RFR Rewards Eligible Members: Sub, Darts, Blizz, Aile, Isaac, Sol, Kaya

Fifteen (15) Snag Coins

Two (2) Ultra Balls

Regular Rewards

Fifteen (15) Snag Coins

One (1) Snag Emblem

One (1) Syringe of Shadow Vaccine (worth approximately thirty-five Snag Coins)

Twenty (20) Gengar Tokens, spendable in Darts' Casino in the Snag Mall (don't forget to tip your dealer)

One (1) Free Park Pass useable in the K&L Nature Preserve for one spin for items in any area. (Try it out, hiking is fun!)

Five (5) Evolution or Purification Points for those who can gain them. (Better late than never? Retroactively added on 12/24/2015)

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Hey guys Darts here again, and I wanted to thank all of you for taking the time to help make this last RP a smashing success as you've done all of the six months that we've been going through it. Whether you contributed a little or a lot, suffice it to say that your voices help make the flavor of the story really come through and I appreciate you all coming out to try out this new RP format and story I brought to the forefront. With that said, and all the story so far revealed I am able to talk about a couple things that you may or may not have noticed, my intent with designing things the way they were and some notes going forwards. Afterwards there'll be a questionnaire which if you can PM to me or send to me on Skype lets me better judge the thoughts and feelings of all the members who participated. If you don't care about my game or writing design aesthetic that went into this feel free to skip to the questionnaire.

Firstly, and something that will be relevant to plots further ahead in the future, I can finally at least partially reveal what Ein has actually been doing the entire RP, so that the thing doesn't seem like an entire random string of events wound together even if it seemed like it. It was subtle, if you were looking for it you might have noticed it, but I infused a secretive secondary plot into the story of us handling the Shadow Virus, HAZARD, and Team Cipher involving Stones. See, if you'll recall in the second mission when we first ran into S-22 on the boat when he left after murdering those Aqua members, he stole a cache of evolution stones from the bottom of the boat. The next time this plot line pops up is in Meteor Falls, where it looks like Cipher again is randomly going after stones, and they get away with a piece of the meteor we were sent to retrieve. The last time stones get mentioned is in the finale, with S-22 being jettisoned out of the rocket and floating past a meteor in space, collecting bits and pieces of it in capsules before falling back to earth in an as of yet undetermined state. I'm not going to spell out what exactly Ein has been doing, but suffice it to say he was working on something else while giving us and the government the runaround with his Shadow Virus.

Leaving that tantalizing tidbit behind I can talk a little bit about my thoughts going into designing and running this RP. When I came up with the concept of Team Cipher, I wanted to go full bore and make an evil version of us that was one weight class above us but with some classic Snagem flare in the mix, and the best way to do that I felt was to have them mirror us but in a twisted way. I wanted to draw back in some of what made us an awesome team in the early days of our existence, back ten or so years ago when I first joined, but I also wanted to design a new system of RP in terms with how people's lives have developed since then. Basically I was looking to blend nostalgia without being ham-fisted as requiring the newer members to know what I was talking about as well as try and break completely new ground. Most of the evil teams we face have some kind of 'Grunt' level unit, and that makes them feel like while the big bosses are the top guns they have all kinds of cannon fodder in the way and it waters down the overall impact of an evil team, I felt. So to that end, I decided six members and six members only was the perfect amount because too many more than that and they all blend into a soup, and if we lost one for one reason or another (Miror B. leaving Ein during the finale) there were still enough to hold a group together. And that was my other goal with this RP, I didn't want the only chance I had at showing off what I could do with the main narrative just be limited to a one-shot and done story. I wanted to create villains that lived and breathed as much as any of our characters did, and to do that they needed to have some play across more than one arc. If you don't let villains build up in their evilness for lack of a better word, antagonize us both figuratively and literally, then all of you guys have no real beef with them when you defeat them. There's no real payoff nor is there enough time to build to one, at least one with the impact I desired. I wanted to do justice to the new Cipher, they've always been the yin to our yang, and for that I felt like placing them in a weight class outside our current strength not only kicks our characters out of their complacency a bit but also gives us something to strive towards in the future. Cipher, and Ein, will be back again in the future sooner or later make no mistake about that and once they show up, I am sure people will have debts to settle, but not only that they will have had time to advance and level up to be in a better position to collect.

Once I found out that I wanted to essentially create another Snagem but a warped and murderous version then the roster was rocky to begin with. I didn't really have anything other than I wanted to bring back Ein as an antagonist we've run into who didn't fully get his bad guy day in the sun so to speak but other than that I had no idea where I wanted to go from there. And then I brainstormed the idea of the S-22. See, for those who don't know S22 (no hyphen) was the very first leader of Team Snagem. He was running another team by the time I plucked up the courage to join way back on the Nintendo Nsider boards, Team Aquos (an Aqua alternate seeing as there was a Team Aqua), but he had given me my very first Snagem rank up all that time ago and I had seen his daring dos with the team from before I joined. One day at work I was doing something and then it hit me like a bolt of lightning: if we've rebooted our universe and all of the characters that we currently are writing exist in this universe, then that theoretically holds that there should be alternate versions of every member that has ever existed, including those that have been gone for... almost always. He was a Sharpedo hybrid originally, S22, but that didn't seem to have the oomph that I wanted so in an attempt to explain the name and to juice him to the world beater you know him today as, I postulated the addition of Ein's enhancements to turn him into a mindless weapon puppeteered by the genius scientist. We had hybrids like Blizz and RC, so to outclass us Ein needed something even stronger, outside the limits of natural hybrids. His muscle to compliment his brain, so to speak. Thus the S-22 was born, the twenty-second of Ein's experiments Sharpedo, S class. S-22.

Once I had wandered into the font of ideas that the idea of discovering characters had brought me, my mind was awhirl and the rest of the roster came together a lot easier. I drew parallels across the board between each member of Cipher and what icon of Snagem I wanted to imitate or what facet of Snagem society I wanted to play on, the rest of the administration pitched in a bunch of great ideas, and it came together pretty nicely if I do say so myself.

Cipher --- Trope --- Snagem
Ein - - - Leader - - - Sub
S-22 - - - Powerhouse - - - RC
Dull - - - Spiritual Power/Preboot Tie-in - - - Darts/Odd
Kess - - - Lone Wolf - - - Blizz/Sol
Miror B. - - - Comic Relief - - - Early Reno/Early Darts
Zera - - - Female Presence - - - most female Snagems (Nal, Crystal, etc.)

Dull I wanted to do something with, seeing as it had been a bit since we had last seen him in the last RP tying up the preboot so he was a bit of a loose end, not to mention with this Cipher being the strongest incarnation and him being the last remnant of the preboot as last Darts' internal darkness he seemed a natural fit. His natural dissonance with our reality seemed like something Ein would be interesting in harnessing yet also making him another crazy strong tool in the madman's arsenal. I like his view of our world, and him going forwards should be interesting.

Kess was an old member we had back before we moved to Gaia, and as everyone who knew her would tell you she was amazing. She was a Zapdos hybrid just like she is in the RP, but she was a very inspiring force for good when she was around and exuded strength, confidence, and courage the whole time I knew her. She struck me very much as a female Blizz when I was designing this team, and again I got to rewrite her a bit because I didn't want it to be necessary to know the past but have it be a fun nod if you did, so she got to be the second throwback to go along for the ride. Kess I know you ain't reading this, but if you are by some miracle, I hope I did her justice.

Miror B. I could not resist. If I think Cipher and Colosseum and XD one of the first things that pop into my head is his amazing theme. I wanted him to be the comic relief, but as you saw at the end of this RP arc I want to go a bit deeper past the miraculous afro and expose some of what makes the man tic. Even though he left Cipher at the end of this one, expect us to run into him again sooner or later.

Zera is a completely new character, and the only one of the six that isn't based on someone else's character concept or is a character in the games already. As a Koffing hybrid, something that hasn't been seen before, and her personality was a bit of comic randomness that has always been floating around our team. I thought of Zera like new Snagem members, larval and still growing. The rest of the Ciphers are confident in their strength, but from what we've seen of Zera she isn't. She picked up Regice in this arc, and seeing her grow and develop going forwards should be just as fun for me as the rest of you.

Phew, did everyone fall asleep from that? The next thing I wanted to talk about is vaccination and the Shadow Virus. Because we were looking to bring back Shadow Pokemon (we are team SNAGem) and bring them back in a big way, I spitballed an idea of Shadowification that could spread like a disease. And before I get any Monster Hunter comments about this, I came up with this idea months and months before I had even touched the game or seen anything about it though they both carry remarkable similarities. The idea of having to worry about having your non-Shadow Pokemon become Shadowified and what Pokemon you have to use as a result of that seemed like a very interesting conflict for people to play with both now and in the future. And what better team to bring this idea into play than Team Cipher, the originators of Shadowification? As you'll notice, Ein releasing his virus into the wild Pokemon in Hoenn was a smokescreen for other of his plans but it also fulfilled the necessity of calling us out and in a big way. The virus isn't going anywhere either, much like the rest of what I've established here I was looking to lay down a good foundational groundwork for us to world build and craft stories on top of, and to reintroduce elements we were missing from classic Snagem of old that I felt gave us the flavor I loved.

About vaccination also: the Shadow Vaccine works once you innoculate a Pokemon, no matter when you innoculate them. HOWEVER it does not purify them instantly. You can inject them or give it to the Pokemon orally, whichever you want, but until you have finished accumulating enough purification points the Pokemon will not fully open its heart. That is why the spreading of the vaccine was necessary over Hoenn, and while they'll probably have to reapply a couple times to make sure they hit the maximum number of Pokemon they can. Wild Pokemon will naturally battle each other and work the virus out of their systems, but trained Pokemon will have to either battle other Shadow Pokemon in the wild or battle someone with Shadow Virus Immunity, granted by curing your Pokemon fully with the vaccine. If you do immunize your Pokemon before you have them gain enough purification points, please keep track of it in your profile, and once they become immune to the virus if you do cure them, please note that as well. Simply being vaccinated does NOT grant them immunity unlike most vaccines, due to the weaponized nature of the virus, a Pokemon has to fight off the infection before they are granted immunity so trying to vaccinate them to pre-empt infection does not work.

Alrighty, that finally just about covers everything I wanted to talk about but couldn't for various reasons over the past six months. If you have questions about anything feel free to poke me on Skype I will answer any that I can without revealing future plot or secrets I'm not able to talk about and always am happy to talk about my methods. The last topic I wanted to talk about is more boring than the actual story as it pertains to formatting. One of the things I felt we had lost touch with was a consistent schedule in terms of RPs that let people know when to be there and what was happening, hence why any time I had to make a change I made sure to let people know well in advance. The once a month formula down from the one RP a week formula we used to run way back in the day seemed to make sense for most of our busy schedules while also giving us a lot of time to tell a story. Six months (not counting the one month we took a break) was pretty much the standard length of most of our RPs so that was what I used as my measuring tool for about how long we should go, with three weeks or so of actual RPing and three weeks or so of break inbetween to give people time to do other things. A couple of the RPs (notably Miror B. and the finale) ran longer than I had anticipated due to unforseen circumstances or in the case of the finale me wanting to not half-a** the ending just to get it done, but I hope the schedule was reasonable and fair for everyone as much as I could make it. We'll be on a five month or so break with no main RP to let people do things like Master Missions, be on holiday, etc, and we will come back in January/February. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed plotting this all out and running it!

QUESTIONNAIRE
1.What was your favorite part of the plot? (It can be a character, an event that happened, something related to the main plot.)

2.What was your least favorite part of the plot? (Was there something I added that didn't need to be there, something that didn't make sense, etc.)

3.What was your favorite moment for one of your characters? (In an effort to try and work more personal stories into the plot I tried to allow more play from people's individual characters, which of those for your character did you like the most?)

4.How do you feel about Cipher? (as characters, as villains, should we never bring them back, etc.)

5.How do you feel about the Shadow Virus? (shadow Pokemon are/aren't interesting, like/dislike the virus part of it, general overall feel)

6.Was there a particular character other than your own or other people's characters that you really liked or disliked from this arc and why?

7.Aile caught a Regirock during this arc as part of her character progression working towards what Crystal wants for her as a kind of Sandstorm user. Was that cool and would you like to see more major plot things like this? (not necessarily always Legend captures, but making people's personal progression be a big part of the plot)

8.RFR rewards - noticeable? Not needed? An interesting way to encourage people to show up the first day? Tell me your thoughts on them here.

9.Micromissions - mini missions that depending on what you do affected the plot. Which was your favorite and why, and if you didn't do a micromission still why and how could we make them more tantalizing to you? (saying you hate them all together works too)

10.General thoughts, questions, ideas for things in the future, etc. You guys are the ones that make this guild run, we Admins are just volunteers trying to make sure that you get the most out of your literary experience. Anything that you wanted to say but didn't get an opportunity to talk about in any of the other questions, please put here.