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Priscilla	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhDHXukh1tU     You're right back to where you started. Or rather, you've started even earlier this time. This is the third time you've found yourself in the same hidden chambers of soft blacks and muted greys, defined by vague edges and barely illuminated angles. Coming through whatever passed for the entrance again, as if nothing had happened, surrounded by that shallow lake of luminous plastic.     Once again, though, the corridors that were once bent in space, scribbled in pencil crayons, or mere glowing suggestions, are firm footing to walk down for this latest trip --an iteration of increasing surety and definition, carrying you just a little deeper and further inside. At the same time as it feels like time is winding back, deepening how far you can see into the past at an equal pace with with how far these past events proceed towards the present, the feeling of foreboding lucidity gradually heightens as well.     The skewed perspective of yourselves and your place in your surroundings only grows more common and regular, rather than either diminishing or growing more exaggerated. The uncanny sensation of 'sharing the room' --of looking around in the dark and finding yourselves sat next to others on both sides-- steadily becomes coherent to more of your senses. The lines of the environment become more definite. More details emerge with each reiteration of the same. Connections strengthening each time the old, atrophied cells that hold this particular memory are fired.     You enter the Room --for it can only be called a room, and there is only one of it-- once again, but this time, you find yourself at a nexus of threes. It is always three, when it isn't four and one secret. Three holies and one more makes four bases. Briefly subject to a dearth of any real substance, you find yourselves in a short void in place of the Room, not entirely unlike the Nothingness somewhere outside.     Equally spaced before you are three flat, planar obelisks of soft, muted grey, rising out of a nothing-floor, as simple and geometric as everything else here. The furthest away is tallest, and the closest is shortest, though the engravings on each are identical: Each one starts with 'Bloq' and a sequence of ??? missing information, a date in 2007, then down from there, three rings and a list of names: The Batter, Alpha, Beta, Epsilon, Yuuki, Zero, Tina, Janine, Steven, August, "George", in line with a name field: §ç涡£¤     The tallest is dated March 18th. The middle's month and day are scratched out. The shortest is January writ upside down.
August Kohler	Another trip through the corridor. August already has Dietrich summoned, just in case, as they move forward. As his senses grow weird from the area, and as things become more coherent, August rubs his eyes, before they enter the Room. As they're there, he looks between the group, makes sure they're all there, and then looks over to the list of names. "Our names, the Batter, his little robots...George is in quotes. Funny." August muses out loud, before he moves to start reading the dates. March 18th, already. A blocked out one, unhelpful. And then January, upside down. That gets a frown from August, as he turns towards Janine first. "Hey, Janine, is this weird puzzle shit? First thought is..." August moves to touch the scratched out obelisk. If it does nothing, he touches January, and then he touches the tallest. Just to see if they are, in fact, pieces of a puzzle.
Tina Natsumi	If Tina hadn't looked at those paintings for a class that one time, she'd be utterly confused by the screwy sight of seeing the same people on both sides of her. She can probably figure they're seeing the same thing as herself, though, and she just saunters along with not a care in the world! That phone is recording, her hat is patched up, and she's ready to take on another confusing Room! She promptly goes up right to the closest and smallest obelisk. Squinting at it, she does a quick lap to take a look at the other two, then back to the first one and its upside down text. "That's weird... I see our names, but why's George in quotes? And..." She taps on the text for Alpha, Beta, and Epsilon. "Batty's buds, but what's this?" She taps the garbled bit of text. "Guessin' the middle one's supposed to be February or something, but... Let's see if these do anything." And with that, Tina just tries moving it if it isn't stuck to the ground. Flipping it, turning it, swinging it a little bit.
Janine Liberi	"We're back," Janine comments to no one in particular as they stand in the room lit by the glowing liquid plastic. Once again along the hallway, Janine moving more assuredly now that she's had time to get used to the way this place distorts her perspective. When she reaches the room with the three, she walks around them, examining the details. "Huh," she says in response to the garbled name in orange. "I wonder..."     August asks her, 'is this puzzle shit?' And she shakes her head. "No, I don't think so. I think this is more like... a series of options. Like the kid drawing earlier." She looks to Tina and snorts. "I bet that's not his real name is why."     She walks up to the tallest pillar, the one labelled 'March 18' and just... lays her hand on it.
Doctor Strange	"Because George isn't his name," concludes Strange, in response to Tina. He waits for something to happen as a result of Tina, August and Janine's investigation. If indeed this is another case of physical contact transporting the user somewhere else, then the pillar of most interest would be January, both for its place in the timeline and the fact that it's upside down. He touches that one, wanting to see as close to the beginning of this story as possible.
Starbound Flotilla	"Tax reasons." "George" answers Tina's question.     "You're starting to understand things, aren't you? How this world works. What it does to people. Where... it comes from, even. Suffering seeks happiness, and makes suffering. What'dya call something that takes in happy folks and turns them into suffering folks, then never lets go?"     "George" lights his cigarette and breathes out a cloud of smoke. "Torture chamber." His smoke clouds one of the few windows in the room. He's smoking outside, you see. Better to keep the secondhand smoke away. The "Captain" seems to have seen fit to rejoin them, or perhaps he wasn't gone and the details have only started to resolve to him as well now.     He was definitely watching.
Janine Liberi	Janine looks at George and says at the same time he says 'torture chamber,' "Social media-oh. That works too I guess."
Zero Kiryu	"Because it's not really his name." Zero speculates towards Tina, though the speculation is confident enough that it doesn't come off that way. It comes near-simultaneous with Strange's conclusion. He doesn't explore the environment, merely drifting along as a part of Yuuki's 'party' more than anything. Where they came from . . . no, where they ended up. Sometimes the truth doesn't offer any help. You have your own homes to go back to. This one is mine. Torture chamber. "How often can you expect a miracle? The conclusion if one never comes is obvious." He wonders, at no one in specific. It's a difficult thing to consider, for him. Difficult, but... for every one Zero Kiryu, how many more mindless Level Es murder indiscriminately from the passenger seat of their own mind? The answer, of course, is all of them that ever existed before.
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki had just pocketed a collection of nick-knacks and box-goodies when perspective shifted. Back to the Room. Back away from her body or her butterfly, to the Room. A strange set of circumstances entirely. But everyone was re-united, as if they had never left, never gone down the 'hall', never been attacked by Spectres... And there's George. "George, I thought we'd lost you. I was worried, really. Because when you disappeared, in almost every case, another Captain would attack us. Well, except that one time. Then again, George, there's something I've been curious about." Yuuki points at the icon with George's name in quotation marks. "George, was the pedalo thing a coincidence?"
Starbound Flotilla	"What, me fallin' out of a duckboat? Sometimes that's just how old-man body gets." A brief laugh, with lungs scarred and healed both at once by smoke. "Everyone has their part to play in torture. Even the victims make sure to scream loud enough to really give the newbies a scare." George answers Yuuki obliquely. "Sometimes I could know when Albert was comin' along, or when Moonfin was going to stop you. But not Seft, y'know. That's 'cause the world wanted to hurt them too, and sometimes, me being out of the way would help that. Sometimes it... wouldn't."
Tina Natsumi	"Really? Aw. But George's such a normal soundin' name. So easy to blend in with all the others that way." Tina replies, tapping her chin lightly when almost everyone gives her the same response. "Sheesh... Am I the only one that didn't know this?" She chuckles and rubs her neck, humming softly to herself when George poses that question. "I was gonna say a career." Her hand goes into her pocket, and a muffled rimshot noise comes out of it.
Priscilla	As expected, the monoliths are choices, no, places in effigy. Points that stand out in memory without any of the times and places that connect them, floating out in a void of forgetfulness.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8INeip9pioI     THE UPSIDE DOWN BLOCK:     Something is terribly wrong here. Your perspective is not just forced outside of yourselves, and not only just turned downside up, but mismatched and inverted in a way so jumbled and inconsistent that it drives the inner ear insane trying to make sense of it. You feel yourselves walking towards your own eyes from a position on the ceiling, then watch yourselves leave from the back. The Room returns through the right door, but back to front, such that the entrances and exits are where they should be, but the crates and tables are against the opposite walls. The windows sit across from where they should be, but their perspective still entails looking through them from below instead of above. Crates seem to hang from the ceiling instead of just being mirrored across the floor, and going by them feels like parts of your own bodies are occluded by them in ways like an optical illusion.     The bedroom itself is the worst, the even the headboards of the bed are reversed, even while the bed itself is mirrored, and across the room, and upside down, and coming from the ceiling but also facing your perspective from below. The poster is transplanted into the outside hall, facing the wall inside the bedroom it would normally be. It no longer speaks with anyone's voice, instead printed with "The centaur with the bow will be the mount of the one who seeks the exit." Even the Batter, as he comes through here first, makes for the opposite door, attempting to exit outside again, before declaring right as he reaches the door: "Something isn't working here."
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki shakes her head, hair swishing back and forth. "You seemed to want nothing more than to ride the pedalo. That you've only heard about how great it is. But you were there to ride the roller coaster, and you've been all across space with the other Captains, done such amazing things." "The pedalo was the dream of someone else." Her pointing finger falls. "I'd be very disappointed if it wasn't you all this time, George. If that's the horrible thing you've been hiding from everyone, it'd be a very poor surprise now."
Doctor Strange	Strange is used to changes in perspective, changes in gravity, confusing space that makes no sense. Even to him, the shift in reality is odd. He's not without his means to mitigate it, however. With his feet upon the ceiling, he simply walks towards one of the walls. His personal gravity shifts, allowing him to walk down the sheer surface of the wall. Again, it shifts, placing him upon the floor. Even with his feet upon the floor, the sorcerer finds the change in scenery jarring.      The bed seems the most unusually impacted. Strange takes a moment to inspect it. As this is a child's room or a figurative representation of one, he looks under the bed with a scrying spell, as well--perhaps there's something hidden there. Or something hiding there. What could be the reason for this date being inverted?
Tina Natsumi	When things suddenly turn to shit, Tina's first instinct is to close her eyes. It doesn't help much since the feeling of imbalance hits all of her senses instead of just sight, and she very nearly topples over sideways before righting herself, then teetering back and forth. She opens one eye, lets out a confused 'uhhhh' when she sees herself walking somehow, and then proceeds to smack herself on the cheeks. "OKay. Okay. Think. This is... What. We're supposed to ride a horseman outta here? When did /that/ start comin' into play here?" She turns to the Batter, wincing a bit when she sees herself doing the same. "So weird.. Ach. You think? Do me a favor and step out that door, see if your vision gets all normal after that." As she suggests that course of action, Tina herself tries her best to get outside of the room as well, checking the poster afterwards if she can even get that far.
Starbound Flotilla	"There isn't a fun surprise at the end of all this." "George" sighs whimsically. "Closure, and arcs, these kinds of things are... the way stories work, for a reason. They're artificial. Tragedy, poetry, valor, glory, and parables all only have meaning because of cathartic closure. Comedy only have meaning because the punchline at the end."     "The thing is, unlike every other universe, this one isn't a joke. It's moments in time. No arcs, not closure. Just pain, unholy spirits that can feel it, and a few people whose happiness it can sap. It's a torture chamber. At least for us. Every other world in the multiverse has a narrative, haven't you noticed? It's this one that doesn't. Only one I've ever seen."     "But I do still want to ride a pedalo without falling out."
Priscilla	??? ??th 2007:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwcBnjgLQyk     The Room isn't empty. It teems with activity, or rather, the memory of it. The instant you reenter the same halls, you're beset by a hundred different shapes and voices on all sides. The corridor is crowded. Packed almost wall to wall with dark, humanoid shades. People, no doubt, but without definition. Dark and indistinct silhouettes of men and women, even children, of many shapes and sizes, but too dim and shadowy to possess any real substance.     You're caught in a stream of them, sullenly marching towards the door as best as they are able to squeeze past each other, though many simply loiter in the hall, or sit dejectedly in the corners. Beyond the door, they fill the already cramped confines of the Room to a capacity it surely wasn't meant for. The metallic crates are fewer in number, scarce handfuls existing outside of the supply stacked up in the dead end corner, but even then, there's not much room for anyone to mill about the overstuffed little set of chambers.     Their chatter is incessant. It's the only thing they have left to do here. Talk. Wait. Let the hours tick by. The cast to all of it is furtive. Nervous. Secretive. Afraid. Whenever one of them begins to speak up a little too much, others around then 'shhh' their volume back down. You can't make heads or tails of anything they're saying. Scores of whispered conversations between lost, tense souls in hiding, all fully well knowing that they can't all occupy the same room like this forever, all hoping that it won't be them that leaves first. Nobody goes near the door.     It sounds exactly like being out in the Nothingness.     Worthy of note is that the blank work desks have been filled in a little further. Glowing computer monitors sit at the workstations, as Yuuki had seen, their displays flickering and fans thrumming, though nobody sits at them. The door 'outside' instead leads into a small, closed chamber, bereft of even a the shadow of a single soul, defined solely by a floral pattern of right-facing petals spreads across the far wall, and a veritable *field* of those old 'buttons' fills the floor space, around a single, out of place cross.     The bedroom is right where it always was, but from the outside, it's surrounded in bars. The inside contains the same amenities, but no calendar, and no speaking poster. It's like the inside of a cell.
Zero Kiryu	Zero is duly disoriented by all the perspective nonsense, focusing his senses through one that probably isn't affected-- the 'blips' of other presences on his mental radar, and where it's centered from. He cleaves closer to Yuuki, continuing to allow the others to attend to what's actually going on in the surroundings. But there is something bothering him, quite a lot. He's scanned George once before during this whole mess, but there's something off just now, and he's concerned that he might have made a grave mistake. His mental presence shifts towards George, probing, inquiring. Trying to ascertain whether or not this is, in fact, the Flotilla Captain he claims to be.
Starbound Flotilla	"George" is still "George". He is still outside the window. He is in both the rightways room and the wrongways room, and in the streaming, active area as well, but always through the window.     Something is sitting on his mind. It is a heavy weight. He feels stressed the way that someone who is talking about their upcoming necessary amputation feels. There's a lot coming up, and it makes him feel miserable.
August Kohler	August is ported into the ??? room, and it's full of noises and dark shades. His first instinct is to try and listen to the voices, the presences, but he can't make anything out, and it quickly becomes mind-numbing. August is caught in the stream, as he pushes outwards. They're avoiding a door? Well, then August wants to go there, but first...he heads towards the work desks, looking to see if anything's on the monitor. If there's nothing that requires him to interact with the computer, he heads out... And steps into the empty chamber, and starts pushing buttons. He looks for those that seem to have some sort of symbology with the cross based on placement, before just randomly pressing.
Priscilla	March 18th 2007:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2-YImNtwGo     The Room is empty. Emptier than before. The crates are mostly gone. Only a handful of folding chairs remain, sat out in the communal area, and before the computers. The Bedroom is as you remember it, though now the childishly decorated calendar says it's March 18th, of course. It's the exact same as the third of three calendar pages back in Zone 1; the phyisical evidence of the one and only puzzle that Dedan --the tall mister-- kept. The date.     The note of today, scrawled inexplicably across the blank poster once again, is short: "Papa gave me a music box today."     It's not quite true to say that there are no signs of anyone else, however. The communal area is full of them, or rather, just one. The first colour to punctuate the pastiche of soft and vague, unassuming blacks and whites, is vivid red. Elaborate geometric patterns have been painted all the way across the commons, radiating from a central cross, perfectly mirrored on all sides, like nazca lines in miniature. Not only is it bright red, it's still wet, and splashes loudly wherever someone steps in it. It of course reeks of blood. The stench of copper is overpowering, as perfectly neat and tidy as the strangely geometric pools are. Fresh. Recently spilled, into liquid shapes.     For whatever reason, it's hazardous to the touch. Even walking through it with shoes on, it immediately scrapes the flesh off your feet, giving you hits of horrible dizzying vertigo and nausea, making your vision swim and hitting you with the urge to puke for the space of each step. It's not too hard to navigate through and around, but it doesn't seem to smear or track like blood should. The lines are more like open wounds.     The door to the 'north', which previously led 'outside', now more sensibly leads to other adjoined rooms in the same complex. Another workstation, with a single Eslen in front of the computer, strangely bleary and out of place as he is. A store room filled with more crates, with another indistinct Elsen taking stock. A reservoir, with barrels, and some machinery that you'd recognize as water distillation equipment, though it's filled with rippling white plastic, and tended by another Elsen. One room seems to have no purpose, save to be occupied by more spreading fractals of floor-bleed, with a single Elsen stranded in the middle.     One part of the wall is decorated with petal designs, surrounding some sort of elaborate piece of art mounted between them. It looks like the back of a playing card. Rather than a company or suit, the central icon is that of a sizable cross, and surrounding it is a field of little interconnected circles, each filled in with stylized flower petals pointing to one another --left, right, up, down, all forming a zigzagging route for the eye from the top left to the bottom right corner of the card.     There's also one more door that wasn't here before. One to the south. Going that way leads out to a catwalk in the middle of the void, tending into a wide U shape and back to another door. It has to bend to get around the single, enormous obstruction in the middle of it. A man magnified grossly out of perspective, only the top half of him visible, as if seen sitting at a counter from a perspective too short to look over it. He's pale and bald, with a harried and tired expression about him, wearing a perfectly plain starched white shirt and black tie. His eyes track entrants around the room, as if watching someone pass by his desk.
Janine Liberi	Janine mercifully chose the most normal one. Given that the floor seems to be bleeding, that says a lot about this place.     She arrives in The Room and gags at the stench of blood, lifting her arm to cover her nose and mouth, before walking forward and stepping in it. She gasps, slumps and practically trips from the pain, thankfully landing clear of it. She lies there for a moment, breathing hard and gulping. "Fucking hate this place," she says, getting back to her feet.     First thing's first, the bedroom. The date holds true, but the note next to it... a music box? Wasn't there a music box earlier? Hm. Next she heads north, jumping carefully over the puddles of blood and checking each room. "Shit," she gasps at the sight of Elsen, but then covers her mouth and pointedly looks away from them. If they're anything like the ones in the other world's, talking to them might stress them enough to be Burnt. So she leaves them well enough enough until she reaches the dead end with the one standing in the blood. "Nope," she says, turning and walking away quick smart.     Back to the room and heading south to see... a gigantic Elsen. "What the fuck?!" she exclaims, not able to contain it anymore. She casts her mind back... the whole idea that the Elsen are a singular being. Is this THE Elsen? He sure seems big enough.     She stands before him and speaks. "Uh... hey big guy. What's up?"
Priscilla	UPSIDE DOWN:     The Batter tries exiting the door, and disappears into the soft, formless glowing beyond --the one that demarcates the solid shadows of 'inside' with the luminous anything-nothing of 'outside'. He reappears out the exact same door in just a moment, somehow looking unsurprised. "It definitely doesn't work." he concludes out loud, seemingly only partially for Tina's benefit. It also feels like she's looking at him from behind now that he's reversed directions. Strange looking under the bed only finds another poster, or rather, The Poster Again. This time he finds the same little scribbled letters on it. "Papa said he wouldn't tell me the code because I can't go outside."     ??? ??th 2007:     Slamming on the floor buttons gets August nowhere. They aren't so helpful as to reset when he gets one wrong. The whole rectangular area around the central cross is carpeted in them, and clicking them on and off by brute force could take ages; he doesn't even know if it's meant to be a combination, a total, or a sequence. Examining the monitor brings him to something fairly interesting though.     On one of them, he can see himself moving about the room, from a vaguely isometric perspective, as if he were watching a security camera feed. There are, of course, no cameras anywhere in the room, but the monitor is playing a fairly clear, very low resolution view in real time. The details of the room are fudged and compressed quite severely to get it all into the vague memory of some old CRT that could probably only handle 800x600, but the teeming crowd of lonesome, worried, whispering black shades are there too. They aren't just his imagination, or some psychological effect; they're recorded in the Room as well.     It's worth noting that looking at himself on the camera, his tiny, pixellated, CRT-compressed self looks abnormally washed out. Almost monochrome. Crunched in dimensions and simplified. His watch and revolver stick out somehow, despite only the bare basics of what he's wearing being discernible. If he turns to look at the supposed source of the camera, even his face is washed out and ghastly white, picking up little more than a simplified, Elsen, Judge, or even Batter-like singular expression from him.     The other monitor simply blinks over and over again with:     »INSERT DISC TO CONTINUE«     March 18th:     Janine stands before the massive Elsen. His eyes turn down to look at her. It's a little odd, considering all of the Elsens before have mostly just had little beady black gazes, to really see and feel this one's focus tangibly turn to her. Big, dark shadows sit beneath said eyes, though they look to be out of extreme sleeplessness --the advanced stage just before someone starts hallucinating-- but not illness.     "Hello. How are you?" he asks in a tired, sighing voice, pausing to cough several times before answering with "I'm fine."     "Did you want to play another game today?"
Janine Liberi	Oof. He doesn't sound so good. Janine recognises that cough, heard it many a time during her various hospital stays. That's the cough of someone with not a lot of time left. And like a lot of those people, this one wants to pass the time with games. Though this is probably not going to be as straightforward as like, checkers.     "Sure thing," she says, sitting on the path so that her legs dangle down into the darkness from which this giant man emerges. "What are we playing?"
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki, once again entirely content to just stand around like a dumb idiot and press A on the dialogue prompt until exhausted rather than go deal with puzzles. This is because puzzles are the worst, and if it must be repeated: Yuuki is terrible at puzzles that aren't people. Those, she sometimes savant Rubick's cubes at, and sometimes bungles so badly nobody recovers from it. George, though, is cause enough for concern. "I don't think you're so one-dimensional as to be comedy. You're ready to betray your image to see this through. You've spun a beautiful cage of words and lured me into it. You've fought alongside us, because there were enemies to be faced between you and your goal -- and you beat them, alongside us. All throughout, you've sprinkled meaning into thigs, relating it to this and that. Even a moment can have closure. They have to. By definition, a moment has to end: otherwise it's a forever. And, George, just because the moment's end doesn't give a full release doesn't mean it's not part of an arc. I think at the end of this, we'll be able to tell a story. What's a tragedy without some comedy?" "I think if it was Albert, he would have wanted to ride the Pedalo and never gotten the chance. Since it's you - I think it was inevitable you'd fall out." Yuuki's gentle smile continues as she places a hand on the window seperating the Room and Nothingness, the normal girl and the old man. "Also, you haven't told me how to do the puzzles, so, I'm worried I'll ruin everything before you get a chance to ruin everything."
Tina Natsumi	Tina's slowing starting to figure out how movement and perspective works in the upside-down tabletspace, only bumping into walls on the way out a little bit before righting herself and trying to get a better look past the Batter's back. "What doesn't work? You talkin' about how you're seeing stuff or something else? Because..." Tina shimmies left and right a bit, but that probably isn't going to help if she's staring at his back from this angle. "...Hm. Doc? Aside from things looking all funky out here, you sense any weird shit like centaurs or... Uh. Archers around?" Tina pauses briefly, then looks for that poster at the outside hall. Calling upon her past experiences with old timey bullshit, she reaches up to plant her hands on the wall, then starts shimmying down the hall to try and find the magic spot where that poster is to see if she can take it down to inspect the front and back of it.
Doctor Strange	Strange clenches his fist, at the sound of George's answer--hard enough that it trembles in excess of the usual. "Yeah, well. No narrative. Eesh. Guess we just better give up and turn it off, huh?" He stands back and away from the bed, turning to look at the image of George. Strange! Pal, believe me, I'm not a fan of letting the world be just 'cause there's no safety net. That's why I'm here.      "Then help /me,/" says the Sorcerer Supreme with evident frustration, beating a palm against his chest in time with the word 'me.' "I've seen what happens with your way," continues the sorcerer, pointing a finger. "Every zone we've purified is a... barren wilderness. The only life there is barely better than spectres." We don't come out of the Room happy. What comes next isn't...      "Isn't what? What am I missing, George? Are the Secretaries part of an ecosystem that gradually rebuilds this place? Does purifying the Queen remove the Spectres for good? Does it create a new generation of Guardians free from the risk of... crippling neurosis, insanity? Does Elsen get to live his life without a... without a litany of tiny tortures spread out into eternity?" His voice raises until he's almost shouting. "What, exactly, is so attractive about this option that we couldn't do it better ourselves?!"      He sighs. Runs his hands over his face, pacing back and forth. The odd perspective of the room is not currently at the front of his mind. If Tina asks, he'll help her get down to the 'ground.' Otherwise... Everyone who comes in here, the torture chamber gets its hooks in them.      Strange responds, more quietly. "George... every action that you or I or anyone here will ever take, across every iteration of this moment in existence, is already accounted for. What you call a 'narrative' or an 'arc' is just the experience of someone in one tiny, miniscule thread of that infinite fractal looking backwards at events that have already happened, and using their past experiences to assign context to it.      "Closure is just a feeling people have when they're able to rationalize those events in a way that pleases them. This world isn't special just because it's more difficult to do that. There are billions just like it. You only feel like other worlds have happier narratives because you're on the outside looking in. In fact, I'd say you prefer it that way. You don't give your real name, you keep people at arm's length--even here, you're standing outside the window and talking to us."      Strange heaves another sigh, stepping closer to the window. "At best... a person has the ability to decide, at any given moment, which of those predetermined threads they'll travel down, and even that decision is the result of your upbringing," says Strange, making a list with heavily scarred fingers, "...your emotional state, neurochemistry."      "But it is a decision. Do you," says Strange, his tone now deathly grave, "In this moment," he continues, "Feel like the thread you should experience is the one where you go along with purification? Is there /any/ doubt in your mind, that this is the thred that this iteration of George should go down?"
August Kohler	The buttons are useless without a code. August depresses those he pressed, and then pushes back through the crowd. As he looks at the monitors, glancing up at the camera and then back, he frowns, and he frowns at the disk. Alright. Time to find that disk, or at least see. August pushes towards the bedroom, opening the barred door and getting inside. There's no poster or anything, but there should be a dresser. August checks there and under the bed for the disk. If he can't find it, he then goes for plan B. Trying to find his way out of this 'choice' and back to the others. He looks for an exit of some sort, maybe the window if nothing else? If he manages to get back to the original Room, he'll head straight to the one with Janine in it.
Zero Kiryu	Zero makes a neutral noise, more to himself than anyone else. He supposes that makes about as much sense as anything does, and he's not willing to try to dig deeply. As much as he's currently unhappy with George, he doesn't particularly feel inclined towards mental violation of Concord agents in good standing. Talk of pedalo rides eases his agitation more than a little. It's a strange little memory that has caught his attention, which is particularly bizarre given the whole... /thing/ of this world. It's like a dream. Something that, inevitably, you're going to wake up from. What a strange way for a world to be, though. He moves up next to Yuuki, reaching over and taking the hand that isn't pressed to glass. Thoughts of hunting his first Level E bubble to the surface. Zero isn't even quite certain what the exact words were anymore, but the gist of them was more than enough. At least I don't have to kill anymore. "Do you suppose... we should find someplace in Dorado, to add some?" He wonders at George and Yuuki, dully.
Starbound Flotilla	"...I like that faith in all this. I really want to protect it." "George" says to Yuuki. He leans back, his head tilting back to bare one eye to her. "I hope it survives through the next bit. What you're coming up to, what you're gonna need to do, I need ya to understand... there's a good chance it's gonna be your torture too. Did I ever say that? It feels like... at some point, I could have sworn I said that. Huh. Deja vu moment." A long pause. "When you get back out of this situation, I just want you to keep that feeling in you. That urge to see the pattern and the lines of where everything's going, even in the storm of moments in time. The urge to add a punchline at the end of this. Lil' pedalo ride in Grand Dorado would do it."     He blows smoke thick enough to drift high up, over the wall, and to the upper perspective, leaving a soft haze that idly moves through each camera perspective eventually. "But don't think that comedy is one-dimensional. There's nothing more complicated than a well-made joke. It's weird to start, and you never see the ending coming if it's made right. But it's the best thing there can be. Wise man said back in the day, 'Make 'em laugh!' A joke is an arc, a joke is a promise, a joke is you saying that everything will be okay because you can chuckle at the end and everything that didn't make sense was for that. A joke is a lie, too, but it's the kind of lie that everyone wants. The world /should/ be a joke. The places without comedy..."     "Aren't they scary, Yuuki?"
Starbound Flotilla	"George" turns to look at Doctor Strange. How, geometrically, this is done without him turning to look at every window he's near, is the kind of complex question that only Doctor Strange would know the answer to in the first place. "We purify all this? We guarantee. No more torture. That's it. That's all I'm after. No more torture. That's all it is. And I'm marching to that, because every detour is one more needle in the flesh. And you know what? If you can find your answer fast enough, Doc," He takes a deep drag of his cigarette. The smoke drifts around him. "Then I won't tell you no. But I can't march this world away from the edge of what it needs. I won't stop you if you pull your solution out at the end, but Strange, the minute you tell me you need more time, you need another cycle, you need me to hold off just a little, you need me to back down from..." He stops. He's gotten stressed enough to accidentally crush the cigarette in his fingertips. He flicks it away into the unformed void.     It drifts as if it were on waves.     "The hooks are in you, Doc. I can see each little fish hook and each little line tugging. You think you're free because you started with all the slack in the world, but those lines are tightening. At the end of this, you'll stop the Queen -- 'cause believe me, she won't like your plan -- and you'll meet Hugo, and then, the lines will go taut."     "I've met him. Had myself a little look. I need you guys to do what I'm not strong enough to do myself. And it's gonna be /torture/ on you, Doc. Your plan, my plan, doesn't matter. You'll feel the pain when you get there, trust me. Those hooks don't come out easy."     With a single clean motion, "George" brings out his cigarette pack, smacks a fresh one out by slapping the bottom, and catches it in his mouth. "I'm not here to tell you to stop, or tell you you're stupid, or get all wise-ass about what you think I'm worth trusting with. What's comin' up is painful. You're thinking about this like a fight, but it's not a fight. It's not a climax. It's just a bunch of moments of pain, one after the other. I just wanna make sure they end." He does, truly, sound like he doesn't want to think of this like a conflict.     "But trust me. Trust me about one thing."     "There isn't a world out there like this one."
Priscilla	UPSIDE DOWN:     "The exit." the Batter replies to Tina, starting to walk out the way they came in, through those unearthly twists of broken, winding perspective. "This is the way out, but it doesn't work. We won't go anywhere with a broken exit." Indeed, there doesn't seem to be much more to it, despite Tina's best efforts to reveal further clues.     Wiggling around the inverted room starts to give the impression that it isn't inverted intentionally, but as if some key piece was pulled out and that perspective collapsed upon itself like a jenga tower, burying her in disconnected bits of time through different views, with only slivers of real detail reamining. All she finds by examining the poster is a sequence of bold dots connected by lines, in a sort of crooked arrangement of line segments that don't seem to amount to much at a glance.     ??? ??th 2007:     August checks the dresser, and finds that there isn't one. In this iteration of the Bedroom, like a barred cage, the outside is a claustrophobic mass of untrustworthy, anonymous strangers, and the inside is a vacant chamber with nothing but a bed and a teddybear to distinguish it from a prison. Why then the bars?     Nothing stops him leaving. The connections are entirely stable this time. Though there is nothing, and Nothingness, between them, these three particular moments are coherent and consistent, isolated and preserved in amber. He walks right into the strangely bloodied room at the same time Janine sits down to talk.     March 18th:     "Um, since we don't have anything around . . ." the huge man with the oddly timid and tired voice says, "How about we play a number game." He terminates his sentence rather lamely, glancing sadly down at Janine as though he very well knows he has nothing fun for her, but this is the best he can do. "Guess which random number I'm thinking of." he says, apologetically even. His fingers drum bashfully on the solid catwalk that is also his desk, confabulated in this bizarre worldspace, as if Janine were sitting on his secretarial workstation.     8946
August Kohler	As August walks into the strangely bloodied room, he moves to step around the blood. If he can't, he literally leaps on Dietrich's back and jumps over it. Either way, he makes his way towards Janine, and waits for her to make her guess in her game. After she's done so, he approaches. "Hey, Janine. I brought the music box." He removes it from a bag, and moves to hand it to her if she'll take it. "Think it might do something special in here?"
Janine Liberi	Janine looks around at all the nothing and offers a half-hearted shrug. "Yeah there's not that much around, unless there's something down below I guess." And so he challenges her to a number game. "Guess the number? What, that's it? Betw-"     A number appears before her.     She stares at the four red letters from her awkward perspective and blinks, placing her hands on her head. Is she going crazy? A 'hook' going taut? Or has she awakened some other power? Well... nothing for it except just hoping it works. "Is it 8946?"     Only for August to interrupt with the music box. "Oh, thanks. Meet the big guy. Big guy, August," she says, introducing the two before heading back to the bedroom. "Be right back big guy." Once there, she opens it up and lets it play, hoping it does something rather than nothing.
Doctor Strange	"I believe that you believe that," says Strange in response to George's statement about the world's uniqueness. It's the best that he'll get from the Sorcerer Supreme. "But no one is free. Not in the way they think they are. Not even me." The batter's statement that the exit is broken gives him pause.      "Is it possible there's a code we need to... input, in order to leave?" he asks of the Batter and Tina. "The poster under the bed mentioned it."      One last question for George. "Biteblade said that using the Grands would let in something like an infestation. What's the possibility of us evacuating this place's victims, using the Grands, and then fumigating the place? We kill the infestation, then we bring them back once it's dead. Is that something we can do with the time we have left?"
Tina Natsumi	So /this/ is suppsoed to be the exit." Tina confirms for herself as she watches the Batter head through the door first, following in after him to confirm that it is indeed not taking her out of the... "So this place really is trying to keep us in here. That means..." What /does/ that mean? When Strange mentions a code, though, Tina memorizes the series of dots and lines, repeating it to herself several times just to make sure she doesn't forget. And then she just takes a picture of the poster after a minute. "I think we got the code right here, then. You see anywhere we can put that code in?" That, of course, leads to her starting to look for anything that might remotely look like a keypad or more posters with suspiciously blank lines to take advantage of. The whole time, she's also repeating that code to herself just to remind herself of the ultimately useless thing she just did what with the phone existing.
Zero Kiryu	"You've been keeping exactly how deep this is going to go until the last minute because you were afraid that if you told us everything at once, we'd turn on you." Zero says to George, in a very matter-of-fact tone. He inclines his head a little, "When I expressed my frank opinion on where I thought this was going, that... is exactly what happened. I suppose that in a way, I was a test run for you. Not just me, either. Every additional revelation of intended plans has caused additional rifts, in one direction or another. I can't blame you for being so deceitful. But I'm still angry that you were deceitful towards Yuuki." "I keep trying to talk to the Batter. For the most part, he isn't interested. But he said something to me that seems appropriate: Sometimes the truth doesn't offer any help." He takes a deep breath, thinking back to what a ghost he was in Chairman Cross's care. The way his skin crawled and itched and hurt, and the pointlessness all of it seemed to hold. "This place needed a 'Yuuki' a long time ago." He decides. "A punchline at the end, huh..." The thought trails off into oblivion.
Priscilla	March 18th:     "Bravo, that's totally right." is Janine's reply. It doesn't sound condescending, or like it could have been any number. He sounds pretty taken aback that she got it right on the first try. "Um, you can have this." he says, picking up something out of the abyss and pushing it over the 'counter'. Whatever it is, Janine can't make heads or tails of it. It's a blurry sort of semi-memory, of a man who once played a game and gave a prize, the identity of which is long since lost to time and decay.     Secret Day obtained.     He waves a little sadly when she gets up to leave, and says "I'll have another one for you if you want to play again". In that exact instant, that precise moment, Janine feels in every little detail, from where his eyes are focused, to the tilt of his shoulders, to the slight lethargy in his hands --everything-- something so intensely, mercilessly, viscerally familiar that it feels like a softball to the back of the head.     He's waving at her just like a fellow inpatient that knows he's seeing off someone worse than him. A critical care visitee there for an organ transplant, who'd be bemoaning the terrible genetics that lead them to a heart failure in their thirties, if they weren't so thoroughly shamed by being across the hall from a six year old child with cancer. It's *exactly* that feeling from the hospital. "Take care. Your mother will come back for you soon, so don't go anywhere."     August takes the main piece of the music box to the Bedroom. The minute he brings it out, the little ensemble of silver pins begins playing itself. In the palm of the hand, the crank turns away on its own; it seems almost glad. Relieved to be back in its proper place. Without any effort from him, the little comb and barrel plinks away its odd, eerie little melody, comforting once to someone, even after being set down completely.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3Ff84GobY     Nothing much seems to happen until he turns back towards the bed, and sees a chest there that wasn't. It's a chest. The chest. The prototypical chest. A cheap plastic trunk with a single, big, basic 'button' to pop it open and no real lock or hinge. Just like every single other chest. Only just right now, set aside a giant teddybear and tiny bed, does it look completely and one hundred percent at home. 'In place'. Two items sit at the bottom of the trunk, amidst boxes of pencil crayons and old toys. The indistinct memory --a hole in a memory-- of the most important and precious thing in the world, and a floppy disc with a paper sticker, its name corrupted into gibberish.     Perfect Symbol obtained!     §ç涡£¤ Disc obtained!     UPSIDE DOWN:     Checking everything a second time, there's still nothing in the inverted and jumbled room that seems to be useful, remaining a broken exit without the key they need to pass through it. Once she takes a photo of all the dots connected by lines, her phone's automatic image searching suggests photos for 'Sagittarius', instantly recognizing the constellation, despite being all flipped around.
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki makes a quiet sound of uncertainty as George explains, but Zero joins his hand to hers, and she's More Okay again. This dream, even if nightmarish, still has a pleasant lucidity as long as the people she cares about is there. "Ah. Oh. That must be the hooks." "You're mine. You, and the other Captains. And there's one more hook to tug. One last twist of the knife. This one just comes from the front. And I'll walk into it, because that's what I've committed to." Yuuki's smile flickers, concern tugging down the corners of her mouth as she looks out the window at George turning his head away. Speaking to Stephen Strange. It gives her a moment to take stock, to compose. Yuuki Kuran rarely needs them, and rarer still with Zero at her side, but still, she is blessed this once with the ability to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, her chest rising and falling in a singular and stretched-out pulse. "There's no world that could be without comedy with you present, George. And I'll be there - in the room where it happens. With you, and Zero, and Stephen Strange. August and Tina and Janine, everyone, we'll put a period at the end of this sentence and not repeat ourselves twice more." "And then, I think, a pedalo with a seatbelt could be arranged."
August Kohler	The music box plays, and a chest appears. August moves to open it, slowly, taking the 'memory', somehow, confusedly, and then the floppy disk with the corrupted name. "Alright, score. I'll go use this, you want to come with?" August says to Janine, before heading back to the ??? room. Once at the ??? room, August heads to the computer that required a disk, looks for a floppy disk port, and puts it in. He makes sure Dietrich is nearby, in case it explodes or something horrifying happens, since it's corrupted, which means it won't be friendly. Not one bit.
Janine Liberi	Janine pockets the strange memory and walks out of the room, and basically has an extraordinarily visceral emotional flashback. That kind of daily misery you experience at the intensive care ward at a hospital. Hers was extremely exclusive, so there were at least a couple of times where people were brought in and turned away because they couldn't afford the lavish prices for care there.     She staggers, and starts breathing in that shaky one one does when they're on the verge of tears. She holds it together as she joins August in the bedroom and he relieves the suddenly appearing chest of its content. When he speaks to her, she turns away to hide her face. "I'll stay here, was some stuff through the other door I skimmed," she says horsely. Once he's gone, she slaps herself hard across the face a couple of times until she settles down. "You're not there anymore," she snarls to herself.     Hooks. It's all hooks.     This time she heads north, to where she saw the regular Elsen, and engages the one who was at the computer. "Hey man, what's up?"
Starbound Flotilla	"I don't think there was ever a time that one was going to work, Doc." "George" says to Strange, scratching his head. "Believe me, we're the guys who have big ol' ships that could evacuate people. This... no, it's not going to solve that way. Wish it could. Z's always got his own way around. Judge is too committed to the world. Elsen... well, I don't think putting ashes like that out into the world is a good plan. And my thinking is, the last one I know would be dead inside 48 hours. You know the only one who I bet could and would leave and survive?" "George" actually laughs, for a moment, realizing it the moment he says it.     "The Batter could. It's who he is."
Tina Natsumi	When Tina's phone gets that match of the lines and dots, she walks into the Batter and gives him a light tap on the shoulder. "Hey, hey. Check this out. Does Sagittarius mean anything to you?" A pause later, and she looks up and around. She's not quite sure where Strange is even seeing her from, but it's fine as long as he can (probably) hear her. "Hey, Doc! Phone tried ID'ing it as Sagittarius, but it's a little wonky-looking. Think that means anything for us? Maybe..." Another moment later, and Tina's calling out Uncle Sam to get a megaphone. Naturally, her solution is shouting "SAGITTARIUS" through it to see if that does anything.
Starbound Flotilla	Zero's question is complicated, but the answer is simple. "Nope!" "George" says. "End of the day, it's not 'cause I thought you'd turn on me. It's 'cause of old-man shame! See, when you get real old -- I mean old-old, bad knees and gray hair old -- all you have left is your adulthood, your oldness, your wiseness. The part of you that knows how to get through things all dignified."     "What's comin' up next isn't dignified. No way for it to be. I hate it! I hate having to think about it, and I hate talkin' about it even more. So, just like every other old man, I decided not to talk about it. When we can't even have our old-person dignity about something, we start making it seem like it doesn't exist. You should be angry about that! It's bad. But it's not the specific kind of bad you're thinking about."     "If it makes you real angry, though, never go to Florida. Wait! Shit. Florida doesn't exist anymore."
Starbound Flotilla	"We all have hooks, Yuuki." "George" says, smiling whimsically. "Albert got a chance to raise an army! Too bad he had to disobey his biggest leader and live the Miniknog life to do it. Moonie, he got to diplomatically control the narrative! Too bad he got humiliated by a human. Seft got a chance to be the kind, just hero! Too bad she had to reveal all her worst secrets, and lost pointlessly. Biteblade got a chance to do the ultimate hunt! Too bad she didn't get any trophies, or meat, or glory, and just got hunted instead. Pavo got to lord over a place where god got killed! Too bad she got her mind burgled again, just like with Samea."     "George" sighs, and the sigh lets out smoke. Did he have his cigarette in his mouth before that? "And me? Christ. It always gets worse. This place, it finds all the little ways and all the big ways to hurt you. Awful, huh? ...Yeah, I hope you can wrap this one up with a bow, you know. Would be nice."
Priscilla	UPSIDE DOWN:     The Batter stops when Tina physically pokes him. He turns to look at the phone, pauses, and then without an afterthought, withdraws from his tunic pocket, the Leo, Cancer, Pisces, and Aquarius Cards, with their namesake constellations on them. Wordlessly, he continues on, and advances through the door of . . .     March 18th:     Even Janine can hear the clean, crisp, immaculate, and somehow slightly menacing footsteps of the Batter's cleats entering the Room, which is odd, because normally his movements are always strangely whisper quiet. None of the Elsens react to them though. Whereas the huge man who had seemed like so much *more* 'Elsen' than any of the Elsens ever had before, these ones are far less. They have slightly different shapes and sizes, imprecise and fuzzy, like visages of Elsen stretched over dark shades, little more than holes in what once was that resemble people no longer remembered.     The Elsen she picks out doesn't even respond to her question directly. There's even less understanding inherent to him than the other sickly baldies she'd bothered before. The second she talks to him, he responds with "What is the day today?"     Talking to any of the others is the same, but even more strange. The one in the store room asks "At which station can I see the metal insides of cattle?" At the reservoir, that 'Elsen' blurts at her "Which book can't be read at the Library?" The one stood in the bleeding room asks for the "Code to the vault." None of them seem to have any other interactions --they're mere masks pulled over faces that no longer exist, doing their best at memory games. Out of all the whispering voices and myriad shades of real people, only this patient, exhausted, bald, guiltily kind face comes to the surface whenever Janine tries to bring any of them into focus, over and over and over again. Walking the halls, the oddly hair raising sound of the Batter's new footsteps drifts past her. She sees him stop in front of the playing card-esque art on the wall, and then stare for a good long while.     Actually, he doesn't really seem to be looking at it. It's as if he's patiently waiting for some other business to finish up while waiting near it. He says "I have the impression that this is important . . ." but doesn't even develop that thought any further.     ??? ??th 2007:     August returns to part two of what may be a three part puzzle, for the way this triplicate of strange and disjointed moments in time are linked so ironclad in their own broken ways. Here there are no Elsens to greet him --to be worn over the vague, impressionistic understanding of 'people'; he has yet to exist, perhaps. When he arrives at the computer, however, and presses the pitch black and paper white floppy disk into the drive, accepted without a single computer sound, what he does is contemporaneous with every computer monitor across all three times and places.     The 'camera' feed multiplies. The tiny, pixelated, oddly 'simplified' rather than just 'compressed' visual he has of himself, fussing over the tiny, boxy monitors, flickers on to every other computer, perfectly in synch. At the same time, feeds of other rooms, in other times, blink on as well, filling empty 'security' windows with overhead and north-facing 'views' of each of the other rooms. Tina. Janine. Yuuki. Zero. The shades. Big Elsen. The Batter. Everyone but George, who is unaccounted for on any of the monitors. Despite the vivid red of the geometric bleeding being perfectly preserved, everyone still looks too pale through the cameras that don't exist. Too small. Washed out. Just a little abstracted. Too recognizable for the awful quality, where rightfully they should just be grainy blurs. There's that low quality photocopied palette to it, but even looking at a Zero who can't be more than thirty pixels tall, any viewer knows who they're looking at.
Priscilla	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xWCs7QCOFs     The weird part, however, is the feed in which the Batter is visible. The figure in miniature stood before the art on the wall is barely visible, because almost the entire 'view' is taken up an extreme closeup of the cross and petal minutiae, blowing it up to a size that the resolution can properly depict. The words 'I have the impression that this is important . . .' have been audio captured (though you can't hear anything, as the computers lack speakers) and recorded into some kind of log window, clustered around a number of other outputs that look like they actually belong to a computer system of some kind. Clustered over the view, they perform esoteric analyses you can't make heads or tails of, filled with strange pseudo-code, energy graphs, time and coordinate sheets, incomprehensible symbols and runes, and visualizers shaped like three interlocking rings.     The closeup of the card-art is seemingly captured and filed away, then dismissed. The Batter walks away from the painting at the same time Janine hears him begin trudging back down the hall, seeing it on the monitor beside the !Elsen, where in she can see herself --and another audio capture of the words she's exchanging, recorded by some external program. There aren't any security cameras. That much is a fact. This is the first place there'd even been anything distinctly and functionally mechanical, but it seems like someone has figured out how to use them. Has *been* using them.     That someone is in the last few monitors. One last view points out into a room that none of you occupy, too dark to make out anything beyond the first few feet around it, where pale, washed out light illuminates a portion of a metal and glass desk, and an elaborate skeleton of digital equipment piled on, under, and around it. A young woman is sat in the central curve of the desk, surrounded by glowing monitors, charts, windows, visualizers, recursively playing the same sights.     Her fingers are covered in a complicated lattice of metal components and pale lights, wired to the same place that her headset is. You don't recognize her, though just like Zacharie, Sucre, the Judge, the Batter, Elsen, even the Guardians, she has the same ghostly, washed out, near monochromatic hue to everything from her overly dark hair to her overly pale skin --her overly white clothes and the overly deep shadows under her eyes from lack of sleep.     Then again, according to those monitors, so do you.
Priscilla	You don't recognize the make or purpose of any of the equipment either. It seems vaguely computery, but not as any computer you've ever seen. Any and all data is utterly incomprehensible, buried in abstract imagery, and a lot of the devices themselves seem to have no earthly purpose, yet thrum with pure, colourless power all the same. She has the look of someone who's been sitting where she is for far too long, but has too much work to do to leave. The fine movements of her equipped fingers move windows hither and thither, adjusting graphs, navigating menus, tuning holo constructions and visualizers, but it's all external; the monitors only show the same space that you can see with your own eyes, and they show you, her, just the same way that it seems they show her, you.     Without a speaker available, you can't actually hear what she says when she stops to rub her eyes, but the moment she does, the Batter stops out in the hallway pretty abruptly, awaiting something or other with the patience of a saint. When she taps the feed showing Janine, indicating the Elsen the Batter audibly says out loud, patiently and explanatorily, "He's busy." A few wrist movements flick through captures of the previous room, and then she sets her fingertips back down to a pair of glowing white rings, and the Batter begins marching towards the exit again. The silent, black and white someone in the window swipes up another window, which has "George" greyed out on a long list of names, along with data that can't be read at such grainy resolution, except for Status: Pure. Seemingly satisfied, she dismisses it, and swivels some sort of seating arrangement offscreen to face the new room the Batter enters.
August Kohler	August looks at the computer screens. He frowns as his eyes scrape over the monitors, not liking being watched, but stops at the person he doesn't recognize. Is that... The Puppeteer? Holy shit. August takes her 'appearance', as pixelated as it is, into account, and then moves to talk into his radio as he watches her. <"Guys. Look at the monitors. The Batter's puppeteer is on them."> As he says so, he moves to look at the computer, trying to use his understanding of machines to see what's there, what's missing, what isn't. After that, he paces, trying to figure out what to do, and says two things over the mic. <"Alright, first question, does anyone have a speaker system for a computer? Second, does anyone have a pattern that could be put into buttons around a cross? There's some sort of elevator door and I want to get past it.">
Tina Natsumi	Those cards were gathered some time ago, weren't they? Tina lets out an amused "huh" as she follows after the Batter, finally used to the screwy perspective as they move onwards. Where they're headed, she has no idea, and she doesn't expect to actually end up anywhere beyond just keeping herself sane and moving. When she spots the strange computer and the bizarre feed showing all of her companions in it, though, she stops to watch it. She also takes a moment to wave her hand behind herself to see if it happens on screen as well. It's like she's never seen a camera before or something. Afterwards, she notices the Batter actually end up in a new room, but she does not follow. Instead, Tina takes a moment to glance around slowly as the Batter mentions someone being busy. She turns her attention to the monitors and the curious feeds showing everyone along with that unfamiliar person in the room that she's pretty sure she had never been in. It's probably not a touch screen, but it's certainly suspicious enough when the stranger messes with the windows coincidentally at the same time the Batter starts moving again. <<"Puppeteer, hm? Let's see if... Oh. Maybe try constellations? I found a weird Sagittarius before, and the Batter had Leo, Cancer, Crab, and Aquarius.">> She suggest to August before turning back to the monitor and gives the screen where the stranger is visible a firm poke and drag on the screen to see what happens. "Hey there! Can you feel it when I do this?"
Janine Liberi	Janine looks over the Elsen's shoulder at the feed that has opened on the screens. Particularly that last one that depicts a room she's never seen. Her eyes widen as the significance of what it shows hits her. Someone at a mass of screens. Someone seemingly playing a game.     The Puppeter.     This little figure is the one directing the Batter. Looking at them all through the screens, screens that seem to be recording everything. Everything that has happened... That's it. She snaps her fingers, and runs after the Batter, grabbing his sleeve to get his attention.     "Batter!" she shouts. If she's experiencing this all as a game, best not to address the player. "These three Elsen here have questions about what we've experienced until now. But I haven't paid a lick of attention. Would you mind taking a shot at them?"     If The Puppeteer is recording everything, they'll have the answers saved somewhere. Assuming they're even willing to heed Janine's request. "I'll give you something if you do!" There, now it's a proper sidequest, they'll have to do it.
Doctor Strange	Perhaps it's out of willful defiance that Strange hasn't made any progress on the puzzle. When August asks if anyone has a code, there is a lack of response from the sorcerer. From a certain point of view, all of his actions might look like willful defiance in the face of the inevitable. That isn't how he sees it. The others can progress, for the moment, without his assistance. The outcome, in his eyes, is irrelevant--he's looking at the bigger picture.      "George," says Strange. "This place you mentioned. The one that could withstand the Grands being used. Is it..." He pauses, brow furrowed, eyes briefly squinting. The sorcerer trails off. "The infection... does it... move towards the Grands from outside, or does it spread outwards from within? Do you know?" Time is running out, but he's still trying to find a way to save Hugo, Elsen... anyone he can, it seems.
Starbound Flotilla	"GEORGE": You've had a speaker system this whole time. The Puppeteer does the deciding. The Batter does the speaking.     Or so says a text box that pops up on the window that August examines, the odd display of the Puppeteer. He's smoking outside every window -- not the least of which is the window of the Puppeteer's room. "GEORGE": Actions speak louder than words, though. She's been talking to you in her own way for a while now, but you've not talked to her much. "GEORGE": But you know how things like this work, don'tcha? This kind of, you know, paradigm of things? "GEORGE": Do you know what kind of way you might be able to get an answer from her? >[ YES] [  NO]
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki has been here for George for a while. A dream turning into reality, and a nightmare for her friend... Well, she couldn't just leave after that. If you expect her to be good or useful at puzzles, though... Well, you should pay more attenion! Yuuki is good at people and obstacles, but not puzzles. Then again, George remains an unconquered frontier in so many ways. One that, almost like a petulant child, she refuses to just use the easy solution and stubbornly tries to to play out 'honestly'. A matter of pride, or weakness, or simple foolishness. "George... What about the girl on the screen. Do we have to wrap her up with a bow, too? Does she need to be saved? Is she just a matter of perspective?"
Starbound Flotilla	"George" puts a finger up to clarify something to Strange. "I didn't say it withstands Grands. I said it withstands the mission -- the purification, that sort of business. Whether it withstands Grands is... kinda past the rules of the game board, so I can't say anything for sure. But if you're looking to put someone somewhere safe, then..."     His finger goes down to point back at Strange. "You don't just need a where, you need a when. Lucky you, this is the Moeran Eternity, where time's a little looser. In Zone 2, Japhet worked his hardest to make bunkers. He wasn't known for obeying all the rules. Back when he was like you, he made a bunker that could survive even a Purification. Judge built his legal, but Japhet was too wild."     "Elsen's gone, though, by now. Three zones of Elsen, all three Purified. Even Dedan's cloning machinery might have bit it in the Purification, though I can never really be sure most times. But you can guess at a where and a when now to track Elsen down and get him through this, can'tcha?" He gives a knowing smile, and the weight of his words seems like... it's more like an olive branch. An effort to prove to Strange that he's not here to mess with him or anything.
Zero Kiryu	"I'm not sure it's helpful to get an answer from her at this point. Not for me, anyway." Zero says to "George", content to lapse into a state of merely being along for the ride. He's tried to force his way on things, and it didn't work. So he stands by Yuuki, listening in detached curiosity to the question she has for George. He hadn't really thought of that. But there are a lot of things he just hasn't devoted the time or energy to considering with this place. If he was going to think deeply on it, he ought to have done so from the start.
Starbound Flotilla	"George" points up, as if that is most of all likely to indicate someone of importance. "Puppeteers aren't usually at risk in the puppet shows." He says, then gestures through the window to the group. "But I can tell you, she's real as anything in the world. Like you, she has her own... things she's doing, her own life she's living. She got pulled in too. Little less directly, but don't you mistake her for a framing device."     "...And her position in all this doesn't mean everything's all together for her any more than it is for us here in the Choir." "George" goes on. "She's pulled in in a different way. Invested, you know? She cares about what's happening. But this world loves hurting people. I'm not sure she's going to see a solution to this story that she likes. But I'm here to make the bitter pill as easy to swallow as I can."     He gives a big shrug, rolling his shoulders with tremendous visibility given the way he's turned away from the window. "Every story ends somehow, you know. Can't have pages forever. But if it ends and you spent the time with nice friends, heard some bad jokes, had some good times... maybe that's okay? So I've been doing my best for her."
Priscilla	Tina jabbing her finger at the monitor causes the pixels in the horizontal band to flicker and stripe --black and white in this penultimate destination of dark and murky memories, but surprisingly accurate for an old CRT monitor, considering the place. Nothing further happens. The strange disk August unearthed seems to have accessed some sort of program or another, or perhaps something only symbolically a program, through the sympathetic connection of workstations used for who knows what purpose, but the connection is solely one of Perspective.     Janine can *see* herself run up to the Batter on the monitor, smoothly transitioning between feed boxes as if they were a connected map, or at the very least, her simplistic, monochrome, pixely self. When she begins talking to him, the Batter spares her only the usual serenely detached glance, still somehow more . . . intense, under the starker shade of his cap bill here. Several layers of resolution compression beyond though, on the monitors visible *through* the monitor, one of the ring-shaped audio captures flickers and fluctuates, waveforms spitting unintelligible symbols, which decode in scrolling lines into text. Whatever place they're looking into, That Person has --has always had-- a surprisingly limited and improvisational means of seeing and hearing what's going on, and yet strangely a much broader one, from a different Perspective altogether.     The Batter, after a moment, replies with a patient, "Sure." and moves past Janine into the room, with those eerily silent, yet echoing footsteps. The blurry facsimile of an Elsen --a friendly faced stretched over the shadowy remembrance of Nobody In Particular-- only asks him the exact same pre-programmed question as it had Janine, seemingly totally incognizant of the difference between them. When he does, it's a window that pops up from the *Batter himself* in the incredibly poor quality, odd Perspective view of that Other Room, with several closely associated thoughts. The date asked causes the Batter feed to come up with all three Calendar dates. The Vault password comes up with several closely similar permutations of the Von Gacy password; Van Gacy, Von Gocy, Van Gocy --things someone would think with the answer on the tip of their tongue. A list of books the Batter himself had touched at the library appears when asked about the unreadable one.     »"She can't talk to us." the Batter clarifies unclearly. "However, she can see and hear everything."«     The extraordinarily tired looking girl in the window checks through voluminous capture records written in a completely unknown and unreadable pictographic language, then indicates choices with the halo-shaped controls. Without a second's hesitation, the Batter himself repeats the selections. Not commands. Inspirations. Revelations. The Elsens fawn over his correct answers, congratulating him with the enthusiasm of talking to a tiny child who'd said something uncommonly clever, lavishing him with little rewards, formed from the black and white dreamstuff around them. A Joker was found. A Thursday was found. A Bleeding Symbol was found.     Somehow, it feels like a circuit has been completed. One that might have been meant for a long time ago, but neglected until now. You've had such a limited Perspective this entire time, but now it's clear. This person can See the Batter. The Batter always Sees you, in uncanny clarity. Now you can See that person. Through the Batter, she Sees you. Through her, you can really See the Batter now. And were the Batter to bother with the monitors, nod doubt through you, he'd See her. Alpha, Omega, Epsilon. Another Holy Trinity.
Janine Liberi	It works. The Batter walks up to each Elsen and delivers the correct answer. Janine watches the woman go through her voluminous logs to find said answers and deliver them through the Batter. The realisation that a loop has been completed now that she can see the Puppeteer who can see her through the Batter is lost on her, as she reaches a different, more important (to her) conclusion.     The Puppeteer can solve puzzles herself as long as she is directed.     "Whoa, good job man!" she says to the Batter, giving him a pat on the shoulder. More hollow praise to come through in a toneless texbox. Good thing too, because Janine isn't a very good actor. "As for your reward... sorry, I kinda fibbed. August has it, I think he's in another block now. Ask him for the memory we found with the music box, he'll get it. Oh and while you're there, he was stuck on something, a bunch of buttons around a cross. I feel like I've seen something like that around here. When you pick up your prize, mind giving him a hand? I'm gonna stay here, there was one more room I didn't check."     With the next stage on the 'side-quest' explained, Janine heads out to the catwalk with the big Elsen. "Hi big guy," she says in passing, heading for that last door she never checked out.
Doctor Strange	"I can," says Strange to George, pacing around the room he still hasn't left. Do they /need/ the Grands, then? He stops in his tracks, his frown worsening slightly. Maybe they don't. "If we don't use them..." How can they be sure that things won't fall apart? "They'd be..." Unsupervised? He can't think of a word that isn't condescending. Parental. Strange sighs, lifting a scarred hand to rub his temple in exasperation.      Is it not acceptable for the Sorcerer Supreme to be a little protective of his charges? /Are/ these people his charges? They're human... or close enough physiologically to make no difference. His memory is drawn to one of his many discussions with the King of Heroes. 'Just let them be,' he'd told Gilgamesh. Here he wants to micromanage every aspect of their lives, after having said that.      When the Puppeteer is revealed fully, he's made his decision. "Okay." He sighs. "There's not much time, now. George, who else besides Elsen /can't/ outrun or outlive Purification?"
Starbound Flotilla	"George" says, "There's only two people who can't, no matter what, outrun what's coming up next. They can run as hard as they want, but they hit a pop fly, and there's no arguing it."     "The first one you know. She's the Queen."     "The second one is named Hugo. You don't know him. But if you want to use the Grands, you'll have to kill him anyway, to keep him from stopping you."
Tina Natsumi	After amusing herself for a few more seconds with the CRT, Tina sighs and turns her attention towards the rest of the feeds. There's a lot of information to unpack here with what the Batter is telling them, but she can't quite sort out what to actually do with it. Janine's ploy gets the gears starting to turn in Tina's head again, though, and she's all too willing to play along for lack of anything else clever she can come up with on her own.     Not that she can think of how to actually do that just yet, but it'll be a good thing to keep in mind as she leaves those feeds alone to follow the Batter once more. "I'll keep our buddy company, don't worry. Maybe we can figure out where these constellation cards fit into all this, too, even if we just gotta rub the dang things all over the buttons just to make sure." Tina laughs and claps the Batter's shoulder. There might be a text box saying that Tina's joined the party (again). Granted, she's probably been appearing in that menu for a while now with how much she's hung around. "So! He mentioned an elevator door. Maybe he's near one of those."
Doctor Strange	Strange nods at George. He seems to have gained a little more surety. "It sounds like we don't have to use the Grands," says Strange to George. "It sounds like we can just gather up Elsen, the Judge, Zacharie, anyone else we can grab... stick them in that Bunker... and Purify the Queen. Am I wrong?"
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki really only has one question to this latest revelation, leaning against the window that George is outside 'looking away' at Stephen Strange. "Well, George. I think Zero will agree with me: just because things are bad, and hurt, doesn't mean you can't try to make things better. It doesn't mean it's a forever. Forever is... a very long time." Her eyes close while she relaxes her neck and presses the back of her head to the wall by the windowsil. "But that doesn't mean I want to put down your book. Maybe I want to flip through it again, with all the context. A good book can be read many times - you keep finding wonderful little new things if it's interesting." She subvocalizes a last little part, a whisper of breath around her lips.
August Kohler	August doesn't find much with the computer, so he heads over to the button puzzle again, pushing past the crowd. His first thought is to press the buttons in the pattern of Sagittarius, and then if that doesn't work or fit, push it in the position of the other Zodiac cards. If none of that works...well, hopefully the Batter will come assist him.
Zero Kiryu	"Forever is an awfully long time," Zero agrees, "but that doesn't mean that every possibility has a favorable branch or end. How many Level Es could not be saved to my 'one'?" "Forever is weak. Forever is unreliable." He concludes, gravely.
Starbound Flotilla	"..." "George" tries to think of the right way to word this to Doctor Strange. It's clearly something that needs to be thought through, for whatever reason. What he eventually says properly is, "You don't /have/ to. It's just a matter of the outcome you're after." His tone goes low in an odd way, and his posture shifts in the same way a bullet shifts when it loads in the chamber.     Something was asserted in the web of outcomes, but what it was is unclear.
Priscilla	Despite Janine's really shitty acting and the inherent jerkaround stupidity of saying that she doesn't have a prize at all but August does, the Batter looks at her as if it isn't the slightest bother. Despite his repeated insistences before, when things went *wildly* off track, that time is a factor, there's a sense of purpose and finality about him here that is outright tangible, lending him a weight and solidity he didn't quite have before. The Puppeteer --presumed but so exceedingly unlikely not to be-- visibly rubs her face on the monitor, but the Batter shrugs ever so slightly and proceeds moving through the maze of screens.     Janine heads out to find Elsen again --for who else could the man be? Giant as he is, the strange, exaggerated sizes and shapes and characteristics of the people all along the way have never quite corresponded to their humanity. "Hello there." he smiles wearily towards Janine, lifting his hand over the catwalk-counter floating above the abyss to wave. "Just say if you want to play again." Again, there's that prickling uncomfortability of guilt and sympathy on her back as she walks past.     Elsen is supposed to be sick. The Elsens, plural, are unmistakably afflicted with a horrendous illness. Yet, she can't help but get the feeling, each time, increasingly so, that it doesn't stem from the big, friendly, bald and exhausted office worker. It feels like . . . she's the one who is ill. And he's too polite to talk about it. Too gentle to say anything.     The room beyond is a dead end. A steep pit in the floor littered with crates, sacks, packages, and pallets, suggest that it was once completely full with carefully stacked and organized materials and supplies of sone kind, but that it's been whittled to the last tenth, if not twentieth over time, creating an aura of dizzying vertigo around it, as if space stretches down and away from her the closer she gets. Bizarrely, an out of place Cube, of the capital C variety that so often serves as a strange and important placeholder, sits at one end of a tight, narrow maze through the clutter, with a very obvious heavy, square button at the other end. As she walks across the floor, the cube grinds back and forth across the floor of its own volition, swerving around like a heavy, sharp-cornered roomba, terribly loud in the enclosed space, stopping exactly when she does.     August slamming in the constellation of note continues to be stymied in that frustrating way. The zodiac cards that'd served as keys to access each Zone, and now apparently a Zone *within* a Zone, are of no use. He can hear the clomping of the Batter's cleats long before he arrives, as if seeking him out through the twisting and turning halls of pitch black and undetailed memory, though they have the harsh ring of dress shoes rather than the tough rubber of proper sports boots, severe and adult.     "You have a memory about a music box." he prompts him, with the unearthly patience of a saint. "What are you doing?"
August Kohler	August resets the code again. After each attempt, he gets more frustrated. Finally, the Batter arrives. When the Batter asks him about the memory, August pulls it out of his 'inventory', as much as that is a tangible object. "Oh, here." And then, he steps aside to let the Batter over to the code. "This is the next way forward, I know it. But I have no idea what the code is. It isn't Zodiac card related. Do you have any idea what it could be?"
Tina Natsumi	Following behind the Batter, Tina brings up that picture of the distorted Sagittarius-like formation of dots and lines she had taken earlier. "Yo, August. Try this one." Instead of just forking the phone over first, though, she instead tries something a little dumber: She holds the phone screen-first directly against the input panel. If that doesn't work, she rubs the screen against it a bit. After that, then she'll hand the phone over. It's worth a shot! "If this doesn't work, maybe it's got something to do with... I dunno. The... Days of the week? Symbols that were on the music box?"
Janine Liberi	Janine catches that show of exasperation in the monitor, the Puppeteer's face being buried in her hands, and can't help but smirk slightly triumphantly. 'Haha gotcha bitch,' she thinks to herself. With that sorted, she heads off to that last room, passing by Elsen. He reminds her to come by again if she wants to play another number game.     And again. Again that sensation of being at a hospital. She's the one leaving, and yet feels like she's on her deathbed again. She slumps against the wall and takes a shuddering breath to steady herself before slapping her own cheek once more. "Get it together," she whispers to herself harshly.     Okay, in this room. Her view zooms even further out, making her stagger from the rush of vertigo and having to lean on the wall again for support. A puzzle, goddamn it. She walks, and the Cube moves to mirror her direction. But, okay. This is one she is well suited for, because she can cheat. "Catherine," she intones, drawing out her Persona before beginning to move the cube once more. If ever she reaches a point where she can't move in order to move it, she just takes flight, adjusts her position, and lands somewhere where she can keep moving it, and does so. Like lifting our mouse from the desktop to readjust it without moving the cursor, she guides the Cube to the button by doing this.
Starbound Flotilla	"A forever of pain really is the worst." "George" says to Yuuki and Zero. "But the worst part is, when you're staring down the barrel of that gun, you'll do just about anything to stay right there. It's hard to tear away."     But he stops for a moment, shifting his weight around a few times, and then settles on something positive. "But I'm glad to think you'll think about this sort of time for a while. I know what you want for me, and maybe at the end of this all you can give it. But old men like us shine brightest in a treasured memory. Living forever is unreliable, being remembered forever is the best there is."
Doctor Strange	"The outcome /I'm/ after is a lot more likely to happen without using the Grands," Strange says. "But I wouldn't have come to that conclusion without your help. Thank you." So, that's that. He won't use his Grand, or convince anyone else to use theirs. He won't interfere The only remaining question is when to make his move. In the short time they've been here, they've already witnessed the Puppeteer in full clarity. Making a change before he has all the information could jeopardize the outcome he's after. He waits, stepping through a portal and emerging next to August after a cursory scan of the other rooms.
Yuuki Kuran	Crossing her arms in her window-adjacent lean, Yuuki cracks her eyes, sharing a glance with Zero. "It is. Some pains you can forget, or even grow to accept. Some pains can give you a new passion. But... Some pains are terrible. A creeping pain. Forever is a pain like that too." "I won't turn you into... whatever this. Trapped in a dream, a failing torture. After all this, I think it's best if I try not to be selfish." "If you're fighting so hard for this torture to end, only for me to visit another one on you, I think you wouldn't be my friend any more."
Zero Kiryu	"I don't think I would compare our condition to this." Zero says, to George and Yuuki alike. This is a much bigger statement coming from him than it otherwise would be, considering the sort of self-hatred he was rolling around in just months prior.
Priscilla	The Batter equipped the Perfect Symbol.     The minute August hands it over, all three Add-Ons flash with a wave of radiant white light, briefly casting the dark room into a photo flash of stark brilliance, before it fractures into a drifting 'snow' of white sparkles, gradually fading. All three halos thrum with a new sense of power, now more rings of light than two-dimensional white rings.     The Batter takes a look at the twin leaf patterns on the walls then goes right up to them, examining them in a way that once again presents a blown up image of them on the monitors, the Puppeteer 'seeing the Batter's thoughts'. Recalling the image of the card art from earlier, surrounded by and decorated with the same leaves, with the big cross in the middle, she spins it to the center with motions of strange finger-mounted machinery, and the Batter goes about silently stomping on the circles of floor, where the leaves on the wall match the leaves on the card in relation to the cross.     What is it with playing cards in this place? Either way, it's obvious that, even when the Choir doesn't solve the puzzles by themselves, there's a reason they're here.     When he finishes, August's ears are battered by a too-loud succession of blended chimes, and when he turns around, the section of wall right in front of him is printed with a sequence of huge numbers in fuzzy, indistinct grey. 5865     Yet, when Janine cheats another sequence, dragged and dropped by Biancabella over the floor, smoothly skating the huge cube of inscrutable mass around the labyrinthine ratway amidst the dwindling supplies, when it finally crushes down that other perspective-skewed button, the same sensation assaults her as well. The minute she looks up, the wall just ahead of her visually blasts her with the vague impression of 3755. Why is it that even here, codes are paramount? These little strings of numbers so deeply embedded in a memory?     It essentially exhausts the last of the rooms of their novelty. Seemingly related to nothing, however, the Batter asks August, unprompted, going by the lack of the Puppeteer doing anything, "Give me the music box." He doesn't say any permutation of 'please', but it is an asking tone, not a demanding one. The girl in the chair sits forward a little when he does.     As far as August's prior examination can tell, only certain parts of the rig are actually digital. Pieces of it look obviously dedicated to display, processing, data storage, and cooling, but so much of it is a complete mystery. Despite the impression of AR portions, haptics, and floating hand controls, the portions of the station that are nothing more than white light are tangible and solid, and an enormous portion of it looks dedicated to some sort of mystery power sourc or anomaly within it, analyzing *that* rather than a camera feed that doesn't exist. Maybe all the data is being interpreted from something otherwise completely inscrutable? Like reading what exists inside a singularity by its radiation.
Janine Liberi	Cheating is the way. Janine solves the puzzle and receives a code, along with a cacophonous tone that makes her head ring. She slumps to the floor and sits there for a short while. Between the dizzying shifts in perspective, the mind-bending understanding of the loop of people looking through people at people looking at that original person, and the psychic assault she receives every time she sees Elsen, Janine feels the worst she has felt since she ran out of her medicine.     But she has a code, and knows one person who is taking four digit numbers. How unfortunate that it's someone who contributes to her nausea, but it has to be done. There's no other way to get back anyhow. She gets back to her feet and gingerly makes her way back out to Elsen's catwalk, walking slow just in case her perspective changes back. She doesn't want to fall after all.     "Hey big guy," she says quietly once she's standing before him. "I'm here to play again." And when he asks her to guess a number, she offers him 3755.
Tina Natsumi	Tina winces at the sudden flash of light, but that soon subsides in favor of staring at the snowy lights coming down from the halos. "Neat... Dunno what just happened, but neat!" She chimes in with an amused chuckle, watching the Batter as he goes about solving the puzzles with what is now known as the Puppeteer's guidance. She smacks herself on the head a few times, each one coinciding with when each puzzle is solved and the solution actually starts making sense. The numbers get entered into her phone for record keeping, and then she slips the phone back into her pocket to leave her hands free for once. The request for the music box gets a curious look from Tina, but she soon looks unfocused after a few moments. Where can she even input these numbers? "Anyone know where else we might be able to pop these numbers in?" As Tina speaks to nobody in particular, she starts backtracking towards The Room to see if there's any keypads or safes or other locks that she had missed.
August Kohler	When the doors open, August covers his ears, and then reaches into the bag and hands the Batter the music box. He speaks into the radio. <"Got a set of numbers. 5865."> And then, it seems like...they're done? August moves to leave. "Hey, thank you, Batter. Uh...Puppeteer, too." He moves out, checking to see if the Puppeteer reacts to him thanking her at all.
Zero Kiryu	"I'm not sure this is a scenario where thanks are truly appropriate." Zero weighs in, taking Yuuki by the hand and observing both monitors and the Batter. With a new medium, he might be able to contact the Puppeteer more directly than they have so far. Only, at this point he doesn't really have a reason to. Does he? He's just a member of Yuuki and George's party. He rubs at the back of his head, focuses on the figure in the monitor, and attempts to scan it again. They're approaching the finish line-- he doubts there will be many more opportunities. This time it is less of a command or an invasion, and more like knocking on a window.
Priscilla	It's not quite clear why there are two codes. Of the two, one seems to be exactly what Elsen is looking for. He patiently folds his hands and awaits Janine's guess, blinking his tired eyes and saying "Wow. That's exactly right. Bravo." to her, and then pulling up something out of the nothingness beneath him. "Um, take this as a prize. I don't have anything else left for you today though. Let's play again tomorrow?" Saggitarius Card was found.     The Batter accepts the music box, and just holds it in his palm for a good, long while. There's even a blown up image of the antique little pitted silver contraption, though what value his discerns from it is unclear. "Thank you." he says to August, at least somewhat sincerely despite the transcendentally unconcerned tone of his voice, before exiting without a further word.     On the screen, the Puppeteer blinks when August's vocal spectrum decodes into text, and then smiles seemingly involuntarily, in that way one sometimes does when a game ends with 'Thank you for playing!'. It doesn't quite take Zero's special abilities to tell it made her a little happy, though there is a strong undercurrent of worry, and the super intense focus that comes after the peak of exhaustion from not sleeping.     A decoder window pops up under Zero - Status: Pure, but the box remains empty, just transmitting a thin static line through it. The Puppeteer dismisses it instantly, apparently having grown sick of the nuisance popping up over and over, possibly mistaking it for a glitch. There's a separate alert entirely when the Saggitarius card is obtained. A piece of machinery in the background actually flashes with a fresh wave of energy running through it, like a computer making a burst of noise when a huge volume of data is suddenly written to its hard drive.     Given the association with the last, hidden keycard is obvious, the Batter returns to the third monolith, and the strange, endless hallway in its upside and backward world. This time, possessed of the correct 'authentication' though, anyone walking the hall feels the world, finally, start to 'untwist' around them. Their sense of balance is gradually assailed again in the process of turning it outside in, making the straightforward corridor feel like a strange walk along the inside of a loop, twisting about like a mobius strip, until it finally results in reeling their Perspective back into its proper place.     At the end is a single door, which leads into another dead end. It'd be frustrating, were it not immediately obvious. The set of cubes. The keypad shape. *The* keypad. The prototype of the thing they've seen so many times elsewhere, cropping up into the other Zones. Possibly the original. Considering you already have a second, redundant code, it's the most immediate, obvious choice, and works exactly like it should. It's a code that someone remembers entering, to go somewhere. Outside? It has to be. The blinding white light that envelops you once again smells of crisp mountain air, tinged with smoke and sulfur, and the warmth of a setting sun on your face.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vtSlaNg9uQ     "Today, papa gave me a comic. But I want to go out and play."     "I hate this place."     "I'm sure mom will pick me up."             Chapter 2         The Boxxer's adventures.
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki lightly rolls her eyes at Zero's comment about 'their condition', heaving a big very-extra 'oh you' sigh. "It was killing you. We had to..." Yuuki blinks. "That's it. We could use *that thing* to make it totally better! Well, not completely better, but yours was awful and torn up in misery and steeped in all sorts of awfulness. Maybe Hanabusa can..." Perspective shifts. The room unfurls. The Puzzles fall into place, codes gained and secrets entered and a door opening 'to the outside'. "I hope Stephen isn't out of time. It's rarely bad to try for something better." A knowing smile is cast towards the Sorcerer Supreme. "He is always finding time to do the impossible." The door opening seems to be a clear 'ending' - if anything that they heard could be believed, from George or the strange and twisted memories. Then again, they still hadn't met the Queen. "I'd prefer if you weren't planning your own death, George. Retirement is fine, though. You should always be saving for retirement."
Janine Liberi	Janine smiles up at Elsen and accepts the Sagittarius Card. "Thanks Elsen. I'll be back tomorrow then." No she won't. She knows it, and he knows it as well. But that's what you do at hospitals. Little white lies, pretend everything will be okay in the hopes that reality itself is fooled. She knows it well, and she gets the feeling Elsen knows it as well. So she keeps up the tradition, this final time they'll be seeing each other.