Chris Waters ("NightFox" / Fennekin) & Natale Pence (MoneyBunny / Buneary)
Exploration Team Lucky Strike
Spawning in Discovery Town
Affected RPers: N/A

Chris had been wanting this game for months, but unlike a lot of other frenzied people, he was chill about picking up his copy and not fighting other people to get in line like it was Black Friday and very limited amounts of immortality were for sale. But today was the day to get into a game that he had been reading articles about for months. He was patiently looking forward to it, but didn't mind taking his time by playing plenty of first person shooters in the meantime.

After getting the highly-coveted game placed into the Nintendo Wii Vision helmet, he decided to kick back, relax, put it on, and turn on the power. He then just allowed himself to be whisked away into wherever this little game decided to take him.

It all began with a welcoming message over a calming, swirling vortex, ushering him into this new Pokémon world, but before it could be decided, he had to go through the personality test. Chris answered question by question, all of them mostly casual and playful in nature. Some of them even made him chuckle a bit, like the "it's so hot today, what are you going to do to cool off?" and having the answers be "relax in the shade," "drink something cold," and the noteworthy "smother ice cream all over my face!" And there were plenty of others with the same kind of nature.

After reaching the end of the test, it told him, with a bit of suspense, that the Pokémon that best resembled him was... the Pokémon Fennekin! He was bit surprised, but he did get to thinking that even though it originally wasn't the Pokémon he thought he'd get, he felt cool with it. Though he couldn't help but think now that with the nature of the game... was he really going to look and feel like an actual Fennekin? What kind of experience was that going to be like? In so many other previous games, he had still role-played human characters, so how good was this game at the process of being a Pokémon?

It then prompted him to select a partner by username or by random selection. Chris didn't know anyone else personally who was currently waiting to be paired up, so he decided on a random selection. It instantly paired him with a girl who only had the username of "MoneyBunny" and she had gotten Buneary out of her personality test.

The game didn't give him too much of a chance to think about it as it all felt so surreal, taking him and his mind far, far away before everything went dark for a moment. The whole time, he couldn't help but think "how far did the devs go with this one?" He was about to find out.

...

After awakening, he opened his new eyes and he was suddenly taken back. Everything felt so incredibly real. The grass he was lying in felt like the real thing, the slight breeze in the air running through his new Fennekin fur was a sensation he had never felt before, and even all the sights of the placid Discovery Town, the grassy smells in the air, the warmth of the sun, and the sounds of nature were all around him. His breath was stolen and he wasn't even sure if it would ever come back.

"This... this shouldn't even be possible."

He got up on all fours, which to him was a completely foreign and downright wild feeling. He couldn't help but constantly feel his own fur by rubbing one of his light yellow-furred front paws on the other, and then switching. And then he felt his white-furred nose. And to top it all off, he tried wagging his furry, red-tipped fox tail. He was totally bewildered and totally taken back at how unbelievably realistic and amazing this game was. He didn't know whether to be completely excited or totally frightened out of his mind.

He tried walking... just a tiny bit. It was very strange to him to be walking on all fours now, but after just a tiny bit of stumbling to get used to this new body, he got used to it quickly and again, suddenly it felt like he had always been a Fennekin though he still had human memories. But overall, Chris was simply bewildered beyond belief and the game had just barely started. Already he was beginning to question if this was in fact still a game or something completely different entirely. Where does one draw the line now with an experience like this!?

He soon enough found his partner, "MoneyBunny" the Buneary, just barely awakening from the grass. She too seemed a bit bewildered by the nature of her new body and what it felt like, but it seemed to Chris that she wasn't even nearly as amazed at the level of immersion compared to him.

"Hey, you that 'NightFox' guy?" she asked, almost so carefree that this was almost no big deal to her.

"...Yeah," Chris replied, still soaking in all of the levels of immersion. "Don't... mind me, I just need a minute to get used to this."

"Oh, please don't tell me you're a newbie," she told him. "Because that's just going to kill it for both of us."

"No, but I usually only play Call of Duty and the like on this thing," Chris replied to her. "So the whole Pokémon fox thing is a bit new to me."

From what Chris remembered from the guides and beta tester claims, he read they had to get registered at Arcane Keep. Unfortunately, Chris hadn't been selected to be a beta tester as the number of selected players was much lower than usual and only a very select group of people got to be one. After talking it over with Natalie, they then decided to get registered and take on the team name "Lucky Strike." He wasn't surprised to see a whole slew of new players were already undergoing this very same process. He imagined maybe a few months from now, this one particular area of the town wouldn't be so bogged down with players, but for now, at the opening bell, everyone was pretty much here or on their way over.

"So you're a first person shooter gamer?" Natalie asked him in the crowd as they waited to meet up with Cyrus the Heliolisk. "I don't think that's gonna help us much. You don't use guns in this game, bro."

"Well duh, I know that," Chris replied to her. "I'm just saying when it comes to games, this ain't my first trip."

"Yeah, okay," Natalie nodded. "Well, we'll figure out how we want to play this out later. Because my god, there are a ton of players here."

It took some time before they finally met up with Cyrus. Chris was actually impressed that the game developers managed to capture Cyrus's tired fatigue due to how many players were prompting him for a team registration. For him, it made it very easy to forget it was just a game and this was all programming and graphics coming together through an illusionary virtual mental and neural experience. But, considering some of the other titles he had played on the same system, it wasn't a totally new feeling, though at least those games still had him as his normal human self... just fully thrown into battlefields and combat simulations and not as a small fire fox Pokémon.

After a few minutes of introductions, both Chris and Natalie were now registered as Lucky Strike and were free to begin their trek through the game.