W͜͏̶Ę͏E͝͠K͝͞ ̧1̵͟

[strangerpeople]

W͜͏̶Ę͏E͝͠K͝͞ ̧1̵͟

[The national council just announced the blight to the country.

There was no sugarcoating it anymore. This was a critical time. Saving all of the vines is paramount, but what does one do when the blight hits? It keeps encroaching on the grapes, day by day. Entire clusters, entire bunches, dead and rotting, while allowing the blight to spread, and the leading botanists and viticulturists cannot identify the origin or the cause. They can't even successfully isolate the culprit in their labs; it seems to disappear like air no matter the precautions taken.

It is a catastrophe that seems to be beyond science, and it will result in the complete collapse of the entire country's wine industry. Already, embargoes on this year's crop have forced other grape-growers to close shop for the year after they'd sold their previous stock; it is all too possible that no grapes might ever be grown here again if a cure cannot be found. The tourists have stopped coming. The towns have grown silent.

You, meanwhile, are devastated. With the way your business is going, it will be on the brink of bankruptcy within the year. You will soon have no choice but to close shop and let every grapevine die, let the land go fallow. There must be a cure for this, there must be. Yet everything that can go wrong is.

Then, as you watch the news, it happens. Breaking news. The blight has been found in another country.

It is a pandemic-and it is only getting worse.


-

Well. This is...what else can can anyone say? You all know the deal. You all know what situation you're in. All that is left is to figure out what you can do about it. If there's anything that can be done.

You still feel that compulsion to distrust. To know you cannot win. To know that only the hosts have your best interests in mind. It would be easy to just do all that. But would it be the right thing to do? You can't be completely sure. Indeed, nothing is certain here, except for that damned ticking sound. If only you could stop it.

But you can't stop it. It is inevitable.


There are 15 strangers in this place.]

Comments

[poorlovefool]

[well, this topic does sound a bit unsettling already so he'll try to pay attention.]

Maybe. If it's like that, then I wonder if I'll recognize any of them...

[illusionarymelody]

I'll start with the plane since that seems to be where the repeats are.

Jonathan's is the Double, that came from the base. Atsushi is the one who got his old title, the Techno. Our Hosts, Hiyori and Link are the Approach and the Component, respectively. The other one from the Base is the Glow. My current title is the same as the one I had on the plane.

The other titles from the plane are the Ursa, Taskmaster, Dawn and Dusk, Shining, Obtuse, Outcast, Cuckoo, Future, and Destroyer. I don't know all their powers, but I do know Outcast can summon a familiar, that was Beatrice's.

The other Base titles are The Hungry, Swap, Snow, Coat, Sputnik, Kragle, Survivor, Puppet, Confounded, and Drunk.

[incendiarize]

Ursa and Obtuse were in the mansion with us, those were Akko and Krone.

[illusionarymelody]

[She remembers Arthur mentioning Krone in relation to Eric.]

Definitely interesting. I didn't find out what those powers did though to be able to confirm if the power is the same. The Ursa was actually in the room next to mine and named Zelos. He was a suspect for the murder, but innocent. The Obtuse was a dog named Ace, who was killed by Akira's double, Ren.

[Now it's starting to come out why she's a bit distrustful of Akira. Though she wishes she could have been lucky and not remembered dying like Ace and Satania.]

[incendiarize]

We should probably try and find out if the powers are consistent....so, if the Noodles can turn her hair into bladed whips, or something. Then we'd know, right?

[illusionarymelody]

Jonathan's definitely is the same as Richard's, that we both can confirm. Link's is indeed the same as Rosenkreuz's. However, unlike at the Base, the powers weren't in our profiles on the plane so I only know the ones I saw personally on the plane. The only other one I saw was Akira's double's power, which was teleportation.

If mine matches up with someone from another group I'll tell what it is. Just please don't make me show it.

[beguiledcard]

[ Quietly: ]

... Akko...

[incendiarize]

You know her?

[beguiledcard]

I've heard a lot about a girl named Akko - not sure it'd be the same one you know. [ but it is a unique name, he thinks ] Chariot - sometimes known as Ursula - talked about her during our game. She... really loves her and respects her.

[ A dim, sad smile surfaces. ]

Compared me to her a couple of times.

[unwittingking]

…Atsushi was there?

[Yeah, uh, sorry Vita! The corgi you don't like is worried again about one of the people you knew.]

[illusionarymelody]

Yes and he went home with my brother in law, Yurick.

[unwittingking]

…just to make sure, that world wouldn't be the one with that coworker that actively tries to kill himself, right?

[He's pretty sure he would've mentioned world hopping if it was the same Atsushi, so maybe this is another alternate version? Hopefully?]

[illusionarymelody]

It's Jonathan's world. So that Atsushi would know Charlotte.

[poorlovefool]

Oh... I do, then. Four of those are Depths powers.

[there was a flicker of guilt as she read off a few of those, in fact. Most of them, really.]

I think I might know what's going on here. It would mean this is even more of a mess than we thought, but ... it reminds me a lot of something that happened there, the titles jumping around and all. Want to hear it?

[illusionarymelody]

I'd be interested in hearing it. I think everyone here has potential insights to share about all the common threads between groups. If you want to know more about who had which I'll give what I know.

[poorlovefool]

Thanks, but I'm not sure the people involved have much to do with my idea.

So, anyway, there was this thing going on in the Depths where stuff would appear in random places. Like a bee statue covered in blood that suddenly appeared in my room and freaked the shit out of me... We learned these were coming from a group of people who were going through a version of the same murdergame, in the same place, but with a completely different group of Titled. ... Titled are what they called all of us, I'm not sure if that's the same in your death games or not.

But, so then, in the end they appeared in our world and they helped us out in the last trial. That's how I met Linkara, my friend who also helped everyone in the space house. Akane's brother was there too, and a woman named Camilla. All of these guys had titles that matched people in our group too. Like, Futaba Sakura was the Balanced, and so was Aoi Kurashiki. What we came to understand was there were a shit ton of parallel universes of the death game.

So, what I'm getting at is... Maybe that's what happened to all of you guys too? It'd mean you forgot about being there, but, we all had some pretty huge memory losses in the Depths too. And losing your original power could be because everyone always loses their powers in these things if they had some.

[illusionarymelody]

That's definitely interesting. Were all the titles in the parallel universes the same then, or just some like we have here?

However, I did regain my powers after the plane and then lost them again coming here and gained back the same power from the plane. The same was true with Jonathan, he lost that power and got it back.

We did have memory loss at the Base, but we regained them in the end other than our supposed willing agreement to being involved in the mission that led to it. We lost no memories on the plane other than not knowing how we ended up there to begin with.

[touchsensors]

I don't remember being in anything like this other than the space house, but I guess if I had a memory loss that would be expected-lun.

[katzenpfote]

But we didn't have any titles that seem to match yours.

[byanyother_name]

[It takes a moment, and Kurama's lips are pressed thin, but he finally speaks quietly.]

The Future, the Chance, and the Bad Luck were also mall titles. Yuuri Katsuki, a victim, Croix Meridies, working with the game runners until the last week, and Chariot du Nord or Ursula Callistis.

[illusionarymelody]

[She's not too pleased either, and especially when she's not going to be able to avoid a certain topic because The Future was Akira's double.]

The Future I know was a teleportation power for us on the plane. It belonged to your friend's double. In our case, The Puppet was the one working with the game runners.

[And she's just going to try to attempt to evade speaking of what her power does. She'll do better speaking of it to someone more neutral than someone she is actively just trying to be civil towards.]

[byanyother_name]

[Kurama strips a fair amount of pointed sarcasm out for the sake of civility. There's still some pointed, but it's well within the boundaries of civil.]

Akira is my boyfriend.

[Moving on!]

Teleportation was the evolved form of Yuuri's power.

[touchsensors]

Oh, I'm the Chance-lun. [Everyone knows that, Lala.] Apparently this time it doesn't include a power-lun.

[byanyother_name]

It's probably just not evident under these circumstances. Croix got extra money every week. We always wondered if there might be more to it but we could never pin down what.

[Pin. You're not funny, Kurama.]

[katzenpfote]

None of those overlap with ours.