Chapter Text
Ughhhhh…
I shift on the surface I’m laying on, which is way too hard and cold to be my bed. It’s very uncomfortable, and I’d gladly get off of it, if not for the fact that I feel like I recently got run over by a truck. I must have been really tired last night, because I don’t know why else I would possibly have passed out on the floor. When did I even lie down? Is this what a hangover feels like? I don’t drink…
Slowly, unwillingly, I lever myself up onto my arms, blinking groggily at my surroundings... which I don’t recognize. What the- am I still asleep? This looks like the inside of a dingy elevator or something…
Finding myself more awake all of a sudden, I start to look around with some degree of actual alertness. The room I’m in is small, cubical, and made of metal. There’s a fire extinguisher in one corner, a fire extinguisher box in another corner, a couple of weird posters on the walls, and a large machine with a screen on the front attached to the back of the room. Directly underneath it is an odd looking safe, and to its right is some sort of big red lump of cloth, with what looks like shifting machine parts peeking out from under-
The lump suddenly stands up and turns around. I nearly bang my head against the wall as I scramble back — staring down at me is a tall, yellowish-white robot, with glowing orange eye panels, an almost insectoid mask, and a long red cloth draped around its shoulder that falls down around the rest of its body like a toga. Before I can even really process its appearance, it begins to speak to me in a calm, measured tone.
“I see that you are awake. Please, do not panic. I know I must look frightening… though I admit, I cannot tell precisely what I look like right now.”
…that voice. That… armor. Am I looking at K right now? K, as in the game character? How-
My thought process cuts off as I happen to look down at myself for the first time since I woke up.
Stockings. Short shorts. Spotted pink bra.
What the SHIT.
I don’t scream, but I must make some sort of noise, because K begins trying to reassure me again. I don’t hear a word of it. Why the hell am I in Virtue’s Last Reward?! Why am I a girl- no, why am I Clover?! What- just, WHAT?!
I spend roughly 30 seconds freaking out before my mind calms down enough for me to think properly again. The conclusions I immediately come to, however, are almost enough to make my heart stop.
Please tell me this is a dream, or a simulation, or something, because if this is real, then I am utterly screwed. I’m sure that there are worse universes to be bizarrely and randomly dropped into, but at present none are coming to mind. Due to the way this game’s plot is entirely reliant on a massive time loop, I am currently an unknown variable in a situation that is going to fail if literally anything about it is not known — if everyone doesn’t do exactly what they need to do/did, then the information Sigma/Zero used to set it up was faulty. Except, it can’t have been faulty, because his experience in the Nonary Game is what he used to set it up to begin with. In other words, I may literally break time here if I say or do the wrong thing — and the "wrong thing" is essentially anything.
“Miss? Miss, are you alright? I promise, I will not hurt you.”
K is currently holding his hands up, having backed away and bowed his head slightly. He must think I’m not responding because I’m scared of him or something, since he seems to be trying to be as unaggressive as possible. Panicking aside, I suppose I should probably reply at some point…
“I… I’m fine. Just a bit… freaked out, I guess.” I tell him as I stand up, my voice coming out exactly the way I remember Clover’s sounding.
“That is perfectly understandable.” K replies, sounding slightly relieved that I finally spoke. “I apologize for my appearance. I’m fairly certain that this is some sort of suit, but I’m not quite sure how to get it off.”
Do I play along and act like I don’t know anything about him? I guess that seems like the safest course of action, at least in as much as any action can be considered “safe” in this scenario.
“You’re ‘fairly certain’…?” I ask, feigning confusion.
“Hmm.” K places a hand behind his head, appearing to be thinking. “I don’t… remember… to be honest, I’m not quite sure who I even am. Are you perhaps experiencing something similar?”
I shake my head no, feeling Clover’s long pink hair tickle my back. “No, not at all…”
I know who I am, I just seem to have been a bit bodily displaced is all.
“You’re saying you have amnesia?” I continue.
“Well… yes. I suppose I do.” If K could visibly frown, I’m certain he would be doing so right now. “If you aren’t experiencing the same problem, perhaps you could tell me where we are, and why we’re in here?”
“Ah… sorry. I have as little idea as you do.” I tell him, blatantly lying.
“I see.” K says, placing a hand on his chin. “That is regrettable. You do not know who I am, correct?” I shake my head no. “If that is the case, perhaps we have been kidnapped.”
Not a bad conclusion, but not technically correct. I guess I — or rather, Clover — technically was, but you’ve lived here your whole life. Although granted, it was not inside this little cube we’re currently stuck in.
“Are you familiar with that bracelet?” K asks, pointing at my wrist.
I hold up my arm. As expected, there sits the Nonary Game Bracelet, its face proudly proclaiming me to be a green pair with 3 BP. It’s heavier than a normal watch, but not enough to be hugely impactful on my arm movement.
“No… where did this thing come from?” I make a show of trying to get it off by wildly pressing the buttons. “Does it come off? Who the heck put this on me?”
“I would assume the culprit to be whoever put us in this room.” K notes. “Perhaps this armor was placed on me by them as well, as it appears to have been built to accommodate a bracelet of my own.”
He shows me his arm as proof of this. Before I can respond, the hum of something flickering on suddenly emanates throughout the room.
“How’re you feeling?” a smirking, self-satisfied voice asks.
K and I look as one at the small monitor built into the wall just above the “elevator” buttons. A small white rabbit wearing a miniature set of Chinese clothes has appeared on it.
Oh joy, look who it is.
“I am Zero III! The king of this kingdom!”
I listen to the half-deranged sounding AI talk for a short while, but it quickly becomes evident his message to the players at this stage is exactly the same as I remember, holding nothing of any real relevance beyond the announcement of his name and the Nonary Game. Deciding I’m going to get no new information from this, I return to my whirling, frantic thoughts.
Okay, I’ve got to calm down. In a situation like this, I need to be as logical and careful as possible, or everything could come crumbling down around me in a spectacularly short period of time. Let’s think about this... the information on how the game eventually proceeds that Sigma-Zero used to set up this game in the “past” comes from the “present”, wherein he went through the game himself. It’s a classic self-fulfilling time loop, at least in that regard. So… maybe things have already changed retroactively, and my presence has therefore already been accounted for? Perhaps the scenario to follow doesn't have to be identical to the game's, since it will have been set up with my actions in the roughly 20 or so timelines “to come” in mind, rather than the original Clover’s. In fact, now that I think of it, if we assume that this plan could only have been set in to motion if it ends up working in some reality, then I shouldn't even have to worry, right? Right! We’re already in the AB game, and since time isn’t broken, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about!
…although then again, that’s WHY time might break. I know how this situation is supposed to proceed, and in the VLR universe time doesn’t retroactively change. You can “trick” it in a couple of ways, or alter the flow of parallel timelines which were initially going to proceed identically to the original, but you can’t change things in an already defined timeline outright. Which means unless this is all taking place in an entire parallel set of timelines, which is a bet I can’t possibly risk, any action I make that Clover didn’t goes against the way this universe’s time physics are supposed to work.
I bite the inside of my lip. While the fact that the stable time loop isn’t already broken could be taken as a good sign, now that I think about it, Sigma/Zero never saw what went on inside Clover and K’s cube, and since his viewpoint is the only important one here, it may not matter what I do regarding things that happened “offscreen”. Time might actually only break when we get out of here, and I’m not still unconscious the way Clover is supposed to be. I guess I could maybe knock myself out again somehow, but K would surely tell the others about that, which also didn’t happen in the game, and thus might just as easily... god damn it, this isn’t fair! It’s not like I had any control over when I woke up! And even if I somehow did, I wouldn’t have known NOT to do so before-!
“Hey, you! Pay attention!”
My gaze snaps back to the monitor. Zero Three stares back at me with an unamused expression.
“I am a very busy bunny, and I do not. Have time. To repeat myself.”
Er… sorry? Wait, is he directly addressing me? Did he do that at all in the game, before you actually escaped the AB room?
“And, as it happens, you don’t have that time either!” Zero shrugs, continuing in a much cheerier tone. “You’d better get out quick, because that elevator you’re in? It’s gonna fall in a few minutes. Waaaaaay down.”
“…oh dear.” K says, sounding rather disaffected. I guess he always sort of sounded like that in the game, but it is kind of jarring to hear someone actually talk like that. Personally, I'm more worried about what might happen when we DO get out than what will happen if we don't, especially as these aren't even elevators. That being said, Zero Three could still “punish” us if we fail to even try, so I guess we don't really have much choice.
“So, hop to it! I’ll see you later. Have a nice trick!”
The screen goes blank, and K turns to me.
“We should make haste to escape.” he tells me, as if that isn’t just stating the blatantly obvious. Although then again, since Zero pointed out how I seemingly wasn’t paying very close attention, he might think he actually needs to.
“Yeah, we should.” I agree.
Practically hearing the “SEEK A WAY OUT!” music play in my head, I turn to the wall and begin pulling the brightly colored knobs off the bar, my body moving almost on autopilot as I continue desperately trying to form a viable plan.
Alright, assuming I don't cause a critical spacetime error a few minutes from now, and ignoring the fact that I already may have nixed the viability of this idea by sheer virtue of waking up, do I just go along with the normal timeline as best I remember? As long as I don’t reveal to anyone that I’m not Clover, and take the same actions she did, then by almost the same principles that Akane used to be “K” in the timeline where she lived, I shouldn’t actually affect anything. But even if I somehow managed that, given that I really only remember the broad strokes of this game and thus can’t even hope to replicate Clover’s actions exactly, the best timeline ends with everyone besides Sigma and Phi left to deal with living in a doomed future. All others end with “me” either dead, stuck on the surface of the moon slowly running out of oxygen, or trapped in here forever with the others. Or rather, trapped until the Radical-6 everyone was secretly infected with takes full effect I suppose. Wow, okay, I hadn’t even considered all that when I said I was screwed regardless; if time doesn’t fall apart the second we walk out of here-
“Excuse me, Miss…?”
It takes me a moment to realize K is talking to me. I spin around to face him.
“Uh… C-Clover.” I answer uneasily.
“May I ask what you’re doing? I’ve no issue with it, but I imagine it will be easier to escape if we’re working together.”
“Oh, uh…”
To be honest, I don’t really know why I'm doing this; I just remember that the knobs need to come off at some point in the process of getting the code you need to escape.
“I guess these knobs drew my eye since they’re all so brightly colored, and they seemed to be loose, so I just sort of took them off?” I say. “I mean, it can’t hurt, right?”
“Hmm… I suppose not.” K concedes. “I’ll get the other two.”
K moves away to remove the other handles while I examine the rest of the chamber. I don’t think I have to try too hard to recall how it worked in the game — this was the first puzzle room, and thus not particularly hard to get out of. Which is honestly something of an issue for me, as despite skipping directly from denial to acceptance in regards to my presence here, I still feel like I need more time to figure out what to do.
I suppose that in the short term, I just need to survive stepping outside this room, followed by the “game” that comes immediately after. Long term however, I ideally need to figure out how I ended up here, and somehow reverse the process. Consciousness travel is the obvious answer for that, but 1) Clover’s body should have been occupied, because she’s not capable of consciousness travel so far as I remember, 2) I’m not Clover, so even if she could transfer her consciousness I most certainly shouldn’t be here, and 3) this is a VIDEO GAME! At least in the version of reality I exist in! How the hell can I even be here?!
My mind briefly stutters as I glance at K, suddenly remembering something else. Wait... there was a scene at the end of Virtue's Last Reward — a “secret ending”, of sorts. A consciousness of unknown origin woke up in “Klim”, which was heavily implied to be the player... does that have anything to do with this? It’s not quite the same situation, and the ending got declared non-canon later, but maybe there’s somehow actual precedent for this, at least from this universe’s perspective?
Clutching tightly to that thought, I quickly review what I remember about that scene. If I recall correctly, Akane treated the player as a theoretically higher dimensional being, who could freely observe multiple timelines and travel between them — something proven by the fact that the player had been doing exactly that all game, through Sigma. She also vaguely hinted about how you’d be traveling to the Nevada test site soon, which was referencing the sequel of Zero Time Dilemma, again something that the player did in fact end up observing.
...implying that Akane may in fact know about “entities” like me, and thus may also know something about how I can get back to my own dimension.
Well, in that case, my plan is now to do everything I can to steer myself into the “true” ending timeline so that I can speak to Akane. She almost certainly won’t be willing to drop the facade of being K before then, since that would cause the whole Schrodinger’s Cat gambit that allowed her to live to begin with to fall apart, but at the end of the timeline she’ll have already done everything she set out to do, and will have no reason not to help me. Non-canon or not, that secret ending is hope, at least, that maybe I’m not stuck here permanently.
…I just have to not die along the way, and also hope I don’t cause spacetime to divide by zero the second I step out of this box.
I tell K to take the fire extinguisher pin out and use it as a key on the fire extinguisher box, which isn't a terribly difficult leap of logic, since there's a poster on the wall literally demonstrating how to do so. Meanwhile, I busy myself with the old people and babies poster, and move to punch the numbers of such into the matching railings, indicated by the tiny plaques on their sides.
The latter turns out to be a considerably more difficult task than one might imagine. The solution is all but self-evident, but it requires crossing the room to input — something that Clover’s four inch heels are making very difficult for me. I’m basically walking on my tiptoes here, and as if that wasn’t enough to throw me off balance already, gravity itself feels extremely wonky. Not completely off, which I assume is due to the tandem effect of the Radical-6 and the moon partially canceling each other out or something, but enough to make me extremely wary of falling over every other step. I end up having cling to the edge of the room to get to the other side, using the wall to support myself.
K quickly opens the extinguisher box, revealing four small socket wrench heads. While we’re attaching them to the handles we pulled off the bars, I find myself lamenting something else as well — Clover’s fingernails. I don’t particularly care about how they're painted a pale shade of silvery-white; it’s more the fact that her nails are less nails so much as miniature half-inch long DAGGERS. I don’t feel like I remember her possessing near literal claws in the game, but apparently she does, and while I suppose it’s good to know I have the option of gouging someone’s eyes out if need be, they’re incredibly difficult to handle anything with. Manipulating small objects with tooth-like points sticking out of your fingers is a real exercise in frustration. I’m fairly sure they’re fake to boot, but trying to peel them off doesn’t work, so they must be glued in place somehow... how incredibly annoying.
Regardless, we manage to get the socket wrenches together eventually. Given the literal color coding that’s been done for us with the handles, it’s immediately clear that they're meant to match the similarly colored screws on the elevator panel. Unscrewing and removing the panel reveals a tilting puzzle with a memory card inside, which also doesn’t take long to solve, and a small green memory card soon pops out of it. I slip the card into Clover’s shorts — good thing it's so small, because these pockets won’t hold anything bigger — before turning to the elevator buttons.
Let's see here. The rabbit placard is supposed to represent Zero Three I guess, so...
I press the 3 button, and a similar memory card in red pops out from a slot in the wall. Satisfied, I wobble across the room and stick the two cards into the obvious card ports of the machine K was hunched over next to earlier, causing the screen to light up with a pattern of stars, suns, and moons…
Surrounded by blue.
“Well done. I believe we can enter this combination into the safe.” K says.
“Yeah, I guess we can…” I agree vaguely, slightly confused, since I know what a blue code means.
Unsure of what I’ll find, I slowly lower myself into a crouch and tap the buttons of the safe to create the indicated pattern. The safe clicks open, and I pull out the contents before standing back up.
“What is that?” K asks, looking confused.
“I’m… not sure.” I reply, staring at the golden-colored folder in my hand.
Actually, I know exactly what this is, but from K’s perspective I definitely shouldn’t. Truth be told I’m not sure how I’d explain it anyways, because in-universe, it makes no sense for this to exist. In the game, Sigma can pick up a secret file from every escape room by finding a secondary passcode, which usually contains extra information relating to terms, science, and thought experiments mentioned in the dialogue. The other characters will see Sigma get the second combination and open the safe twice, even mentioning as such aloud, but they never comment on the files themselves, nor do they ask to see them, or really react to them at all. Sigma also clearly isn’t toting them around with him everywhere, nor does he ever attempt to share them with anyone else — in other words, they have no plot impact, and once taken out of the safe they aren’t even tangible items. They aren’t supposed to impact the story at all… yet this doesn’t seem like it’s going to just vanish out of my hand, and K is asking about it, so it’s clearly real. I’m not really sure what to think about this.
“…hang on a moment.”
I walk back over to the elevator buttons, still using the bar on the side of the wall to support myself. Usually the difference between getting a green escape password and a blue file password is just a single difference in how you solve the final step, and since the baby and old man buttons are locked in, and the sliding puzzle is already finished, this is the only thing in the room that can still be manipulated. Seeing as how there’s no penalty for being wrong, I decide to just press the buttons in one by one without bothering to think about it.
I start with the button at the very top, and a blue memory card immediately pushes its way out of the slot. Wait, the answer was zero? Why-
Oh, right. Duh. Not sure why that didn’t come to mind first, actually.
I slot it into the machine alongside the green and red cards, and this time the screen turns green, displaying a different pattern. Closing the safe, I input the new pattern and reopen it, this time finding a key inside.
“A different code results in different contents?” K notes as I hold it up for him to see. “How does that work? A trick back, perhaps? And what exactly is the purpose of that folder?”
“I dunno.” I tell him, trying to sound confused. “It doesn’t look like we needed it to escape though. Let’s just get out of here, we’ll look it over outside.”
K nods in agreement, and I walk over to the elevator panel again, finally starting to get the hang of doing so without a hand on the wall. The key opens the plastic door covering the button (couldn't we have just smashed that open), which I press, causing a hatch in the ceiling to open.
I look at K. He looks at me.
“Hmm. Miss Clover, if you would step over here for a moment?” K asks after a few seconds, positioning himself beneath the hatch.
I comply, assuming he’s going to tell me to climb up on his shoulders. Instead, to my surprise, he bends down and lifts me off the ground in a bridal carry.
“Hey! W-What are you-”
I don’t have the time to say anything else, as I’m instead forced to cling on for dear life as K leaps off the ground and out of the hatch…