#ch13a

Poor Invader-Hunt Takumi. It's bad enough that this version of him was literally possessed by the G'ie early on, that no one in this loop knows a damn thing about, so now he's like some harbinger of death, disaster and much confusion besides that. (Not that he helped things by killing Eito, but that had nothing to do with what came after)

Anyways. Funnily enough, the fact that the parallel-leaping involves the same suits as the G'ie infested Sponsor - who also uses multiple parties - fits in a little too neatly to look suspicious. These suits show up not horribly long before Takumi and co see a whole horde of them. So without further context, you really would assume that it was the Sponsor who was messing around with Takumi, with seeds of suspicion being sown in that when Takumi seems to be doing things that are helpful and- miraculous, while he's out for the count

(yeeeeah hahaha it's FUNNY you should say that.............)

I wonder what it would have been like to play this more blindly, though. Playing this after even just the beginning of the SF path means you know well where the suit comes from and what it's actually for. Which means you might even have some suspicion that there is a parallel-leaping Takumi in the mix, when you get to the part about the liquid appearing out of thin air and an alternate self living his life in his place. But then again, with so damn many suits around, it's nigh impossible to keep track of them all. So you'd have to be pretty sharp about it with how well it's been disguised

Jumping back a bit-

Ahahahaha oh goddddd- a valid concern when this is a complete unknown of a situation, and when you know that there is something that causes a complete personality override, you're kind of internally screaming because it encapsulates what Takumi's deepest fear was while he's hung up on a complete red herring

I love the narrative bit of how they divert from investigating on the issue further, because clearly it's not Takumi's actual fault here and the suspicion for Gaku's murder has - fairly reasonably - transferred to the Sponsor anyway. But the sheer irony is that he's right on the money- the first lapses in memory he had were literally the G'ie taking over him, because he is unconscious when it does its dirty work. And yet the other times really had nothing to do with this version of him at all, he just got knocked out through other means

As for Takumi sleeping a lot generally, and at times severely oversleeping, I wonder if that is also part of a device to make his moments of manipulated consciousness look less suspicious, but just suspicious enough that he suspects something is amiss

Also side note that Sponsor neither confirms nor denies that Gaku's death was their own doing. Probably wanted to take ownership of it more tacitly for the threat angle- and boy, it works

I mean... he did indeed, in the ones where he kills Eito from the start. If you wanna get technical about it, he's done it many, many many times over the course of loops, since he has to restart those loops from the earliest possible day, after all. What's more, this whole 'absorbed Eito' thing was more or less debunked in one such loop, Takumi only gets possessed because there's a G'ie parasite, that's it