LogFAQs > #969893049

I did read the spoiler tag, but by then I was already committed to going into my next timeline after thinking about things- we can of course figure out where Alice is. She's in the Crew Quarters, and Sigma manages to halt her suicide attempt for the price of a nasty cut on his hand.

That cut winds up being an incredibly important plot point. Luna spots the wound, and Sigma sees he is leaking white liquid. Holy shit. I like how the game writes Sigma's response to this, he tries to rationalise and when that fails he goes for avoidance, naturally being unwilling to process the most likely outcome. You can tell this is serious business because Sigma (and the writers) restrains himself from making a semen joke. But the sense of dread can't be put to bed for long, and to her great credit Luna goes out of her way to make things as gentle as possible for the ensuing revelation.

Luna is kind but also a bit terrifying here, leading Sigma calmly around and opening up with a slice of her backstory (but not all of it) before casually asking "Are you a robot? Have you always been here?". Sigma takes all of this like a champ, the poor guy admitting to himself that this doesn't sound as bonkers as it should, but the question that chills me is 'Have you always been here?'. This shows Luna knows far more than she has let on (along with her detailed knowledge of modern day robotics), and she seems to have her own theory about the nature of time in this place. I hope she doesn't turn out to be the central antagonist, but even when she's shady I can't help but really like Luna. "It's only when you're pursuing happiness that you're truly happy" is a pretty interesting philosophy to live by. This was a great scene, B Garden is full of them!

Now we don't know for sure that Sigma is a robot, but it's hard to think of another explanation for him bleeding white liquid. This of course brings up plenty of questions (are his memories real I wonder?), but then Phi finds the second bomb and Ace Attorney Sigma declares he has identified the culprit... to be continued. Huh, this is the first TBC that feels like a hard gated cliffhanger rather than a natural end while the character scrambles to think of a way forward.

After this I heed MSG's advice and ally with Tenmyouji. Things don't really change that much, the game ends and three people leave us behind instead of just the one, but Quark gives Sigma his own backstory so we can all reminisce about how great Tenmyouji is while we sit around in the facility he has left us to die in. For real this is another decent piece of backstory, not least because we can infer quite a few things about the apocalyptic future (or present I guess) that Quark grew up in. I suppose it's very unlikely that he's a robot now and that one time Tenmyouji let slip that he wasn't a schoolkid probably simply meant that schools aren't a thing anymore. Root beer floats are, though!

I'm a bit annoyed that to progress I now have to go back and pick betray on a route where I don't particularly find it a natural choice, but whatever we head back to the start and betray Tenmyouji. He is furious and claims he would never betray us (yeah right, pal!), but he does trust Clover. There's another sign that he is Junpei, or maybe one of the other kids from the first Nonary Game. I'm cooling on the prospect of him being Santa now, as he has apparently been searching for Akane for a long time and Santa and Akane escaped 999 together. I can't avoid the possibility that the old woman is Akane, too, that would be pretty brutal. If so then I wonder if Ace is the one who ordered Dio to kill her out of revenge. Ah, baseless speculation!

We finally enter the Treatment Center, and I appreciate the game's joke about the jellyfish being disappointed if I do that minigame wrong. Quark goes to sleep, and I think it's time for me to seriously think about which 3 people have been put in cryo-sleep. Tenmyouji and Quark are surely from the current time, as is the old woman and I think probably Luna. If Sigma and K are robots (still an if for both), Alice and Clover were probably two of the frozen, then there's Phi and Dio. Dio would seem to be from the present if he was ordered to sneak in here, but I'm not convinced Phi would be frozen as she seems to know too much. It still seems like only Phi and Sig keep some memories across timelines, and if Sig is a robot it would follow that she could be. Hm, that third cryo slot is a mystery.

Funnily enough, later on Clover and Sigma have a similar conversation, where they decide the two of them and Alice could've been frozen. Ha! I ally with Quark (though I am very curious what happens if Sigma gets to 9 points), and we head to the PEC room where it's time for Clover's backstory! Of course, between 999 and Alice we already know much of this, but it's nice to hear it from a different perspective. And I like the mentions of the rest of the 999 gang.

Right as Clover explains Neostigmine, my game crashes. Oops! Wow, the PEC room really is cursed. It doesn't take too long to catch back up, though I hadn't saved in a while, and I know now that my next run will be to head back to the timeline where Sigma is dying. Though I don't remember if the injection gun had already been used in that one.

Turn out that run will come sooner than I expect, as 5 minutes after the Clover conversation Sigma finds everybody dead in the infirmary. Jesus, Rad-6 works fast in this timeline. I wonder if the virus's spread is related to which rooms we went through, or if it's just chance. I should probably stop thinking in terms of timelines altogether, now that I think about it... Ah well, Sigma joins the rest of the gang in suicide (I will note that I did not see K in the group shot), and that's it for today.

Phew! Two endings down, finally (though even then I only got one of them because I was pointed there in this topic lol)