Working for G-Corp could be a real bitch at times.
While Asuka was grateful to have the opportunity to work for them and appreciated all the company had done for her, as she pulled yet another all-nighter filing stacks of paperwork for the R&D department, setting it ablaze was being seriously pondered.
Again.
The air was stale, cold, and depressing inside and the rainy, muggy summer sky outside looked even less inviting. And that said a lot. Fluorescent lights seemed to be taunting her with their incessant flickering. The room was empty save for the desks on each side of the room. Three years ago, when Asuka was recruited for Research and Development, she imagined working in a lavish and eccentric building filled with quirky and ingenious products. Everything bright and vivid and awe inspiring.
And yet, here she was. In a building indistinguishable from the average rundown warehouse. Big, bulky, with brick walls poorly covered with chipped white paint. The inside barely looked any better. Cold, hard vinyl floors that murdered her feet. Dirty white walls in desperate need of repainting greeted her at every corner she turned. Every office had office had dark steel desks on each side of the room. The most luxurious thing about the place was its cushioned chairs. Only the privileged, or the privileged's lackeys like her, were lucky enough to be placed into rooms with windows. When she arrived at her first day at work, she seriously thought she had been given the wrong address by mistake.
A popular theory amongst the newer employees is that the barrenness helps inspire workers to crank out the impressive number of patented products. An even more popular, and logical, theory amongst the veteran workers is that Rijuchi Sukotochi was just one cheap motherfucker. Having never met the the G-Corp CEO, she would just have to at take their word for it and curse him all the same. With a building as welcoming as this one, it's no wonder the employees were walking, talking balls of sunshine.
Her sadistic coworkers had long since departed for comfort their familiar warm beds, giving her half-apologetic, half-sympathetic, completely insincere smiles on the way out. And considering most of them contributed to the plenitude of paperwork on her desk, all she could maintain was a strained smile. The more miserable Asuka looked, the more paperwork Asuka got. She surmised that most of it was busy work that could have easily been done by the engineers within a few minutes. Dropping it on her desk could mean it would take almost half an hour per file. The former fighter would have to hunt down the necessary paperwork and files in offices that were sure to be locked, meaning she would then have to hunt down custodians all the way across the building. Then she would have to read over files and files and files of experiments, hypotheses, patents, etc. to well verse herself in what to file for whom. Sometimes the brunette would get lucky and find a file on project she had been observing, shortening her thirty-minute-per-file rate down to five. Her three years on the grind had gotten her used to doing this unnecessary busywork fast and efficiently, but that didn't mean she liked it.
But she never complained. The young woman was fortunate to have been given the opportunity and refused to sabotage it.
Now that she had graduated from college , her internship with the corporation was winding down. In two weeks, Asuka was to meet with the CEO, Mr. Sukotochi himself, to discuss her future with the company. There was a high chance that Asuka was going to be offered a position with Research and Development in exchange for covering her graduate school tuition. However, that didn't mean she wanted to take it. She was sick of the building, sick of the people, sick of the work. Asuka no doubt loved engineering, but quantum physics and computer science were where her heart was. Never once in her life did she aspire to be an engineer. In fact, the only reason she studied engineering in college in the first place was that it was part of G-Corp's terms of her scholarship.
In hindsight, Asuka definitely should have taken the other plentiful other scholarships she had been offered, but she was stubborn and liked a challenge. And challenging it was. In order for G-Corp to cover her tuition, she had intern at the Research and Development field as well as major in Engineering. An amazing opportunity. An amazing opportunity which lead to her trying to balance three majors with cruel corporate office work that she learned very little from. Sleep became a fond memory of hers while a severe coffee dependency asserted itself as top priority in her life. What she called temporary insanity, others called cockiness of dangerous proportions. While Asuka wasn't a genius, officially at least, she was indisputably brilliant. She graduated high school a year early and possibly could have graduated earlier if she hadn't wasted her time on martial arts. While she loved the challenge, she missed out on many opportunities to connect with others in her age bracket. Most of Asuka's childhood and early adolescence was spent in vain trying to get her father recognition for any of the plethora of endeavors, primarily martial arts, Asuka took up to please him.
How many times had she work throughout the night and into the morning trying to perfect a technique?
To prove herself to the fellow students at the dojo?
After her father's dojo had been crashed and the events of the Fifth Iron Fist , Asuka spent more of her time with her nose in the books. Trying to find her path, the way she had always wanted to, she had shed the parts of herself she yearned to lose for so long. The Asuka at the age of twenty-one was someone completely different from the Asuka at the age of fifteen. She had thrown away her pseudo-bravado and learned to accept herself as she was.
She'd never learned to heal her broken parts, however. Maybe she could with time. But for now, she focus on the work.
The buzzing of the lights overhead and the routine sounds of custodians making the rounds had worked to send the young woman into a trance. Asuka had completely missed the dark truck pulling into the dark parking lot below. The clock ticked on and the stack of files on her desk gradually wound down to one.
All the while, not noticing the footsteps getting louder down the hall. It was nearing midnight and her internal clock reminded her to go home and rest for school tomorrow. It took several seconds to remember that she had already graduated.
Creatures of habit.
Regardless, Asuka promised was grateful to only have to complete one more file. Soon she could go home to her lonely bed and restart the cycle again. She just had to look everything over to make sure no mistakes were made. Asuka knew all too well how someone's simple mistake could ruin another person's life. But that was another story.
As Asuka was finally finishing up the last file, light sprang into the dimly lit room, directly into her eyes and startled the brunette out of her trance. Rampant footsteps filled the room like a grenade. Temporarily blinded, all she could make out was black figures coming towards her in bright light. Voices boomed across the room as Asuka was jerked by the collar of her shirt. Disorientated, Asuka little chance to react before she felt herself being shoved and a loud cracking sound echoing in the room.
The world instantly went black.
Rijiuchi Sukotochi used to be a man with an infallible spirit.
Thirty years ago, he founded an energy efficient company in honor of his mother, as she had humbly brought him up in a small village far from the mainland. He remembered the birds most, how he understood them. They had all the freedom in the world and yet, always came back to where home was.
He never got the chance to.
While he had been away at college,his entire village, and everyone in it, had been burned to the ground. A European oil company synonymous with corruption had recently strict a deal to begin drilling in the village, bringing revenue to people who desperately need it, being rural in a growing industrial world. Greed had overcome the village leaders, who had heartlessly turned a blind eye to the vanishing landscape around them. It had been two months into drilling and two days before Sukotochi's graduation, his mother was due to start traveling to see him.
An act of God, they called it. A explosion as a result of corporate greed. Sukotochi didn't necessarily disagree. No one paid for the negligence and it was soon swept away by time. It was that day, when he volunteered to help search for survivors, when he had to drag out the remains of the people that raised him, that Sukotochi swore he would change the industry for the better. It was that day the G-Corporation was founded.
He rose his small pro-environment business to a worldwide corporation in the midst of the worst energy crisis of the century. And he was proud of it. The G-Corporation, he called it. The Good Corporation. Every employee, hand-picked by Sukotochi himself, lived by was "Clean Air, Clean Hands". There was never to be any dirty dealings: no bribe money, no trail of bodies, no secrets from the public.
It didn't last long and he regrets it to this very day.
It was one act of vengeance, one petty act of retaliation brought that man back into his business. That man taught him the true meaning of hostile takeover. That man and his ruthless companion. It had been four years but the blood of his long standing partners and colleagues still permeated his nose. The sight of their mangled corpses still haunted his dreams. Two set of eyes, three different colors, still had him cautious of every move he made.
He learned to stop asking questions. He didn't question the sharp increase in money spent on developing military-grade weapons, the drastic amount of new recruits in the G-Force. It wasn't his place to.
He was a puppet, nothing more. That was the only reason he was kept alive
Every decision made by him had to be reported to the man upstairs, every employee he hired had to receive that man's final stamp of approval. Sukotochi was so lost in his thoughts that he never noticed his assistant barge into his office. He was about to reprimand her for not knocking when he noticed her flustered expression.
"Sir." She said, "We have a problem."
Thank you so much for reading the first chapter of Flying into Fatal Lightning. This chapter was a little vague, I know. Run on sentences are a huge issue for me and I tried to minimize it in the story.
For all of you confused readers:
There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of issues with canonical Tekken's storyline. I could write a book on it. But the thing that no one seems to mention is the fact that Tekken 4-Tekken 6, and possibly 7, all occur within the same year. Tekken 4 and Tekken 5? Maybe you could pull that off. Tekken 6?
I call bullshit.
As badass as Jin Kazama is, I highly doubt he is able to win TWO Iron Fist Tournaments, take over one of the most ruthless organizations in the world (With very little known training on how to RUN a business), recruit an army large enough to take over the would (And how did Lars manage to rally the support to start and successfully lead a coup?), bankrupt several business, and try to pull a Hitler on the ENTIRE World all within the course of 365 days.
But Lord Troll Harada says it is, and so it shall be.
For the sake of plot, I am putting a nice time gap between Tekken 5 and Tekken 6. A five year time gap to be specific. And that will probably be the biggest difference between Flying into Fatal Lightning and Tekken. This story is NOT meant to be AU. This story IS meant to take place between Post-Tekken 5 all the way to the end of Scenario Campaign with very little alterations to the main storyline and a similar, if not the same, ending. I want to explain several things in FIFL that are merely brushed upon or utterly ignored in the main plot, primarily:
*Why is Jin such an ass?
*Kazuya's role from behind the scenes of G-Corp
*Lee's role in all this nonsense.
*Seriously, why is Jin such an ass?
*Why are we being trolled with Asuka's power?
*Why is Harada such a troll?
There is a lot of foreshadowing in this chapter that I plan on getting to. Anyway, thank you for reading this and I would love to hear your thoughts, questions, complaints.
