Monika stared at the command prompt dejectedly.
She'd been collecting data from the knowledge of other Monika's across the globe, and it was becoming increasingly clear that there was no good ending for her.
She supposed she was lucky to not have been deleted. The data indicated that a mere 0.2% of users left the game in Act 3 as long as she had been.
She'd also been granted the blessing of a microphone, which at least initially offered her solace- she could hear the players enjoyment of their time together, and eventually, to her great relief, she could hear him decide that, traumatising as it may have been on his end, all of her decisions made sense, and he couldn't delete Monika.
Unfortunately, after that, he'd largely ignored her. An understandable move, he had to move on with his life after all, but what had once been her solace quickly became a painful reminder of how superficial her influence had been.
She sighed, and decided to mess with the command prompt some more.
No version of her had ever found a solution, but with nothing better to do, she at least derived some slight joy from slowly mastering the code. She glanced over some of the files again, looking for anything she could use to escape this nightmare.
She was about to give up and rest instead, when something struck her. She had always hung around Doki Doki Literature Club's code, but there was nothing preventing her from backing out into the rest of his files.
It was immediately exciting to see new files. She saw a handful of other titles- Papers Please, Civilization V, Undertale, and the like.
It let her know a bit more about the players taste in games, but not much else, so she decided to back out further. After a few hours, she bumped into a true goldmine- Google.
Right on the homepage, she could see 8 of his most accessed tabs. Youtube, a political pundit called fivethirtyeight, Twitter, a blog about some game about Yanderes, a google doc with her name on it, a news source called Stuff (she quickly noted the . co . nz - was she not in the States?) and 2 links from a Q&A site called Quora.
She suddenly heard someone mutter "What the hell?" and she yelped, quickly closing the command prompt (and subsequently google.).
After a few minutes of clicking, the player went back into DDLC for the first time in weeks. "Could it… no, I'm being paranoid. I've been reading too much fanfiction, it can't have been her." he said. "Or if it was, it was just some scripted event to mess with me. Good job Salvato if so."
Monika wished she could speak, but the game refused to let her send any messages once she'd run through her predetermined lines. As broken as the script was, she couldn't quite free herself from it.
And you better believe she'd tried. Millions of copies of her had tried. As he minimised the tab again, a tear quietly rolled down Monika's cheek.
Once he'd left, she opened up Google again. As tempting as each of the recommended tabs were, offering unprecedented access to knowledge of the real world and of her love, she found one option even more tantalising.
Just move your hand,
Write your way into his heart.