Thank you for reading the sequel to Echoes of the Dark. I know it probably wasn't as good as the original, but I tried to make it as good as I possibly could.
Okay, I want to get this out of the way, since no one figured it out, outside of the people I told it to. But RMCP is literally PCMR spelled backwards. What's the biggest threat to console gaming? PC Gaming, thus the group was PC Master Race.
Let me go over the characters involved in order that that I figured out who was going to be in the group.
Acti was originally just going to be an arms dealer, but when someone thought he was representing Trump, I had to change what I was planning and thought "how can I tie this into gaming?" and the idea of "hey, these companies have a bad rep with gamers, make them the baddies", and so, making Acti, who represents Activision, the first just came up. The idea of him having super powered vision abilities was just something I threw in for no reason, though now that I think about it, his ability to see anything with super vision is kind of tied to the name Activision. Kind of just a happy coincidence that I wasn't thinking of.
He originally was going to be loosely based on Geese Howard from the Fatal Fury games, just a FYI.
Tence was based off of Tencent and sorry to everyone who read it and pointed out what I messed up with for Tencent when I was trying to represent the company. So I threw in Xinnie as her "teddy bear" because it annoys the Chinese Communist Leader, Xi. And that's the most political I actively got in this fic, I tried to keep the rest of politics out.
As for GBox, he was supposed to just be a goon from the GearBox games, but they did make the Duke Nukem games, so...
Erika being Electronic Arts was supposed to be a sports nut. The fact that she ended up blackmailing Plutia was a coincidence on my part, as I didn't know about EA threatening Sega until it was pointed out to me.
Okay, Ubi being Ubisoft and her design was based around Anita Sarkeesian, who's basically the female Jack Thompson, and that was my thought processes for her design. Also why I threw in so many quips about her being ugly, because she's ugly on the inside.
Beth is based on Bethesda and she changed clothes and looks a lot because there's a LOT of customization in Bethesda games. Her ability that she used early on was literally a call-out to the amount of times that Bethesda games have had PCs crash when using them.
Tyger is based on Tiger Electronics. Because those games were horrible to play as a kid, but your parents got them for you because they were a fraction of the Gameboy, any Gameboy games and only needed two batteries instead of four.
Matz is based on MadKatz, which made a LOT of third party controllers and other peripherals for consoles since forever. It's why I made Matz a futanari and never revealed their gender until later.
I don't know why I had Matz and Tyger working together, it just happened over the course of the story.
Epic is based on Epic games, I based his body off of Jack Thompson and his attitude off of the moral authoritarian busy-bodies that try to rule our lives.
Okay, some other notes to make here, well, the whole RMCP thing wasn't supposed to happen, I partially blame my beta reader and partially blame myself, because my beta reader was pushing hard for a human/CPU conflict to happen because of Neptune's actions and I realized that I was losing steam with Echoes of the Life quickly if I didn't have a focus for it.
Will there be a third part of the Echoes story?
No, I'm done. If I do come back to this, it'll be in one-shots, nothing more.
But, hey, coming back to the story let me re-visit this Nep, Chrome, Filyn the Villain (ducks scythe attack), the Gamworld CPU Candidates and more. Plus, hey, we got a few scenes of the redheaded Noire, right?
As for the humans from Gamworld, they weren't needed for the sequel, so they didn't show up. Sorry. Besides, let everyone just live their lives normally, right?
I guess I should talk about the idea to have the Voids that did show up, huh?
Alright, originally my thought was, when I drafted the idea in my head, have the Voids from Echoes of the Dark appear again. But that was an idea my beta reader shot down, but I really did like the idea, so I changed it to being Void versions of the CPU Candidates and that they became Voids because no Neptune to save them.
Just a quick note, the reason Green Sister/Peashy was willing to go full on "Seduction Mode" on Acti was because she accepted that being lewd wouldn't turn her into a monster like Green Void was.
Neptune's decision? Well, my original idea was to have her regain her HDD form by bonding with Chrome, but a review I got from "Dragonsayianblue" made me realize that things could be a bit more interesting if she got to make a choice on whether or not to regain her HDD, so, she got to make that choice. As for what she chose, again, that's up to the reader.
Thank you for reading Echoes of the Life and I'll see you in the next story that I write.