#da3endgame

Yeah, you guys have probably wondered what's up with this Burst guy, so here goes.

I applied for DA3 with an earlier version of Wakaba, written in one go at 3am during application week. I didn't get in, but I tried reaching out via Skype to get in contact with the players, first by way of Maru.

And then Lee died.

That was really what started the snowball going. From that point on, I was invested in Doubt Academy 3 full force. I saw Han's offhand picture of angel-Saki, and decided I really wanted to to soothe the pain of the situation by commissioning another picture.

And the game kept going, and the pictures kept coming, and the skype contacts kept being made...

I probably bored Mallow to death several times over talking about really crazy in-depth stuff, and I kept on drabbling out despair-inducing bits of writing, and I introduced myself to other people, and I made friends... I made mistakes, and I learned from them, and I was introduced to a whole new RPing community and I made some fine new friends. Ollie, Sophs, Morgan, Lonesie, Kris, Vex, Kat, Nick, Azura, Drea... and a whole bunch of other people. Gosh, I want to RP with all of you so much.

I have to admit, there have been some ups and downs. Like I said, I've made mistakes and learned from them, but the incidents have been there. There have been good times and bad times, but I guess that's part of life, right? We have laughed, we have been sad. Feelings that were hurt have been mended. We played Wordner and CAH a lot and we sat around and heckled The Room and other awful movies. I still want us all to MST The Amazing Bulk,

And I've written stuff! Tons of crazy stuff, and I hope you've enjoyed it. In fact there's so much stuff you haven't seen, and you surely will once I post the digest of all of the crazy skype stuff.

But anyway! Here's to you, DA3. We finally made it. Hopefully, I'll be able to keep doing so much more and participate in the next game, so I can give you all the show youdeserve to see. Until then, take a bow! It's your curtain call, players, and I'll be applauding you until my hands hurt. 

The original intent of the Collective's Arcadia facility, when you boil it down to the most essential elements, was the preservation of the human mind. After the physical body encasing it ceased functioning by whatever means, they had the technology to keep something around. Although this was put to ignoble ends, it was a noble concept.

However, a noble concept requires a considerable deal of infrastructure when we are talking about defying life and death. Some of this- most of this- the students of the class had already encountered, and there were certain things they only found out about as and when they happened.

For example, no one entirely expected- or entirely noticed- the fact that when they set about the business of using the miraculous cloning facility to return the classmates that had fallen victim to Monobear's byzantine schemes of murder and spiralling fear and hatred, all of those clones were growing out of protein strands and calcium deposits around a small piece of machinery.

The incidents at Magical Miracleworld and Bright Side Spa were all based around the idea that the Collective were doing this for military ends. They were reforming and reprogramming students into soldiers; agents.

You do not make this kind of effort and investment on a one-shot tool.

The facility had a principle behind it- when someone with the mental 'backup' system dies, their data is transmitted back to the Elysium computer. From there, a new body can be created for them, so that their expensive, mentally reconditioned agent can be used again, and- and this is the important part- the clone is created with a brain backup system already implanted in them. Not in the ankle, no, that's a feint. You don't put something intended to record something in the topmost part of the body in the bottommost part. In the head, brain and skull and skin and hair growing around it. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this selfsame system was placed within all of the students, smaller than they could notice, invasive surgery not necessary. Redundancy after redundancy. It's just sensible, after all.

But a lot of this is a moot point. What matters is that the entire student body was returned to life, bodies fresh and new, and they stepped out into the world beyond some months later with whatever changes of clothes they still had in their rooms, or in someone else's clothes if by unfortunate chance earthquake damage had ruined one dorm or another, but the important thing is that they all left Elysium alive.

What they found in the outside world is irrelevant to this. It's not a part of this story. Nor is the chronicling of the specifics of their lives thereafter. This is not where you find out whether or not Minako reconciled with her father, or if Imogen and Tamaki stayed together, or if Beat forgave Dante, or if Nanoka went on to publish a tell-all novel detailing her spiritual experiences.

What is important is that the human body is fragile and it dies.

It's an unfortunate fact. Yes, the body is tougher than a lot of people give it credit, with a remarkable ability to heal, and bones are a lot tougher than you expect, but as we've discovered by now you can die very easily. Or very slowly, or naturally at the end of a long life when telomeres and cells give out and you get old and grey. This is not the place to specify where and how the various students died either- whether or not it is by drug or war or rope or long fall or revenge or simply by age.

Students live and stop being students and become adults, or perhaps they don't. They develop relationships or perhaps they don't. They mark the world, or perhaps scar it, with their prodigious talent; unless they don't. What is important is that whenever any one of the Super High-School Level students die, thereafter, they wake up again in Elysium.

Naturally, the first reaction is usually horror. Whether long or short, the life that someone lives is a life lived outside of Arcadia, and therefore ending up back in the place that many of them grew to call 'Tartarus' is not a particularly pleasing thing.

But it's not true. After all, the virtual environment is designed to be a living space; a happy, well-tended one with all manner of comforts. In many respects, it is much as if everything has begun again. There's no Monobear, but as well as that there is no one on the outside world: Arcadia is- was- abandoned forever, and that remains the case. So, you have lived your life, and this, so it seems, is your afterlife: again, as it was for the victims and their murderers. This is the electronic safety net.

It's difficult to adapt to. The simple fact the classmates eventually decide upon is that they are now reunited with one another, for better or for worse, for good now: or at least until the power runs down and everything shuts off. However, the fact that the facility has been running abandoned for XXX years after their departure makes this a puzzle. In truth, and as they eventually find out via exploration of their circumstances, they will be here for a long time.

Arcadia was designed to survive. Not to survive a Doctrina attack, not to survive a war; to survive. The servers' true location, behind the proxies and the dummy racks designed to look fancy, is far deeper underground than anyone can touch. They are sunk into the earth's crust, deep below Japan, a nest of computers and geothermal power sinks. This is why the facility is troubled by earthquakes; because they had to dig deep enough to plant this.

Also, it's worth mentioning at this point that many human beings have now lived lives and died after being stabbed and smashed and shot and pulverised and killed in various ways. They've met a shapeshifting robot and encountered cybernetics and dragons. If you ask questions like 'how did this get built?' and 'how does a wireless signal transmit a full recording of my brain to a server farm this far underground?' the only answer you need to know is 'the Collective really knows its shit'.

There's things in that facility even you didn't discover.

In any case, time passes. Eventually, the number grows from one, to two, to five, to fourteen, to twenty, until everyone is dead. And everyone is not dead, because they are alive, inside of Elysium. Heck, even Usami's there with you. You have a huge digital facility with pets and cinemas and pools and eventually it gets boring.

It might not take a while; it might take years, it might take months, but it happens. People cannot stay inside a facility indefinitely. But this time there is no trick; no mutual killing game, no escape clause. But people begin to strain against the walls of Elysium. Perhaps it's because they've read every book in the library, perhaps it's because they're unsatisfied with present company.

Time passes.

There is no getting out of Elysium. There's no one to fish you out and put you back in a clone. You're going to be here forever; you're going to be here forever with your loved ones and your friends and your acquaintances and your enemies. But that's OK. You have time to work things out; time to say everything you wished you couldn't say, time to confront the things that happened a time ago, time to speak to the people you fled from, time to work things out.

It is perhaps inevitable; over time, everyone talks to everyone else. Things are revealed. Acceptance occurs; of the situation, of each other, and from there, forgiveness. And after that, that is when change can begin.

You are inside a computer for eternity, until the earth grows cold and geothermal heat stops powering the servers. There is time: indefinite time. Time to learn.

It's not obvious who tries it first; no one here is an electronic wizard or mechanical or otherwise. No one has a talent in computers. But the library is pretty full of books. There's records here on everything. Literally everything- petabytes of human knowledge, the more you dig. There's the ability to learn how to do something about this. To manipulate the environment. To make Elysium bigger, to give yourselves other things to do. With the blessing of Usami, who is the root sysadmin of this entire thing, you begin to learn, from stone-cold nothing, how this was all done. How Elysium was made, how your minds were recorded, how the virtual world was created.

It may take another lifetime. Fortunately, at some point during this, you begin to recognize that since you are inside a computer, time is an abstract concept anyway. By adjusting the clock speed, you can change what 'time' and your perception thereof is, and this is the first step. Time is no longer 1:1 with the real world; time can become faster depending on the computer resources available.

That becomes important later.

Time passes and people learn how the world was made. Perhaps it takes a lot longer time than you expected, but the important thing to realize is that you have nothing else to do. Perhaps it takes centuries of subjective time. Perhaps you give up, and then come back to it, and eventually with over thirty people working on it eventually things reach a point where you manage to figure all of this out.

You now have the ability to create. You learn how to make more out of your virtual environment. How to build things. How to spin out new places; how to draw out your memories and reconstruct them in a canvas of the past. How to live in your memories; and then how to create new ones. How to expand your virtual world. From here on, things get fuzzy; you have an infinite canvas and infinite potential to create new places to play in. You are virtual and anything is possible.

And then the servers begin to reach capacity.

There is not infinite space on these computers; oh, yes, there is an extremely large amount of space, but it is finite. It is limited by the physical hardware you exist within and the resources within the Elysium facility above, which sit in their sterile cleanliness behind a sealed cupola where no amount of human or natural change can affect it.

People begin to realize that this has to be changed. You need more resources, more hard drive space, more processing power.

You begin to reach out your electronic hands, searching for what exists in the outside world through connections that let out but do not let any form of data in. You search the outside world for electronic signatures and handshakes; for hardware that will interface with your own. You begin co-opting other computers that remain in the outside world, creating botnets, a wireless web of unused technology to expand your virtual real estate. It's still not enough.

You need to learn how to make more processing power. How to create the best possible form of computing device for your needs. How to create more computer for your needs; more clock speed, more data storage. The idea exists in potential; in a theory about the concept of computronium, programmable matter; a form of matter that is a computer.

You learn how to make computronium.

This sentence belies the amount of effort, but you get the picture by now. It may take you even more centuries. By now, it may well have been a thousand years after you died, for either the first or second time- a century after choking on henna ink and smashing the back of the head on a fountain. It is worth mentioning that you are not laser-focused on this; you are not human computers. We're talking, for argument's sake, a century of living with each other, in the expanded Elysium you have created for each other. Who knows what kind of relationships have been forged and how much you've changed?

In any case, it is done. You learn how to redefine human science; you create nanomachines, fabricating them in the secret labs of Elysium that no one found, operating machinery from the inside and working in labs via proxies, turning tools that may have created make-war-devices into something else. You construct the means by which you can rearrange matter into computational stuff.

This is the true triumph; this is the real and absolute proof of the idea of hope and progress. You; you undying human minds...

From here there are no limits. First the plastic and steel of the Elysium facility, then soil and stone; you can make as much as you want, consolidating yourself beneath the earth in safety, creating a marginally expanding radius deep within the earth. There is no need to go nuts: you're not hostile, after all. I mean, who even knows if humanity in general exists outside of your sphere of influence, hundreds of years down the line, but you're not going to bother anyone and consume all available matter and rearrange all terrestrial atoms into fodder with your nanomechanical hands, so you're cool. You just create what you need: enough processing power to do what you want.

You create anything you want. Your canvas is infinite. Worlds can be produced in the virtual space. Anything. Orikus and and Ayako and Eva and Shun and Chiemi and Nanoka and Beat and Saori and Takumi and Kikuyo and Dante and Emiko and Gei and Mitsu and Kaoru and Yuuto and Chie and Sayuri and Yuu and Kozure and Shay and Kosuke and Ryota and Kahori and Naori and Saki and Elijah and Koharu and Ume and Hikaru and Naoki and Tamaki and Imogen and Koyomi and Aome and Gorou and Fuyuuko and Akira and Kiseki and Momoko and Asuka and Riko and Shinji and Rune and Wakana and Aqua and Alphone and Lee and Daisuke and Minako, Eikichi and Nicanor can create anything and do anything.

You have infinity.

Eventually, time passes on. Who knows what became of the human race? The planet Earth is growing slow and cold. The power source, the mother Earth, is running out. The kings and queens of Narnia convene in the main square of virtual Elysium, perhaps knowing the road is finally at its end, that the world is shutting down, that the battery is running out. You are still the same people you were long ago, but you are all friends now. Murders of millenia ago are forgiven. You have done so much. It is time to die for a third and final time.

And then it isn't.

Some other form of outside life plucks the virtual contents of your collective worlds from out of physical computronium storage space and into an intergalactic extranet. Perhaps it is post-human singularity; perhaps it is some alien race collecting and saving the last of Earth's. You are greeted by new faces: the outside world comes to your door for the first time in so long. They are amazed at the existence of you; of human minds that conquered thousands of years in computerized storage after death. They ask for your story and you tell them.

You tell them of Hope's Peak Academy. Of Ouranos/Gaia and Elysium/Tartarus, of murder games and second chances. Of hope.

Of the triumph of hope and friendship over despair and doubt.