Author's Note: OK, That's weird, but you might have noticed some… somewhat benign, blocks of unreadable text in both what was called 'Error: Story Not Found' and the previous chapter. From what I can tell, there's definitely a pattern to them, and they might actually be more than they seem. I'm just going to leave them, and let the problems happen. I think there was something similar in the original game in a few places. They definitely look similar in format...
Going back to the story, Monika's, ahem, statement at the end of the original story extract certainly seems to have caused a lot more than was expected. I doubt that we'll figure out what just yet. I will state that the word count might be also a bit smaller than it actually is, since some words are in the garbled portions...
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The following morning, after getting up, Monika went to one of the far desks, popping some catches that were not textured or even part of that desk's geometry. She then slid the slim laptop out of it's hiding place. This was still here, which was good. This was her first laptop, the tool she used as the Club President. It was nowhere near the power of the laptop in her developer room, but it had a few extra features.
For one, it had no real geometry within the rendered world, effectively being invisible, her using it displayed as her reading a book. She had to do something she'd sworn off doing seemingly years ago, and opened a console window to access the game's unfiltered code. She had to check what happened yesterday, while everyone else was unrendered.
debug act1 . scr
Checking… Loading Act 1 script into debugger...
'Hmm… OK, No sign of the new image or the conversation…' Monika thought as she looked through the script, 'But nothing's showing up glitched there… So, What exactly is going on?'
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By the time she'd finished her debugging, Sayori and the others had arrived, sitting supposedly writing their poems. She checked the entity data, , , and herself, along with the walking viewpoint that was the New Member. She got up, waving her hand in front of everyone's faces, to get nothing happen. Completely locked into the scripted event. She had nothing to do but try to figure out what went wrong with her room.
debug dev_room . loc
Checking… Located as moni_apt . loc, Rename? (Y/N)
Monika winced. She'd clearly forgotten renaming it. She cancelled out the request to rename, and looked at the slew of messages about broken object references and rendering errors. Telling it to repair the errors, she closed her computer and put it away again as it started the countdown, the poem minigame having finished it's prolonged period of inactivity. She dealt with her part in the inane task, Natsuki positively celebrating that her words were the ones chosen.
She sighed. Even with Sayori's comments earlier, this futile task still happened. She wouldn't mind, if it wasn't for the fact she was just there as a bystander. She'd even contemplated what words would work for her, and knew there was a Monika 'sticker' in the code.
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"Monika, I'm the one with depression issues, not you. What's up?" Sayori asked, this not being scripted, but since the only interactions that were 'on script' were with the New Member, this wasn't going to come up at all.
"Ever feel like your life is worthless?" Monika asked, then sighed, "Maybe that's not a good question..."
"The same thing, day in, day out..." Sayori replied, "Want to go sneak into the gaming club, see if they have a spare gaming setup we can borrow?"
Monika blinked as a prompt appeared in her vision. Her hand twitched to the computer hidden under the desk she was sat at. The player was the guy doing Natsuki's event on the other side of the room, not her.
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"Not right now. OK, Sayori?" She stated, the choice being made.
"That's alright. Just thought that we have four people here, grab a Gamecube..." Sayori sighed.
"Don't you mean 'five people'?" Monika asked, thumbing the New Member.
"Yeah, Five..." Sayori stated, "Anyway, Looks like they're finished..."
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The rest of the act went mostly as before, Monika monitoring Sayori's depression as well as she could, what little there seemed to be of it. A school textbook, properly recoded, could replace the laptop, a snapshot of the data she wanted appearing when she read the book. She let the game run through, creating a new developer room when the third act began, and transplanting what she knew could be salvaged from the original into the new one, and replacing entirely anything that couldn't.
However, she hit a slight snag when a panic handler came up on her laptop.
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"Error – Choice Not In Script," The laptop displayed, showing, again, Sayori suggesting borrowing a console from the gaming club. She picked 'Not right now' again. This time, however, Sayori said 'at least four', and Monika took over to manually type 'This is a literature club, not a Smash Melee club...' instead of the now incorrect Monika response.
'Don't you wish they'd release a new one? Hell, If they made it 8-player, even [New Member] could join in...' Sayori replied, Monika thankful she was talking through a proxy. She'd just done it again, as Monika looked towards her Switch. The console output it with [New Member] in place of the name the player was using, but she still effectively said 'Hey, What if we had Wii U or Ultimate?'
'I know I'd choose Fox, What about you?' Monika tried, keeping the conversation going, but Sayori didn't respond, not even with the character she suggested in the comment on the online post. Before she could, Yuri's event had just finished, and Sayori had snapped back onto the normal script, Monika having lost her opportunity. Something was going on, but she didn't know why or how.
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All she knew was that if she did something slightly off-script, somehow, she was slipping into a second script she knew nothing about, and a quick check of the scripting showed no signs of any extra scripts in the ren'py data. She sighed, wincing as she stepped into Act 2, dismissing the Monika copy. This was risky, talking to Yuri, especially when she was fully aware the code was broken, but she needed to test if only Sayori caused these scripting errors.
"What do you want, Monika?" Yuri asked, "We're not the most popular club by school standards. Hell, Natsuki's already got head-hunted by the manga club, I got an offer from the tea ceremony club yesterday..."
"Yes, Yes, there's not really any club to speak of..." Monika replied, annoyed the game had thrown that in her face, the fact the club was fractured as much as the game's script was.
"Miss Debate Club, queen of the school… Starts a literature club and can't even keep the minimum club size..." Yuri snapped, "Look, I'm going to see if the tea ceremony club was serious about that vacancy..."
Monika watched her storm out, and the script beginning to unravel. She was back in her new room and weathering the crash before it had collapsed fully. She checked her laptop. It confirmed something about what she'd walked in on. It wasn't Act 2. That script hadn't loaded after Sayori died. It had been dummied out by someone. And she'd not even noticed.
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"OK, So half the game is dummied out..." She mused, "Let's see what was running."
'moni_ end, load moni_ ,' She read. And blinked. What was 'moni_act1' She then input a command.
debug moni_act1 . scr
Checking… Cannot debug running script.
She slapped herself mentally, as she suddenly realised something. She'd loaded the Act 1 script into the debugger, and hadn't noticed it had loaded fine, since the script wasn't active. She checked the system logs, locating the crash. It wasn't glitched, but it had been switched around the time the table was brought in, and the bypass left in.
"Goddammit. The script file had been changed," Monika declared, and removed the bypass, planning to look over the 'replacement' script files later. The fact they had the prefix 'moni_' made her think about the fact the Player was running a completely different script to the one she was.
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When she booted back into Act 1, the new table and all the new dialogue was missing. That confirmed what she thought. None of that actually touched the master script file. However, she couldn't actually find the new script files anywhere in the data she could access. She had the only developer laptop. Yes, there might be one in the other developer room, but that was sealed off. She might have been a bit cavalier about what she considered salvageable, since most of it was fixed by the debugger. But she didn't have time to do another pass.
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She guessed that the script was submitted at a higher level than she normally used, because she needed to be able to access the script while in the game world. Most of her edits were done while she was supposed to be present. She couldn't just speak through a proxy and handle it that way. She shrugged. It was likely a hung process she'd been running before the crash happened. Well, the Player was back to being denser than a black hole.
"Poem time, Yay..." Monika sighed, taking out her Switch and plugging it into the screen for the backup laptop, effectively making it completely invisible the fact she was playing videogames.
'Monika – 1 point' flashed up in her sight, causing her to pause the game, looking at what the Player was seeing. Sayori, Yuri, Natsuki… Her?!
"Cyberspace..." The player picked, and her representation jumped, and she saw the prompt again. Terms based round computers and hacking were all triggering the Monika sticker to jump up. She didn't 'win', but that wasn't the point. What was her sticker doing bobbing along with the other three?
She found the word chart, and quickly replaced the hacking terms with debate-related ones, deciding on a fit of whimsy not to disable the edit. She instead tapped in a simple command.
commit moni_words . py to master
There was a brief pause, as the game considered the commit, then she could feel it. The poem minigame now actually used four word lists, instead of three, in both Act 1 and 2. And at least they weren't particularly dark words that had been assigned to her. Now she'd dealt with that, she considered the script files.
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Monika knew Doki Doki Literature Club had mods. She ran a few of her favourite ones on sandboxed environments on her laptop. But this was always the untouched original Team Salvato game. Hell, the reason she didn't exactly name the player when personally present was that his name changed every few cycles, as who the Player was changed. She then noticed something that made her eyebrow rise.
Sayori's character file had changed, just a single word. Her 'fatal flaw' was marked as Narcolepsy. She had a terrible, terrible sleeping problem. She still was prone to over-sleeping, but her depression was missing entirely. She'd completely missed it, analysing her mood, and not checking if she was dropping off every ten minutes.
Wnp6enp6Li4uDQo=
"OK, That's the new bot done. It should be able to react to Sayori's requests for a game of Smash..." Monika offered, booting up her Switch as she considered who other than Fox she'd actually use herself. She was about to relax, when a very clearly bespectacled Sayori walked over, clearly having just woke up.
"Sayori, Please, stop wearing glasses, you're already his childhood friend, you don't need to look any cuter for him..." She offered to her, putting down her Switch.
"Mmm? Sorry. Just woke up. Found a really good place to sleep..." Sayori offered.
"Were you in the nurse's office again?" Yuri asked, "I'm sure you find good excuses to spend an hour in there, because it's just a short distance from the club room, and it has a ready bed!"
"Sayori, You have a real problem. Get to bed earlier..." The player offered, "I'd love to know what keeps you up all night..."
Monika sighed. So would she, picking back up her Switch and going back to her game. Now, this was how to monitor a developing situation. Next time she got into a bad crash, keep the Switch in her pocket.
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