decided yet. The chairman said that we'll have a meeting to discuss it in a while, and everyone will submit a proposal, and then we'll vote on it."

"Voting?" Ling Nai looked as if she had heard something amusing. "Aren't you the one writing the script? The specific subject matter is up to you, so what's the point of voting?"

"We still need to consider everyone's opinions to some extent when it comes to club activities." Ryosuke smiled. "Besides, the president is very enthusiastic about this project, so I can't just set the direction right away."

Ling Nai stared at him for a few seconds, then suddenly narrowed her eyes.

"Here you go again."

"What's here again?"

“He clearly had already made up his mind, but he said he would ‘consider everyone’s opinions’.”

Ryosuke didn't refute, he just smiled.

Ling Nai thought about it more and more and felt that this was indeed the case.

If someone else had said this to her, she might have thought it was overthinking, but Ryosuke was no ordinary person. She knew him too well; he never did anything like "wait and see."

"So, what are you planning to write?" The girl put down her pen, crossed her arms, and completely bypassed his high-sounding explanation. Her tone was so confident that she already knew the answer. "Anyway, you probably already have an idea. Just tell me sooner rather than later."

Ryosuke looked at her and realized that her posture was no different from that of an interrogation.

"There is indeed a direction, which is probably related to themes such as Kara no Kyoukai."

Ling Nai frowned. "What? Another FSN fanfic?"

Chapter 269 "The Night of the Wizard"

"It's not exactly fan fiction; strictly speaking, it's a work that expands upon the world-building."

Ryosuke leaned back in his chair, his tone not becoming more serious despite Ryouna's questioning, but rather as if he were talking about something he had already thought about.

"The world view will retain some of the underlying framework of Type-Moon, such as magic, the Root, and the Counter Force, but the main characters and core events are all new. The story timeline is outside of Fuyuki City and will not have direct interaction with the characters of FSN."

Ling Nai stared at him for a few seconds.

"You've already thought this through, haven't you?"

“It hasn’t been too long,” Ryosuke said. “I only started thinking about it slowly after Winter COMI ended.”

In fact, this was something I had already decided in my heart long ago.

From the moment he presented Kara no Kyoukai at the manga club, he was already prepared to create a sequel.

The response to that doujinshi was as expected. Even stripping away the characters from FSN and the main storyline of the Holy Grail War, the underlying rules of this world still have enough story to carry.

Given this, it is logically reasonable to develop a completely new original game project based on this foundation.

Ling crossed her arms over her chest.

"Didn't you say you were going to hold a meeting and vote? How come it sounds like it's already mostly decided?"

"The subject matter has been decided, but how to implement it depends on the feedback from Ayumi and the chairman."

Ling Nai gave a soft hum and turned back to face the desk.

"Whatever, we'll talk about it after my exams."

She picked up her pen and continued working on the next problem on the draft paper.

Ryosuke didn't leave immediately. Instead, he sat down in the chair behind her and flipped through the test questions she had finished that day.

The accuracy rate has stabilized at over 90%.

“You’ve been doing well lately,” he said.

"Of course, who are you underestimating?" Ling Nai said without turning her head.

Ryosuke chuckled, put the test paper back on the table, and stood up to go back to his room.

"Oh, right." He stopped at the door, "The company's new project also needs to wait until you finish your exam."

Ling Nai paused for a moment.

"Okay, okay." She waved her pen as if shooing away a mosquito. "We'll talk about it after the exam."

……

On the second Wednesday of March, the manga club held its first galgame planning meeting in the club activity room.

The tables in the activity room were arranged into a rectangle, and a whiteboard borrowed from the drama club was laid on it. Several A4 sheets of paper were attached to the whiteboard with magnets, which were divided into four sections: "Script", "Original Artwork", "Programming" and "Music".

Makoto Takeda arrived the earliest.

He brought his laptop, which contained the project files and source code of two small AVG games that he had previously independently created.

When Ayumi arrived, he had already connected his computer to the old monitor in the activity room and was demonstrating the performance system he had written to Tian Zhongxue.

"This is a dialogue system plugin that I wrote myself. It supports fade-in and fade-out of character portraits, position movement, and expression switching. The logic for jumping between branch options is also done. It can be triggered directly in the script using tags."

Tian Zhongxue stared wide-eyed at the smoothly switching character illustrations on the screen.

"This...this is already usable! You wrote it all by yourself?"

"It was saved up when I was making games, and I used it for about half a year by repairing and patching it up."

Makoto Takeda adjusted his glasses. "However, there are still a few bugs in the current version that haven't been fixed, and the UI also needs to be redesigned."

"That's amazing!" Tian Zhongxue patted his shoulder hard, then turned and shouted towards the door, "Ayumi, did you see that! Takeda's program is fully functional!"

“I saw it.” Ayumi put the canvas bag on the table and peeked at the screen. “The performance was very smooth.”

Ryosuke was the last to arrive.

When he pushed the door open, Tian Zhongxue was writing something on the whiteboard with a marker. He waved to him as soon as he saw him.

"Takashiro! Perfect timing! We were just discussing the direction of the project. Takeda said that we can do any kind of programming, while Ayumi said that she is more skilled in modern school themes in terms of key animation. What do you think?"

Ryosuke sat down at the table and took a notebook out of his canvas bag.

"I brought a proposal."

"Huh? It's already finished? The script!"

Tian Zhongxue's eyes lit up as he picked up the notebook that Ryosuke had placed on the table.

However, upon closer inspection, it turned out to be not the main text, but rather a collection of character settings arranged in pages.

"The script isn't ready that quickly, Chairman."

Ryosuke smiled.

Although he is not slow in creating content, he has recently been allocating more time to RE, and hasn't touched the main text of his work for the manga club at all.