prawn pot hangout spot

the form closed after what i think was around 36 hours. but this time it didn't return to the typical "Thank you" page. instead it changed to this:

so first, i think this might be confirmation that it is still only people who made first-round submissions whose submissions still qualify; they received 1,229 submissions out of 1,571 available entrants. that sounds to me like a limited initial pool of individuals (or individual email addresses) who were prompt enough to become 'entrants' in the very first round, and on this latest round, they received 1,229 responses back of that limited pool of 1,571. that's what makes sense to me, anyway. also, really hilarious to me that if there had been just 4 fewer submissions this round then it would've totaled at the number 1225 by sheer coincidence and confused everyone even more, but anyway asddffjhf

'Next correspondence: When less than 24 hours are left.' so presumably, the next round of submissions will start exactly 24 hours before ch5 drops. i think response emails will probably roll out prior to the start of that new submission period, maybe even in the next couple of days if it's like last time? it's nice that the entrants at least get a heads up this time to prepare answers; if you're part of the limited pool of people who are able to get responses back from this, then you might want to consider using your valuable submission to help document specific answers/responses in collaboration with the other entrants. godspeed to you guys lol

there's one more interesting difference with the new page: the title currently reads, in all caps, 'INTERIM RESULT.'

it makes sense to refer to these results that way, we are now in an interim period between ch5's announcement and release. but this is the first time this page has been titled something in all caps, and i'm actually less interested in what it says than i am in who is saying it, and what it means that that specific person is saying it.

i think it means Gaster is now confirmed to be directly connected to this ARG, and to the mysterious character who has been giving the responses.

i was thinking about this unknown character before this most recent submission period closed, and i've found them funny for a while, because. they're obviously not Gaster, just based on their writing style, but their overall demeanor is also very different from him; they'll get straight up impatient or even sarcastic when given certain types of answers, especially for stuff that's too nonspecific, unoriginal, wishy-washy or just generally unhelpful for what they're trying to do. i said on bsky that they come across to me as 'like a jaded lab assistant who's just trying to wrap these surveys up,' and that was before the site changed and we were given hard evidence that Gaster was directly connected to this thing at all. now that we know he is, i'm starting to wonder if 'jaded lab assistant' isn't too far off from what this character's role actually is; whatever's going on here, it seems Gaster is part of it, and knowing him, he's likely the head scientist at this very organized weirdo operation. this is just another part of the long-term project, the experiment, that they're running. Deltarune is the main experiment that Gaster is conducting, and whoever this other person is, they're conducting these...supplementary, Weird Route-related surveys that are directly sanctioned by him. aka, this person works for him.

aka. Gaster has an employee. or something akin to that. disclaimer of i could be wrong and that's just what i personally think might be happening here

why is that a big deal? i mean, maybe you could already infer based on vibes that this whole thing was Gaster-related, but having a hunch is simply different from having confirmation, so i think this is really cool. it's a big deal to me because it gives new data points to work with, to learn more about the situation. if this is the case, then Gaster is officially not running a one-man operation, he has at least one employee, and at least for now, they seem to handle certain minutiae that's not directly related to the DEVICE experiment itself, like gathering data from the Player(s) every so often using these thankyou page submissions, and handling the email responses for those submissions. i wonder if that also indicates that they see the Player/Angel entity as like? a collective of beings? or are they just aware that there are well upwards of 1500 of these Player/Angel entities, not that we're necessarily a hive?

that might be too speculative, but to speculate even more, maybe this supports the idea that this person is the second narrator who discarded the Vessel? we don't have a JP version of their ARG dialogue to compare to, but imo they sound similarly point-blank & nihilistic in english at least. they sound like they could be the same person. them working with Gaster would explain why they were able to fuck with the gonermaker in the first place, why they even had access to it. because they're part of the minimum of two people currently known to be running the experiment. if that was the case, the fact that they discarded the Vessel at all would be interesting, because it could either mean 1) the discarding of the Vessel was part of the original plan and Gaster is pulling a Dr. Glenn Pierce and made it seem like the experiment didn't go to plan when that was part of it all along, or 2) the second narrator was a disgruntled employee who genuinely sabotaged part of the experiment, but instead of getting fired they were just made to write a bunch of emails. i definitely prefer option 2, personally