[CONTINUE + 3] Week 1 || Act: mingle

[foundationmods]

Monday comes onto the snowy town once more, though it still looks as if it's 'night' as ever.

Then again, you are underground. That's just to be expected, considering no natural light can get down here in the first place. The Monsters around you are just as friendly as ever, despite this being your fourth 'time' trying this monday.

There doesn't seem to be many Monsters here...or at least, you think there was more before? Huh.

Well, whatever.

You still have a mission - And with three trials under your belt, you're now a little closer to figuring things out.

...How much longer will this repeat?

FUN VALUE: 7
Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday
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Comments

[improbablenotimpossible]

Something that is required to proceed.

[dereban]

Do you think that there's a possibility that 'the action of throwing someone into the core' equals 'what is necessary to reset'?

[improbablenotimpossible]

If resetting is the goal.

[dereban]

It's also possible that it's not necessarily the 'goal', but rather... how do I put it?

A means to an end... maybe?

Like in a video game, you'd either reload from your last save point in order to redo something because you messed up somehow. Like you missed an item, or chose the wrong option...

[...

And then, a sudden realization-]

...we shouldn't do any more of those missions...

[improbablenotimpossible]

Unlocking areas is a common way to advance in a game...

ah, I see you're suggesting we're helping them along by completing them.

[dereban]

Also don't you think that the fact we found the keycard to the lab in a cake, along with a 'letter' that can be added into the UI is too convenient?

It feels like it might have been... planted.

[sageking]

And yet, last time a reset occurred without anyone being 'thrown' into the core.

I believe that action is simply a required condition to help this creature 'clear' the 'game'.

[dereban]

There's still "the action of attempting to throw someone there"...

I don't know if it's a 'game clear' in that way, though - the really strange part of it all is that last message before the reset -

No, the "reload".

[improbablenotimpossible]

Yes - there would be a difference between reloading a save, doing a soft reset, and a hard reset...

[dereban]

The thing that doesn't make sense to me though is that... we maintain our memories between reloads.

Why?

[sageking]

This creature is hardly omnipotent. An easy answer would be simply because it can't easily override everyone's memories.

[improbablenotimpossible]

Solomon rules out an immunity due to being 6350, perhaps if this is a "game" - that -

As horrible as it sounds. We're treated like "PCs" - player characters, while everyone else is a 'Non-player character'.

[dereban]

So basically...

It's a setup where "only the PCs remember things from previous save files"? Rather than the entity being unable to... things are made so that we can't forget.

[improbablenotimpossible]

That is possible, but it's not a perfect system. I believe I suggested to Amamiya that we might be dealing with a "Hacked" game with the entity using glitches in the system.

[dereban]

Glitches, huh...

It makes me wonder if we should start glitch hunting now.

[sageking]

An attempted setup of that, perhaps.

Though, it's not perfect, given that a certain monster seems to recall this as well. It's unsurprising that even that creature has limits.

[dereban]

If the entity is a 'player'... I suppose it makes sense that they'd have limits.

[improbablenotimpossible]

Even with exploiting things, a player is still within the parameters of the game - you can't suddenly turn a beat 'em up into a visual novel no matter how hard someone exploits an error in the programming.

[dereban]

Exactly.

Which means that like, the game's programming - if we're talking in this context, is more than likely, a mixed genre. There are plenty of visual novels with RPG elements and vice versa.

But even then, there are limitations to the programming itself... especially since we don't know how skilled the person is at trying to mess with the game's coding, or whatever. If that's what's going on here.

Since - you remember one of those textboxes from the trial, right? The first one that showed up when we used CHECK looked mostly like a garbled mess, but at the end of it... was a closed bold tag, like you'd see in HTML.

[improbablenotimpossible]

Good catch, it's possible if we know where to look we may get access to the 'code' so to speak.

[sageking]

Hmph, a cowardly player at that. They still haven't shown their faces to us despite how overconfident it seems.

[oceanicbutterfly]

Do you often show your face to characters in video games?

[sageking]

...no. But I am no mere 'character'. I am King Gilgamesh, mankind's first hero, and the King of Heroes at that.

They already know it is a great insult to dare hide away their despicable form in the darkness, asserting themselves so far above us that they view myself along with the rest of you as simple 'characters'. I will hardly tolerate this any longer than I have to, and once we've the chance to reveal this enemy, I will end them right when they stand at the best opportunity available to us.

[ he's fukken salty like everybody else. just royally salty ]

[dereban]

It's possible that the player isn't exactly cowardly - or rather...

It's not that they don't want to show their face. It's that they can't.

[oceanicbutterfly]

...because even a "player" who has the ability to modify the game is still working under limitations. To use an overly literal example, even if I could make the characters in Octopath Traveler aware of myself, I couldn't actually show them my face, because the Switch doesn't have a camera.