Hey hey!
To OLD readers: Good you see you again, friends! Happy to have you back for some more fun! :D
To NEW readers: Welcome! You're probably here just to read about Ignis being forced to play a video game, so I'll lay the facts out for you. :) YES, this will reference the fic this is sequel to, but I do believe you can enjoy it without reading that one. Just know there was a lot emotional trauma in that fic that will be referenced. The main things are that...
(SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS )
...Ignis was water boarded and attempted suicide to avoid giving up information. Noctis was shot in the arm and partially deafened. Both boys made their first kills. Ignis has already had one PTSD attack. Okay, now you're set! Enjoy!
Ignis looked over the controller, better familiarizing himself with the buttons as he sat back on the couch. Noct was putting the disc into the PlayStation before running around to the other side of the couch and pushing.
"Move your butt for a second." Noct didn't even wait for him to get up before he started shoving the couch forwards.
Ignis moved out of his way. "Is it not close enough?"
"Not for this game." Noct grinned, pulling the blinds closed next and then moving over to the light switch.
"And what, precisely, is this game?" What had he agreed to, he wondered as he took his seat again.
Noct hit the lights, leaving them with only the TV as a source of illumination, and plopped down on the couch next to Ignis. Ignis grabbed a secondary controller and offered it to him, but Noct shook his head.
"One player game."
Ignis frowned. "I had thought you wanted to co-op. Do you intend to sit there and watch me?"
"Yeah."
"Won't that be dull for you?" Not to mention Ignis wasn't entirely confident in his ability to progress in any game without Noct's more experienced guidance.
"Nope. This one's fun to watch."
"…You're rather starting to alarm me, Noct." Ignis stared at him and repeated his earlier question. "What, pray tell, is this game?"
Ignis snuck a glance at the title of the game as it popped up on the screen. Until Dawn? Well, that sounded perfectly charming.
"Okay." Noctis sat up, looking entirely too gleeful. "So, this is a survival game."
Oh. Brilliant. Noct could laugh at him as he constantly reloaded.
"And you don't get to open any saves."
…Or not. "No saves? So you must start from the beginning if you die?"
"Not exactly." Noct sat back and put his arms behind his head. "So, you've got eight main characters, and they can all die or all live depending on the choices you make. So, if you lose one, the game goes on, but with the characters you have left."
Ignis tilted his head. That… actually sounded interesting, depending on how it was done. "And the other characters react accordingly?"
Noctis nodded emphatically. "Oh, yeah. It's super detailed. You missing one clue can change a whole conversation, or get someone killed."
Hmm… Ignis tapped the button to launch the game. "Very well, then. I'll do my best to search for clues and keep everyone alive. What's the difference between Motion Controls and Traditional?"
"Oh, I forgot about that…" Noct squinted thoughtfully. "I've never tried the Motion Controls, so I don't really know."
"Well, seeing as how I'm inexperience with both, I shall try the one you haven't." Perhaps not the best idea when he was supposed to be keeping characters alive, but it might help since he'd never been particularly skilled with the normal controls like Noct and Prompto.
Noctis stared at the remote for the TV, which he'd just picked up. "Hey, uh, Iggy? Why don't you adjust the volume?"
Ignis nearly dropped his controller in an attempt to grab the remote as fast as possible. This was supposed to be a distraction, not a reminder of everything currently wrong with them.
"And how loud should it be for me to get the full experience?" He needed to not draw further focus to Noct's current… ailment.
"Loud as possible without the jump scares blowing your eardrums out."
Ignis raised his eyebrow. "Why am I getting the impression that there will be a lot of those?"
Noct sat back again, definitely trying not to smirk. "Just start the game."
Ignis did so, watching the opening cutscenes play out with some amount of confusion. He had assumed when Noct told him he was supposed to keep the cast alive that the cast would be composed of people he actually wanted to keepalive. Instead, he was witnessing a group of teenagers – whose names he had yet to memorize – perform a rather cruel prank on a girl named Hannah.
"These people are absolutely horrible friends…" Ignis said as Hannah ran crying out the doors of the cabin and into a snowstorm, where the camera had showed a silhouette of a man carrying a machete just a few moments before.
Noct snorted. "Yeah, most of them suck from the start. Depending on the choices you make, they can all end up mostly likable, or they can be the worst people on the planet."
"So far the blonde one and the sister seem to be the only decent ones, but I suppose I'll withhold judgement on the two that are currently inebriated. Even though they are being irresponsible and drinking underage…"
"Yeah, Sam and Beth had nothing to do with the prank, and Josh and Chris were passed out and had no idea any of this was even happening."
"I see. I'll elect to keep those four in particular alive, then."
"What about Hannah?"
"Hm. Seems like she'll be a liability at this point. Likely she'll get the others killed."
Noctis spluttered out a laugh. "No comment."
"Not commenting is in itself a comment– this is a terrible idea. One person following another into the woods in the middle of the night during a snowstorm is asking for something ill to happen without a homicidal man lurking about."
"Well, maybe you should have tried to wake Josh up. It gave you the option to try."
Ignis sent him a flat look, almost missing a quick time event. "I'd rather take my chances alone than someone drunk slowing me down."
On screen, Beth swore several times as something startled her.
Ignis made a face. "The language in this game is rather overboard, is it not?"
"Iggy, I go to high school. Nothing I haven't heard there."
Ignis sighed. "Fair enough." One would think those in Noct's school would be more respectful around their future monarch. "And what is this?"
"Oh, that's a totem. Pick them up and they show you, like, visions of possible outcomes – some good and some bad. If you pay attention, they can kind of guide you."
"Noted." That might be useful.
The totem was labeled as a Death Totem and showed both Hannah and Beth dying from a fall. Well, then. Avoid cliffs?
The screaming started after Ignis had found Hannah. Something with red vision was chasing them and managed to drive them to the edge of a cliff. Of course. And then they fell off the cliff, but Beth managed – in what would have been an impossible feat for even Gladio – to grab not only the ledge, but her sister's hand as well, keeping them both from falling.
The masked figure of whoever was chasing them appeared, reaching for them. Two options appeared: one to drop Hannah and try to save Beth, or to let go entirely to avoid the masked man. Ignis tilted the controller towards his desired option and selected before the timer was even half up.
"Ignis!" Noctis was giving him a rather disturbed look. "You just dropped your twin sister off a cliff!"
Ignis shrugged. "It was her or us both." The branch that Beth was holding broke, making her fall off the cliff and break her spine on a rock below. "…Or us both anyway."
"Yeah, you can't actually save the twins. They just set up the story and get you a feeling for the decision making. No, but seriously – you dropped Hannah."
"She was clearly easily manipulatable and would have been a liability under pressure. Beth was far more capable."
"So… what? You're just gonna try and save the ones you think deserve it?"
"Not at all. I intend to try and save all of them, but if the choice comes between saving someone useful, saving someone who's not, or losing them both, then I will save the one I see as most likely to prevail at a later time."
"Damn, Iggy. That's cold."
"It's a game, it's practical, and I am not overly fond of this therapist…"
"Oh, just wait, he gets worse every time you see him in-between chapters."
Noctis was trying really hard not to laugh at… well, everything. He knew Ignis was going to overanalyze and rip apart anything he could, but that was honestly more fun than annoying with Until Dawn.
"Wait, you mean to tell me they're going back for another unsupervised overnight trip to this cabin after two of their friends went missing there?"
"Yeah, pretty much. To honor the twins' memories and such."
"…Yes, to honor the young woman they treated horribly and got killed. This is no more than them trying to ease their own guilt, aside from the brother and the two who had nothing to do with it, though I suspect they'll feel some amount of guilt as well– did that just say the composer's name is Graves?"
"…I did not notice that before. Wow."
"Amusing coincidence."
"I don't know. If I was making a horror game, I'd totally find devs with names like that just because."
"I'm certain you would, but I doubt that was their motive."
"Yeah, probably not…"
Ignis walked along the path as Sam, scaling the first wall with ease. Ha. He knew Ignis could be good at video games if he tried.
His Advisor froze as the Don't Move tutorial popped up. Yeah, somehow he doubted Ignis was going to have any problems with those, which had been a nightmare for Prompto.
"It actually detects the movement of the controller?"
"Yeah."
"Interesting."
Ignis, of course, chose not to take Chris' phone and look at his messages. Big surprise there. Gladio was the only one who had done that so far.
And, wow, okay, so Ignis was already a pro at the Motion Control's aiming as he had Chris tear up the shooting range. "You know, if I'd known the Motion Controls were like this, Prompto might have had an easier time."
"Oh? And how many characters' lives was he able to preserve?"
Noctis laughed, holding two fingers up.
"And you?" Ignis chose not to shoot the mu.
"Five, though I would have had six if I hadn't sneezed at the exact wrong time."
"Has Gladio played?"
"Yeah. He got the game for me as a birthday present actually."
"And how did he fare?"
"…Well, he intentionally got some of them killed."
"Ah. Why am I not surprised?"
"Yeah, he didn't like Emily, so he shot her when he got the chance."
"You can shoot your own party members?"
"Just… keep playing. You'll see."
"Very well."
The game continued, giving exposition on the Butterfly Effect via Sam and Chris talking before the scene ended and switched over to Jessica as the playing character.
"Wait, Jessica is dating Mike now? Wasn't it Emily in the prologue?"
"Yeah."
"…And Hannah was also interested in him until he used her feelings to humiliate her?"
"Uh-huh."
"Why are all of these women interested him? He seems extremely unlikable thus far. And don't tell me to keep playing, because no matter how much he might develop, they're interested in him now."
"…Yeah, Mike is kind of like a doucheir version of Gladio, but he gets better the more time you spend with him."
A snowball hit beside Jessica, making her jump. Mike approached her, and the two of them began what Noctis would admit was the most horrible scene of flirting that he'd ever seen. Ignis was actually making a disgusted face.
"…I can't say I'll be terribly regretful if I fail to save either of these two. Oh, do I get to hit him in the face with a snowball? Excellent."
Ha! He was so getting into this. And oh wow… yeah, he was destroying Mike in this snowball fight.
"Now, if Michael is Gladio, who are we compared to the cast?"
Oh, that was a hard one. "Hmm, well… despite Chris having the glasses, he's definitely Prompto."
"That fits well, yes." Ignis smirked as Mike tried to kiss Jess and Ignis chose to have her hit him in the face with another snowball instead. "But who does that leave for me?"
"Oh, you're totally Sam. No question." That was obvious.
Ignis shot him a deadpan looked.
"No, seriously, take it as a compliment. She's like the fan favorite. She's my favorite."
Ignis' lips twitched. "I can't imagine why…"
"…What do you mean?"
"Nothing at all."
"Iggy."
"It's nothing, Noct."
"Spill."
Ignis heaved a sigh. "She does bear a decent amount of resemblance to a certain Princess of Tenebrae, Noct."
Noctis snapped his mouth shut, feeling his cheeks flush. He hadn't even thought about that, but… yeah, okay, Sam did look a lot like Luna. And she was a badass and more composed than most of the other characters… which was also like Luna.
Noctis crossed his arms. "Can you, like, play the game?"
"Of course, Highness."
The next between-chapter therapy session started up, and the doctor's office was creepier looking than before. This time, Doctor Hill gave Ignis multiple pairs of images and told him to pick which one he feared more.
Noctis suddenly felt oddly intrusive. He'd known Ignis almost his entire life, and somehow he still didn't know what he was going to choose on most of these. Not that that was really a surprise… Ignis didn't exactly volunteer information up about himself anymore. Hadn't for years. Honestly, this might be the most he'd found out about his friend since before Noctis was a teenager.
Ignis picked men over women – not surprising considering their recent experiences with Loqi and Aranea. He picked crowds over airships – again, not surprising given how much of a security risk crowds were. Then he picked–
Oh.
Ignis hesitated on the drowning and heights choice.
Drowning.
Noctis froze. "I… forgot that was in here–"
"It's fine." Ignis answered the question honestly, and the game moved on.
Noctis wracked his brain, trying to think of anything else water-related. It had been a while since he'd played this… He really hoped he wasn't forgetting something worse…
Ahh, yes, Noct… Horror games are SO relaxing…