Board 8 > Tsunami does blind playthroughs of VNs--Grand Revival [spoilers] [ztd] [aa6]

(+) Yeah! (+)

How the hell did I let this purge? Well, luckily it's not too hard to get a cached version.

Well, we went back to December 31, 2028. Just as expected. But who are these people locked up in a confinement room? Heh...they all have bracelets. Look nothing like the bracelets from either of the first two games. Our "Zero" looks different, too; he's wearing a plague doctor's mask rather than the usual gas mask. He flips a coin. Heh...already a Schrodinger's Cat situation. Red, or blue? Win, and you get your freedom. Lose, and you must stay in the game until six of you are dead.

...Oh good, the thing that I knew is revealed early on. Though she doesn't look much like herself in the previous two games (and yes, her 999-era self does appear in VLR), one of our compatriots has been identified as "Akane". I'm in control of a "Carlos". I don't remember all of the other names; one of them was "Diana", which stands out to me because of the mythological connection to the name of a character in VLR. I have to choose which side landed up. Knowing this series, whatever I choose will be wrong...so why am I thinking it over? I select red, and...it's red?! But now Zero or whatever is passing for Zero in this game puts us to sleep, and we'll forget everything. Heavy dose of Soporil, I assume. We all wake up outside in the desert...without bracelets? Akane remembers making a bet with someone, but everyone's memory is foggy. And no one knows who the kid in the helmet is.

Cue opening credits. They look more like ending credits, though.

Wait, are they, in a sense? Would the first choice have made a difference, and this is some cop-out ending?

Ah, no. Now we have a choice of whose path to follow. C team, following our intrepid protagonist, Carlos. D team, following Diana. And Q team, because there's always a f***ing Q. That would follow the kid in the helmet. The flowchart suggests that, no, we can't go back and redo the very first choice of the game.

Well, blindly following pretty girls is always a rule of thumb in this topic series, so D team it is. I'm alerted by the game that each image I see here is a story fragment, though only one is open to me now. Agh, don't tell me this game is going to be even more frenetic and confusing than VLR!

...What the. I...am going to the one choice? Let's just see what happens if I jump to later...

...Well, I'll be damned. It really is an ending. And to think, I initially was thinking blue, and changed my mind. Was it always going to be red, or are you forced to get the automatic ending first? Now this looks more like a beginning than an ending.

Getting more names. Eric, Mira...wait, Junpei's in this game too? The man in the mask identifies himself as the Second Zero. He tells a story about a woman who goes jogging every day. One day, she takes the left path instead of the right. A person she's known for many years is surprised to see her on this path and asks why she changed paths. She says "because there was a snail." A few hours later, she's found in some bushes along that path, murdered. This happened 17 years ago. Huh, so that's what he meant when he called Carlos "that solitary snail." Zero also tells us we're in a bomb shelter 50 meters below the ground. Carlos, Akane, and Junpei are in ward C. Q, Mira, and Eric are in ward Q. And the three in ward D are Diana...Phi and Sigma?! Heh, I thought the voice sounded like Phi's, but still...ah, I guess Akane's appearance should've tipped me off not to trust my eyes.

So at most, we have 5 new characters. Quite possibly fewer, given that Q is a mystery. Hmm...given where we are in the timeline, it's quite possible that Luna was based on Diana. Zero tells us that it's less than half a day until New Year's, but that many of us won't get to celebrate 2029. Ah, here's the twist...
---

There's a door to the center of the bomb shelter in each ward. These are the X-Doors, marked with an X. Simply obtain X-Passes to get to the elevator therein, thereby escaping the shelter. This is the only way out. Six X-Passes are needed to get out...and one X-Pass will be announced every time someone dies. The door will remain open for thirty seconds, and then it closes, never to open again. How to kill six people? Well, you can vote. Each team has one vote as to which of the other two teams to execute. If a team fails to vote, they will be penalized two votes. A team with two votes gets executed. This is the Decision Game. Ah, so that's our new gimmick...and I get to choose the team again? Well, now that we know the teams, it's back to Team C.

Preparation Room, Decontamination Room, Control, Power Room, Infirmary, Pantry...and finally, Rec Room. We get a map of Ward C. Carlos thinks this could be part of Dcom's psychological test, but Junpei figures that because the masked guy called himself Zero, that means he's for real. Akane, of course, is against the idea of voting at all. Of course she is. She's just as soft-hearted as she was during the Second Nonary Game. Though now she comes up with the obvious solution--if we could contact someone on the other two teams, we could assure that no one would have two votes. They try to contact them directly, but it doesn't work, and then Junpei just causally asks that Akane try using the morphogenetic field. So this is where we stand, huh? Just casually throwing that out there in the first few minutes of the game? Well, okay, my play time's already nearing an hour, but that's because I keep pausing to write all this s*** down. Carlos doesn't seem to know what the morphogenetic field is.

There's graffiti on the wall, similar to what happened in VLR. "Let the game end where I treat two." That actually could make sense in context, and I know that re-using gimmicks isn't in character for Uchikoshi, but screw it, I'm throwing that into an anagram machine. ...Damn, I forgot just how long that particular machine takes. Well, no sense waiting around for it. It'll probably continue working in the background. Junpei finds something called the "Force Quit Box", and they talk about the legend of Urashima Taro. Also time travel-related. Oh, choices! We get to ask...ah, that's right, we're Carlos, so we're asking questions to Junpei and Akane. Who is Zero? What is Zero's purpose? What is your relationship? Okay, yeah, anyone who knows me knows exactly what question I'm going to ask first. By the way, remember how in the post-999 Q&A, Uchikoshi said that Junpei spends the rest of his life searching for Akane and never finds her? Yeah, so much for that. 999 was originally meant to be a standalone game, though.

I can't help but snicker, however, at the fact that Carlos just addresses both of them by their full names. Even with all of the pausing, I've barely been at this for an hour and it's just casually spoiling a major surprise from VLR. Of course, given how VLR flopped and this game only was made because the fans demanded it, I guess they really don't expect many people to be coming into this game without having completed the first two, do they? Carlos at least knows some of their history..ah, Sigma told him. Akane says that the two of them joined this experiment separately, but Junpei says it was inevitable, not a coincidence. Carlos, meanwhile, just did it for the money. He's apparently a firefighter. Junpei calls him a "hero of justice", but he says he just has good instincts. Okay, I can't actually save on the choice screen, so I selected "Who is Zero" and then immediately hit save before they could start talking. That's all for tonight.
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Well that anagram generator was worthless. It starts with phrases with fewer words and stopped once it reached a certain number of anagrams, so it's all stuff like "welterweight emanated thereto" and "theeing warmhearted towelette".

Junpei says Carlos should really be asking "who is the second Zero". Carlos surmises that he knows the first one. Junpei is evasive, and mentions that he's had a bracelet like this strapped to his wrist before. He and Akane were trapped somewhere last year. Akane says she doesn't think that one has anything to do with this one. Carlos insists they have to be connected, and Akane begs him to believe her. As for his purpose? To make them play a game. Sigma apparently already let them know that six billion people could die. Akane asks if Carlos has ever heard the term "Reverie Syndrome". Its causes are unknown, but it causes you to stop reacting to a variety of stimuli. Junpei is unsure how this relates to what they were talking about before; Akane says he should already know. Mankind is facing an unprecedented crisis, and those affected are sensing it coming. Carlos has heard of Reverie Syndrome.

And then a small dog called Gab comes in through a vent. They wonder if it goes to the surface, but figure that defeats the purpose of a bomb shelter. It might go to Ward Q. Carlos asks Akane if she can fit through. She doesn't think so. Junpei says someone likes cake too much, and she retorts by suggesting they cut off Junpei's arm so he can fit through. Gab has a collar like rescue dogs, holding medication. It's empty. Carlos writes a note for Gab to take through the vent. Carlos also tossed cheese in there, and Junpei says they should toss in some ketchup and pickles too; maybe when he comes back he'll be a hot dog. I love those two so much.

Five minutes to voting. Gab's not back. Junpei suggests that since they told the others they were voting for D team, they should vote for Q team instead. But...didn't they send that letter to Q team? If anyone's not looped in on the plan, it's D team, which means that C-team changing their vote would be irrelevant; if D team votes the wrong thing, C team is done anyway. Junpei's gone cold. Three minutes to deadline. Decision time. I pick Q-team without hesitation. Zero tells everyone to sleep well. No memory loss drug this time. He suggests that Q-team may actually perish. Team selection screen. Hm, maybe I have to play this out with all three to progress? In which case I should have D vote for C and Q vote for D.
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D team's up next, of course. Their message is "When a curious hate oozes calamity." Phi, of course, immediately suggests it's an anagram, though she doesn't reveal what. They've got a force quit box, too. They try to input a password. No good. They try to look at the underside, but it's beyond heavy; Sigma thinks it may not be made of anything of Earth. Phi makes a crack at Sigma's age. Ah, metahumor.

Prep Room, Decontamination Room, Healing Room, Transporter Room, Manufacturing, Trash Disposal Room, and Locker Room. Transporter Room is the only one that doesn't look like something I recognize from a previous game. Heh, Sigma calls Junpei by his last name and Akane by her first. That seems like a sure sign that it is in fact his 67-year-old consciousness in this body, though there wasn't really much doubt anyway. They talk about the X-Passes, and Phi suggests Sigma "try dying once". He politely, but firmly, declines. Phi does make a decent point, though; given how many Espers are in here, it'd be easy enough to get all nine of them out eventually. Though as far as we know at the moment, there aren't any in group Q. Diana asks who Zero is. They're not sure, but they know that the person must know about the events of last year. Phi suggests that the speech being prerecorded is because Zero is among them. Next, Diana asks if they think help will come. Phi finds it unlikely. Dcom can't contact them because they're simulating an actual Mars mission. Diana thinks Sigma and Phi are like siblings with how in-sync they are. Hm, so this is indeed the Mars Mission...the one that they found transmissions of in 2074. Diana also notes that Sigma has an unusual manner of speaking, and Phi confirms that yes, this is the Sigma from 2074. He, Phi, and Akane infiltrated Dcom to try to prevent the events of the future. But they didn't know what happened inside the facility, so they couldn't prevent the Decision Game from taking place. Diana asks why this had to happen to her and says she never should've listened to Rebecca. They ask about Rebecca, and Diana says Rebecca is the head nurse at the hospital where she works, and that Rebecca suggests she join because Dcom was looking for a nurse. Heh, now I'm almost certain that Sigma based Luna on Diana. Gab arrives again. Sigma suggests that Phi go through there and Phi says it's clearly impossible, claiming to be a D-Cup. Sigma tells her she's full of shit and points out that that's a size larger than the last time she told him. Phi says that it's been 45 years and growing is natural. Aha. This is further down the line, and not only has C-Team written the note, but Q-Team has affirmed that they're on board with the plan. Phi, as usual, is suspicious. Sigma wonders if she thinks Q-Team will betray them, but Phi points out that if tha t was Q-Team's plan, they'd have no reason to send Gab. They'd only need to vote for D-Team. She thinks C-Team will betray them. That they'll actually vote Q-Team. Which, uh, they kind of did. But then she says that the fact Gab showed up means that Q-Team is voting for C-Team, so they have no choice but to vote for Q-Team. I'm already regretting turning on Q-Team as C-Team...Phi's logic is scary, and I can't help but want to follow it, but knowing that D-Team did in fact vote differently than they said they would... Ah, screw it, I'm voting for C-Team. Sigma is angry at Diana for voting for C-Team, and Diana can't explain why she voted the way she did. Zero gives the same spiel as he did last time.
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Finally, it's time to take control of the mysterious Q-Team. I'm predicting based on what little I've seen of them that Mira will be in favor of screwing over D-Team and Eric will be the one pressuring Q to follow C-Team's plan.

Quantum Computer Room, Pod Room, Biolab...I missed the early ones. Eric says there should be another room...Eric's the one distrustful of Q still. Maybe I had them pegged wrong. Back to the Lounge. "Let's inhibit the virus!" Q asks what we'll do about the vote, and Eric says he doesn't know. Q says they have to vote, or else they'll die, and Mira agrees, pointing out that even if neither other team votes for them, their failure would give them two votes against. Mira doesn't believe that this game is real at all. Eric wants Q to take off the helmet, but Q says he can't. Heh, a keypad. That's the only way to get the helmet off. He doesn't know who he is. The game wouldn't be complete without an amnesiac, would it? Q asks about Zero, and Eric gets angry at him, still insisting that Q is the one who knows everything. They conclude that Zero is a psychopath, possibly the "Heart Ripper" that's been in the news. The amnesiac suddenly remembers a headline. March 15, 2026, a woman named Virginia Bailey, age 28, was found in a park in Roseville, her chest ripped open and her heart removed. Again on May 22, of that year, Jeffrey Foret, age 37, found in a trash can in Sacramento. July 29...Eric interrupts and points out that Q is supposedly amnesiac. Next is the question of where we are. Eric gets mad again, pointing out what Zero said, but Q asks where exactly that bomb shelter is. Eric's not sure, but Mira doubts it's far from Dcom, and expands the acronym to Dwelling for the Cohabitation of Mars. The eight of them lived there for five days, along with Gab, who is an old dog. They were testing primarily for psychological data. Mira says she signed up because she thought it sounded like fun, and Eric says he joined up because Mira wanted to. Leading into the final question: what is the relationship between those two. Eric is apparently very tsundere. And now we get the experimentation with the Force Quit Box...which Q is shaking as if it were a simple Christmas present! So that little kid can easily lift something that Sigma couldn't budge. Granted, Sigma has his real arms still, but that's pretty odd. Eric says Q should go through the vent, and he says he can't, but Eric forces him to try. Unsurprisingly, the helmet stops him quickly. Eric is ready to just go for it, but Q realizes the message hasn't made it to D-Team yet. He says he'll get a pen and some cheese...again with the cheese? And they send Gab through a vent in the Prep Room. Mira wonders if Diana will do what the letter says, but she doesn't want to consider the alternative--that it was a trap all along, and they need Diana to do the opposite of what the letter says. Ah, hell, I'm probably going down the best early path. Having everyone do what they said they did would be most likely the path to the good ending, and I know from 999 where I accidentally stumbled upon the Coffin Ending on my first try that going to the best ending right away is usually a bad idea. ...Even though technically, I already got my first ending, because this game is literally set up so that you have a 50% chance of getting an ending as soon as you're first given control. In the end, I was right about which one would suggest voting against the note. Though Mira then points out that regardless of how they voted, if C-Team betrayed them, they need Diana to flip or they're screwed anyway.

...Holy crap, five new fragments for C-Team? 5 for D as well, and 4 for Q. Well, I was planning to go back to C-Team...and let's go with the one on the top. It appears to depict Akane holding a chainsaw, and I'm curious about that.
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Fragment flowchart shows a split after the fourth piece. Right side only goes down 1 slot; left goes down two.

Suspicion, it says. They're in the Pantry now, and Junpei's not with Akane and Carlos. The door is locked...Carlos thinks Junpei might have done it, and that now he's Zero's accomplice. Akane says that's not possible. Carlos asks Akane directly what Junpei is to her. She considers him very special, as she didn't have many friends. We get a truncated version of the rabbit story. But she concedes that the past year, he's been the exact opposite of how he used to be. She wonders if it's because of her somehow. Yeah, that's probably accurate. Carlos says that he hasn't had much luck with romance, but he can tell when someone's in love. Akane asks if that means he doesn't have anyone like that in his life, and he says that the only person that means that much to him is his sister. Fair enough. Akane teases him that he has a sister complex, though. And it seems we finally have our first escape segment.

Fwip, fwip, fwip...ah, right, my stylus went missing a couple of months ago. I assume based on when I last had it that it got eaten by a piece of furniture but I've checked the area multiple times. I go back to do my most thorough search yet, but all I get for my trouble is a face full of dust bunnies and the attention of my yandere cat. I search for something else that can serve as a stylus. I suppose this pen cap will do. Hmm, two screens seem to be showing almost the exact same thing, but not quite. Until I choose something to zoom in on and the top screen stays with the wider view. Machine, powered down, hole looks like a gingerbread man. Boxes have rations, but no interesting text. Locked door to freezer; four-digit passcode. Air duct's too small to crawl through...Ah, a cabinet. Locked of course. A blue doll and a right arm are in there, and the glass has various green lines. On the other side, a bottle and a card, and the lines are pink. Trying to examine further only gets the other contents examined, even though what I want to examine are the lines. ...Oh, wait, we're going to find a way to project more lines onto it, which will make words. Ah, thought I saw something, but I guess it's just the foot of the cabinet because clicking on it took me back to viewing the cabinet. A box of potatoes also has a "round part", and two lines of text:

L-door -->
<-- R-door

A poster with a gelatin recipe. Powder, water, and the mold. Directions in a picture. I think that's going to unlock the machine. ...Oh, hey, we get a back log of past text! Another box, this time with a mannequin's right leg...we can't take it. In the golden timeline, Junpei would've been the one to go through the Number 7 door, not Akane. But we've completely circled around...oh. The locks on the glass doors are literally one input? No, they are not...I try pressing right and then left, repeatedly. After six inputs--Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, Left--it tells me I'd failed. Damn, I was hoping that would be the key! Oh, wait, we do have one item...huh. It fits in the head of the gingerbread man. We can power it on already. ...No we can't, we still need the gelatin man. I go to the left door and hit right six times. No good. I find a sliding door in a cabinet I'd already looked over, but all that's in there is a left mannequin arm handcuffed to the bar. There's also a drawer without a handle in the fridge-machine-thing. I am thoroughly stumped, and have a sneaking suspicion that this game has evolved to the point that even the puzzles themselves can't be solved without accessing the morphogenetic field. It would be in line with the First Nonary Game, after all. I save and head to the flowchart. Heh, maybe I should've picked "Team Select". Well, this does confirm that there are versions where I have to kill off a team early. I jump to another of Team C's fragments.
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This time all three members of the team are together, in the Rec Room. It's already past midnight. Junpei seems jaded. Akane misses the old Junpei, and he replies that she changed first. Ah, Carlos was unable to save his parents, back when he was new at firefighting. He was 18. He managed to save his sister, but not his parents.

We find JAM 100(%) pure, but can't take it. There's also the rules of chess, and a chess board that won't open. The letters of "chess" are written in five circles on the side, but the whole thing is upside-down relative to the default view and the e is mirrored. There are also some circles and arrows...3 appears to be the king, and 1 is the rook. There are also a few stray arrows that allow me to figure out the bishop's position. There's a fireplace, unlit. A bottle of oil on the mantle. 130 (ml). Can't take that, either, though we get a fire hook from a suit of armor. There's a slot machine, but it has no power. It says "Make a Heart!" The Jukebox, JUKE803. Needs a card. Another suit of armor has a chart with the letters of the alphabet on it. While they're all uppercase, I'll be putting only letters in black in uppercase, with those in red being lowercase.

qTwzCfiLorUx
PsVYbEHkNQtW
oRuXAdgJmPSv

Next we get a neon light, advertising BEER. There seems to be a tube missing, though; bottom half of the straight part of the B. The fire hook lets us open a trap door in the floor. On the door itself, 55643 written like a digital clock, with a red X over the 3. In the compartment, a wooden hammer. Next to it, a thing that says "Collect 5 coins!" With 5 holes for the coins. Digital clock with no numbers...a stack of cards on the table. Around the house of cards, there are other cards. All of the kings are ripped in two...Ah, the cards underneath stick to the table. A83 - TQQ9 + 94Q58J =

Uh, let's see...wait, that's a strange order to put them in. Subtracting a 4-digit number from a 3-digit number. Ah, well, the result's still the same. 94Q58J + A83 should equal 94Q74A, - TQQ9 would be 94A745. Three square holes in the side of the table, probably to put dice into. Junpei finds a copper plate of the funyarinpa. We get to the bar, but the only one we can take is the bottle of water. There's also a thing of cigarettes, and we're able to take the matches. We're also able to zoom in on, but not take, SAD MAN 570, a legendary wine that makes wine experts lose their will to live. Hm, I should probably note that the cigarettes were a brand called SUNSET 24, too, since there seems to be a lot of numbers floating around. We successfully pick up a small wooden box...there's a four-letter input on the roulette wheel. We have many clues, but none that fit this puzzle. On the felt, 5, 21, 26, and 28 are circled. The first two are red, the latter two black. Just like the letter chart...I feel like I should be able to start putting these clues together. I've completed my loop, so I go back to the chess board, hammer in hand...and Carlos points out that the mirrored e might actually be a 6, with the s's being 5's and the h a 4. Makes sense; the c could become the 3. If it even was a 3; I noticed that the X'd-out square looked like it was missing the center, just like the upside-down c. But what can I actually do with them?

Oh, hold on. The Red/black pattern for the three columns is exactly the same as the chart's rows! And the most logical anagram for those four letters would be SPIN! We get the roulette wheel itself and also a coin. But what can we do with just one?

We can put the Roulette Wheel in the slot machine. We hit the jackpot and get puzzle pieces. I light the fire with the matches...I have no idea what this is for. The fire hook does nothing, even with the fire lit.
---

Ah, Junpei tosses the wooden box in, and then they put the fire out with the bottle of water and retrieve what came out with the fire hook. It's coin number two, which...is of no help on its own. Ah, the red X on the trap door matches the one on the hammer...I had to investigate those things, I guess, before I could use the hammer on the chess board? We get a round cylinder (that's redundant), and the board is open. I examine the cylinder, and it has three windows for chess pieces. I enter rook, bishop, king, and it opens. Yielding a coin, and also a note that tells us the correct order to put the letters in for that roulette puzzle. Guess I was supposed to do this before the roulette puzzle, huh? But now all I have left are the puzzle pieces, and no idea where to use them. They don't fit in the holes on the card table...examining the card table suggests using the cards to calculate. They're not sure what the ripped kings are about, nor what to do about the Queens and Jacks, and suggests there's a clue around here somewhere.

...Aha.

94Q74A
SADMAN

So A = 4, S = 9, M = 7, N = ace, D = queen. Except that seems odd, because our four-digit number was TQQ9, which ends in DDS. Our only four-letter word with a double letter in the middle is BEER. And A83 most certainly cannot be "JAM".

But BEER had no attached number. Our four-letter word with a number attached was JUKE. The oil had a number attached, but wasn't all-caps.

Ah, but what does it matter?! We have no input device!

A thing I missed in the slot machine. Odds = 35(%). ...JAM also had a % sign!

I was right all along. O = 10. But that means our three-letter word is, in fact, probably not JAM. Unless I completely whiffed on doing the math blind, and just got lucky. ...Well, the 9 = S is obvious regardless of which six-letter word we use. ...Our base word was 94Q58J. That, uh...doesn't fit the pattern for SADMAN or SUNSET. No repeated letters. But if it was SADMAN, the 8 would indeed be an A. A83, the only thing we have to go on is the 8. Maybe it is JAM?

...Bugger, the pieces are for making the heart. Oh man this puzzle's annoying...and it seems you can rotate the pieces after all. ...Finally got it. Coin and card...calendar...

Mother fucker. A83 is JAM, and TQQ9 is ODDS, and and 94Q58J is, indeed, SADMAN. 100 - 35 + 570 = 635. Sticking the card calendar into the jukebox reveals the three dice, which we stick into the table at 6, 3, 5 to get the last coin. Pressing the button gets us our first "You found it!" of the match. The armor seems to be pointing guns at them, and the decision game's rules are explained. Each person must roll one of the three dice, and if all three dice display a 1, they win and can all escape, but if even one person's die shows something else, or if someone refuses to roll, everyone gets gunned down. We get "decision game", but our only decision is to roll the dice. 1, 3, 5. Carlos has us cower behind the bar. Doesn't work. Seems that whatever happened for the other two teams, Phi is the only one of the nine that survived this iteration.
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Q-team's turn now. Bottom right corner. "Pop off", it says. 18:10, same as the pantry...Pod Room. Eric and Q, but no Mira. Eric has anger issues, but he's clearly in love. Still, he pisses me off. Too white knightish; from what I've seen of Mira, she's capable of taking care of herself. Q tells him to stay calm. Q feels the same as Eric, though...since he's got no memories of his own, Mira and Eric and the others are the most important people to him. He understands how he might seem suspicious, but...

Eric apologizes for yelling at Q. Escape time.

Huh. There's a clear difference...or at least, there was. Something glowing in the middle. They seem the same now, though. Seems like maybe a dart board. There's also a locked case with a hammer, and an upside-down painting. Metal gear stuck in the wall...red circles on the floor and ceiling...but nothing I can find that we can grab. ...Heh, I guess the locks on the hammer case aren't actually blocked by anything. Just go into the puzzle and start moving things. It's a damn simple puzzle. Hammer doesn't help with any of the obvious things...ah, there's a note on the floor. Strike in the middle of a red circle. So, hammer all the red circles. Ah, that reveals more locks at the end...There's a picture of a Zero doll that says "Become me". Also a serrated hole...wait, I was right about the gear, I just wasn't clicking in the right place to open it up! ...But it doesn't work. The gear is officially on the screen as "driver tip", so I try combining it with the only other item in my inventory, to no avail. Aha, another cabinet! The puzzles are getting tougher, but still easy. Finally, I get to the last puzzle...ah, I thought it was a simple matter of alternating between plus and minus, but it's based on the color...And now we can rotate the room far more easily. Easy enough to line it up now. Second-to-last block shifting puzzle is kind of tough; last one, not as much. This unlocks the shotgun, and the button makes the pods appear. One opens, and we've got our escape. Mira was in a pod. She does not appear alive. There's an electronic key in her mouth. Marks on her neck, suggesting she was strangled. Q remembers something. An abusive father, and a brother begging the father to stop. Also Q's name is Chris, if this is reliable. Or, no, I've got it wrong maybe? The wrong person had the flashback. That's Eric's flashback; Chris is Eric's brother. The voice sounded so much like Q's, though...At his father's behest, Eric put Chris's body in the lake. I'm almost certain that was Q's voice, though; my current guess was that Chris was either revived or saved somehow and kept in suspended animation, and that Q is in fact Chris. A screen lights up...Junpei seems to be frozen to death. Also, it seems I've been spoiled on the room that stopped me. Akane and her chainsaw seem dead, but Carlos and his fire axe are alive, if bloody. The six X-passes are revealed, as D-team also got wiped out. June, Jump, Virgin, Blue, Red, Milk. Well, those first two are Akane and Junpei, and the last one is Sigma. Phi is probably "Blue", since Red seems more likely to be one of the other two. Guessing that's Mira and Diana is "Virgin". Ah, Eric suspects, incorrectly, that the reason D-team is gone completely is because of the vote at 13:30. Makes sense from his perspective. Also, I'm absolutely certain now that my theory is correct, or at least, they want me to think that. The dialogue parallel was too perfect. And now Eric's shot out the input device for the X-Door. He demands to know who killed Mira. There's a decision...oh, shit, I have to actually type something in in the time? I closed the 3DS to stop it so I could type this...I type in Zero. He says that's true in an overall sort of way...but still says Q did it personally. Back to the pantry.
---

I manage to find the gelatin powder this time. Also iodine solution. Neither is helpful just yet. ...Wrong. The iodine solution reveals that the potatoes have letters on them. DUDLLR. So left door is exactly that, and right door is RLLDUD. A drawer requires rotating the sides of a dodecahedron...oh! The two sets of lines, put together with the doors slid, reads LEFT hand + DoLL =. I combine the mold that came from the dodecadrawer with the water, then the powder. I chill the gelatin and warm the doll. The gelatin man unlocks the drawer, revealing a key. I unlock the handcuffs on the hand in the opaque cabinet, and reveal 529. That one was the left, correct? The one in the glass cabinet looks like the right. Yeah, it is. The key works on those handcuffs, too, and the right arm enters the inventory. Ah, the pale doll has numbers, too. 1234. So the sum is 1763. Which begs the question, what is the right arm for?

...Apparently something, because 1763 is not the passcode. Did I...wait...I didn't add it up wrong, but... unlike the 1234, which are written clearly, the 529 is written with all right angles, like a digital clock. Which means that it still looks exactly like a number if viewed from the opposite angle! Let's try 1859. Yep, that did it. It was 625, not 529. That only opens the cover to the switch, though. We've got a right arm, but it's balled into a fist. Ah, trying it again gives a hint. Warming it up in the hot-cold machine opens the fist, and that authenticates the door. Successful escape! Sort of. It's into the freezer, not the proper exit. There's still a bloody axe...and a chainsaw. Casualty announcement. Ah...D-team has once again perished completely, but Junpei alone is dead from Team C (beheaded as well as frozen) and Q team is wholly alive. The four X-passes issued are Blue, Red, Milk, and Jump. I guess Mira was "virgin" and Diana was "red", then. Carlos points out that the room is locked, so the one who killed Junpei is...

He swings the axe, and Akane seems scared of Carlos...but he swung it at the wooden door, trying to break it down. Hmm, with fewer than six deaths, and with the wholly eradicated team not being the one that they voted for, Carlos isn't actually suspicious that the fully wiped out team was killed at 13:30. Unless they failed to vote. So why did they go at each other in...oh. Akane's going crazy...no, she too is attacking the door. And the chainsaw broke through. They're out of the pantry. Akane's breaking down. Gab's here, too. Ah, Carlos needed the money to save Maria... Reverie Syndrome! His sister has it. A doctor in a flashback compares it to playing a bunch of videos on a computer at once, slowing down the processing speed. Her brain and nervous system seem fine, but... Hold on, slowing down the brain's processing speed? That's Radical-6! Except not. Reverie Syndrome has a variety of thoughts flicker in and out of the mind, like a constant state of dreaming. No complete recoveries yet, but the symptoms have been relieved with the latest technology. Ah, but they have no insurance for this...Ah, here we go. Now Akane suspects Carlos. She attacks him. He dodges, suggests that maybe she's the psycho...he's got the axe. But he doesn't seem like he's ready to kill yet. Surprisingly, Akane runs away. Carlos is having doubts about himself. He's remembering the bit about the anesthetic and the memory loss drug, forgetting that they weren't going to be injected with it again after the voting. The lights go down...oh, Akane is trying to get Carlos at a disadvantage. A brief cut, suggesting a place to jump to in the flowchart. He calms down, thinks rationally, and decides that the most threatening person is the one who killed Junpei, so he should remove that person, even if it ends up being himself. But it can't be. So who killed Junpei? I have to type something in. I wonder what would happen if I typed in something other than a character name? ...Damnit, Funyarinpa doesn't fit.
---

I'm honestly stumped here. The people get moved whenever they've been knocked out. That much, we know. So who's moving them? Whoever it is is probably the one who killed Junpei. Given that Sigma, Phi, and Akane have to specifically infiltrate this, two of them using time travel to do so, I doubt they're the Zero here. Same goes for Junpei. So probably one of the members of Team Q...that's the most likely source for a Zero. Though I suppose it could be Carlos. I do wonder, though, if I directly input the name of a character in another Ward, how will Carlos react?

...Ha. The game says "Not likely to be Q-Team" and doesn't let me go on. Error also comes up when I try "No one". Only one thing left to try...and honestly, of the three members of C-Team, I actually find this the most plausible.

"The dead cannot kill anyone". I applaud you for your creative error messages, but how is suggesting it's a suicide not an option when Carlos said that he had to remove the killer even if it was himself? I''ll bet this is the fork, though. ...Fine, I'll go with the timeline I saw from Q team, even though Mira's not dead so this isn't actually the same timeline. I accuse Akane, as implausible as it seems.

Wait. Blood, a bracelet on the floor, falling off freely...and then Carlos strikes Akane with the axe? Holy shit, that means...Carlos has no bracelet! Nor a left arm! Except he does. Maybe? He's holding that arm, maybe it is partially missing. I use the flowchart to try to get back to that decision. Hah...the flowchart is crazy. And yes, the bit I did of Q-Team's is directly downstream from the choice I just made. I go to the choice and accuse Carlos this time. He realizes she'd never do that to Junpei, and so it could only be Carlos. He warns her not to come any closer, saying he's dangerous, and his body moves against his will. He turns the axe blade upon his own neck and cuts in. Also, I noticed on the flowchart that the ending I got in the Rec Room is called "The 99.537% Reality." Cute, game. Now I want to jump to that all the more. I figure it's rigged to always fail the first time, but always succeed the second.

It does not succeed the second. They wouldn't really put a mandatory 1 in 216 chance in a Visual Novel, would they? Extremely rare events are for RPGs! I have half a mind to flip to a path where a team died at 13:30, but I won't. D-Team, you're up. "Outbreak". Oh god, it's Radical-6. We're in what appears to be the GAULEM Bay. It's actually "Manufacturing"...oh dear, and it's 18:10. We already know from both other paths that D-Team doesn't survive 18:10. We get a screwdriver tip and a stun gun, and three blueprints, two of which say "Cut Charley" and "Cut Betty". There's also a note that says: "From the far left -> 4 right -> 1 left -> 2 left -> 4 right -> 3 left -> Boot up!"

Cut Charley? But Charley has been our faithful companion for over a decade! We've got wire cutters, too. And now we've got a screwdriver head, which we combine with the grip to make a screwdriver. Note two says White Red Blue. Note three says Alex Betty Charley. So Charley is Blue, Alex is White, and Betty is Red. There's some sort of bomb thing, which we'll probably blow up to get out. Huh, and examining these machines now results in talking about the bomb. ...Ah, we stun gun the high volt thingy...Ah, damnit, that means "start with the one on the far left, then do the 5th from the left second". You're killing me, game.

Alex seems friendly enough, but Betty wants to set us up the bomb. And no, that's not me doing a Zero Wing shout-out, it's the game. Charley's kind of rude, but better than Betty.
---

I am as confused as ever. There doesn't seem to be anything we can interact with using any of our tools, including the three robots. We "don't need" the crane "yet"; the floor panel is still impassible, every other machine is "strange", and the three robots are polite, asking us to set up the bomb timer to zero seconds (and calling us stupid for not doing so), and rude; and the colored machines are all acting like they're bombs too, even though I see no red or blue balls in them. And we still can't even pan to the apparent drawer on the front of the hi-volt connector. Heh, finally got to see the bomb timer display. Can't set it, though. I try examining the inventory...no help. I'm thoroughly out of ideas. I'm quite certain I've clicked everything with every item. Ah, well, the advantage of this fragmented storyline is that I can just give up and try another fragment if I ever decide I'm stuck.

Heh. Third time's the charm, they say. I return to the rec room, and after getting 1-3-5 and 2-3-5, I get 1-1-1. Junpei's deliriously happy to be alive, while the other two seem stunned. And we get our first typo. "Let's blow this popcicle stand." Junpei's getting drunk in the lounge. But I've still got a bad feeling about this, because not only did five out of the other six...oh, wait, Akane knows that this didn't happen on the first try. She specifically says what the odds would be if they'd done it three times, though she doesn't get it exactly right...though that close to 0%, the additive version isn't that far off. She's got some weird analogies, like a 100-round rock-paper-scissors tournament. The anthropic principle...the one who lives on does so due to circumstance.

So as I was saying before Akane used her esper powers, not only did five out of six of the others die on this timeline, but the survivor came from the team that Team C didn't vote for. So they could suspect that Team D betrayed Team Q. Sure enough, there goes the announcement. But the X-Passes are all different! Eye, Kill, Fool, Moon, Fate. If I'd been paying attention before, I wouldn't have even needed to guess; there's a board that displays all of the deaths and the X-Passes. Eye is Q, Kill is Mira, Fool is Eric, Moon is Diana, Fate is Sigma. Hmmm...Mira is Kill? Not Eric? Ah, well, Eric didn't actually kill Chris, he just helped cover it up. Anyway, we're back on the team selection screen. I jump to another of D-Team's...this one has a three-way split. There's a pistol...in a lock? "Fire", it says. Trash Disposal Room. 18:06...ah. That's close enough...Phi's already missing. She survives because she's not here. Oh, wait, there she is. Locked in...something? The incinerator. Wait, THE INCINERATOR? Oh motherfucker. You know what, let's call it a night. I'd been drinking, too, before I came back up here; I'm surprised I got as far as I did although I feel like I'm sober now. And admittedly I only solved about half a puzzle room. Everything from after the solving of the dodecahedron (as in, I'd finished the puzzle, but had yet to see my reward, when I was called away.)

Night, all.

Edit: Ah, wait, I just realized I screwed up. 18:10 is the one where D-Team all dies. This game is so damn annoying, because you can't play any section without knowing how a couple of others will end. Maybe. Mira died at 18:10 when I was playing Q-Team, but not C-Team. So if I'd actually finished the Pantry on the first try, I would've been surprised by Mira's death.
---

30 minutes in-game time until Phi gets incinerated. Gas torch, coin at the base of a thermometer, and a slider puzzle, three letters. Phi needs more light to see anything on her side. A three-digit number input for a dust chute. A padlocked box suspended from the ceiling, containing a revolver. A locker contains a toolbox and night vision goggles. At least, that might be what they are? Looking through them, the numbered puzzle has a display next to it with two screws and a screwdriver. Goggles also show the letters "TIC". That opens the shutters, allowing Phi to see. A flathead screwdriver is found in there, and it can be used to unscrew a wall panel. 188 lbs. She also gets the screws from the panel. I find a thermometer, but it can't be taken. I try 188 in the number puzzle. No good. Oh, there's a weighing station...the two screws are 22 grams, and the screwdriver is 133. So 155 is our key. We can use the dust chute to send things to Phi now, so we send the screwed-shut toolbox. It creates a puzzle. The bottom reveals a note: Max out the needle! I send the gas torch over to Phi, and it lets the coin escape from the thermometer on Diana and Sigma's side when Phi uses it on the thermometer on her side. The coin is used to unscrew the grate over a switch on Sigma and Diana's side, which makes a chair come up. Diana sits on it, and nothing happens, so Sigma tries it next and ends up restrained. It drops the box from the ceiling, though. The chain allows Diana to hold onto it while sending it through to Phi, so Phi can unlock it and Diana can get the gun. The gun barrel fits into the lock for "stop", and this ends the escape sequence...but upon turning, the gun automatically flips up so that it's now pointed at Sigma! Zero starts talking about the preparations being complete and a story about the past. A woman died 17 years ago, an innocent man was sentenced to death, and his wife took her own life; a taxi driver and his passenger, a surgeon, were killed in an accident, and this led to a child awaiting a critical operation perishing as well. Why did these six die? Because of a snail. A single solitary snail took the lives of these six people...no, not just six, but six billion. Six billion people will lose their lives as a result of that one snail. Isn't life unfair? And now he explains the rules. A revolver is set up beside the chair. It contains six rounds. Three are live and three are blank. The sound of the revolver's discharge, be it live or blank, will open the door to the incinerator. Three minutes left until the incinerator fires...

Sigma tells Diana to pull the trigger. If she doesn't, he has a 100% chance of survival, but Phi's is 0%, whereas if she does, Phi definitely survives and he still has a 50% chance of survival. Phi asks he consider everyone else's feelings. What if it is live? Then Diana blew Sigma's head off with her own hands. Diana comes to the logical conclusion. I get a decision game and choose to pull the trigger. Or did I? I thought I did, but it plays out as though I didn't pull the trigger. Also, this music is fire, no pun intended. The doors open now that the incineration is done. Flashback to two days ago...Phi's medallion. The one that played such a big role in her ending of VLR, specifically the second AB game. She talks about her mother dying in childbirth, and no leads on who her father is. Also a little bit of ship tease. Geez, with this music, I feel like I'm back to playing CLANNAD!

Gab's with them as they hear the results. Phi and the whole of Q-Team. Future, Eye, Kill, Fool. Same ones for Q-team as in the Pantry escape. Sigma figures C-Team had voted for Q-Team...wait, isn't this a timeline where D-team voted for C-team? You're screwing up, Sigma! The mind wipe will come again. I redo the last decision and choose to shoot. As I expect, first time making this decision, it's a live round. Phi is pissed. She says she doesn't matter at all. Diana then puts the gun to her own head and fires again. Ah, this is the version we saw where only Phi lives.
---

Going to note the beauty that the one that says "Edit:" ended up having to be edited here, too.

Hm, the other one's not a game over, but that was. Anyway, there were three branches to that fragment, so I have to shoot again and get a blank. I think the music's different this time? Yeah, definitely is. A blank. Sigma's ears hurt from having a gun discharge right next to his head, but he's otherwise fine. Phi's still angry at them, or rather, at Diana. Sigma thinks Phi's being unreasonable and should be thanking Diana. Again, Q-Team is dead. They still think it was the result of the vote at 13:30. Diana's seeing something...glowing red collars around their necks? And now everyone's poisoned or something. Gab comes in. Akane sent an antidote. Phi is suspicious... Sigma says they can trust Akane, but Phi thinks Carlos could've forced her to write it. She correctly surmises that C-team voted for Q-team...well, okay, yeah, the very fact that both C-team and D-team are alive means that C-team did vote for Q-team, because D-team didn't. Except...by the rules of the game, Q-team might have been penalized for not voting, in which case Phi's conclusion is wrong. Sigma points out that they have nothing to lose; they're already dying.

I choose to take the antidote. Phi's confused. She figures C-Team has fractured, because she's still convinced that Carlos wanted everyone dead and Akane sending the antidote represents a betrayal of Carlos. Phi reveals that she's actually a redhead and has been dyeing her hair. It's...kind of obvious, actually, especially with Diana on her team. They have the same color eyebrows. Zero says it's good they're okay, and they should rejoice as they have a dark future ahead of them. Again, they'll be made to forget the last 90 minutes.

Q-Team's up...a 4-way split? The opening graphic has Q with some sort of bladed weapon. 18:10. Eric's searching other rooms...Mira says they've searched all of them, but Q points out that there was one they couldn't get into. Eric cries out. He found a secret door. Library. Q has a flashback when asked if he likes to read. Still embers in the fireplace...Zero was here recently, Mira thinks. So it's Zero's Study...We can go upstairs and downstairs. There's a chair with a keyboard, but no power; four small figurines. There's a note about the meaning of the dolls' poses. Confirm/deny. There's a "confirm" over a door up here--the moon safe. Four-letter key needed for a cylinder. More safes we can't open...and a poster with odd caricatures of the cast. Carlos and to a lesser extent Mira and Phi look pretty normal (though the latter has her newly revealed real hair color), but of note is that the one that can only correspond to Q looks female. Oh, no, it's just a matryoshka doll. Speaking of which, I just realized that Junpei's is a voodoo doll. Akane's is a moe catgirl. I wish Sigma were here to comment on it, nya. Another safe, with a deny doll. But that seems to be all we have. Oh, the desk drawer has the human mark key! In the human safe is part D, the star key, a handgun, and the bird man card. HFGY. I try it on the bird man cylinder and it doesn't open. I get a hint that maybe the four figures on the table are related. I suddenly remember that the confirm/deny switches NIL to EXIST, which is exactly the right set of lengths for the two safes. The EXIST safe has Part F and a lever that powers up the chair. The NIL safe has Part E, a crossbow, and the Sun Card, which has NIL below a target. I combine parts E and F to make part EF, but can't combine that with part D. Five spaces for the keyboard input; letters and numbers available. The star safe has part C, which I combine with part D to make Part CD, and the moon card, which also says NIL. Oh, Star key gave the hint to moon safe, which gave hint to sun safe. I did them out of order. Plus another note. S-02-16. That's for the chair. It gets another note on the Polovtsian dolls. 3 down for grass dance, 5 for sand, 7 for wind. So... MIND.
---

Part B appears, along with a note that says Bullet for C-team, Arrow for Q-team, Acid for D-Team. The last is crossed out. So fire the crossbow at the members of Q-team and the handgun at the members of C-team. This reveals a grenade launcher behind Q's portrait. This is fired from the second floor to break open the cracked safe. Three dolls are in there, along with part A. This gets combined for Part AB, then Part ABCD and finally the combined key. The note says J-05-03. The dolls say this means Q-12-10. That merely retrieves the blueprint for the combined key, though. All that's inside is a note that says kill one. We then see Junpei's frozen head and Carlos taking the axe to himself. And D-team's all gone, as expected. Fight, Jump, Blue, Red, Milk. So Carlos is Fight. And there are three weapons...everyone's pointing a weapon at someone else. Standoff. I see why there are so many branches. Who will you kill?

Eric is a jackass and I don't like him. Let's kill him first. Q turns from Mira to Eric and fires the crossbow. Then Mira finishes him off with the gun. If it's for Mira's sake, Eric's okay with dying. She's surprised that his last words were the same as "her first's". I think she's a professional killer! She doesn't understand how feelings work. She doesn't understand why facial expressions change. Okay, not a professional killer. Just a psychopath. She killed a random woman because she wanted to know what a "heart" was. And she received forgiveness, as long as she never did anything like that again. And she found the heart. And she received a warm sensation, and realized that that was when to smile, and she wanted to reach out and touch as many hearts as possible. And she did, and got better at it, but she never could find that comforting warmth until she met Eric. She could tell as soon as she met him that he was worthless, but for some reason, she still took interest in him. She's absolutely crazy. I'm thinking her first victim actually was her mother. Eric's X-pass this time is "POOR". Q seems to have figured out the meaning of the "Let's Inhibit the Virus" anagram. The truth is invisible. And...we're allowed to enter the X-Passes! ...Roll credits. I had a feeling, when I heard that much of Mira's backstory...I'll bet this is the Mira Ending. Well, it just says Q-End: 1. A picture of a crossbow appears on the endings list. Might as well finish off this branch, though I didn't plan to initially. Mira's turn, after that last display. Q fires at Mira, but Eric intercepts the crossbow bolt...and Mira says that that's bad; if you do it there, his heart will be gone. Mira's not happy. Q gets shot. He gets announced as deceased before giving his last words. Q's turn. I press "Q", and it says "Please input Q's name". I try "Chris" and get an error message. Seems I can't finish this branch until I learn something else...but there are four branches. I try "Zero", and it says "Do not know identity". Hm, makes me wonder...is this a very important fragment? It already got me one ending, and it seems that the remaining two branches are probably both blocked off at the moment. Ah, well...time to jump back to a 13:30. I go back to D-team and select Q-Team. Sure enough, Q-team has the collars on. They're in the Pod Room. They receive the news that they received two votes. Mors certa, hora incerta. And kaboom. Your head asplode. Might as well finish out the other two. I jump into C's vote to flip it to D. They're collared in the Healing Room. Phi suggests that she and Sigma jump. I finish the flips by switching Q's vote. I'll take care of C-Team's execution some other time, I guess.

Hmm...there's another option on the Pod Room segment? I input Eric's name. He still shoots Q. C'est la mort.
---

...Damnit, the last set of updates wasn't caught in the cached version. Ah, well, there was a minor blind spot in the 999 playthrough, too. I remember finding out that Carlos was an esper, getting angry about the manufacturing room being a pixel hunt and otherwise a fairly short escape sequence, and freaking out because an entire fragment both lacked any sort of escape sequence and had the "obvious wrong choice" in fact be major progression, to the point that I had to reload an earlier save in order to avoid getting railroaded into a new fragment when I still had so many others to check out.
---

Okay bump again.
---

Change of plans. Looks like I have a bit of time tonight after all.

As I suggested at the end of my last post, I will now be pushing the big yellow button. It almost feels like Diana realizes that her actions are being controlled by the player instead of herself. Wait...I just got a strange idea. What if this is actually the birth of Radical-6?

Well, even though we're in a D-team fragment, we pan in on C-Team. Trapped in the decontamination room. Q-Team is, also, and Q feels he's been trapped in there before. All three members of C-Team sense the importance of the button. Q thinks they've forgotten about it via memory loss.

Then the showers come on. For a moment I actually thought Zero had lied about what the buttons did.

After midnight. 2029. Casualty announcement. SHIFT, SIX, RING, AGE, HEART, LOVE. Hmm...Six being Akane is obvious, and I guess I understand why Mira is Heart. But the other four bring up some mysteries. (Shift=Carlos; Ring=Junpei; Age=Q; Love=Eric)

Phi confirms that Diana didn't actively choose to hit the button. She said it was as if someone had taken control of her body. Phi thinks it's alien hand syndrome. She explains it, how it's caused by a faulty connection between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Then she turns back into the smart-aleck we all know and love, claiming to have "alien mouth syndrome". Sigma wants to believe that the six names are still alive. Diana's certain they aren't. Time to input the X-Passes. Second time I've gotten to do this.

Diana refuses to leave. She runs back into the shelter!

"Wonderful acting. It's an excellent strategy! Your actions in the Decontamination Room--I'm surprised you thought of it so fast. At that moment, all you wanted was to get out quickly. To make that a reality, it just happened that the fastest way was to touch a yellow button and kill the other six participants. However, pressing the button just like that would make you a murderer. A bad person. And even if you did escape after, in a court of law, what you did would be considered bad by judge and jury. So you thought, how could I make this not as bad for me... What you came up with was oh so simple. You simply needed multiple personalities." Zero, you bastard! He then accuses Diana of refusing to believe because by doing something unbeneficial to herself, she makes the "multiple personalities" lie more believable. And Phi will bring a rescue team back, so nothing lost. And he closes by saying "Let us meet again somewhere. Stabat mater dolorosa. I will be awaiting that moment..." And then it's a game over. Well, full openness again. Might as well go back to the 13:30 votes to pick up the last execution. Oh, hey, more Latin! Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.
---

Safety bump
---

And again
---

Well, C-Team has the most unfinished threads, so it's up to them...wait, is that the decontamination room again?

And for some reason, it opens on them seeing their deaths from the execution. Or Carlos seeing them, anyway. Akane is chewing Junpei out about urging Carlos to vote for Q-Team, and Junpei says that Akane's one to talk. Carlos wants to know about both of them. They were friends, and they were both trapped together, so why the animosity? And Junpei says that's exactly why. He joined a detective firm after Akane disappeared, and had nothing but dirty cases. He's a mess. He'd fall asleep in the bathtub with the shower running so he could get the scent of blood off of him. You know, I think I liked it better when 999 was a standalone game and Junpei spent the rest of his life trying to find Akane again. This is disturbing, especially since even in VLR, Junpei's still pining over her. Junpei asks about Santa, then corrects himself and calls him Aoi. And then we get an update on the rest of the 999 cast. Ace is still in jail, as far as we know. Lotus is doing fine, raising her kids. He found this out from Seven, who he worked with once, destroying Free the Soul's headquarters. Akane's shocked at this. Akane brings up again that Free the Soul was behind the First Nonary Game. Er, well, I keep calling it that, but there were other Nonary Games before the one that happened in 2018 (wait, holy crap, I just realized that we're past the date that the flashback parts of 999 took place); Ace won the last of them and convinced the rich dudes to invest in him. Carlos asks if this Zero the Second has anything to do with Free the Soul. Junpei asks Akane, and she reiterates that she's not connected to this and has no idea why this person is calling themselves Zero. I love how this game keeps dancing around outright stating that Akane was the first Zero even though it seems to be the root of Junpei's sudden animosity towards Akane. Junpei asks why she joined Dcom and tries to call bullshit on Akane's claim, and Carlos stops him, saying that it looks to him like Akane's the victim. So, yeah, obviously it's still not clear to him. Akane says she's here to change the future and gives the exposition about the distant future that Free the Soul created. Carlos is confused once Junpei mentions the morphogenetic field. Then Zero interrupts with voting results and creates the decision game. Junpei's the one who goes for the button; Akane stops him. Man, his mouth is out of sync with his lines. Carlos's sister's name is Maria, because of course it is. Junpei suddenly becomes compassionate, and...Carlos has a similar reaction to Diana. That it wasn't him. Man, this part will be fun with Q-Team...but first, C-Team's denouement. Q-Team's reactions are the same as with D-Team, and D-Team has a bad feeling about this.

SELF...RIP...LAKE...BIRD...TWIN...OLD.

Okay, that's...even before they show them, OLD has to be Sigma, and BIRD Diana. So Phi's is "TWIN"? Strange... SELF is Q, RIP is Mira, and LAKE is Eric. Carlos is still freaking out about being a murder. Akane refers to Leucochloridium and Spinochordodes tellinii. Parasites that control creatures larger than themselves. The former are snail parasites; the latter control praying mantises and grasshoppers. What, no Cordyceps sinensis? Ah, but there is one, Toxoplasma gondii...ah, yes, I've heard of that. The one that not only makes rats fail to fear cats, but actually causes them to be drawn to the scent of cat urine. And it can infect humans, too, changing their personalities...and also slowing their reactions. WAIT SHIT THIS SOUNDS LIKE AN ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF RADICAL-6. Just like Diana, Carlos refuses to leave. He cites a promise he made in another history to save them. And he says to hold on; he'll go save them now.
---

Okay, just archived all of the posts so far on the wiki. Including the hyperlinks that I can't do when posting here. Don't worry, it's just an obscure reference to a not-obscure game.

Just search "Tsunami" if you're looking for the whole archive (which includes all of the 2013-2014 stuff); you'll find it right away. I have fun reminiscing about it sometimes, and apparently even I forgot some of the references I made.
---

...And boy, did my "reminiscences" help!

"Luna was based on the woman from the Mars mission test site whose voice is heard on the recording in Tenmyouji's path."

"Tenmyouji says in his ending that he knows who Zero Sr. is now, which makes perfect sense because he would've recognized the man in the hologram as Sigma. But he also realized that he met Sigma 45 years ago at the test site.

Sigma's run of bad luck in December 2028 that led to him getting captured was engineered by Akane and the Crash Keys. The "DM" in Luna's product model number stands for "Diana Model", and he says to stay tuned for the next installment to find out what that means but it seems to already make sense to me--Diana is the Roman Goddess equivalent to the Greek Artemis, goddess of the hunt but often conflated to also be goddess of the moon. The goddess who actually held that role was called Selene in Greek mythology, and in Roman mythology, Luna. Seems pretty clear to me."

So...yeah, some things outright changed, but I like seeing the connections between the post-VLR Uchikoshi interview and what we've already learned so far from ZTD. Also, Diana was specifically the one on the recording...so it seems that the timeline that leads to VLR will be one that has D-Team as the survivors. Which kind of makes sense with the bit about Sigma and Phi being the important ones for saving everyone; that Akane couldn't do it herself. Because she dies again in that timeline...wait...no, she and Junpei are clearly still alive in VLR...Goddamnit, Akane, did you set up another time loop where you save your past self's life?

And just a reminder: This is not me violating the "blind" aspect of these playthroughs. This is entirely information from before Zero Time Dilemma was even a thing.
---

I go to Team Q's version of the Decontamination Room, but it immediately pisses me off. Eric's treatment of Q is annoying. Eric has trouble calculating numbers, and he's from Nebraska. He reminisces about meeting Mira at his job at the ice cream shop. Though at least Mira makes the segments bearable. "Me, an angel? You've got to be kidding." Q notes that Eric's like a different person when he's talking about Mira. Eric even apologizes for being so scary to Q. Then they start to speculate on the purpose of what's going on. Q suggests that it's all part of the experiment; investigating the effect a closed space has on emotions. Eric wonders why they chose ordinary people instead of researchers and military professionals, and Q suggests that maybe they're planning on sending those types of people to Mars in the future--a colonization. Mira then brings up the weird fact that in transporting live koi from Brazil to Japan, the koi often die if they're on their own, but are more likely to live if there's a piranha in the tank, because it activates their self-preservation instincts. So that's what's going on here. Injecting emergency. Eric's the one that wants to press the button; Q tries to stop him. Mira knocks him out and says she'll leave the decision to Q. Just as with C Team, I choose to abstain from pushing it first, then go back to push it. Q seems panicked; Mira seems amused. Eric blames Q for killing them and says he was against pushing it from the start; Q calls bullshit. Eric's daddy issues start acting up again...it's clear that he's a deeply disturbed and traumatized individual...ah, here we go. "Chris didn't do anything wrong... I was the one who... Please... Forgive him, Dad... Cold. It's cold... the water was so... so cold..."

This time, D-team is the one that thinks they've been there before.

DREAM... KEY... QUARK... MOM... DEAR... ARM. Heh, fun. Eric passes out, and as usual, Mira's calm. Eric's back. Q wonders if maybe every time they wake up, they have to go through the same scenario over and over again. Eric and Mira want to leave, but Q reminds them about Gab. But now Gab's been chained up...huh. That wasn't a thing in the other two versions of this route. Maybe Zero releases Gab if Q-Team dies? Mira says Q's suggestion is like the Sleeping Beauty problem. Eric doesn't know what that is, but Q knows it's a famous paradox. The experiment begins on a Sunday. the subject is put to sleep, and a coin is flipped. If it's heads, the subject is woken up on Monday, asked a question, and put to sleep again, and that's all. If it's tails, the same thing happens, but then their memories of Monday are erased and they're woken up again on Tuesday and asked the same question. The question is "what is the probability it was heads?" The paradox is that even though the probability it was heads is obviously 50%, there are three possible situations. "The coin was heads, and it is Monday"; "The coin was tails, and it is Monday"; "The coin was tails, and it is Tuesday". Eric's not convinced. I'm actually with Eric on this one; the probability is 50%. Mira read a book on it once. "Wouldn't waking up without your memories be just like being reborn?" It's called metempsychosis. How important are memories for making you who you are? And then they leave, finding themselves unable to break Gab out of his chain. Just like Carlos and Diana, Q refuses to leave, but this time, it's because he doesn't want to leave Gab behind. There does seem to be an additional fragment open on each route now.

C-Team: 3 unlocked fragments untouched, 3 locked fragments
Q-Team: 2 unlocked fragments untouched, 3 locked fragments
D-Team: 3 unlocked fragments untouched, 2 locked fragments
---

I just played this myself, so I can share what I was thinking going through this game.

The X-Passes, as you've figured out, relate to the character. Some of them, like QUARK, OLD, SIX, and ARM, are fairly obvious, but others have hidden meanings. In fact, X-Passes were how I figured out crucial details, or early spoiler information if you call it that, about (nothing specific, spoiling just to be safe) ____Mira, Diana, and Q___.

Although you probably know this after VLR, if you see a lock on a fragment flowchart, you're plot-locked from something in another fragment. If you don't, you can theoretically get to it immediately, though it might require guessing or brute-forcing. I heavily recommend not trying to brute-force any "enter a name/password" Decision Game segments, as it ruins the flow of the game and it spoiled me early on something major. If you have an answer, you'll know it.
---

Don't worry, I never want to brute force passwords. Though you're right about the X-Passes sometimes being spoilery; I already got one question/answer from Mira's "Heart".

Besides, the one time I tried to act on a hunch, it turned out to be wrong. Though I'm still not convinced that Eric's backstory isn't somehow related to Q. Can't prove anything though.
---

Probably going to be busy tomorrow so I'll bump this now.
---

As my analysis suggests, I'm going with C-Team. The fragment I land on is titled "Monty Hall". Oh, I know that one! In this one, the probability really is 2 in 3. I'll explain it for those who don't know. It's named after the host of the old game show "Let's Make A Deal". A contestant chooses one of three doors. Two of the doors have booby prizes behind them and one has a desirable prize. One of the doors that they didn't pick is then opened to reveal a booby prize, and the contestant is offered the choice to change their choice to the other unopened door. It seems, to the untrained contestant, that their chances of getting the prize if they switch are 50-50, but they aren't. It's 2 in 3 that they should switch.

See, there are six possible courses of events.

A: Door 1 is chosen, and Door 2 is opened.
B: Door 1 is chosen, and Door 3 is opened.
C: Door 2 is chosen, and Door 1 is opened.
D: Door 2 is chosen, and Door 3 is opened.
E: Door 3 is chosen, and Door 1 is opened.
F: Door 3 is chosen, and Door 2 is opened.

Except two of these will never happen. If, say, Door 2 has the desirable prize, A and F will not happen. You may think to yourself that that leaves 4 options, two where switching is right and two where it's wrong--but that would create the paradoxical outcome that the contestant had a 50% chance of choosing correctly in the first place! To illustrate it better, map each outcome to a side of a 6-sided die, and add the word "then" to the conditions. The contestant's choice is made based on the result of the die toss, and then the producers' choice of which door to open is based on it as well--except they're not allowed to reveal if the roll was invalid, so they'll covertly change it to a roll that doesn't invalidate the player's choice. Essentially, in the example above, it's a 6-sided die with the numbers 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5.

It of course becomes easier to see the more doors you add. If you had 100 doors to begin with, your choice is made, and 98 booby prizes are revealed, it becomes easy to see that there's a 99% chance that switching is the correct move and only a 1% chance that sticking with your original choice is correct. But for whatever reason, people don't inherently see that when it's just 3 doors. I think it's probably because there's only one door opened. As few as 4 doors would probably make people more likely to switch. And it does inherently rely on opening all but two doors. If, say, there were 4 doors originally and only one door is opened, the odds of winning are still better if you switch than if you don't, but the odds will never completely be in your favor. There's a 25% chance that switching is the wrong move, a 37.5% chance that you switch to the right door, and a 37.5% chance that you switch from one wrong door to another wrong door.

But wow, I've filled up most of a post without any gameplay. I kind of geek out at math, especially probabilities. We're in the Control Room, where transmissions to the outside world would theoretically happen if they could, as well as managing air and water. They're locked in, of course. Oh, and it's also the security room. Carlos is surprised there are security cameras, and Akane says that it's 2028; she'd be surprised if there weren't cameras everywhere. Junpei says that the ones he used for work were the size of a woman's nipple, then backpedals and says that he guesses not uniformly, because nipple sizes differ. Why do I feel like Clover is involved in this somehow? There's also a carbon dioxide extinguisher in there; Akane notes that Carlos's eyes immediately going to that is telling that he's a firefighter. Junpei feels threatened by Akane praising Carlos, and she apologizes to Carlos for Junpei's behavior, saying that when he was younger, he used to rush to the rescue a lot. Junpei says he's done playing the action hero. I don't like jaded Junpei.
---

00:10. Carlos says it's the worst way to start the new year. First time he hasn't been able to say Happy New Year to Maria. Time to Seek A Way Out.

Buttons, switches we can turn... don't want to mess around with those yet. Radiation meter with 12 large buttons. Blue canister has a compass on it...so does the pink one. Lockers that won't unlock, the poster we saw in the cutscene...sunglasses behind the poster. Another locked floor door, and a red canister with yet another compass to fiddle with. And a green one. Card behind a panel...9, 2, 13. Another card on a device that looks like the poster; the card looks like the first card, but has numbers in different boxes. 3, 10, and 7. There are 14 boxes overall.

Okay, poster has 41253 on the left and 31542 in Roman Numerals on the right. I try connecting the wires as such, with no luck. Akane says the shock mark might be a hint...it's in the upper right in both places. That puts it left of the poster's III, and up-and-left from the panel's V. Maybe I should instead connect the like numbers from the poster's positions? Which...is also connecting like numbers on the board itself, but different ones. 1 on the poster corresponds to 2 on the panel, 2 to 4, 3 to 5, 4 to 3, and 5 to 1. Of course that isn't it, but it's good information. There's a console we can zoom in on, but it does nothing. I examine the sunglasses in our inventory and get a Matrix reference. Cylinders on the monitor, probably from another room. Lines on a shutter...oh, this is a clue to the puzzle I said I didn't want to fiddle around with! ...Oh. I had to hit the "check" button. Small battery parts and Card 3. We can fiddle with the 12-button machine, but I don't have a hint for it yet. Oh, hey, the cylinders on the monitor are also 2 rows of 6, just like the buttons. Can't tell a clue there yet, though. Looks like the voltage puzzle is our best bet. I try using the counterparts I came up with, in both directions, and have no luck.

Oh goddamnit. Examining the "small battery parts" reveals a terminal that "looks like an earpiece". I have to combine the two items in my inventory. And that does...what? Oh, examining them in inventory now reveals three viewing modes. I don't understand what Mode B does...but Mode A has the electricity hint! 1-3, 2-5, 3-1, 4-2, 5-4. Except...still no. Okay, let's apply those positions to the poster.

1 --> II
2 --> III
3 --> IV
4 --> V
5 --> I

Now back to the plugs...yes, that finally worked! Door on top-left monitor opens, reveals hint for compass puzzle. Blue one stays on North, Pink is West, Green is East, Red is Southeast. It does not appear to do much...oh, checking the monitor reveals pink is actually SW. Yeah, I see the S now. A black stand appears in the center of the room, and the light goes out in the cylinder room, revealing that all but 2, 5, 7, and 10 are illuminated. A locker opens, revealing an ear speaker and Card 4. I combine the speaker with the sunglasses to get HUD sunglasses. I try mode C and get a password input. Maybe B will make sense now?

Vree, Znur, Whir, Znur. That didn't really help. The black stand isn't doing anything. Oh, we can control the crane in Manufacturing. Following the audio cues lets us hit a button, lighting up the small monitors. BETESTEDBYFIRE. "Be tested by fire"? Oh, right, the password for C. Green north, red northeast, blue west, pink south, black northwest. The panel will rise up, and we'll plug the cable into it. And we do that, setting it on fire and activating the extinguisher. Which ends the escape section, except now we're in a room filling up with carbon dioxide. Normally, there's only 0.04% carbon dioxide in the air; IDLH level kicks in at around 5%, Carlos says. The highest level you can safely inhale. At around 7%, you lose consciousness, and... the PA interrupts Carlos's explanation.
---

It's time for a decision game! 10 lockers are beside the door... Within one is an oxygen mask. Which one will we open? Ah, here's our Monty Hall. But we have to just choose one...let's try 7. Sure enough, we're going to get the Monty Hall. If we chose correctly, 8 of the 9 wrong ones will randomly open. If we chose wrong, the other eight wrong ones will open. 4 is the only other one that stays closed. The exit door won't unlock for 20 minutes. Junpei shows his lack of understanding of the Monty Hall problem, which Akane referenced by name upon being told of the rules. Akane tries to explain, but passes out again, just like with the poison.

Now, having spent the better part of a post explaining why switching is inherently a better option, and explaining that the more doors there are, the chances that switching is a better option increase...I stick with 7. One, because I know these games like to screw with the odds, and I suspect no matter which option I take, I'll have to reload to get the correct one. Two, because the door that stayed closed was Door 4, and since this game was made in Japan, that signifies Death. The question is, since this series of games works on Schrodinger's Cat principles...what are the actual odds that I chose correctly? Are they 10%? 50%? 0%?

...It's not in 7, of course. But what will happen if I choose 4 next time?

It cuts to Sigma and Diana opening the X-Door, with all seven other names listed as deceased. But Sigma tries to convince Diana that they're all alive, so this can't follow the version where Phi is incinerated. There was one other that opened past midnight...but that was the rec room, which was another C-team fragment! So this follows something I don't know yet... I naturally jump right back to Monty Hall. To see if switching is always correct, I take a different initial choice to both 4 and 7. Namely, q--er, 9. Sure enough, 10 is the other one that stays closed. So at the very least, the identity of the correct door doesn't stay constant. Now, for the question. Does the game randomly pick the correct one each time, and the odds that switching is the correct option are the expected 90%? Or does the game only choose where the mask is after you've made your second choice? I chose red, and had to go back and choose blue to get the game started properly. Another person in the topic initially chose blue, and had to go back to choose red. No matter which choice you make, the same thing happens.

Except here, there's a third option. What if the choice of correct one is made after your first choice? Then the odds would actually be 50%. I find that unlikely, though.

Sure enough, when I switch to 10, it's empty. 9 was correct here. I believe it's likely that this time, no matter which choice I make, it'll be correct. Just like the dice, where it's a 1 in 216 chance, but the game always rigs it to happen on the third try. Or at least, I assume it's always the third try. I did the math to figure out how many tries you'd have to do to "expect" to get it, assuming that it would in fact be lower than 128 (basing it on the "birthday problem", wherein it only takes a mere 25 people to be in a randomly selected group for the odds that two of them share a birthday to exceed 50%), but honestly that's foolish, because even an infinite number of tries doesn't guarantee it. Care to guess how many times it actually is?

It's 150. Exactly 150, which is a bizarrely round number, though only by the arbitrary fact that our numbering system favors 2's and 5's above all other prime factors (though 150 still has a 3 in it as well). To 4 digits,
215/216 to the 149th is .5009, and to the 150th it's .4985. So it would take 150 trials for "at least one success" to be more likely than "all failures".
---

Naturally, to keep the game dishonest, I must now rule out 4, 7, 9, and 10 when making my initial choice on the third try. I select 6. 9 stays closed. Perfect, so now I understand how it works. At least, I think I do. I'm going to open up that second save file I made when I first got locked into the decontamination room segment to test something. But first, the results of finding the mask. Just as the announcement suggested, there's only one mask. Junpei suggests rotating the mask between the three of them, but Carlos says there's only enough oxygen for one person to last the 20 minutes. I expect to have to make another decision as to save, but nope, it's automatic that Carlos agrees with Junpei's decision to save Akane. Junpei reminisces about a festival that he and Akane went to as kids. She bought two weird character masks and tried to get Junpei to wear one. She was wearing a yukata that was too big for her, which had belonged to her mother before she died. Akane urges Junpei to put the mask on... Akane alone survives this. Sigma and Diana are the only two other survivors. It's still counted as a Game Over. Now to test my thesis... it's going to be annoying because I can't speed through cutscenes that I've already seen in my main save file. I wait out the executions of C and Q teams in the decontamination room...right, I also need to enter the X-Passes to complete this. Way too long. Why must I be so curious? Hopefully I can at least skip the puzzles in the control room that merely unlocked hints to other puzzles. The only ones that should be necessary are the compass puzzles. Sure enough, the solutions don't change, and I skip everything else. 999 wasn't so good about allowing that, because the story would randomly cut in during the puzzles. Though usually the triggers were on pickups of required items. I guess VLR might've had some oddly tacked-on exposition if you skipped the puzzle, too, but it felt less frequent.

...Urgh. I had a feeling when I saw the "all branches completed" message after the contamination room segment even though this save file hadn't actually done both sides. See, here's what I wanted to test. The first time, I chose not to switch from 7 to 4, and 4 was correct. The second, I chose to switch from 9 to 10, and 9 was correct. The third, I chose 6 initially and was again given 9 as the option to switch to, which proved correct. So here's the question: What if I had chosen to switch to 4 in the first place? I assume, of course, that 7 would've been correct in that iteration. But when I chose 9 the next time, would it still be 10 that I'd have the option to switch to? Or would it be 7? Do I automatically have to get it wrong both ways, or is the eventual correct one always set to the first number that you choose to switch away from? It's much like the AB games in VLR, specifically the second one on Phi's path. Whichever one you pick, you're wrong. I loaded a fresh save file, hoping to ascertain the answer...but when I again chose 7, the door that stayed closed wasn't 4. It was 9. Which, okay, I think means my theory was probably correct, but can't quite ascertain it because now it's going to be 9 across all save files on this game card. Except the all complete message didn't come up again, so maybe the message before was a red herring based off the fact that the executions in the decontamination are technically in separate fragments from the associated decisions? At any rate, I just spent four posts on a single fragment in which the actual escape portion was entirely contained within one of them. Quality content here, amirite?
---

Still, having the results of Q-team's time in the decontamination room fresh on the page when I started Monty Hall, I was inherently inclined to compare the two. These games do that a lot, frame the same theme differently in different parts of the game. 999 did that especially often, with the rats and the detergent and the funyarinpa and all of that. The thing is, the Monty Hall problem and the Sleeping Beauty problem are exact opposites. Or rather, the solutions are; the reasons are the same. In both cases... the initial probability doesn't change. There was always a 1 in 3 chance, or in this case, a 1 in 10 chance, that your initial choice was correct, and so with all but one wrong choice revealed to be wrong, the odds favor switching to the other unknown. And there was always a 50% chance that the coin landed on heads, so the fact that there are three possible situations changes nothing. There are, after all, two variables. Was it heads or was it tails? Is it Monday, or is it Tuesday? Since the experiment terminates on Monday if it's heads, the combination of Tuesday/heads is automatically ruled out. Leaving, it would seem, twice as many options with tails as with heads... but by the same token, twice as many where it's Monday as where it's Tuesday. So what if the question asked wasn't "what did the coin land on?" but "what day is it?" If the chances of the former question's answer being "tails" are, in fact, 2 in 3, then so are the chances of the latter's being "Monday". But whether the question will be asked on Tuesday is dependent on the coin being tails. You can frame it thusly: "If the coin was heads, there is a 100% chance that it is Monday. If the coin was tails, there is a 50% chance that it is Monday. Therefore, there is a 75% chance that it is Monday." And then it becomes clear that the missing 25% from automatically ruling out Tuesday/heads was all added to Monday/heads. That option has a 50% chance, and the other two are 25% each. Even I didn't bother analyzing it that closely when I saw it; I just instinctively said "it's 50%" and left it there. Hm, the "if A, then 100% chance of B; if ~A, then 50% chance of B" sounds an awful lot like what happened to D-Team in the incinerator room...

Speaking of D-Team, we're joining them next. For... Force Quit?! Holy crap I don't know if we have the information for that yet!

No casualties yet. Past midnight again; 00:03. No memories past the vote at 13:30. Probably follows the result of all teams refraining from pushing the buttons in the decontamination rooms. The Force Quit Box is open! There's text on the monitor. Force Quit program on standby. To initiate, two key items must be set. Each is a mother's memento. Sigma asks if any of that rings a bell to Diana, and she starts screaming in pain, her head hurting. I know Phi has one, but...I don't know the other. And I don't know exactly what to enter for Phi's, anyway. Looks like we have a 6-letter word and a 9-letter word, so I'm guessing Phi's is "Amulet"? Only other words I can think of don't fit properly. Well, I guess we'll jump to Q team oh shit this is Force Quit, too. Well, we only have one unexplored fragment on Q's side, so we're more likely to have the necessary info. 00:03 again. Eric says that the fact that the death count is still zero is worth celebrating with a shot. Q mopes about him rubbing it in. Eric thinks he's referring to being a minor, but actually it's that his helmet has no mouthpiece. The Force Quit Box says that the central control computer must be booted to run the program. Q has an idea and runs off to the Quantum Computer Room. The Central Control Computer looks disturbingly like GLaDOS. Q remembers how to do it. Get the cover off, and... We've gotta enter an 8-digit code. Damnit, I've got nothing. Again. Looking at the files, it seems that there are translations provided for the Latin phrases, not that they help much. Well, one might, but not yet.
---

Just to have something to put in, I try 14383421. As expected, it doesn't work, but rather than booting me from the input menu, it just gives the "wrong" sound and clears it for me to try again. I exit out. Sure enough, my next pick for C-team is, once again, Force Quit. 00:03 for the third straight time. Junpei suggests that time might be going in reverse for some reason. I don't know, I think his brain broke from trauma between 999 and this game. But somehow he was relatively fine in VLR. Carlos thinks he knows the password to the box...9 letters. Still not sure what it was, but...I realize there was a clue we once obtained in an escape sequence that we've never used. In the pod room, the Zero doll that said "become me". Well, there is a spacebar on this input screen so let's try it.

No good. It would be interesting if the teams had to use knowledge from each other's fragments. So I'm 0 for 3.

Aha. I'm looking at the full flowchart now, and a lot of the connections I thought I saw do in fact exist. The pod room continues from where Carlos killed Akane, and the study from where he instead killed himself--both stemming from D-team dying at 13:30. So the manufacturing room is the only fragment we've been on from the "C-team killed at 13:30" segment. There are a few oddly placed locks. But it's strange...D-team pressing the button is a "Game Over", and Q-Team doing so is a "bad end". But C-Team doing so is neither! What am I missing here...? Well, I pick a D-team fragment. "Transporter". Looks like it could be the start of the...no, the start of the C-team dead branch would be a Q-team, because we already have a D-team outcome on this timeline further down. Phi is nowhere to be found. Zero welcomes them to the transporter room. He says that for them to find what they're looking for, they must follow his orders. He explains that the transporter was found in Antarctica in 1888, and that it was not made by man. The intelligence it created far outstripped that of humans. It was capable of transporting things through spacetime. He explains how to operate it. The two items that look like beds are the input pods, and the ones that look like chrysalides are the export pods. In the back is the material tank, which has a variety of elements such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Essentially, it acts as an atomic level 3D printer. It requires so much energy that it takes 10 months to recharge. In order to transport a human, only one person may be in each pod. But it isn't a teleporter. Only the atomic data is transported, not the object itself. And it goes not only to the past or future, but to alternate histories. ...So we're going to be cloning Phi? One of her X-Passes was TWIN, after all. Zero's instructions are to start it up to obtain what they desire. A bunch of cards...huh, I expected them to be notes, not inventory. Human and moon, flower, three moons, wind, moon, moon and star, two humans, human, sun, two moons, birdman, star, human and two moons. I think that's all of them. A few devices...oh, we have to scan all thirteen cards to get a hologram of a book to appear. Chapter 1: Wind = 0. At the nucleus, the image of three birdmen, one flower, one human appears. And now we can use the cards on another device. Wind lost to flower; and star beat sun. As does "human two moons". I try flower, but the opponent uses flower as well for a push. Even a lone moon defeats sun...and human loses to flower. Sun lost to birdman...I try birdman, and receive no new info as the opponent plays sun. But star loses to flower! I keep playing star until it finally loses to birdman as well. So birdman > star > sun; flower > star, flower > human; moon > sun. That's what we know so far. I try flower, and it loses to birdman as well. Moon also loses to birdman, so birdman is the largest. Moon also loses to flower, so that's second-largest. Running out of characters for this post so I'll cut it off here.
---

Neither star nor moon have appeared on the opposite side yet, so I can't figure which is larger. I try human, and much to my surprise, it defeats sun. So right now, we're at birdman > flower > moon, star, and human > sun > wind (which is zero). But if the opponent never plays anything other than birdman, flower, or sun, we need to use the cards with multiple symbols to figure it out.

Flower > Two Moons
Two Moons + Human > Birdman

Okay, that's probably helpful. Assuming they're all integers, Human has to be at least 3. Of course, we already knew it was at least two because of Sun being, presumably, 1.

Birdman > Moon + Human
Birdman > Three Moons

Beautiful. So Human > Moon, by enough that Birdman fits between them. Since moon has ti be at least 2, human is at least 4 and birdman at least 7. And Birdman > Moon + Star > Flower (finally; I just could not get flower to appear) so Star > Moon as well since Flower > Two Moons. Let's summarize.

Two Moons + Human > Birdman > Moon + Star > Flower > Two Moons, also Birdman > Moon + Human. I opt to keep playing Moon + Human until I find out how it fares against Flower. It loses. Good, so now we have the full inequality.

Birdman > Flower > Star > Human > Moon > Sun > Wind. But Moon is still big enough that Two Moons + Human > Birdman > Moon + Star > Flower > Moon + Human. So Moon is at least 4... but Birdman was greater than Three Moons, so it has to be at least 13. Thus, the smallest integers that work are Moon = 4, Human = 6, Star = 8, Flower = 11, Birdman = 13. I feel like there's got to be some better way of pinpointing these numbers... but I'm already away from the game now, so this is all I can do for now! Though obviously, my next course of action ought to be to play Three Moons until it goes against Flower. Based on those numbers I threw out, Three Moons would win. If Flower wins, it means that Flower is at least 13, Sun is at least 10, Birdman is at least 15, and Human is at least...8? Yeah, 8. Oof, this is tough. I half expected all of the symbols to stand in for digits, but I've pretty much proven that only one out of 1, 2, or 3 corresponds to a number. At least I think that's what I've proven. It would really help if there were more options for the opponent than the two largest and the second-smallest. Though even if I can't get the exact values, I can almost get the order of all thirteen cards. Remember, the smallest possible number for Moon was 4, and in both cases, something else was going to correspond to 8.
---

Three Moons is indeed greater than Flower. I'm going to tentatively go with my guesses of 4, 6, 8, 11, 13. That would make the five symbols written in the hologram equal 56. There is also the question of what to do with this knowledge...oh, hey, the holo-book has new information? Chapter 2...Oh balls. The cards with multiple symbols aren't additive; they're multiplicative.

Actually, never mind, that makes this really easy, because it also says they represent the numbers 0-12. Sun was already determined to be smaller than everything but Wind, so that's 1. Two Moons and a Human was biggest, so that's 12, and everything else lines up with that anyway--Moon showed up so frequently because it's equal to 2. Human is 3, Star is 5, Flower is 7, and Birdman is 11. I honestly forgot there was a Two Humans card, and sadly, it wouldn't have helped me clear up my misunderstanding because it would've fallen between Flower and Birdman anyway.

So now the five symbols in the sky become 11^3*7*3. 1331*21=27951. There's something else in the holobook...oh, it's just a place to input what I just figured out about the cards themselves. Solving this unlocks two new chapters. 3 merely summarizes what I just told it I knew, and 4 tells me that to operate the machine, 4 cards must be placed on the sensor. The alien society has two methods for expressing numbers, though, so I must convert the number displayed by the nucleus to a second format to determine which cards to place. So I need to convert 27951 to this new format? A new monitor comes on...oh, now the cards are being turned into a wheel for the 3D printer. Wait, they're decagon reels...aha. So now I input the number. Or, no. I put the decagon reels on the horizontal axis of the weird machine, but I can't turn them until I have something to put on the vertical axis. I assumed that machine would tell us which cards to put on the sensor. Oh, wait, more reels. Tridecagons! I wonder...it looks like when I hit the crank after setting the five reels to 2, 7, 9, 5, 1, it changed it to 12, 9, 5, 1. Is C951 the proper base 13 expression of 27951?

...If I put everything into my calculator correctly, C951=27726. Awfully close, but not quite right. ...But I didn't. As I suspected, the two numbers are the same. (I accidentally multiplied the 9 by 12 squared instead of 13 squared.) As soon as I saw the tridecagon reels--nay, as soon as Diana said "it's a bit different" to what was on screen--I realized that the machine was a base 10-base 13 converter. And that's all for this room's puzzles. But the PA says that Phi's a casualty, along with all of Q-Team and Carlos and Junpei. And Akane has already escaped through the X-Door! Diana feels Zero has tricked them, and Sigma refuses to believe this is true. They look all over, and when they get to the incinerator room, Diana suddenly remembers the timeline where Phi was incinerated. Wait, this is probably that same timeline! Sigma and Diana were injected with the drugs again. I check back to that one...yeah, that was along a line where Q-Team died at 13:30. But all of C-Team was alive after that, so the game continued. Diana wonders why Akane left alone. Sigma says they can't know what happened in Ward C, but they know how Q-Team died. And furthermore...if Q-Team was executed at 13:30, it means C-Team didn't vote as they said they would in the note. Sigma says that means Carlos was the betrayer. It's 1:25, almost time for another injection, but Sigma says there's no time to waste. Back to the transporter room. Sigma wants to transport. This is the treeform timeline. He wants to escape this history and go to one where Phi exists. Decision game. I choose to transport. Also, when I looked back to my own post about the incinerator, I realized I was wrong. "Medallion". That's nine letters. It's the six-letter word that's still at large.
---

Huh. I'm locked to D-Team, but I can either choose to go to a new point in the fragment I was just in, or one other fragment. I wonder, were there any other fragments where I missed out on going back to them for more content? The pods open. Sigma wonders what's going on...they came out of the input pods, not the export pods. Diana wonders if the process failed. Sigma then remembers that the transporter isn't actually a teleporter. They themselves weren't transported, but their data was. Sigma likens it to a fax machine. Sigma wonders why this him was the one that stayed. Ah, there's still a lock on the end of the fragment..."Don't transport" might still be important, though. Hah, Diana wrecked the transporter! She says this has to be Zero's trap. He was the one who made them start this thing. If they transport, they'd be doing exactly what he wants. Electricity is crackling all over; they run. A huge explosion. But they're still alive, back at the X-Door...at 1:37. Hah, because the game's already over. Diana feels that Akane will return. Sigma's not so sure. This is called a game over. Oh, and the other fragment is in the transport timeline! "Door of Truth". They come out of the export pods. 18:05. But that's all they know, so they could still be on January 1st, 2029...or years in either direction. Diana asks where Sigma set the transport point to. He says he doesn't know. He couldn't read the text on the display, so he pushed a random button. But they're in an alternate history, so Phi could be here.

...Oops. Wrong alternate history. They actually wound up in a timeline where D-Team was executed at the 13:30 vote. I was wondering what would happen if they'd gone to a timeline where they already existed, but it seems that there's still only one of them in this timeline. And now another locked door. Time for an escape sequence! The wall has an arrow and the word "Spin" pointing at a fan. Some sort of text hidden by the fan blades. Hair dryer, which could probably do it but it needs a two-hole outlet. No water comes out of the faucets, but draining one sink fills up the other. But there's still something stuck in that sink's drain, even with the water. An area that's "too dark to see anything" even though I see something we need. Button lock, but it's changing colors so there's actually 4^4 combinations. 256, that would be...possible to brute force, but it'd take a long time. Another locker triggers Sigma's cat tic. Note 1 says the power supply must be restarted to unlock the door. Already on it. The cat locker also has a converter plug, and with the fan spinning, we can see that the combination is violet, white, blue, red. It yields a coin and a remote control. The last locker that was already unlocked has a music box inside, so I assume the coin will help...but no, it runs on water.Oh, the coin is for unscrewing the control panel! That changes the lights so we can see the other side...but we still have to drain the strange, dirty water. There's a lid to the drain...Oh. We have to examine the remote control and push the button. The drain itself has a start button, and there's a bucket in one stall, a water tank in another, and a third has a note to fully submerge the power supply in water to restart. The last one as a working showerhead, but its screws are loose. I fill the bucket with water, but I can't use it to start the music box for some reason. Oh, but it will help me get the key out of the sink. Doesn't unlock the last locker; that's another button puzzle. Oh, it's for the locked shower stall, giving me the hose. Now that's gotta be for the music box. Ah, but I have to attach it to the shower first...and it won't fit on the faucet, so I need to unscrew the loose showerhead. Which I can't do yet. There's also a C-shaped hole on the control device, which I also have nothing for.
---

...What.

I had, at one point, flipped the lid to the drain back down, but I flipped it up again. And apparently, had I ever looked over in the direction of the lid when the lights were on the other half--violating everything that this room has been telling me about having to always switch the lights whenever I want to work in the other half--I'd have found glowing numbers telling me the answer to the last locker. Another spinning panel puzzle. Which finally gives me the screwdriver. I unscrew both the showerhead and the cover to the tank, find that the start button goes to the tank, and get the C-shaped piece. I initially decide to hook up the hose first, since I figure I'll have to flip the switches anyway to hook up the other side, only to be told that I should try to illuminate both sides before hooking it up. Which inserting the C-shaped piece allows me to do. Note 3 says "Fill the room with water." And then the place where we hooked up the hose bursts, and the room starts to fill. Ah, so that's why we still had the remote! To keep it from draining. Except, Sigma seems to suggest that we don't want it to fill up. I even try the button on the control panel...Oh. The locked stall was already shown to be completely airtight, and watertight. We go inside to stay safe, and allow it to fill up, then drain it again. All lights are out, but the restart button works, and...the watertight shower recedes to reveal a door not marked on the map! It needs an 8-digit code...Huh. Where have we seen that before? Only problem is, we didn't know what it was then and we don't know now. Diana doesn't know, and Sigma wonders if there are any hints around here. Q-Team was the one that needed the 8-digit code for the force quit box, not D-Team...All three teams only have one fragment untouched. My instincts say C-Team's is the most important right now, but for some reason, I want to do Q-Team's instead.

Oh. Well then. It seems I chose correctly. The name of this segment is "Radical-6". There's a pig in formaldehyde. They're in the Biolab. Eric is freaked out and wonders why there's one of these in a bomb shelter. Q thinks it's to be prepared for a pandemic. 18:10. There's a notice to slash the pig's stomach. Escape sequence. I get a red piece of a DNA model, a research note involving green and pink liquids, and said green and pink liquids. But there's no lens in the microscope so I can't follow the note's instructions yet. There's also one puzzle we might be able to brute force, but there'd be over a thousand combinations. Oh, I can look in the sink on the equipment with the locked wheels! And that grants a knife. Slashing the pig pillow reveals many things. Fanatic Bio R note (that might actually be what Zero uses for the executions), Microscope Lens, Power Cord. I plug in the power cord where it's needed, but it needs something else, something long and thin. Microscope time, then...huh? It's too fuzzy to see? Can't adjust it, though. Oh, what? The red thing lets us unscrew a thing? We get a centrifuge cover. Can that be used in the analyzer? ...No, but the knife can. It's no longer usable, though. Argh, but we need three containers! We only have two. I finally find something to do with the centrifuge cover, and now there are letters. It looks like the word "orange" is there, but the rest is kinda fuzzy. Maybe there's also "blue" and "white"? Yeah, that's what the examination says. Orange, blue, white, and...pictures of dishes?
---

Unlike the last time, where I was still musing on the current puzzle after leaving mid-puzzle, I had nothing on the current one, but continued to think about the one I'd left off in last time. Really, with the knowledge it was multiplicative, figuring out which was 7 and which was 11 was all that was needed. Huh, but the title screen has the room we're in right now. The Biolab. Oh, hey, that door puzzle's more complex than I thought. It's not "hit five buttons", it's "hit each of the four buttons somewhere from 0-5 times". Oh, we can use the same liquid more than once in the analyzer, but that just means...that "orange, blue, white" is for that. We don't have orange, blue, or white. Which means that once again, we're at a standstill. Our only inventory items are the green liquid, the pink liquid, and the centrifuge cover with the hint. The fact that the centrifuge cover is still in our inventory suggests it has another use, but maybe it's just there to make sure we don't forget our hint before we can use it. Both the sink and the pig container have locked wheels. The computer next to the analyzer is off, and the drawer there is apparently decorative. The game notes that of the four specimens, only the butterfly can't be moved, but doesn't actually let us move the other three. We can't actually use the centrifuge. We can't adjust the microscope. We have no hint for the door. We can't use the clean bench for anything. We have no fifth cylinder to put in the empty space. What am I missing? And what's with the shelf of tools? I'm pretty sure we didn't pick up anything from there initially, but it's something we zoom in on. 6 to the 4th is 1296, so that's how many combinations it'd take to brute force the lock. Too many. Why can't I adjust the microscope?! I'm absolutely certain I've checked everything with everything. We need those orange, blue, and white liquids. ...Damnit, there was something on those shelves! "Set the dial to A to mix the liquids. Set the dial to B to separate the liquid". It's the centrifuge manual. Green separates into blue and yellow...which means pink will separate into red and white! And yellow and red will make orange. Using the analyzer reveals the fetus cylinder and also turns on a monitor. Yellow bird, purple fish, white dragonfly, red flower, blue human. I feel like this is some esoteric clue for the specimen puzzle. The butterfly is locked to position four, but the hint that's a bug looks like it ought to be either position three or position five. ...But there are only 24 possible solutions to this puzzle. You know what that means, right? It's finally time to just brute force one of these things! ...This doesn't seem to be working. I should probably have a pen and paper to take note of each order I've tried. Oh, wait, I know what to do! Red is 3, blue is 2, white is 1, yellow is 5. The microscope works fine on the separated liquids. Another arrange-the-pieces puzzle. Capsules...ah! Yellow 1, Purple 2, Blue 3, Red 5. And here we go. A fingerprint identification device...but it draws blood! Light by the sink turns on, and we can move it. It stops in the corner, but examining it again turns on the light by the pig. We got the pig! There's a drawer in the sink with a scalpel, so we cut it open and...we're done. Zero talks about 17 years ago, a woman died, carved open just like that pig. But her heart was still beating as it was carved out of her. A male suspect was quickly caught. He must've planned to escape via taxi as he called one before his capture. The police arrested him before he could use it. Instead, a genius surgeon crawled inside, headed for the hospital, a seriously ill patient awaiting his arrival for a life-saving treatment. However, the taxi got into an accident before it reached its destination, colliding with a large truck. Both the driver and the surgeon died, as did the young boy waiting for surgery. Life is truly unfair, don't you think?
---

Eric wonders what the point of him telling them this story was. Mira figures it's just an act, and doesn't mean anything. Q's not so sure. Anyway, it's time to begin the game. The pig's stomach contains three syringes, filled with Radical-6. Once infected, symptoms can take anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours to manifest, but once it happens, the host finds an irresistible urge to commit suicide. The mortality rate is 75%. Transmitted through liquids, it's extremely contagious. Of course, the mortality rate of FBR is 100%. An antagonistic relationship exists between the two viruses. If you were infected with Radical-6, it would be canceled out with the addition of FBR, and you are unaffected. Conversely, injecting Radical-6 into you after becoming infected with FBR will cause them to destroy each other, and there are no adverse effects. Q sums it up. Zero then claims to be a clairvoyant. If he had foreseen that they'd all choose to inject themselves with Radical-6 at this moment, he'd have coated the fingerprint authentication device with FBR, meaning they'd already be infected with it. On the other hand, if he'd foreseen that they wouldn't inject themselves, then he'd leave the needle clean, so they would not be infected with Fanatic Bio R. So if what Zero says is true, there's no reason to worry about the situation. Either way, their being saved is a foregone conclusion. Eric says that if that's the case, there's no reason to choose. But Q and Mira figure Zero is lying about being psychic. Well, it's decision time. Let's start with "don't inject". Q says that the important thing to determine is if they're already infected with FBR. He believes that they aren't, and in fact, that "Fantastic Bio R" doesn't sound like it should even exist. Eric says the same could be said of "Radical-6", but Q says there's no doubt Radical-6 is real, because he's heard of it before. Q thinks Zero wants them to become infected with Radical-6, but can't do it himself. The door opens, and Eric runs for it, followed by Q. Mira, however, takes a syringe before leaving. Back in the lounge, Eric asks Q if he was telling the truth about Radical-6. He can't explain why he knows about it, though. They ask for more info on Radical-6, starting with its name, which Q explains just as we learned in VLR. Mira finds this explanation satisfactory, but Eric wonders if it's really possible for thoughts to slow down like that. Q launches into some scientific babble. Mira makes him dumb it down to "the body's composition changes as a genetic switch is flipped." For example, the fact that parental experiences can sort of be passed down genetically, even though the genetics don't actually change. Mira screws with Eric for a bit, suggesting that if the two of them did it, the baby might be psychic. Oh, because of the danger they were in. If someone infected with the virus were to go outside, it would end humanity. C-Team's dead, but D-Team's still all alive. FIRE, CRASH, FIVE. Huh, thought I saw those before, but Control+F didn't reveal it. Must've been in the lost post. Eric believes C-Team is still alive, but Mira and Q don't. Eric asks Gab his opinion, because Eric's clearly losing it. They get injected with the sleep/memory loss drugs...that could be related to the spread of Radical-6. Anyway, there's something I noticed in Zero's story this time...the heart was removed from the woman, still alive. Doesn't that sound like Mira's MO? She did say she was fairly young the first time she did it, so...it could've been 17 years ago.
---

Anyway, now it's time to go back and inject the Radical-6. Q's reasoning this time is that regardless of whether Zero is psychic or not, there are two variables: whether or not they're infected with FBR, and whether or not they inject themselves with Radical-6. Obviously, if the answer to both questions is yes, or if it's no to both, they'll be fine. But if it's yes to the first alone, there's a 100% chance that they die of FBR, whereas if it's yes to the second alone, Radical-6 only has a 75% mortality rate. So not injecting it has only a 50% chance of survival, while injecting it has a 62.5% chance. They're back in the lounge...Mira says that Eric's laugh is kind of strange. He says it's a bad habit he's had since he was a kid. He talks about his childhood. But he says his childhood was totally normal. Kind mom, clumsy dad, annoying little brother. Flashback to Chris and Eric fighting. Their mom says that no matter how painful things get, you should never forget to smile, because smiles have a strange power and can make everyone else around you happy too. This seems so damn banal, and nothing at all like the traumatic past...oh. Dad changed when they lost Mom. The abusive father from the other flashbacks, that's from after Mom died. "Don't cry. Don't get mad. Always be sure to smile." But he was always angry. So Eric started smiling all the time, no matter how unhappy he was. Even after Dad fell ill and died. He has two smiles, the one taught by his Mom and the one forced by his Dad, and they got kind of mixed up. He's afraid of ending up like his father, but it was no use. The worst part of him came to the front after they got trapped there. Q says Eric never mentioned having a little brother, and Eric says that yeah, about Q's age. Q interprets that in that he's that age now, and wonders if they'd be friends. Eric tries to change the subject. He's sorry for turning the mood dark. Mira finds this funny. A joke. But listening to it was a lot of fun. Q wonders how that was a "joke". Oh, her inability to understand proper emotions is coming out. And now she's stabbed Eric in the back with the scalpel. She's laughing as she advances on Q. Is this Radical-6, or just Mira's crazy?

Huh, C-Team's last fragment has an interesting name, too. "Ambidex." They're in the nuclear reactor room. 00:10. We find out that Maria is 22 years old. She's been in the hospital for...ten years?

Meanwhile, it's been ten years that Akane wanted to be able to say that to Junpei. Carlos again suggests Junpei is Akane's boyfriend, which Junpei denies. Heh, if this is one year after 999, then Junpei and Akane should be 22, as well. Carlos apologizes for making things awkward. And already time for the escape sequence...but I think I should probably call it a night.
---

I find something that looks like an inventory item from afar, but it's actually just power cables sticking into a drain. Everything seems to need power...I find a box of matches. There's one slider that works...ah, that's how I send power to things. I get a "freezing extinguisher". There's also a valve which we switch, and a steel mold. I try to interact with something else that I thought would interact with my steel mold, only to find it was a drain cover which was immediately put into place and can't be removed. What was the point of having that there? Another valve to open...and there are exposed wires at the opposite end of the drainage ditch, too. No doubt we'll be connecting them...ah, a gas valve. Now we can finally warm up the room. Or, uh, half the room. There's a drain cover to be moved on the side that's still cold, too, and another switch...wait, that's the one connected to the exposed wires. Nothing to do with that yet. I try rerouting the power again, but it still doesn't seem to do much. There's a keyhole, but...oh. The steel mold fits the gas heater on the cold side. But there's a second hole, and nothing to put in it. Oh, the lockers themselves have power switches! There's two lockers at each. The trickiest rotating panel puzzle yet, not that that's saying much, grants us two sink plugs. I put them in the sinks as I go for the last locker, which grants a block of tin. I light the second furnace and get a key. I turn the water valve and use the key to start the reactor turbine. Then I turn on the water...ah. The water itself is our "connection". Or not? No, wait, I just had to flip the main power switch one more time. I get the another "toughest yet", a place the shapes puzzle...this one's legitimately challenging. Start with the Sigma because that's the biggest and really only has two possible alignments, both of which cover the same area save for the actual anchor...but in the absence of any particularly oddly-shaped pieces, that Chi is damn near impossible to place. To the point that it makes me doubt what I know about the Sigma because the easiest way to deal with the Chi is to just poke the short end of the Delta or Phi into it.

Okay, let's work these pieces one at a time. Sigma can only fit into one of two spaces. No matter which one it fits into, Alpha is the only one that can fit into its gap without covering another anchor point, and can only do that in one orientation. Delta seems to fit well into the negative space of that construct. ...Damnit, there is going to be empty space, isn't there? Oh yeah, plenty of it. I got done in by my own assumptions, and even when I started to consider that possibility, it seemed like I was having trouble fitting things. This opens up the core, and a new puzzle. It's another tricky one, because the yellow laser in particular can only be worked in one particular direction. Then I try moving something to "start" to work it backwards and unexpectedly find that I'd already put everything else in a position where moving that piece didn't ruin it, and solved it right then and there. And now we have to find a way to shut off the power...oh. The freezing extinguisher. That'll cut the water flow. That opens the door to the small room. Akane gets knocked out, but she's still alive. Only Q-Team is dead (Eye/Kill/Fool). The main door's still locked, so they look into the small room and find...an AB Game machine, as the title suggested. Except with a twist. Carlos and Junpei must vote at the same time; if the timing's off, everyone in the shelter will be executed. The reward/penalty for a successful betrayal has been jacked up to +6/-3, allowing it to bring one party to 9 and the other to 0 in a single round. Also, Carlos's fate is tied to Diana and Sigma's, and Junpei's to Akane and Phi's. I'd almost say that doesn't quite sound right, but it was Akane herself who survived in the Transporter Room segment, not either of the two players.
---

Carlos understands the benefit of double-ally. He says there's nothing to be gained by choosing to Betray, that Zero's trying to get them to kill each other off. Junpei wants to check on Akane before playing the AB Game. Flashback time. Junpei talks about how Akane's strong will made other kids not want to be friends with her, and tells Carlos about the rabbits. That's why he always wanted to protect her, and help her bear the weight she's taken on. But after last year, it's like he doesn't know her as well as he thought. Junpei says Carlos has someone important to him too, and he talks about his parents dying in a fire and Maria falling ill to an incurable disease. You know, it is suddenly occurring to me just how few live parents these characters have. Akane was confirmed an orphan all the way back in 999, and Phi's mother being dead was confirmed in VLR. Carlos and Eric both have confirmed the lack of living parents, and while it's not confirmed (and in fact she outright claims that it isn't), I kind of got the implication that "Mira's first victim" was her own mother. We don't know much about Q himself, let alone his family, but my pet theory would suggest that he doesn't have living parents, either. I'm not sure which option to pick first, though...there does tend to be plenty of info gated behind bad endings, after all. I have considered even going back to the ones where it seems pointless to intentionally get the bad ending, like the two involving the poison antidote. Mostly because those are TPKs. Actually, going for bad endings first is always the right move. Betray it is. Damn, that worked quickly. Not like in VLR. Carlos claims that he did it expecting Junpei to pick Betray to protect Akane. He says he did it to protect Diana and Sigma, but the shield that protects becomes a spear in the end. Huh, but for some reason Akane isn't killed quickly the way Junpei is...for a moment I wondered if this was what led to the Transporter Room. But no, I remember the flow of events. Akane does die, too, but not before bludgeoning Carlos to death. There are two remaining outcomes, but one has a lock on it. I pick Ally, expecting Junpei to Betray this time. I am not disappointed. And sure enough, Carlos remembers Junpei Allying "the last time", getting the same reaction as Sigma always did. Carlos admits that this should've been the first time, but for some reason, he feels it wasn't. Then he remembers that Junpei said Carlos's decision would come back to bite him in the ass, and realizes exactly what Sigma always did. There's still a lock on the third path...but I can't skip text when I go back to the decision! As I should've figured by the exclamation point. Junpei starts to give his speech, but there's a flash of light. Carlos seems confused and asks if this is before the AB Game. So now we're explicitly using a Carlos that has jumped. And Carlos interrupts Junpei and finishes his story for him. I'm cracking up here. Junpei asks how he knew that, and asks if Akane told him. He says no, but stays silent on the reasons. He stops Junpei from starting the AB Game, saying that whatever he chose, it was always the worst outcome. Akane comes to and says that Carlos has SHIFTed--Spacetime Human Internal Fluctating Transfer. A phenomenon where one's mind crosses space and time. Junpei asks if that's the same power they used a year ago, and she confirms it. Then she references Back to the Future to use it as an example. What happened to the Marty who had been living in the new timeline when the Marty who went back in time to create that history returned to 1985? In a way, the "original" Marty is committing a form of murder, by overwriting the memories of "alternate" Marty and taking his place. But in the multiverse theory, that overwriting doesn't happen, and the two merely switch places, in order to keep everything consistent. Junpei says that either way, alternate Marty gets the worse end of the deal. And Carlos is in the same situation.
---

Junpei asks how Akane knew Carlos could SHIFT, and she cites what Carlos said about being able to see which paths Death lies down. We get the Reverie Syndrome infodump again...but this time, Akane suggests that Reverie Syndrome is in fact what happens when a person can't stop receiving information from the morphogenetic field and receives too much, or when they can't stop jumping between histories. Junpei says that that means she's like them, and Akane says that in a way, yes, but the power is running rampant in her, and if she could find some way to control the ability, she might be able to overcome Reverie Syndrome. Carlos says that, starting with the fire that killed his parents in which he saved Maria, he's always been able to hear the voices of the endangered people even though he shouldn't be able to. Akane then suggests that rather than actually playing the AB game, they should just SHIFT to another history, even though at this point it's highly likely they'll both choose Ally. They'll be able to do it...if they find their lives in danger. Then she decides to turn the reactor into a bomb. Carlos asks where they need to SHIFT to, but Akane says that if they'd thought it out in advance, the danger would be lessened. Junpei says to jump to the same history he does. Which one, the others ask? One where they didn't get all ones on the dice rolls. Holy crap, I knew I saw a locked piece beyond the bad ending, but... Carlos says that Junpei's insane, that they'll just get themselves killed. Akane says she trusts Junpei, and Carlos says that if they die, he's going to kill him. "Ambidex" complete. Sure enough, the only choice is to go back into the rec room fragment. It starts out just like every other time they were about to get killed, but then there's a flash of light and the ones from the Ambidex timeline come in. Junpei knocks Akane down, and has Carlos put her in the fireplace. His plan is to have the two of them shield Akane from the bullets, then SHIFT to yet another timeline before they die. Akane is to follow once she's heard all of the X-Passes. He chose this timeline because there are already five people dead in it. With his and Carlos's, there will be seven. And then they jump to the history where they rolled all ones.

EYE...KILL...FOOL...MOON...FATE...SAVE...DOLL. I think we've seen all of these before.Akane breaks down crying, saying Junpei's horrible, but she admits she should go now. And she shifts. Still no choice but to go to that fragment, this time on the all-ones side. Akane's still pissed at Junpei. What if the SHIFT hadn't worked? Akane comes right out and says that Junpei is the one she cares about the most. He takes out a ring...odd, I've seen that before. But where? Well, at any rate, it's on Akane's left ring finger now. Oh, no, wait, it's the right. Junpei screwed up. What a doof. Well, he made Akane laugh so I guess that works. He says they'll move it to the correct side once they escape. Akane says that normally when you SHIFT, you forget the memories from the previous timeline, but she's used to it so she remembers. Junpei and Carlos remember too, though. Akane says it might be the resonance effect, because they have more SHIFTers, and says that the overall number of SHIFTers in the world is increasing. Then the bit about the upcoming loss of 6 billion lives, and that the rise could be the world adapting. Junpei wonders if everyone signing up for Dcom was part of Zero's plan, and Carlos suggests that Zero needed them to SHIFT. Akane picks SAVE to tell them, but...it doesn't work. Neither does DOLL. The voice cuts in and says that X-Passes are set to their respective histories, and X-Passes from alternate timelines are not applicable. As I figured based on the fact that they aren't even consistent between timelines. Junpei flips out, expectedly. And Junpei seems to be suggesting he wants to kill himself to let the others out. He races off and finds...Dark Q? No, there is seriously a red-eyed palette swap of Q here.
---

"Penalty. Penalty. You are charged with a rule violation. That means you must be punished. Time to exterminate." This Q has ridiculous strength, sending them flying with a single punch. Carlos sees the deaths of Q-Team. How to survive? Carlos decides to SHIFT again, but he can't leave them behind. He'll come up with a plan in another history and SHIFT right back. And now into the timeline where Carlos murdered Akane with an axe after she came at him with a chainsaw, because Junpei was dead in a freezer. This Carlos is shocked to see Akane dead, but realizes which history he's in. He says he killed her, then corrects it to say it was the him from this history. Has to be fixed somehow...I was right, he did lose a hand here. He sends a message to Q-Team: "Search the Family Portrait".

I'm absolutely certain that this does change something in a Q-Team fragment, but I can't tell what. Where was the family portrait? I feel like it should be "Pop Off"; that's the same timeline where Carlos landed. But every possible input down that path has led to the wrong side. Maybe it's the three-way standoff?

..."No One" was actually an option this time. It wasn't in other name inputs. Well, that's how we get Q killed here. Hold on, this is something. "Three Days later". We get the same scene as in Eric's flashback to when his Mom was alive. He wants things to be like this forever and ever...then things go red, and it's a game over. Okay, that was strange. I expected maybe some real exposition. Well, it seems we only have one fragment open for new content if we can't get the password to a Force Quit Box. "Suppression", over on D-Team's side. In the Healing Room. We actually get all three of them for once. 18:05. As I should have figured, since we still hadn't grabbed the very top of the "C-Team Executed at 13:30". Phi wonders if this isn't the first time they've woken up. Not vertically, though, but laterally. In other words, alternate histories. Matches in a drawer, and water and a note on top of the chest of drawers. Also a tumbler. A poster with a demon that says "Defeat Me". I pour water into a glass and pitcher as the note suggests, and find a dial. This changes the walls, and I play a game with flowers and pick up a knife. Back in the first iteration of the room, stabbing the poster changes the monitor, telling us to shoot more keys. We can see the pixel plate better after shutting down the room entirely, but we can't properly take note of what is clearly a very important hint. Oh, but we can light the candle. Hmm...shoot more keys. Piano keys! But how do we shoot them? The tumbler can be placed in the center of the pattern that appears in the forest section, but...now we have zero inventory items. I see a few things I can click, but none seem to do anything. The chairs with the odd pattern, the inconsistent part of the wall (which is inconsistent in the forest as well but we can only click it in the black-and-white segment)...the lit candle casts a pattern similar to the one that appears on the tumbler, which the game says looks like a key. So maybe my piano keys guess is wrong. Not that it matters when we have zero items.They don't comment on the candle holder being different in the forest. Damn, pixel hunts are hard enough when there's only one iteration of the room! ...Huh. That big device, if I click certain areas, it instead says that the cover is closed and there's a letter at the bottom. It goes from C to G and then back from A to C, unsurprisingly--one octave. So it's related to the piano. There's even a play button. I think they were wrong and I was right--it's talking about piano keys. But how do I do anything with the piano?
---

Okay, have to admit: I had to consult a walkthrough for the first time on this one. And apparently the Vita version of this game is different than all others because that one was actively detrimental to solving this.I pull a lever on the machine to get a camera, and start shooting every "key" I can find--the tumbler, the candle, the pixel pad in red, the blooming flower...not the piano keys; my theory was wrong there. Or was it? I see that those panels that open up are the shape of piano keys. The correct ones for the letters, even. The chair back and the odd spot on the wall in forest mode do light up at the camera, but fail to register as keys. The examination of the monitor is finally updated to admit that they're piano keys, and now playing the piano actually works and obtains the keys, which was what the Vita walkthrough said you should obtain first. I grab all the keys, then put low-C through G in their proper places. Just have to figure out how to open up A through high-C. Argh, now I get a better zoom-in on the chair, but...still can't get it. Third time's the charm, and high C opens. Putting it in opens up a fifth wall pattern, the sky. The water tube is all black now, and...the star is here! Taking a picture of the water glass and pitcher, with the star covered, grants A key, and also makes a projection change to grant B key. GEFC'C.DAB is the order, and returning the keys to the piano and playing it there opens the tube, and ends the escape sequence. A blue button appears, with a warning not to press it. Sigma's certain they should press it anyway. Phi thinks it's a trap, that he's using reverse psychology. That something bad will happen if they push it. Sigma asks what, and Phi's not sure. Sigma says that there are far easier ways Zero could kill them, and Phi finally says that it's a Decision Game. Well, yeah... Diana says we should take a vote, and as expected, Sigma says push it and Phi says no, giving Diana the deciding vote. Obviously we push it. It causes...a huge explosion? And an immediate game over, no exposition added. Right, so try again, and this time don't push it. There's over a minute, and the longer we stay on the screen, Sigma and Phi weigh in trying to sway Diana to their side. It's all pretty generic, though Sigma suggests that the button turns off the timer on a bomb, the exact opposite of what we've seen it to do. The door opens. Diana thinks it's because they didn't push it. Sigma says it might've opened anyway, and Phi calls him a stubborn old man. They leave the room, and Diana asks Sigma about his true age. He tells her his mind must be almost 67, as he came back from 2074 and was more or less that old there. Diana asks if it's the same with Phi, and Sigma says that she, too, came back from 2074, but her mind is still young, around 20 years old. Diana does the math and suggests that that means Phi was born around 2054, but Sigma says no, she was born in 2008. Diana says the math doesn't add up, but Sigma clarifies that she was in cold sleep from April 2029 to January 2074. Diana asks how it's possible for them to come back in time, and he says it's the SHIFT phenomenon. He gives a similar explanation to what Akane did, using the alternate history where they pushed the button as the example. Diana asks for a better explanation of why it happens, and Sigma says he doesn't know. He knows how, but not why. Then we get exposition about Sigma's strange childhood. One winter, he and his friends went fishing and he slipped and fell into the water. He woke up in his bed the next day, under the blankets, and when he asked his friends what happened the previous day, they said he blew them off and didn't come fishing with them. Another time he was about to get run over by a car and found himself in the school gym, or fell off the roof and woke up on the school bus. Sounds like he was accident-prone. At the time, though, he thought they were extremely vivid dreams. Now he knows better, that each time he was in danger, he SHIFTed.
---

C-Team is deceased, as is Eric. FIRE, CRASH, FIVE, ICE. Huh, so another of Eric's is ICE...that's quite interesting. Is it tied to Chris in the lake? Though that's certainly not the first ICE in this series... Sigma is certain that Diana voted for Q-Team at 13:30, though, so C-Team's execution mystifies him. Diana's not sure she did, though. She doesn't remember. Sigma says that's not right, that they weren't injected with the amnesia drug. Then he suggests that maybe the votes were split properly, and that C-Team died for some other reason--if they're even dead. Diana gets a vision of their execution, though, and is certain that it's real. Sigma asks how Eric died, and the TVs cut in in response, showing his corpse. Then the lights go down, and a cloaked figure appears, wielding some sort of weapon. A scalpel, maybe? Can't think of any of the people in this game with that sort of build; Carlos and Sigma are the only ones tall enough but it's much too slight a build for them. Maybe Mira? Sigma tells Diana to run, and she does, finding Phi. They come back, and Sigma's bleeding out. He mistakes Diana for Luna, and apologizes to her, saying the him from the past won't be coming back here. His SHIFT connection has been cut. Diana's crying, asking what he's saying, and Sigma goes on. "No... Not just you, Luna. Kyle... Lagomorph... The others... But maybe it's better this way... History's changed... Mankind... This world will surely be..." Phi says that as difficult as it is, they have to stay moving. It's not safe here anymore. The killer could be back any time now. Diana asks who the killer is, and Phi says it should just be the two of them there, but Zero must've found some place to hide. Diana wonders if there's really anywhere to hide. Phi thinks Diana's suspicious of her...or is it the other way around? Though Diana is suspicious of Phi. And then Phi gets stabbed, too. She says it was "the killer", but she doesn't think it's Zero. She tells Diana to escape, saying that she'll be the sixth, and Diana can escape once she dies. Phi says this feels nice. Such a familiar smell. Smell? The PA cuts in, adding "DAD" and "TIME" to the list. I enter them. But there's a sound...Diana is murdered before she can escape out the X-Door. The figure in the cloak does so instead. And now, there are no new fragments...nothing left to do but puzzle out how to get through a force quit box. I'm left to return to calling the pendant the six-letter word with "AMULET" and making "FRAGRANCE" the nine, because Phi mentioned a nostalgic scent. No dice. ...There is an exclamation point beneath "Don't Run" in "Outbreak". I figured that was the path to go to, if only because it meant that the data would be hidden in the post claimed by the purge. The scene we saw before ends, and Phi and Diana get blown back, but...Sigma comes out alive. Or is he? He's basically dead. No arms; shard of glass in his eye...he'll be dead before long. And the hydrofluoric acid shower did stop, and the door's been blown away. Eric's dead. Q, tough to tell because of the helmet if he's dead or just unconscious. Mira's alive, though she doesn't think it'll last...oh, there's an injury there, too. She knows that D-Team set the bomb; Zero told them. Mira says it's fine, but Phi deserves something nice in return. She stabbed Phi...no, she injected her with the Radical-6! Diana gets the vision of what happened in the Biolab--Mira taking the syringe, and Q's explanation of what would happen if someone with the virus were to go outside. Phi runs off...rubble comes crashing down. Sigma is certain that this is the history that connects to "that future"...the one that VLR took place in. Sigma says that there's no choice but for them all to stay, because even if Phi stays, once Diana and Sigma reach the surface, a rescue team will come for Phi. Phi demands that they kill her now and burn her remains to stop the spread of Radical-6.
---

Diana says she can't do that. She still has the stun gun from the Manufacturing Room, and uses it to knock Phi out. Sigma asks Diana if she knows what she's doing. She says she does. She's going to save Sigma and Phi. And the radio comes in.

"Hey. What's going on? This is Control, I repeat, this is Control. Please come in! I'm asking you to respond!"

"This is Diana..."

"Oh, thank God! You really had me worried there. What happened?"

"Six of us are...dead."

"What?"

"Counting myself... there are only three left."

"How... Why are...?"

"They were killed."

"Wh-What?!"

"I... I guess you could say I killed them. No...no, that's not quite right. Not just them. Not just these six... All of them... All six billion... Soon I will have killed six billion people."

"Are you there?! Respond!"

Sigma says he supposes this was meant to be, and asks that we put our hope in the next Sigma, the him that will return from the future. Pan up to the full, red moon. And credits! I got another ending. 4 more to go. Based on this one being called "D-1", I assume it's one more each for D and Q-teams, and two for C-Team. I wonder which team will have the true ending? Still no new fragments, though. Time to just clean up the last stray bits of obvious bad endings. I start by not drinking the antidote with D-Team. Diana smashes the vials and says there's poison in them. Sigma asks why they're writhing and groaning, then, and Diana suggests it's a pain drug, and shouldn't be lethal. It is. I go back a bit further in the timeline to take the wrong vials with C-Team..but, what? I lose the ability to fast-forward before the decision game! This time, Carlos's tongue has gone numb. But then I was able to fast-forward again...I honestly don't know which one the antidote is in, if this does randomize. I think it's in E? I choose E, even though I intended to go for a wrong one. Carlos has a vision of Junpei's head in the freezer...I think that happened last time. Huh, so the correct one randomizes. But outside of taking the wrong one intentionally, I have no idea how to progress anywhere? This time it's Akane who gets it. That means the correct one is B this time. I select D. I'm actually able to fast-forward part way, I guess it's the same whether you get the dummy or the real one. But there's a new Fragment in Q-Team's section! I wonder what opened it. It's called "Reality". Q stands alone in the Lounge. The casualties are announced. Mira is the only one other than Q that's alive, and the X-Door has been opened and subsequently closed. Mira has escaped. I guess maybe she really was the cloaked figure. But I didn't think this was here before! Q gets visions of the past. C-Team's execution, Mira plunging the scalpel into Eric's back... Okay, so the chain of events that leads to this is C-Team Executed, Inject the Radical-6, Don't Push the Button. Mira was the one who killed D-Team in that timeline, too. Q wonders why he sees that, and wonders why he's alive right now, as he remembers being stabbed by a scalpel. Zero asks him if he really wants to know, and suggests he come to the Quantum Computer Dome. Everything will be explained there. And Q and Zero meet face-to-face. Zero supposes that Q detests him, and says he's welcome to kill him if he wants. It should be easy if he puts his mind to it. Q says he wants to know the truth. Gab stands by Zero. Zero gestures to the walls, and a number of panels open up, revealing more of the Dark Qs. Those are Q's "spare bodies". Oh! Like Kyle is for Sigma. Zero continues that they were prepared in order to support him and his plan. Wait...no way. Okay, coming up to the end of a post and I've got a fresh theory as to Q's identity.
---

Q is Left. Zero is Brother. The Myrmidons are all clones of Left, the younger brother of the founder of Free the Soul; we learned this in VLR. Dio was one of them. And Brother was known to be an esper, and it's been shown that being an esper tends to run in families, so it wouldn't be surprising if Left was one as well--which Q certainly seems to be.

Zero continues that the spare bodies function mainly as physical labor, plus additional deeds. He shows the bodies moving other bodies around--Carlos for one, I think that's the timeline that they shifted into, but also Eric. Have we seen that yet? Zero confirms that Q is not human. His consciousness does not reside in that body, but rather, his thought center is there, in the quantum computer. Okay, so my theory was wrong. It is more similar to the GAULEMs. I had that theory earlier, I think it was after C-Team originally got attacked by a Dark Q, but it wasn't worth discussing at the time. Q says that's why he didn't die then, and his lack of memories is because he just came into existence. But he's certain he has a true heart. Zero assumes it's the remnant of the boy he was modeled on...was I right after all? The boy struggled with an incurable disease and died at the age of 10. No, that doesn't match up with the story of Brother and Left. Brother's anti-human outlook on life came in response to Left being murdered. The boy's name was Sean. I assume that he was the one who would have had potentially life-saving surgery had the taxi cab not crashed? And that's Q's name, too. Sean was used as the mold to create Q's personality. Zero says humans may be the same. Not all of them retain their consciousness in their brain. This sounds like what Lotus was talking about when we went through Door 8. Q has another question. Why did Zero give him a personality? Why not make a simple robot if he wanted an assistant? Zero says he wanted to see the world as Sean did. Then he says he has something to do, and he'll speak to Q later. He commands him to play the Decision Game. Q says the game is already over, and Zero says that's only in regards to the others. There is a button. The choices are press it, or don't. If he does, the computer retains all the data that makes him uniquely him. Memory, personality, how he thinks and senses. If he pushes the button, all of the data will be duplicated and transferred to a virtual space. There, a copy of him will live indefinitely. That world will be an exact match to reality, and there's no way he'll know it's false, but it will be a simulation, and in this world, his original self will be required to stay and exist. The Sleeping Beauty Problem! The original and the copy will have no differences. But if he doesn't press it, the data will be erased. And thus, he will die completely. So there are three possibilities, but only two options. Obviously, start with the "don't press", for the quick bad end. Q says he just wants Zero to end it. Then we press it, and Program "Sean 729" is transferred to virtual space. Huh, and then if I go back into the fragment, I have to choose each half separately. But first...Q-Team's fragments have a couple of name inputters. In particular...in the 3-Way Standoff, attempting to select "Q" asks me to input Q's name. Which we now know. ...And it gives an error message. I can't input "Sean 729", either; there are no number keys. And one too few spaces to properly spell out SevenTwoNine. Bah, that was no help at all. Looks like I landed in the virtual world, where Sean recovered from his disease. He feels like he's had a really bad dream. It's the same music and setpieces as Eric's flashbacks. But yeah, Sean's basically in a child's paradise. The screen says "Happy End" with a picture of a gift box. It's not a proper ending, though. Q asks Zero why he's still on this side, while an identical version of him is living out a happy life? Zero has yet another story.
---

A senior citizen and a boy with an incurable disease met in a hospital. The child was always reading books significantly above his level. The majority of his young life was spent confined to a hospital bed, so books were his only friends. The boy was very gifted, and his ability was highly regarded by his elder, so in exchange for new books every day, the boy would share his academic knowledge. The boy was told that when his disease was cured, he was welcome to a job. However, life was unfair. The path to the child's future closed after a number of coincidences piled up. The boy just laughed. He never laid blame. He simply, quietly accepted his fate. He did not despair. Giving up on his life didn't mean giving up on his dreams. Before he died, he shared them with his old friend. And that dream is finally...

Q asks what Zero is talking about. Zero says "The universe. This quantum computer contains all of the infinite number of realities within space. Let's suppose that there's someone, somewhere who can fully operate this program. Perhaps he'll find he can traverse the universe." Q does his best Solid Snake impression, and Zero's response is..."6140-4091." Yes! We've got our eight-digit number! Q asks what Zero's saying, and he tells Q to be sure to remember that number, as the time will come when it'll be handy. He inputs it on the keypad on the side of his "helmet", and...his entire head comes off. Not just the helmet. He's still speaking, or screaming. But that was important nonetheless, because we've got two places where we need an eight-digit number. I'm almost certain it'll work for Q-Team's Force Quit Box, but I want to try it in the shower room first.
---

As expected, it's no good. When I got it wrong the first time, Sigma suggested maybe there was a hint in the room itself. Was there? None of the hints in my file from the locker room seem to pertain to a number. Well, I'll figure it out eventually, probably. ...It doesn't work on Q's Force Quit Box, either? That I didn't expect.

There are no new fragments. Right now, I've got a few options. I can figure out the last answer to the three-way standoff. I can figure out how to not get Eric to kill Q after Mira dies in the Pod Room. I can open a Force Quit Box. Or I can find the password for the Door of Fate. None of these seem possible with the current data.

...Wait. Something's off. The timeline where C-Team is executed is almost completely filled in, and it's all green and blue. The one where Q-Team is executed is almost as full, and it's all red and blue. But the one on the right, where D-Team is executed at 13:30...it's got plenty of missing pieces still...and Door of Fate is in that segment! Yeah, that's on that route...I wonder.

Huh. Weren't there ever only five letters available for inputting X-Passes? I just noticed, one of the X-Passes in "Pop Off" is six letters long. And I wonder if the only other live name in that timeline is the answer...nope. Seems like nothing I input will keep Eric from shooting Q. I don't know what to do. I am, once again, completely stumped. But it has to be somehow relevant...that Door of Truth is in the timeline where D-Team was executed at 13:30. Could it be the result of them transporting?
---