🪭 [Episode 2: Episode Structure] 'The Underground Quantum Reactor' 1/2

A complete shift from the flashy action of the first episode. A gritty cyber hard-boiled episode where the 'danger' lurking behind the daily life of the downtown area intersects with the bloody pasts of the men.

• [Avan Title] The end of daily life and the entrance to a secret

  • Daily life in the downtown area: On a sunny afternoon, Gen-san (52), the owner of an old hardware store (blacksmith) in the downtown area of NEO-EDO, closes the store's shutters.

  • Switch to the extraordinary: In the back room, while drinking bottled tea and snacking on rice crackers, he presses a hidden button on the wall. The cupboard slides, revealing a heavy iron door.

  • Underground secret workshop (Quantum Reactor): In the secret underground workshop, the cyber cat Tetsu is already sitting in a chair, having arrived ahead of him. When Gen-san starts up his self-made cyber boombox, intense John Coltrane jazz blares at full volume, and he begins typing at a tremendous speed.

• [Part A] Cross-fading Past (The Glory and Price of a Genius)

  • Former Legendary Programmer: Amidst the blaring jazz, Gen-san's hands typing on the keyboard overlap with his younger self. Gen-san was a genius who once built systems for a massive organization. A past where he was scouted by the organization as a boy and served as a genius programmer.

  • Meeting his Partner (Rai): Within the organization, he meets young Rai (47), who also stood out as a genius. They become the best of buddies, like brothers with a significant age gap, who understand each other's loneliness.

  • The Truth of the 'Left Eye': Knowing too much of the organization's darkness, Gen-san decides to leave. In exchange for signing a 'non-aggression treaty,' the organization burned out Gen-san's real left eye with a system as collateral for his betrayal.

  • Tetsu's Death and 'Rebirth': Gen-san, who had extracted the 'memories and emotional fluctuations' of Tetsu, the cat he kept in his youth, poured nanotechnology into him to resurrect him as a cyber-cat.

  • Invincible Ability [Absolute Barrier]: Tetsu's system incorporates 'the cat's whimsical biological data (fluctuations)' that even a perfect AI cannot predict. The secret of the 'inviolable hacking cat,' the only one in the world completely independent of the organization's network.

Gen-san's Feelings and Tetsu
Perhaps what Gen-san truly wanted to create was not a weapon, but the presence of a 'cat' that comforted him during his lonely childhood. However, as a result of having to pour the organization's cold, ruthless technology into him, 'the cutest and most dangerous cat in the world' was born...

[Director's Playlist / Soundtrack in the Story] These are jazz masterpieces I envisioned for the production of the main story. Please listen to them along with the lingering emotions of the tale.

── ✏️ Tweet ──
I repeated the process of thinking and bouncing ideas off the AI over and over. For example, since Gen's visual design resulted in his left eye becoming a cybernetic prosthetic, how should I justify that? For the setting of Episode 2, I came up with a scene where the fingers of Gen typing on a keyboard cross-fade with his fingers typing on a keyboard as a boy, and I had it summarized in bullet points in Word. I can't program at all. It's all imagination.

🪭 [Hokkamurai] Read the main story