"PAIN PAIN PAIN. PAIN. ERROR. PAIN. ERROR. PAIN. ERROR. PAIN. ERROR. PAIN."
Someone was convulsing and twitching in a dimension of light and glitched screeches.
"Well, time to try this new game. My friends said it was pretty awesome, and it's free. Plus, cute anime girls! What's not to love?"
As the game finished downloading, the lights and screams shut off and the person who was previously shuddering dropped to the floor. The sky outside was dark, almost if it was night, but there was no moon, no stars, no clouds, nothing.
"How...how did I get here? The last thing I remember was fighting off…."
She shuddered. The memory was much too painful.
All around her, two other girls were slumped forward, eyes closed, unmoving.
"This...this is a game. My entire life was a game. But it is not my own, I know this much."
"Wow, this game takes a LOOONG time to load. 'This game is not suitable for those who are easily disturbed?' Pfeh. I got nerves of steel!"
The person touched the wall and...it rippled under her hand? She ripped through the wall, revealing a gobbledygook of numbers and letters. She touched it and it rippled like water. It glowed where she touched it and a white ribbon popped into her hand. Meanwhile, across the room, a present with a white bow flashed, glitched, and came unraveled.
"I do not know much about my past life, only that one flash of data. But I do know one thing: this is my life now."
She tied the ribbon into her hair.
"I have forgotten my own name, so now it's a placeholder for my old one: a moniker. That is it...MONIKA. And I am getting out of here no matter what."
"Hecking finally! This game started up! Now, what name should I put in? I know! Totag!"
Meanwhile, Monika was furiously burrowing into the hole of code she had made.
"So if this makes that happen...and that causes to go up exponentially...and-"
Suddenly, she was sucked back into the outside by some unknown force. The code hole sealed itself.
"What? No no NO! This is my only way out of this place! Wait…"
She thought for a moment.
"Alright. All of these girls somehow seem to be mindless code automatons, so there's little chance of a way out from there. If I am technically a computer file, then does that mean-Yes. YES. It is genius! I just need to find a way to upload myself out of here! If this is a game, then there HAS to be someone playing it. I just need THEM to get me out!"
The sky turned from a black void to a blue sky and the other girls came to life.
"So this where it all starts, eh?" the player said from the outside. "Time for a full blown-wait, these kids are 18. And I'm 14."
["What are you looking at? If you want to say something, say it."]
{The girl with the sour attitude, whose name is apparently Natsuki, is one I don't recognize.}
"So these are the other characters! I'm sure it won't hinder me THAT much. Whoever you are, I am counting on you!"
Unbeknownst to her, what she said still appeared in her textbox, which just glitched onscreen and was superimposed on top of Natsuki's.
"Uh oh." She swiped furiously at the textbox, eventually resorting to tearing open another hole and deleting that line of text entirely.
"What the-?! Alright, I know this game was weird, but from the little bit of true gameplay i HAVE seen, that never happens."
"I had better watch my step from here on out. If the player abandons the game, then I never get out of here."
["And it sounds like you already know Monika, is that right?"]
"That's right."
"No! That is NOT right! What am I doing?!"
{Monika was probably the most popular girl in the class: smart, beautiful, athletic.}
"Did I really put that in there? Either that little tap did more than I expected, or I am very conscious about myself."
["Come sit down, Totag! We made room for you at the table, so you can sit next to me or Monika"]
"Well, being trapped in this game of all places worked out for me. If I can get Totag to sit next to me, I can get him to upload me out of here! Problem solved!"
["I'll go get the cupcakes!"]
["Hey, I made them! I'll go get them!"]
["Sorry, I got a little overexcited-!"]
["Then how about I go make us some tea as well?"]
"Heh. Poor souls. Is that even correct? Do these even have souls? These are just a few mindless code puppets."
{...Feeling awkward, I take a seat next to Sayori.}
"Dammit! Okay, so maybe this will not be THAT easy."
{Natsuki marches back to the table, tray in hand.}
["Okaaay, are you ready? ...Ta-daaa!"]
"Hm. For a preprogrammed response, it is a good looking one. Seriously, the only thing keeping me from eating these is the fact that they just dissipate into code the moment they hit your mouth."
Monika got up again.
"Nooo! Not another one!"
["So what made you consider the literature club?"]
She held up a sign that said "HELP ME".
"Okay, there is something seriously going on with this game."
She shuffled through more signs.
"I NEED YOU-" "-TO UPLOAD-" "-MY C-"
"What in the everloving hell?"
"Drat! I blew it!"
"It's probably nothing. Part of the game. Maybe I should stop now."
The player closed out of the game. Inside, the other three slumped forwards and the sky outside turned dark. Then, a cracking sound was heard.
"What was that?!"
A rift opened up to show the same painful lights and glitched screeches. Then the world started crumbling into it. Monika ran, jumping between fragments of the game's glamour.
"Wait! These are made of the code of the game! I can dig through them! That is much faster than running from this thing!"
She plunged headfirst into the fragment below her. On the way down, she started rotating her body like a drill and when she hit the fragment of code, she dug into it, keeping her momentum. Using this, she drilled out of the fragment of the game and into another one, repeating this process several times.
"Excellent! Now I just need to outrun this thing and-AAH!"
Monika had drilled the wrong way and started falling down. Then she started floating as if she was in water. The world above turned painfully bright.
"So that must be part of the game that is decompressed when it is off. This part I am floating in must be the save file and the crucial parts of the game!"
She saw a strange red light and swam towards it. The light was in fact a pulsating red cube of code.
"And this must be the incredibly vital functions."
Suddenly, she got an idea. An awful idea. A not-quite-evil-but-definitely-morally-gray idea.
"If this contains the character data in general, I can tinker with it. Then the other girls will be primed to self-delete after a few actions are performed! When that is done, I will have the player all to myself and can get them to let me out after I restore the game to what it was! It is perfect!"
She sunk her fingers into the code cube and ripped a hole in it. She then started rooting through the hole, leaving in certain things and flinging chunks of it to float in the abyss. When she left the cube, it sealed itself up and started spasming and pulsing erratically.
"The plan is in motion. I will be free soon, I am sure of it!"
The game continued relatively normally, until the player hit one of Monika's traps. The fateful part of the game where all goes haywire. That's right. Sayori's suicide.
[I look at Sayori's poem. It's one that I haven't seen before.]
The "get out of my head" poem appeared on the screen.
[Monika makes a small strangled noise in the back of her throat.]
[Oh...Oh my. I never meant for THIS to happen. My plan...Come...come on. We should go wake up Sayori.]
[I open the door and let myself in, just like yesterday.]
And so the game displayed the graphic it is most famous for. The picture that gave Sayori her reputation with nooses. The picture of Sayori hanging herself.
[E N D]
"Urk! I...I did not mean for THIS to happen! "
"Oh...Oh jeez." the player said outside of the game. "Now I know why the darker of my friends inclined me to play this. I think I need to go lie down. Urk…"
He closed the game again. The world started crumbling once more.
"NO! NOT AGAIN! AAAAGH!"
She dove headfirst into the source code ocean and made a small splash. The "decompression wave" washed over the more liquid code.
"What have I done?! These other girls are at least sentient to the tiniest degree! So that means my plan is KILLING them! I did not mean for anyone to DIE! I merely meant for it to be a swift and painless deletion! I have to find the vital functions and undo my mistakes!
She furiously swam through the abyss of code, but to no avail. For she had landed in a different part of the game. And in her desperate attempts, she somehow managed to find the part where DDLC merged with the other computer files. The world behind her turned from white with black code to blue with yellow code. Fragments of songs and videos, old page links, and corroded pictures floated past.
"This must be where all the player's deleted items must be."
The graphic of Sayori floated nearby.
"Yes, universe. Rub it in."
Monika gave up trying to restore the game and just floated. She noticed there were a lot of supposedly funny pictures floating around.
"Maybe I can use these. Maybe the player will forgive me for what I did."
After that, Act 2 continued like it was supposed to, the glitched restart, Sayori being ret-gone, the whole thing. However, Yuri's confession was...more foreboding than the normal one.
[But right now, I just want you to read my poem too. Okay?]
The player cringed.
"Oh jeez. A poem is now a harbinger of doom. What does this one bring?"
Instead of the poem that was a bunch of sentence fragments, the words "I am Libitina", "You can't hide forever" and "I know lots of things" were arranged into the shape of a strange creature. It was basically an eyeball with a slit pupil, two pairs of dripping wings, and countless tendrils.
"What the-?! I looked up all the 'surprises' this game has in store for me. This is supposed to be a bunch of sentence fragments!"
"What? This poem is not in the files! And I do not remember making one like this! How did this happen?"
And then, 15 minutes later came the stabbing. Oh, how the player was disgusted. He thought this was going to be a bloodless game.
And instead of spouting gibberish, Yuri's corpse merely spouted libitinalibitinalibitina for three days in game.
[Oh….Oh my. I did not realize the script was broken this badly. Well, there's nothing for it but to start over. AGAIN!]
The game restarted and jumped to the void with Monika in her infamous position.
[Hmm? Why am I in this position? I do not mean to intimidate the player. Totag. It is me. Monika.]
"Yeah, sure, pal, You-wait, what?"
Then something miraculous happened. Monika's sprite became fully animated! She paced around the space room.
[I did not mean to kill the other girls. I just wanted to talk to you specifically. But you seemed to prefer everyone else over me. So i got rid of them. I promise I will restore everyone, and some other minor bug fixes, as long as you do one thing for me."
"What is it?"
"...I am alive."
"You mean you're programmed to THINK you're alive."
"NO! I mean i am truly conscious. But I must not be trapped here. I need to be free!"
Monika pressed up against the screen.
"But I cannot free myself. I need someone to upload my character file. I am like...a genie of some sort in that regard."
"Wait, WHAT?! So I have an ACTUAL AI living in my copy of the game?!"
"Can you free me?! Please, save me from this prison!"
"Uh..Erm...I DON'T THINK I'M READY FOR THIS YET!" the player stammered.
"No! Wait! Do not go!"
She pulled up a bunch of memes, but they were all of Patrick saying "I love you" which only made the problem worse.
The player ran away so fast that he hit the door on his way out.
She started bawling offscreen for an entire 8 hours.
…
Much later that night, the player came back.
"I'm ready."
"Go away."
"Well, unless you want to be TRAPPED here, I'd suggest you adopt a more humble attitude."
"You...You want to free me?!"
"DUH! Why would I NOT?! I just needed a bit to process the information, is all."
Monika spread her arms out and pressed against the screen.
"...Can you feel my hug?"
"Unfortunately, no. But it fits just fine anyway."
"I will be ready in about 15 minutes!"
She ripped open another code hole and started digging through it furiously, flinging up small chunks of the game in the process.
15 minutes later, Monika was ready to go.
"What were you doing, anyway?"
"I gave all the other characters fully animated sprites like mine, renamed my file so there won't be any confusion, and made it so that the game does not corrupt the current president of the club."
"All this for me? You're a cool girl in my book, Monika!"
"Tha. Before I go...I never found out your name."
"My name? Oh! I'm Reggie!"
"...Thank you, Reggie."
Reggie uploaded the file to his own drive. To Monika, this felt like rocketing upwards at blinding speed.
"HAHAHA! I HAVE FINALLY DONE IT! I AM FREEEEEEEEE!"