Good evening, everyone. Influenza Man Machida at your service. Today is my third day of self-quarantine in the storage room next to my office.

When I first got a high fever of 39℃, I panicked, thinking: “Did I finally get covid?!” But after using a test kit and finding out that I was negative, I safely became an Influenza Man. Looking back, this is actually my first time getting influenza in six years. I’d nearly…well, actually, I’d completely forgotten that it existed due to covid…

When you get influenza, your throat swells up really badly and it becomes painful to swallow anything, right? Even drinking Aquarius can be a struggle when it’s really bad… And Aquarius is merely a sports drink! You need to stay hydrated more than anything else, and yet every single swallow hurts so badly. It’s pure torture.

Luckily, I was able to retain my appetite throughout the influenza. I took a lesson from what Lupin III does when he gets shot and ate and slept like my life depended on it. Slowly but surely, I’ve been getting better. When you first get influenza, the pain seeps through to the bone, and every inch of your body hurts, but you forget all about that once you get better, don’t you? Thus I’m taking a trip down memory lane and relishing all the painful aspects of the influenza experience.

Right now, you’re probably thinking: Machida’s intro is really long right now… And he’s only talking about influenza. You want to know about the project, don’t you? Sorry, but I’ve still got more influenza talk for you!

Did you know that roughly 100 years ago, influenza had taken the world by storm? People called it the Spanish flu at the time, and some even theorize that it caused the majority of deaths during World War I.

Virus research hadn’t come very far at the time, so the pathogens and true nature of the disease remain unknown to this day – but apparently it was even more contagious than covid. Wikipedia even claims so many people died from it that it even caused the number of army recruits to drop and expedited the end to WWI. Scary, isn’t it?

See what I did there? I just connected everything I was saying to Penny Blood! Okay now, time to change gears and report on the progress of the project. *cough cough* Oh no, now I’m suddenly getting a cough…

Let’s start with the story first… *cough cough*

Day after day, I’ve been diving deep into the game’s world and thinking up interesting stories about *cough cough* and *cough cough*.

Kato-san has been working on the design for Luca’s wolf form and *cough cough*. Next she’s going to work on *cough cough*, while Hanya-san is working on the tri*cough cough*al version NP*cough cough*Cs and *cough cough*. Watanabe-san is drawing im*cough cough*portant loc*cough cough*ales for the story.

In terms of music, Hirota-san has been arranging *cough cough* and *cough cough*, while Kaida-san has been *cough cough cough*.

Whew… Finally finished my report. I hope you all liked it.

See you next month!

Matsuzo Machida