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Hello all, it has been quite a ride hasn't it? I appreciate those of you that have been here throughout our five-year mega arc and am grateful those of you that have shown up partway through have decided to stick around to the end.
Something that has marked my time with this team, sadly, has been absences. I have been known for taking lengthy absences without warning and that has been something that has always weighed heavily on my conscience as a writer and a team member. In mid 2014 when I came back to Snagem after a long absence due to school, I was disheartened by what I saw. There was no fire, there was no continuity and no consistency in anything being done and it seemed like the team itself had slipped into a deep depression. My life was in a similar spot, coming out of college and having worked and continuing to work in the food industry, while successful by that metric, was no where near where, in my mind, I should be in my life given the talents that I have been blessed enough to have. I had wasted my educational experience even though I got my degree, made more than a handful of terrible mistakes towards derailing my life, and now was stuck in a dead-end fast food job.
Snagem, to me, seemed to be stuck in the same place I was - lost in the past glories it had once had and pining for days that were never going to come back. That spring I utilized the connections I had gotten to get a new job - still in food service but to me more of a challenging and well paying position as a kitchen chef at a higher-end dining theater. As I entered into this new position, struggling to find my footing in a challenging new environment and fretting over what Snagem had become, I had a bit of an 'aha' moment.
The reason Snagem had entered into this rut was twofold - once on a storytelling level, and once on a logistics level. Firstly, we were pining for the older days of storytelling without figuring out why the old stories we used to told worked and how structurally a lot of our best stories came to be. This, to me, was rooted in the fact that Team Snagem had become nothing more than a grungy group of thugs. Not that the aesthetic itself wasn't attractive but we had never developed or moved on from what we had been established as being since the days of Tails running the team. For all our talk of shades of gray at the end of the day we were really heroes and our best stories involved protecting regions/the planet from true villains who meant to destroy everything people held dear. A simple concept, but one that is hard to entwine with a group of simple shades of gray people in a gang. We needed to elevate the team narratively in order to make the stakes bigger and our presence in future storylines more applicable.
The second half of our current problem was a logistics one. RPs ran for too long, started and stopped with no real direction and there was no cohesion to storylines and we had no real idea where things needed to be 'aimed' narratively in order to set up moments that had any real emotion behind them. We handled most obstacles too easily, we didn't have a lot of cohesive structure as an administration as to when we were doing things and as a result we weren't very transparent.
I can still remember frying beignets (french little doughnuts that we had to fry for 3 hours before service because of how long it took to cook them properly without them squishing) at my job and trying to come up with an antidote to both of our problems when I decided that what we needed was a real opponent, something that would test us both philosophically and mechanically - an opponent of greater strength that would give us a benchmark to chase and also an opportunity to test and change our current conventions with regards to running an RP. And that's when I came up with the idea for Team Cipher.
The ending of the RP you all read is functionally identical to the ending I had in mind five years ago, that's how far ahead we had things planned in relation to this story arc. During that timeframe we changed how we scheduled RPs, limiting our timeframes to how long we were going to run them and during what time of the year we were going to run them. (Though that went out the window for this last RP as a super finale it is fine I would caution against falling into that trap again in the future.) We added things like micromissions and pushed Cipher (Ein, S-22, Kess, Dull, Miror B., and Zera) to be worthy adversaries and rivalries. We used Zero Point to fix our broken continuity and re-establish our origins. The fight against S-22 at the end of everything and the final philosophical showdown with Ein was five years in the making and the fact we made it this far astounds me.
As we've succeeded and pushed this RP to be better, so has it enabled me to push and better my own life. My successes in the RP allowed me to translate to greater success in my own personal life and while it's not perfect by any means it's in a much better state than it was 3 jobs and five years ago. So, from the bottom of my heart - thank-you. Thank-you to everybody who participated, critiqued, engaged, loved, hated, or felt something as a result of this arc. It hasn't been all smooth sailing and the thing has threatened to be upended any number of times but we made it and told a story that I feel immensely proud of and all of you should feel immensely proud of having been a part of. I hope the story was at least adequate for all of you to find your own canvases to paint vibrant pictures of your characters inside while also being a legitimate vehicle for telling an amazing story on its own. I hope the foundation that we have laid here will only lead to greater successes not only within the RP but also within your own personal lives as well.
It is with a heavy heart I step down from the role of Admin at the end of this monumental accomplishment. Five years is a long time to dedicate to any kind of project and while I love Snagem, it feels appropriate that this is my stop in terms of doing the telling of the story at least for the moment. I have several other projects in the works, and I hope some of you will at least humor me by seeking those out when they come around but I need more time to dedicate to them that I could not also split with running the main story of Snagem.
I am not quitting the team as Darts has several stories that still need to be told, and I myself as a person have several Snagem-related things that I still wish to accomplish. I hope that if nothing else years from now this arc will be remembered fondly and you can look back on it with a deep sense of pride and accomplishment for it is not a story that could have been written without all of the rest of you. It is you and all of your characters interacting with the skeleton we provided as an administration that truly made this arc as great as it has become.
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tl;dr: Darts stepping down, hope you enjoyed, where the ******** is our rewards?
These are the rewards for both this RP and the last one combined into a cavalcade of joyous rewards.
75 Snag Coins
Mysterious New Egg (Oooh it's mysterious! More details to come on what's inside these babies though maybe you can guess....?)
3 Snag Emblems
Choice of a mix of 2 of: Balm Mushroom, Big Nugget, Pearl String, or Comet Shard.
2 Berries, of your choice. Can be any berry.
2 of each Color Shard, or 5 of any single Color Shard
3 Vivid Scents
And finally *drumroll*, a big Snag Machine upgrade that has come about due to the technology that ended up being scavenged from Ein's Realgam Fortress... the Shadow Charger.
Shadow Charger:
The Shadow Charger is a new upgrade that absorbs excess Shadow Energy from battling or purifying Pokemon infected with the Shadow Virus, allowing it to be used later. It'll gain one level of charge, up to a maximum of three, each time a Shadow Pokemon is defeated or purified. The charges can be spent to activate the following effects.
1 Charge: Halves the cost of Shadow Moves performed for one RP encounter/battle, making it take longer before the Pokemon enters Hyper Mode. Costs are rounded up to the nearest full number.
2 Charges: Allows a Pokemon in Hyper Mode to be controlled normally for one RP encounter/battle. During this time, the Pokemon also is unable to resist being recalled.
3 Charges: Expels all stored Shadow Energy to briefly, but rapidly combat the Shadow Virus. This gives half of a Shadow Pokemon's total required Purification Points, rounded up (i.e. If they need 25 total points to be ready for purification, this gives them 13).
Mostly only adding the R because Shadow Charge sounds more like a move (though it isn't).
The final reward is more of a story-line related reward than anything. Due to everyone's heroics during the World War itself and the liberation of Orre the councils of the known regions in the world have banded together to grant Team Snagem an international writ of diplomatic immunity - basically it's an agreement by all parties to allow us access in every region to conduct business either official or unofficial and any region that opens their borders either through trade or travel with them must do similarly. Basically it grants us full permission to traverse the various regions as we please and... any future ones?
Finally, for the Pokemon and the Pokemon trainers out there any Pokemon used during either of the missions will receive 30 Evo/Purification points.
I look forward to seeing where the story goes from here just as much as the rest of you are. I'm gonna be sitting on that big old porch with Blizz and eating tapioca pudding after we get it put back together. Thank-you all for a wonderful and life changing five years. *bows*
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