'When in doubt, listen to smooth jazz' was probably the worst piece of advice Sophie heard in a very long time. She has attempted concentrating for twenty minutes now and failed again and again. It got so bad that she figured she'd give her father's terrible advice a shot.
Smooth jazz. I should've never bothered.
It's just little bug. I can fix this today.
She presses the F5 button again. A new window pops up on her monitor in which a door appears. Sophie presses the W key and the camera moves towards the door. E - the door opens; the window closes; red text appears.
Sophie grabs her head. Simon looks over to her.
"Having problems fixing bugs?"
"Yes. Whenever I try entering the Inn, it just crashes."
"Sadly, I don't have that much time to help fix your bugs. The supporters from the Help Chat will probably be able to help, though."
That might be my last resort.
She opens her browser, types in the address and presses Enter.
She went onto the Server she had saved at the top of her bar - I&I Studio.
Sophie checks the file again. Corrupted. Maybe the upload just went wrong, so she decides to upload it yet again.
But it is still corrupted. Something went wrong. She checks her files again.
A portion of the files for Knights of Terra are corrupted. Mostly files for indoors textures, models and scripts. She hears a deep voice ring over the loudspeakers of the building.
"Ms. Lancester, to the Manager's office. This is urgent."
She stands up from her office chair and swiftly walks towards the glass door used to exit her department.
She walks up the staircase covered in a big blue carpet, passes by the support department and enters the managers department. Her manager is sitting on his way too comfortable office chair.
"Did you notice already?" Mr. Hunt spouts even before Sophie has a chance to just sit down.
"Just right now, yes. Listen, I myself don't know what happened."
Mr. Hunt sighs. "We promised to release this game by autumn next year. Now, your bloody team fucks up and half of your files are corrupted. This is bad, Ms. Lancester. Fix this."
"We could load up a backup and—"
"When was the last backup made?"
"About three weeks ago."
"Good, load that up. Now get out."
Sophie is quick to stand up. When she gets out and passes the support section, she feels a cramp in her chest. Her vision starts to get blurry and her throat tightening up. She attempts to grasp for air, only to slowly lose control over her muscles. She quickly grabs into her pocket to get her inhaler. She takes it, puts it in her mouth and presses the orange button on the top. She feels her throat loosening up and takes in a lot of air. And so, she walks back to her office chair.
She exhales and opens private messages.
Sophie gets nervous. She quickly takes another breath from her inhaler.
Sophie sighs. She opens another DM chat.
Make yourself useful.
Over the course of the next two hours, Sophie's team plans a total of 5 easter eggs and 3 achievements. During this entire time, she has this nagging thought in the back of her head: someone did this on purpose. The files went corrupt for whatever reason, which is bound to happen from time to time, but the access history corrupted as well. What if someone corrupted the files before corrupting the history to hide their wrongdoings? Sophie brushes it off. It's nothing. I'm just paranoid again.
She went to sit back down at her computer.
As Sophie reads the letter she clenches onto the armrests of her chair. She feels her breathing getting stronger and faster. Her eyes close themselves. Stay calm. This-… This is fixable.
Sophie gets dizzy. She stands up from her chair and opens the window. Disgusting polluted London air enters the room, and she closed the window again.
They have three weeks of work to catch up on, so the team starts programming fast.
A total of two hours pass in which Sophie programmed her literal ass off.
It was when she returns from a small toilet break that she finds many disstressed looks on the faces of her colleagues.
As she slowely goes onto the databank of her Studio, she hears murmurs and sounds of distress coming from her colleagues. She doesn't even need to navigate down to the Knights of Terra files to see the damage. Most files were completely missing. Instead of several folders with games in them, there is a single .txt file. Sophie opens it. The PC tells her that another user from the studio was already using it, so she opens a copy.
Within an instant, she opens her chat program and attempts contacting her manager.
Sophie has never heard of a paratechnical department inside of I&I, and James is responsible for the servers, not for some department.
Sophie wants to call the M&M Salesperson out on their bluff, but before she could even type…
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