#i'm free...

Corrie: "so which colors would you mix to get magenta?" sorry what was that, zero? i heard "murasaki"

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Dio, K, and I gingerly lifted the woman up and carried her to the infirmary.

Perhaps he just didn’t consider himself one of the “boys,” or maybe it was something else… But whatever the reason, Tenmyouji only stared.

Corrie: me, averting my eyes from character tags: that’s some weird behavior, old man who i’ve never met before!

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Corrie: The astronomy theming is fun and I’m interested to see how relevant it becomes! I haven’t been spoiled in any detail but I have seen references to concepts such as “time travel” and “the moon”

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Corrie: girl you got the distributaries?

Phi: Time to see what the results are.

Phi: Maybe it’s different this time…

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Corrie: it's interesting that per the rules so far, unless something changes (and i hope it will), i'll never be in an escape room with K or clover, and i'll never be in one without phi

also quark and dio but i care somewhat less about hearing from them

Storm: you don't want to hear the magnitude of dio's wit? Impossible

Corrie: i'm surprised that zero said we weren't limited to three rounds or some other arbitrary number. if we all agree to ally we could just boost up to 9 for everyone no problem. but that's not going to happen is it

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Corrie: ooough they weren’t lying that thought experiment CAN dilemma. the smartest play is probably to stick with magenta doors for as long as I can and keep building up points with luna…but the most interesting play is to hear from as many characters as possible. also that strategy doesn’t account for the fact that people who betrayed in the first round have a head start to 9, and there’s no guarantee they’ll wait for everyone to catch up. the fact that there’s a second dilemma, layered on the first, in which you could ally by waiting or betray by opening door 9 asap is so goooood

Storm: yeah!!!!

and what's really fun is throughout the rounds you will see those varying situations, everyone stalled or trying to keep the top points people from getting to 9

just the mix of people and personalities alone ensures if it was just the A/B rounds and rooms in a vacuum it would already be fairly complex

Corrie: i loooove the choice to hold the first AB game without explaining the rules thoroughly. make the player (and characters) act on limited information and then scramble to salvage the situation

Storm: yeah

Corrie: that’s good game design baby!!

Corrie: for pete’s sake.

Sigma: Yeah, it did change… Mine changed from red to cyan.

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Corrie: I FUCKED UP

Dio: K! Goddamnit! Wait, you son of a bitch!

Storm: LMAO THERE HE GOES

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Corrie: sigma getting dizzy in the robot workshop. squints.

Storm: what have you been up to. where have you been.

Corrie: first round was the lounge with phi and luna, second was the rec room with K and alice, and now i've backed up one decision and am in the "gaulem" workshop with luna

i feel...overwhelmed with information! i have no guesses about murderers or motives yet. it's a little harder when all the completed doors are open to everyone, and i'm having a harder time keeping track of teams when bracelets change every round. the AB game makes the web of potential motives so complicated

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Corrie: so i take it there are one or more gaulems amogus

Storm: lots of possibilities there…

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Sigma: So let's choose "ally" and get the hell out of here together. Sound good?

Luna: Okay...

Sigma: Come on, why do you look so sad?

Luna: Well, it's just...There's a part of me that can't feel genuinely happy about that...

Corrie: hey my steady friend. what’s up with that

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Corrie: clover i'm on my knees. please don't axe murder my AB buddy

Phi: You’re going to make me repeat myself. I never said Luna was the killer.

Phi: Still, I have a feeling Alice thought she was.

Phi: Which would mean that Clover probably does too…

Storm: clover no!!! remember the bookmarks

Corrie: welp she’s dead. or is she? with all the nonsense going on I feel like I’m in danger of forgetting about really important details like the presence of the gaulems. the artificial skin is apparently very convincing…but does that extend as far as temperature and a pulse? presumably a muscle relaxant would have no effect on them. I highly doubt alice is playing possum, but luna could be, if the gaulems don’t have to play by the rules regarding bracelets falling off

----- Corrie: sigma gets woozy brain fog while they're poking around in gaulem computer caches. okay

this is exactly what i'm talking about! i'm forgetting important info like the weird plague newspaper!!

For just a moment I thought of Radical-6…But I didn’t want to worry Phi if I didn’t have to.

which everyone took bizarrely seriously considering they found it in a carefully staged puzzle room. guys please learn what a reputable source is

Storm: zero iii only provides the most reputable sources. come on.

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Corrie: hang on a sec. I’ve been trusting that the game is actually set in 2028, but my evidence for that is

it said so at the beginning

Clover is here

but

there could have been a sneaky time skip after the prologue

there are robots

so actually I’m completely untethered!

I’m imagining a scenario in which they actually rigged a model for the gaulems, and later you meet back up with luna in a new skeleton terminator frame that’s speaking with her voice and using her animations… but sadly I don’t expect that to happen or they would have used it for Golm

that would be so sick though. a girl can dream

Storm: god yeah ;;

Corrie: this also makes sigma suspect. I stand by my vote that it’s more fucked up to find out you’re a robot

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Corrie: new theory based on spoilers (the existence of ZTD): phi and sigma are both gaulems. they got…scanned? in 2028, released back into the wild, and reconstructed much later. the phi and sigma(? pretty sure) that I see in the ZTD cover art are the originals, not the ones I currently know

Storm: that's a good theory!

whether it is good (accurate) or good (extremely amusing)....

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Corrie: i love how they simply did not bother to put sigma in group shots

Storm: sigma yelling from across the room

he's shy of the fourth wall. doesn't wanna be seen.

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Corrie: ooooooh she's got the distributaries!!

Phi: Where…where are we?

Her voice was low and rough.

Sigma: Huh?

Phi: Ah, I see. Hm.

Phi: This timeline…

Corrie: "he must not have made this jump"??? do i get to be reality-hopping buddies with phi????

i didn't think the flowchart was going to be diegetic!!

Storm: oh are you far enough in now that I can ask for more character thoughts

Corrie: my character thoughts is. i love phi. let that girl be ruthless!

other character thoughts...hmm...quark is basically absent in these branches. REALLY was not expecting Dio The Eugenics Cultist. have a feeling this is going to be a "wellllll the plague was good because it Purged The Weak" type organization. even though phi had the opportunity to kill him in the cryopod, i now doubt she did because she needed info from him. it seems like she knows what's going on in other instances of the game, but not the context of the outside world

luna...i like her and really want to trust her but you know that lady has an Agenda. it might be a benevolent agenda though. unclear as yet

wonder who K's dad is. trying really hard to pretend i don't know who the senior citizens are

ride-or-die with phi. but part of the riding is saying "not now, ferb" when she wants to backstab people

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Corrie: it's a shame they mostly avoid showing sigma in key artwork, and that he doesn't get a voice. junpei felt like more of a character

Storm: yeah it's a very interesting choice that they decided to do that

Corrie: he certainly has personality! and character details like...being in a research cohort?? so it's extra weird to me that they show his face so little

Storm: I will say it's a conscious and thought out decision but now I must recuse myself on this topic. aiat

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Corrie: oooh three people were in cryosleep in the treatment center. my guesses are....clover and alice, but by my current pet theories, everyone else has something that precludes them

[18:13] another no-evidence spitball: assuming that sigma is indeed a construct recreated in the future, what if his organic self went on to develop some of the technology that’s critical to the game. it’s cool that he’s doing undergrad research(?) and i think this would be fun

lmao what if he’s K’s dad

this series rules. I’m just taking potshots bc nothing is off the table

[18:36] I’m seriously mulling this now. it’s tidy in a way I have come to expect

[21:56] ooooough I am hoping more and more that this is the case. I’ve been kind of foolishly proceeding as if sigma is some unlucky doofus who got dragged along for the ride, but that’s not really how previous nonary games have worked. and perhaps this way lies madness, but: neither junpei nor date was that. they were hopelessly entangled

Storm: zero saw his outfit and was just "ugh I need to put this guy through the torment nexus"

Corrie: [12:19] help I’m really invested in this theory now shdjdksl. in that same flashback sequence sigma is like “boo hoo, why me, I haven’t tangled with organized crime or anything like that”

well sigma then the simple answer is that it’s not about what you have done, but what you will do, someday, in another life

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Corrie: WHAT

I lifted it slowly, carefully, to my neck, as if someone were guiding my hand with theirs…

…And drew it across my throat.

wait asldfksd. let's say one million people were to decide to do a handstand right now

Storm: THAT WAS MY FIRST ENDING

Corrie: clover’s comment about a more powerful esper being able to suppress her attempts to use the field, combined with the stuff in the first game about the power of suggestion, have me eying quark pretty suspiciously

everyone dies bc this kid’s dreaming too hard

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Corrie: WE’RE BACK BABY LET’S GOOOO

Zero: I have chosen two things of great importance to tell you.

Zero: First, I will tell you about termites.

WEIRD MONOLOGUE TIME

Storm: sigma forced into unskippable termites cutscene

Corrie: i want this to be future sigma soooo bad. mr uchikoshi please

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Corrie: jesus. when tenmyouji said "salvage business" i did think "post-apoc" but i didn't consider that it meant quark had grown up post-pandemic

Storm: remember when the pandemic was a prop,

Corrie: GOD. yeah.

Storm: I ran into the ending where everyone is brutally dead first and hadn't explored many other routes yet so I think I believed it fairly early... you being skeptical for so long was so different from my experience and really funny

especially since things are so ambiguous! sigma feeling weird during/after the gaulem bay... that's such a clever place to put a reaction

also to be fair a disease that puts you on fast forward is much weirder than... idk a secret robot having damaged processors

Corrie: in the gaulem bay he just feels dizzy for a second or something like that, but in the security office when they're looking through gaulem footage, he has the serious episode. so i was like "oh phi is poking around in his shared storage/taking up RAM without even realizing"

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Corrie: FUCK YEAH!!!!!!

Sigma: Wh-What….

Sigma: It’s…it’s my face…

MY LONGEST YEA BOI EVER

when i first proposed that sigma’s research would be relevant i was also thinking of cryogenics, robotics, AI development...but now i feel confident saying it's genetics huh

i am a little confused because i was predicating my theory on the assumption that sigma was a robot and therefore had an organic self who diverged. but i guess maybe we're dealing with multiple timelines?

Storm: the game is going to def do its best to confuse you further from here on

Corrie: for now i'm going to continue operating on the assumption that k's dad is an alt!sigma and say: the dissonance between sigma in the game and k's memories of his cold, detached dad is really striking. sigma could have said "dio's got the antidote, go dose yourselves while i go in a white door." but instead he got himself killed trying to save them

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Corrie: current thinking:

present-day people, no stasis: K, tenmyouji, quark, dio, luna (who i suspect of being a robot)

past (2028) people: alice, clover, sigma, phi (a mystery to me)

treatment center seems to indicate that only three people were in cold sleep, so i'm either wrong about one of those or there's a pod/other method of stasis that i haven't encountered yet. hmmmm

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Corrie: the crew quarters were not my favorite in terms of actually doing the puzzle, but i did appreciate how strongly everything was mirror/reflection themed. like the astronomy and alchemy i assume this will only continue to get more thematically relevant

Storm: oh good catch

Corrie: oh it's driving me wild that i haven't seen sigma's face except in flashback. YOU'RE torturing ME

he could look like the guy from the projector and I would have no idea (except that we have some rude bitches on staff and no one has said hey sigma what’s up with your weird eyeball)

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Corrie: I like the contrast between K and dio bc their demeanors are so completely opposite but as soon as they get in the AB rooms they’re playing for keeps

K doesn’t want to kill but that’s the only line

Storm: yeah

I do appreciate someone polite who is also very ruthless

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Corrie: i promised to meet phi at T-5 minutes to die together and then i spent too long talking to luna T.T

GTF-DM-L-016 is formatted like a gaulem designation and the unique part is what clover wrote in blood...but i have no idea who that could be. 016 looks like dio if you mirror it and squint but i don't actually think that's important, i'm just fully spinfoiled now

and now i see that the solution to the "you got injected" lock is probably going to be "amputation"

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Corrie: ohhhh i see why this is one of your favorite endings. lunaaaaaa ;;

we did get quite close to "luna reappears as a terminator." i'll take it!

"sayonara, doctor"? OHOHOHO

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Corrie: she’s so….

Phi: We’ll give the dead the closest thing to a funeral we can manage…

Phi: And when that’s done, we’ll start looking.

Phi: Even if I never leave this place, I’ll figure out why we were here. I swear it.

Corrie: i’m gonna weep

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Corrie: dio called me a senile old fuck and I thought well I don’t have time to unpack that but I can’t. I can’t ignore it. is zero NOT an alt!sigma? was he just regular sigma, now a secret second amnesiac?? what is going ON

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Corrie: trust…your partner….

Sigma: I promised. I said I’d choose “ally.”

Luna: Yes, but… Phi has 6 BP.

Luna: If she betrays us…

oh she's such a good character. i love her so much because i can't quite be sure

Storm: pressing my face to the glass

the teetering precarity of trusting phi but also. you know she could...

Corrie: and she did. we love her for her bright clear line…

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Corrie: realized it’s worse than I thought: not only will the game not let me see sigma’s face, it will only let me see the artificial parts of him

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Corrie: root structure as an analogy for interconnected consciousness is a really good visualization

elegant and i like it. also wise of them to put that root scanner in the reactor control so you just had to deal with cross-sections

i like that the hologram is explicitly from before the game but akane still says "the construct you refer to as zero jr." nice little touch

LET’S GOOOOO!!!!!! [new flowchart destination]

so could they go back...further? when this is all done, could they go back to a version of 2028 where they weren't put in cold sleep or whatever happened?

YES. YES. YES. YES. YES

Akane: You can inhabit your body in the past…or in the future.

Phi: We’ve done what Jupiter can’t.