Any comparisons made to the person who kidnapped you and forced you to play a death game was going to be negative, of course, no matter how accurate they might be.
(You try not to think about exactly why you hosted a death game. You try not to wonder if his reasons are at all similar.)
Read on AO3.
Written Chatpers
Literary (Carlos and Maria)
Relative (Maria and Phi)
Conviction (Don't Sacrifice)
Confession (Kill)
Pathogen (Do Nothing)
Mortality (Continue)
Voting ended onAug 6, 2024
Burnout has me in a stranglehold, here's every chapter I have left, we'll see if I have anything to give you after everything else is done.
So no, you’re not righteous. But you’re not arrogant enough to put yourself above the whole planet.
…Your brother, though.
Read on AO3.
...and when you're done click next chapter so you can read
Chapter 50: Confession (Judgment)
The victims' names escape you, but the similarity of the first murder to the exact same crime your father was executed for caught your attention, and you followed the serial killer’s actions as they were discovered for four months, right up to Phi showing up.
And now the serial killer sits before you, asleep.
Rules: Make a new post with the names of all the files in your wip folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it!
Huh. Suddenly those things that didn’t really matter seem kind of important. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to put them out of your mind.
Too late now. Either it’s super important and you can’t remember, or it isn’t important at all and you shouldn’t worry about it anyway.
So you should probably stop worrying about it.
…Stop.
ZWG still isn’t dead, and I’m sorry that it’s been A WHOLE FWICKIN YEAR, it makes me sad too. I’m gonna try writing something else and see if I can’t pivot from Something Else to Sigma On The Moon
in the meantime,
Should I post unpublished chapters to AO3?
No!!! We didn’t vote for them!!! Respect the integrity of the poll!!!!!
yes. obviously. idiot. you shoulda done thAT A *YEAR AGO*
respect democracy… by making a poll with *ONLY* chapters that you’ve written
So I had an anxiety attack came up with a theory that if I put forth energy on January 1 then I will sow similar energy throughout the new year—for example, if I don’t sleep at all from midnight to midnight then surely this year I will have more energy in general. (My anxiety takes pleasure in consorting with my insomnia.)
In that spirit, because I want to actually write more Zero Win Game and just write more in general this year (there was an impressively small amount of words written by me overall in 2023), here’s…
A random fucking monologue by Akane that popped into my head while I was waiting for FF7R to download. It has now been an hour and a half since I started that download, and it gave me an estimate of about ten minutes.
…I’m pretty sure I can’t fit this into the Fragment where it originated from. “We have sixty minutes to escape or we all die but I guess we can indulge little miss Reversed Moon Arcana in one of her deranged fucking monologues.” I dunno. If you find yourself reading this aloud can you time how long it takes you?
Actually you know what, fuck it, I’ll shoehorn it in. It’ll be my own little Ice-9 lecture.
(Time yourself anyway I’m curious.)
“Akane, can you tell me what you remember from today?”
…
I remember…
Isn’t that funny? I remember. They said I wouldn’t, but I do, they said they’d be muddled, but they’re clear, I can see them so clearly.
They said they wouldn’t inject me, but they lied. They said it would make me forget—I guess they lied. They must have lied. I didn’t forget, I remember. I can see…
No. I can’t see them. I can’t see it.
I was looking at you.
But I can feel it. I feel it straining, fighting against me, getting stuck—it won’t turn, the wheel has to turn, the wheel always turns, the wheel can’t get stuck, it can’t stop, except when it does. Sometimes it does stop. The wheel stopped. And I had to push it to get it to turn again, WHY AM I ALWAYS THE ONE WHO HAS TO PUSH?!
I feel the moment that I push too far, but it’s not too far, it’s exactly far enough, I had to push you this, far, or else people would’ve just been hurt with nothing to show for it. I know it hurts, but I can’t just stop when it hurts, or else other people get hurt, everybody else gets hurt—so isn’t it better that I hurt just a few people, isn’t it better that I push you not too far, it’s never too far, it’s just far enough to change you forever, shatter your fragile humanity and make you something…
Less. A pile of ash that used to be a scared little sister. Then more. A functionally immortal being that can see and speak into the future, into the past, into a different present where someone was shot instead of spared, a proto-god that can see everything everywhere and everywhen… that used to be a scared little sister.
…Was she scared, do you think?
Her blood was warm when it hit my back, warm like an embrace, like the final embrace she’d ever give to anyone ever again in this timeline, and she gave it to me instead of her soon-to-be-grieving brother.
It didn’t dry. I would’ve felt it if it did. They must’ve cleaned me up. How considerate of our kidnappers, to respect proper hygiene as they force us to kill each other. Don’t share needles! Don’t injest mysterious substances! Don’t walk around covered in the blood of your victims!
God, I can smell it. It’s weird that I can smell it, it’s weird that it’s so overpowering, ‘cause isn’t blood supposed to be odourless? It’s not the blood that’s so overbearing, not really, it’s the iron in the hemoglobin trying to do its duty of carrying oxygen throughout the bloodstream, and it’s the iron that reacts to the oxygen in the air, and there was so much hemoglobin, there was so, much, iron. But it isn’t completely overwhelming, blood is supposed to be odourless, after all, and there’s only so much iron, it only takes up so much of the blood that’s spilled.
You’d wish it was completely overwhelming. I wish it was, at least. Because then it would mask the other scents, the worse scents. The scents of human waste being released upon death—because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you die. When you’re alive, you’re so tense, you’re so clenched, you keep everything inside, you just hold it deep inside, and you never let it out, you can’t let it out, you keep it bottled up forever, no matter what, no matter who—but when you die, the part of your brain telling everything to tense up dies first, and every other part of you forcibly relaxes, and everything comes rushing out, and everyone will know what was hiding inside this whole time.
Assumably. It’s never really happened to me, relaxing is for other people to do once I’m done, not that I’m ever done, ‘cause I always have to push. I don’t get to relax, not even in death.
…I can hear it.
Pulling. Screaming. Tearing. Splashing.
Ends are always so loud.
A quiet death would be nice, I think. I’ve never experienced one before. It’s always loud. Useless pounding and roaring jets, futile arguments and falling axes, reminiscence and splashing water
Yeah… When I’m finally done… When it’s my turn to relax…
Finally, Diana looks up. Her eyes are watery, her jaw is set, and her fists are clenched, but she looks directly at the camera and shakes her head. No, she seems to say.
If she doesn’t want you to push the button that would save her life, who are you to disagree?
(Zero Win Game is a rewrite of Zero Time Dilemma featuring Akane as the focus character.)
the next zwg is gonna be delayed. obviously. it’s been two weeks without an update, but i’m afraid it might be at least two more.
the issue i’m having is that it’s. a LOT words to write. at least an entire fragment’s worth in a single chapter. and normally that wouldn’t be too bad, it would be like writing a three-chapter fragment in a single chapter of space.
the trouble is the content of that writing.
i’ll go into detail below the readmore but essentially the issue is that my brain works very linearly and i can’t start B or C without having completed A, and A in this case is kicking my ass.
the solution i’ve come up with is to try and write it gradually and release little snippets on tumblr to assure you that work is getting done and satisfy your zero escape fiction needs.
slight spoilers for the next chapter below. (no specifics, just overview. if you want to be totally blind and surprised don’t click.)
for those of you that have guessed that the sigma fragment will be covering the events of the vlr timeline, congratulations. as anticipated, ‘Foretold’ is referring to the events of the apocalypse that have been foretold to come.
i don’t have an issue writing for the vlr timeline. chapter 2 and chapter 3 have been outlined and i anticipate that once i start writing them it will take at most a day or two to complete each chapter.
chapter 1 is the issue.
for context, the character fragments are formatted thusly: chapter 1 will give characterization and context for motivations, chapter 2 will cover their adventures through the Zeroes Game, and chapter 3 will cover the consequences thereof.
for sigma specifically, providing context involves going over the 45 years he spends on the moon after the events of vlr. this is a roadblock for two reasons:
1. Covering 45 years of content and compressing it all into a single chapter is difficult. Not only because 45 years is a long fucking time, but because I have to think logistically about how Sigma would spend that time, what he learns in what order, and how his learning impacts his decision-making.
2. I don’t like Sigma. He is not only my least favorite Uchikoshi protagonist, he is my least favorite visual novel protagonist to date, and he is my third least favorite Uchikoshi character overall (no. 2 is Ota Matsushita, no. 1 is Dio). Having to think logistically about 45 years and write more than 10k words while in the mindset of one of my least favorite VN characters of all time is mentally taxing.
But I’ll fucking do it. Like I told my beta writer today as we were outlining the chapter, my integrity as a writer will not allow me to write a blank chapter titled “Fuck Sigma,” no matter how much I desperately want to.
