Canon Information

[nicearms]

Setting and History | Espers and 999 | The Nonary Game | Participants


Setting and History
Virtue's Last Reward is a canon dealing heavily with alternate timelines and the traversal of said timelines in a non-linear manner. It is a visual novel that does more than take into account the genre's keystone mechanic of being capable of living moments over again in order to experience different events based upon your decisions, it is as integral to the plot as it is to the gameplay. For the tone of the game, it seems to keep relatively true to modern day, progressed fifty science-fiction years into the future. Space travel is relevant. Holograms are a thing. Cloning is possible. Medical advances such as cure-all treatment pods, scanners that register the tiniest ailments in real time, and successful cryogenic freezing are a reality. Cybernetics and artificial intelligence are advanced enough to imitate human life without detection. Presumably the state of the world was as hunky-dory as a modern mirror can be before it all went to hell.

The year is 2028. Humankind has set its sights on manning a mission to Mars, and the technology with which that dream might become a reality is finally within its reach. On Christmas Day, the American government sets out to run a test mission at an old Air Force base in the remote Nevada Desert, rendered into an identical, fully functional copy of the facility intended to be installed on Mars' surface. Nine participants are stationed there, and set out to perform a series of simulations and experiments.

On New Year's Eve, six of the nine participants are declared dead.

Unbeknownst to the test group, a deadly pathogen known as Radical-6 had been somehow introduced to the facility. The virus is airborne, aggressively contagious, and affects the infected individual's brain—primarily their perception of the passing of time, reducing what a normal human views as 1:1 speed to 1:√(1/6), or 1:0.408. For every minute a person perceives, roughly two and a half minutes pass in real time. This reduction in the brain's processing rate results in the person taking in more information than it can rightfully handle, and eventually this causes the organ to fail. This is believed to be the cause of the second symptom, which is the overwhelming, almost feral urge to commit suicide that follows.

Attempts to contain the virus fail, and it quickly spreads across the globe, causing millions upon millions of people to kill themselves in any way possible. The few humans discovered to be immune to the disease are quickly locked in underground bunkers. Around April of 2029, the exponential mass suicides become so devastating that what remains of humanity decides to make one last attempt to destroy the virus by simultaneously detonating eighteen antimatter power plants around the globe. Needless to say, whether this course of action was successful or not, the explosions sent enormous amounts of dust into the atmosphere, subsequently wiping out flora and fauna worldwide via nuclear winter.

Such is mankind's terrible fate.

Espers and 999
Before we continue on to the inevitable attempt to alter this fate, first the concept of Espers must be introduced. The universe in which Virtue's Last Reward takes place paraphrases Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance: that there is an unseen field of energy surrounding the globe known as the morphogenetic field that life taps into on a subconscious level, presented as an explanation for the phenomenon where groups of people or animals that have no contact with one another exhibit identical behaviors at similar points in time. Certain rare individuals henceforth referred to as Espers are capable of accessing this field and conveying information through it, not unlike telepathy. The title's predecessor, 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors centers around this concept of projecting information and remotely picking up on it by way of a thought experiment called the Nonary Project (subsequently the Nonary Game). The first Nonary Game involved nine pairs of young siblings exhibiting potential Esper capabilities who were split into two teams, one placed in a test facility in Nevada, the other on a remote ship in the ocean, and given an ultimatum. To the children on the ship: solve a series of puzzles or die. To the children in the testing facility: solve a series of puzzles and send your siblings the answers, or they will die. This particular environment is employed to produce two key factors that strengthen one's ability to connect through the field: epiphany and danger. In other words, the rush produced by the sudden understanding of a difficult problem, amplified by the ever-present threat of death. A sadistic experiment, to say the least, one that resulted in two things: proof that the morphogenetic field was accessible, and the death of a young girl by the name of Akane Kurashiki. In one version of history.

In another, she morphicly resonates so intensely, it's as if her consciousness splits and connects to two points in time simultaneously. She does so with a childhood friend of hers, Junpei Tenmyouji, who is forced to play a game identical to the one she is participating in. A second Nonary Game she devised herself nine years in the future (in 2027) with her brother as a means to save herself, as well as bring down revenge upon the men responsible for the first Nonary Game in the process by making them participants. In the moment these two timelines diverged, honestly the simplest way to describe it is that she became Schrodinger's Girl for a spell. She should have died (and does die in instances where the second Game comes out wrong), and only lived because of circumstances she could only have produced had she lived, which she went on to produce in order to prevent this impossible loop from evolving into a full-blown time paradox. The long and the short of it is that it's not 100% understood, but it proves something very important for the events of Virtue's Last Reward to take place: thoughts, memories, and even entire consciousnesses can not only be passed from one place to another, but also through time by way of alternate universes.

And so, with her powerful abilities, Akane moves on to her next great project: halting the end of the world. One year later, the events of Christmas Eve, 2028, are set to occur, and she enlists the help of a fellow Esper named Sigma Klim to devise a 45-year campaign to produce a timeline in which they can investigate the mission test site before the outbreak comes to pass, and put a stop to it. Taking two agents who had been investigating the first Nonary Games, as well as another Esper by the name of Phi, they put them into cryogenic stasis and make their way to one of the moon's bases known as Rhizome-9. There, Sigma studies programming, genetic engineering, and robotics in order to produce the Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition, an exercise that will strengthen his Esper powers and allow him to jump back in time with Akane and alter history.

The Nonary Game
The game is inspired heavily by the original Nonary Games, thanks to Akane, but the Ambidex Edition throws the stress of trust and betrayal into the mix. In the Nonary Game, nine players are issued a watch-like bracelet, and each bracelet has three components featured on its face. A color, a number, and the words PAIR or SOLO. The number determines how many points a player has. Every player starts with 3, and must accumulate 9 points or more in order to open the door to the facility and escape. The combination of colors and pairs/solos determine the teams for a round of the game. Complimentary colors or like colors may team up, and a solo must team with a pair to ensure three teams of three players are formed to enter three doors of their complimentary or corresponding color. Beyond each door lies a logic puzzle, which teams must solve in order to escape, as well as receive the keys to unlock the next portion of the game known as the Ambidex Game. In the AB Game, the pair and the solo of each team are separated into voting booths and pitted against one another, presented with the choice to ally with or betray them. This portion of the game plays out much like the Prisoner's Dilemma, in that if both teams choose to ally, they are mutually awarded 2 points. If they both choose to betray, they are mutually awarded 0. If one team allies and the other betrays, the betrayer is awarded 3 points, while the allied lose 2. Any player who abstains from voting automatically allies. If any player drops to 0 points, needles in the bracelets activate, injecting the player with the anesthetic Soporilβ and the muscle relaxant turbocurarine, which causes respiratory arrest and death. This also occurs if a player does not enter a colored door in the time allotted, enters the wrong colored door, or exits the facility without 9 points. If all three players on a team abstain from participating in the AB Game, all three are penalized in the same manner. There are three standard rounds of puzzles and voting periods, and after the third round, the AB Game can be repeated until someone or everyone accrues 9 points.

The design incorporates the original Nonary Game's elements of epiphany and danger, in addition to being convoluted and strict in order to produce many points at which executive decisions must be made, making distinct branches in a timeline that can be traversed in order to strengthen one's ability to do so, like the sets of an exercise strengthen muscle groups. To go even further, all of the participants are unwittingly infected with Radical-6, creating a risky balancing act between the flood of information caused by the condition strengthening Sigma's and Phi's mental abilities even further, and any (or all) of the nine participants cracking under the strain, which occurs in many versions of history. Once the game is completed, the Sigma that has had 45 years to hone his Esper powers without the crash course of the game swaps consciousnesses with his 22-year old self, leaving the young, clueless Sigma on an eerie moonbase in his 67-year old body to participate in the game with Phi in order to strengthen their abilities and travel back to before the outbreak.

Participants
Sigma and Phi participate in the game alongside seven others that seem to have a connection to Akane, Nonary Games past, or the viral outbreak. Clover and Alice, the two agents taken and cryogenically frozen until 2074, had been investigating the Nonary Games as well as the terrorist threat believed to be responsible for the outbreak, the former even being a participant in the first two Games. Junpei Tenmyouji, Akane's childhood friend and savior from the second Game, who had been involved in the Mars mission project and subsequently lived through the viral outbreak (making him significantly older and unrecognizable to the player and Clover), as well as his adopted son Quark. Luna, a robot designed by Sigma himself. Kyle Klim, the clone backup created of Sigma in the event he was compromised before the project could be completed, though he had been heavily dosed with Soporilβ (one of the side effects of repeated heavy doses being generalized amnesia) and locked into a suit of armor obscuring his face. And last but not least, Dio, a terrorist agent from Free the Soul (a radical religious order believed to be connected to the Nonary Games as well as the outbreak) sent to infiltrate and sabotage the Nonary Game. Little does he know, his presence is actually integral to the Game's success due to the timelines it creates.

To summarize, Akane Kurashiki creates a 45-year mental Large Hadron Collider using Saw puzzles for children in order to slingshot her and her Esper companions back in time to stop the apocalypse.