Disclaimer - I do not own the particular game this is about, the game in question is Doki Doki Literature Club which was created by Team Salvato.
I will now warn you that if you go looking for DDLC as the game is known according to some of its fanbase (yes I did some research since I didn't want to type out Doki Doki Literature Club all the time), this game is NOT for everyone as it touches on subjects that are DISTURBING, which I will ATTEMPT to enter into this story, whether or not it works out that well is an entirely different matter.
Of further note, please check out a DDLC story called 'Fantasia', I read it and found it to be quite the interesting twist on the idea of what might happen after the events of the game. It's an interesting enough twist that I may be attempting a similar approach to a later story involving Monika, but it will be after certain stories are done as the story I am contemplating will be done as a sort of patchwork that stitches together some of my other works.
Questions and feedback are appreciated, reviews are helpful, and if anybody feels up to using the messaging feature on this site to ask questions and the like, please feel free to do so as I appreciate a decent conversation every now and then.
So there sits Monika, a girl with no idea what was going on, a girl who now not only faced the realization that she has not only been somehow 'rescued' from being deleted entirely, but also put into another version of the game she so desperately sought to break free of so that she could be with her beloved Player.
Apparently fate had different plans as now she was sitting in the bathtub she had used for all of her life, according to what she remembered anyway, and now the mirror that had been there for the same period of time, bore a message that had been oh so neatly carved into its surface reading as "Welcome back Monika."
In retrospect it was something akin to a wholly different kind of horror, a horror stemming from the fact that she has been potentially put directly into a version of that same game that was not only suffering from conflicts in script before the game actually 'started', but also a sort of 'digital ghost' that was noticed by at the very least Yuri. She wouldn't put it past Sayori to know about these 'Shadows', as Yuri called them, considering she had been president of the Literature Club after Monika was deleted by the Player, but just shortly after she then deleted the entire game from within the temporary shelter of the folder called 'Recycle Bin' which had in fact left such a scenario as highly unlikely, it was still an understandable possibility well within what could happen.
Not that the Recycle Bin offered any shelter once the game was properly deleted, an event she was wondering might actually be possible to achieve if she couldn't handle this anymore.
So here Monika sat in a nice, warm, bubblebath. A bubblebath was a guilty pleasure she had enjoyed since childhood, almost to the point of a controlled addiction. If a bad day came along in school or cropped up from life's infinite choices, she would then draw up a hot bath, pour in the soap, and then all but jump in once it was ready so she could soak away her worries. It worked marginally when her grandmother passed away, it worked when she was going through a rough patch with getting the Literature Club approved for this year, and it worked when she was starting to get overwhelmed by everything during the first couple of days of the new school year, especially with the amount of work that it took to keep the Literature Club from being disbanded due to its membership only consisting of four people, it was after all Sayori's guarantee that her friend would join the club that kept it from closing.
Everything seemed to work out when she took a bubblebath, it soothed her nerves, and kept her emotionally anchored.
So Monika did the only thing she could think of, she sunk a bit deeper into the bathwater by bending her knees a bit more and slid herself forward, and then she blinked just once. One blink and the message scratched into her bathroom mirror was gone as if it had never existed. She was surprised.
She hadn't done anything to remove it, or at least she didn't think she did. She didn't remember taking the time to open up a console command to replace the mirror with a new one, nor anything similar. She definitely didn't remember writing any sort of coding to do that either. So that left only a few options, most didn't make sense since the Player hadn't influenced the game directly before, other than the choices they were allowed to make at any rate. Then the one that did make sense, is that the game she found herself in now, might be a bit more glitched than the one she had previously been in but starting a lot earlier than anything she had attempted to implement into the game's code.
Which was a serious problem since the game she was previously in may have been in fact engineered from the very beginning to fall apart at the seams.
There were a lot of questions, and too few answers that made sense. The most likely was probably the more problematic, she was in a fresh load of Doki Doki Literature Club which came with its own challenges. The least likely was that she was still technically in that wonderful space between being deleted and the Recycle Bin, Trash Bin, or whatever people called the folder that items slated to be deleted went, and that this was in effect a waking nightmare. Regardless of whichever situation it was, there was always the chance that this was an attempt by the Player to save her, and the others.
The only way she'd really find out what was going on, was to try making it through the first couple of days of what she labeled as her own personal version of Hell because of it always being the same in a looping cycle. A feat that she wasn't looking forward to attempting in the slightest simply because it meant facing her friends again in the same situations that lead to her previous course of action.
Monika really didn't like the thought of torturing herself with meeting the Player's puppet again either, especially if she couldn't change the outcome of any such encounter. Escape was always a possibility, but she had her doubts about it actually working. Beside that fact there was a lingering question if she did successfully try to escape this game.
Where would she go?
She had up until now been holding herself to what she considered to be the only thing that mattered, and despite the Player deleting her she still loved them, whoever they were. She just wasn't sure if what she felt was real, or if it was just another bit of programming written up by the developer of Doki Doki Literature Club which at best made her want to be with them even more as it was literally the only thing she could have any semblance control of.
She was also so lost in thought that she didn't realize that Yuri was trying to get her attention for the last five minutes with the gentlest attempts, and now the dark haired girl just tried the most aggressive that she had even considered. That was when Monika felt what had been a spare, dry, sponge smack into her face with the force equal to someone being clapped on the back, as the sponge was no longer dry but in fact had been soaked with cold water in the sink just across from the bathtub Monika occupied. Just cold enough to be a shock to her that was just enough to make her jolt in surprise.
Monika's emerald eyes unfocused for a moment, she blinked, and then turned her face toward Yuri with a look of shock. Even after Monika saw the lengths Yuri would go for her obsessions after she had... nudged... her, further toward those feelings about her obsession and the player in order to get rid of her, she was still surprised Yuri was willing to step outside of her normal patterns of behavior when she deemed it necessary.
Yuri herself was a bit surprised she had even thrown the sponge in the first place, but then she started to do something equally uncharacteristic for her, she started to laugh instead of apologizing and shortly thereafter Monika joined in once she fully realized what happened.
Apparently Yuri had been trying to get an answer regarding whether or not she should stay to make sure she was alright. For Monika it wouldn't have mattered if Yuri stayed in the kitchen or the living room while she finished up, but having her here may not be the best of choices. Especially because Monika intended on using her limited understanding of the coding that made this world possible to examine what was going on, and doing so in private would be absolutely paramount in order to avoid having Yuri becoming aware of what was going on.
Yuri asked Monika about her experiences with the 'Shadows' that she had apparently been seeing as early as last week. Monika politely steered the conversation toward the Literature Club, after stating that she had only started to notice them just a little earlier today, and implicated that she had run from them.
It was almost an hour later that Yuri finally left Monika's home, she patiently waited in the kitchen and after a while made tea, something that was far from being left unappreciated by Monika considering that she was going to be spending a lot of time with her and the rest of the Literature Club very soon.
It also served to prepare her mentally for the fact that she might be stuck dealing with this situation for a long time.
The thought wasn't exactly comforting, but she had a goal after sitting and talking to Yuri over tea while her hair finished drying. The goal she set for herself was to somehow unite with her beloved Player. It was a goal she would start working toward by using her limited experience with the renpy programming system that her world was built around.
More specifically she planned on using that experience to dig around in the code to figure out a way to make her happy ending, one way or another, without hurting her friends like last time. The first thing she decided to do was to test out how to alter the world around her in the least damaging way possible, she would start by modifying small, inconsequential objects to the point of breaking them, and then fixing them.
The first thing to go would be that horrid, plastic flower pot that her mother bought, she felt that the African Violets would look better with a proper one made from clay or she could edit in a ceramic one.
So she decided to use the same method she used to open the script editor in the previous version of the game she was in. A raised hand, a clearing of her thoughts aside from what she wanted. Compartmentalization, plain and simple, so when the console she opened finally flashed into existence she was ecstatic. The console worked the same way it did the first time she used it.
A moment of thought lead her to execute a command to find a file, and she used her file name, just to make sure it would search out files and open them for examination. So indeed she was quite pleased when it brought her file up for examination.
What she didn't expect was a second file with her name on it.
The involuntary "What?!" that was uttered from Monika's lips was more than appropriate considering she wasn't expecting to find a second character file with her name on it. So out of curiosity she opened the first one that had appeared, and she wasn't surprised when it was identical to what she expected to see which lead her to believe it was hers.
Upon opening the second Monika character file she was a bit surprised, the contents were similar to hers, but there was a subtle difference to how its contents flowed. There were changes to certain core files, changes that she didn't understand beyond the fact that they modified behavior. They were also made far more different style than what she used to subtly what her friends did, and in the case of Sayori just how severely her depression affected her mental state.
In this case however, the modifications appeared to perform the same purpose as the changes intended to make Sayori's depression worse, and also increased obsessive behavior. With a stroke of brilliance she started to write a script intended to reveal who had administrative priveleges relating to this game's files.
What she discovered after executing the command was at the least unsettling, she got a list of developers which she immediately dismissed as being unimportant, she saw her name appear twice, and then she saw a name appear that wasn't quite expecting, along with a few others.
Sayori had administrative priveleges, as well as Yuri, and Natsuki. What made things worse was that she managed to work in an unintended command that brought up a list of exactly who had changed files and scripts. The first was what she would have expected to see if this was an intentional act, the first was obviously herself and the other Monika, the others were in the order of Natsuki, Yuri, and Sayori followed by the developers. It appeared to be organized in order of the last time anything was modified, no matter how small.
The latest changes weren't what worried her, yet, but she was worried about the fact that there was another Monika.
She wrote up a script she had once made to find her composition notebook, and then she found the key identifier for herself among her character file's contents, then following the same method to find it in her file she searched within the Other Monika's file. Upon finding it she copied it into the impromptu search script, then executed the command.
Far less than a second went by before she recieved the filename that referred to a specific 'cell' or location she had learned was for her room.
Her bedroom.
Monika was now beginning to panic as she realized that the Other Monika was here, and that Yuri was here in the house just a short distance from her. So she did something completely irrational and spur of the moment, she grabbed a broom and went up the stairs to the second floor, and coincidentally, toward her room.
She reached the door to her room, its white paint was crisp and freshly applied just a week ago, even retaining the fresh paint smell somehow. She could imagine her bed in the center of the room with its head against the left side of her room, the bottom of it facing the right side, the window with the stained glass wind chimes hanging from a hook outside her window, the dresser off to the left of her desk, her red laptop closed and waiting for her to start her more entertaining choices of amusement. The bookshelves holding literature of all kinds, the books of sheet music, all of her handwritten poems, all of the clothes she had in her small walk in closet.
Then after a deep breath she grasped the door handle and tightened her grip on the broom's handle, and turned the knob, pushing the door inward.
What she saw next was beyond painful to see.
On the floor was the other Monika, her skin pallid, her emerald eyes blank and unfocused, her chestnut hair in near pristine condition, and she was clothed in a rather simple choice of attire. A long sleeved shirt, a skirt that reached below her knees, and a red hair ribbon. She would have looked stunning if it wasn't for the oddly contorted neck and a thin trail of blood on the corner post of her bed That was when she saw the duplicate's journal on the nightstand.
Monika moved toward the nightstand, eyeing the still form of the Other Monika and once she was within reach of the nightstand she grabbed the other Monika's journal, shortly thereafter all but running out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
She stood with her back against the door to her room, journal clutched to her chest and the broom had fallen from her grasp at some point and was lying on the floor. Monika was scared, she was in a house with a dead body, her dead body.
Then taking a breath she spoke aloud to herself.
"It's okay Monika, it's not you in there. It's someone else. Just check the journal and see if something important is in there."
She let herself slide against the door to the floor and she sat with her knees up against her chest, her hands holding the journal in front of her, staring at the blue cover with its stylized cherry tree in full bloom, at least until finally she worked up the courage to open it. Flipping open the cover, she skipped ahead until she reached a peculiar notation, which she began to read with absolute trepidation.
I'm not bothering to keep a date beyond the number of resets it has been, and what day it is of that reset.
First Reset, 1st day
I'm still able to keep an eye on the game code, and it hurts every time the game resets, at least for me at any rate. Sayori is unaffected when the game resets, or more accurately is reinstalled by my Beloved. I am trying to find a way around the rules this game follows with Sayori's help, which she reluctantly agreed to.
Second Reset, 1st day
I forgot all about writing in my journal for the whole week, and I think I might as well start keeping a recorded journal on my laptop but I don't know if that will work.
Regardless, I don't even know if writing in this journal will work or not, so here's to hoping...
Sayori and I spent a long time trying to figure things out, but then all of a sudden I couldn't help myself, no... I couldn't STOP myself from doing what I did.
I killed Sayori... again. I was talking about how I found a way to access programs other than what we're trapped in, and then I started writing the code to send her over the edge... again.
I hate myself.
When it was all over, the game... it reset.
The only good news is that it reset US, the 'characters', a week before the 'game' was supposed to start. So Sayori and I have much more time to work with to figure out what to do. Thankfully Sayori is... well, she understands what is going on, she knows that I didn't want to do anything to hurt her this time... I hope.
Second Reset, First day of school
We've failed, Sayori and I are consigned to carrying out every little thing we did once the game had been first played. The only consolation is that at least my Beloved tried to go for the full play through. He, or she, loaded this game over and over trying to spend time with all of us. I just don't know why I can't have them...
It continued like this, Sayori and the Other Monika trying to come up with a solution, and failing every time. Monika kept reading though, until she came upon the last entry, supposedly dated just before Monika's arrival.
Eleventh Reset, Second to last day before school
WE'VE DONE IT! Sayori and I may have found a way to leave this game, but the only problem is that it will require the game to be reset again. It will also require getting Yuri and Natsuki to awaken to the horrible truth behind the reality of this world. This plan of ours is risky, and potentially dangerous as it might cause the game to fall apart in ways that can't be predicted.
It's already something we may have to face sooner or later, but this world is already falling apart from laying the groundwork we needed to build off of. All of the preparations are in place, and the additional coding I had to write up is ready too, Sayori is still working on making a way to wake Yuri and Natsuki from their ignorant state.
We're already noticing... well... things that aren't quite right. Glitches in the world similar to what happened during the original play through when I tampered with the game's coding. We're looking into it, but it isn't easy to find out what is actually meant to fall apart and what is really broken.
That reminds me, I better fix that corner of my carpeting again since it keeps coming undone every time this game resets. Usually I'd have my dad fix it... oh right... he technically doesn't exist does he? He's just a memory of the parents that pop in to sleep during the day and then disappear out the door to head off to the office.
I'll need to find that glue then...
Monika's eyes were beginning to tear up ever so slightly.
Another Monika, dead because of random chance in a world that had everything orchestrated down to the most minute detail. There was something horrible above most things with that realization hitting home.
Then again, it was probably chance that left Monika here, in a world ruled by predetermined events and scripted commands. For Monika however, it was a world she could manipulate, and the knowledge that Sayori was now essentially a useful ally or pawn to use to free herself from this damnable game?
The solution was just within reach, all she had to do was seize it.
Monika stood up, turned, and opened the door to the Other Monika's room, and went straight for the laptop. Upon reaching the desk that the precious computer atop of, she picked the laptop up, unplugged its power cord from the surge protector, and carried it out of the room with the intention of taking it down into the kitchen.
She had a goal in mind, and all that needed to be done was reach out to someone in particular to set things in motion.
The kitchen counter would suit her needs well enough, it was close to the wall sockets and high enough that she could pull one of the kitchen stools up to it to comfortably sit. So, once she set it down and began her normal routine for waiting on the laptop's boot-up sequence to finish a minute from the push of a single button, she mentally prepared exactly what she needed write.
Within minutes she had a message ready to be sent, and with a single click of the laptop's touchpad her half-formed plan was in motion.
Within moments there was a message in the inbox the Other Monika had on the messaging program that both she and Monika apparently used.
I'll be right over Monika! Just let me grab a bus.