Video | Llama 29

[firewalled]

Yo! Needed you all to know something important, so listen up, train!

[Rich is standing in front of the monitor in the music room, hands on his hips, looking very stern and serious... but then he smirks.]

Have you ever gotten ads online promising hot bisexual singles in your area?

[...Is he actually shooting fingerguns?]

It's me. I'm the hot bisexual single in your area. Just thought you all needed to know I am currently on the market.

Please field all date inquiries to my mailbox. Or my sleeper car, whatever. I'm rooming with Alice, but we are not an item.

[She would pretty much laugh in his face if he even implied they were.]

Comments

[labcatte]

Sorry to disappoint you, then. Who's Jeremy?

[firewalled]

Oh, just a... classmate of mine. We used to be friends, kind of...

[But it's definitely complicated to explain, considering the fact that both of them were kind of brainwashed into it.]

I just liked to tease him about liking animal-like characters.

[labcatte]

Oh, he was an actual furry, then? That's legit. I don't know if I'd call myself that kind of a furry, where it's a sex thing, though. I just like animals.

[firewalled]

I mean, I don't know what his deal is either exactly. I've just seen keychains on his backpack. As long as you aren't like, grossed out by it.

Animals are cute though! And being a tiger lady is pretty badass.

[labcatte]

No, no. I was a very junior member of the devteam for Another World Online back home--AWOo as we all called it. Do you know how many people in the playerbase were furries? So many. Of the five non-human options for players to build their characters as, three-and-a-half of them were deliberate furry bait. You got cat people like me, dragon people like my cousin and Vulpecians, who're humans with fox ears and tails. Oh and the pixies are mostly just small humans, but they have butterfly or dragonfly wings.

So yeah, no. I'm not grossed out by furry shit, as long as it doesn't involve my dads and in that case, it's because it involved my dads, not because it's furry shit. You know?

But, uh, thanks. I'm glad you think I'm badass.

[firewalled]

You worked on a MMO? That's so fucking cool! I'm not even into that, but I would've loved to play it. Even if it was lowkey built for people with different tastes.

[He beams and nods his understanding.]

Yeah, nah, I can imagine no one wants to see their dads in any fanart like that. Or any family I guess, for that matter. You had a dragon cousin though?

[labcatte]

I mean, it wasn't built for furries. It was built for everyone? We just pander to furries anyway, because they're profitable. It's a business thing. Better we pander a little to furries than go hogwild with lootboxes--we're really not into play to win at OWTB.

But yeah, I worked on a lot of the monsters and other assorted fauna for AWOo. Not as much the visual design--that was more other people on our team--but modeling the life-cycles and programming them and stuff.

And, uh, Delvar's technically a kobolt, which are dragon-like but not straight-up dragons, but yeah.

[firewalled]

God, that makes you like ten times better than most companies who make MMOs in my world, then. It sounds like it's a lot more fun then having to grind for 500 years to get a decent enough weapon to win.

It sounds really interesting, though! Is it just a regular quest based game, or could you just like, hang out and run a bar, if you wanted?

[labcatte]

Oh yeah, totally. People have been able to from the start. You just level up by doing crafting instead of combat--though, uh, that does come at the expense of combat prowess, unless you're playing as an artisan class, like alchemist or artificer or entertainer.

And we hope we're more fun! The company founders all played old-fashioned two dee MMOs when they were younger, so they came in with a bunch of ideas of how to make them more fun and less, uh, predatory. That's why all our official cash shop merch is either cosmetics, pets that don't affect gameplay like my Sal--which you can either just buy virtually or if you order the stuffed animal, you'll also get a code for them in game--and, uh, transformation items.

[firewalled]

Well, I mean, naturally there's gotta be a trade off. You get the ability to make cool shit, but you aren't as good on the battlefield. Unless you spend a really long time grinding out your stats to make up for that.

[He beams at the explanation of some of the game mechanics, and then even wider when something catches his interest.]

Oh my god, you made fuckin' Webkinz for your game? I mean, those were huge in my world for a while. They were these dumb stuffed animals you could buy and they had a code on them that'd let you log in online to like, play with your pet virtually and dress them up or whatever.