PRE-SPIRAL

Julienne is born

Julienne goes to school, develops interests in computing, social manipulation, and the occult

Julienne gets a job at a software company, plays at being a white and black hat at the same time

Julienne meets Hammerman and has him create Black Sun

Julienne discovers a /real/ occult tome

Julienne’s attempts at spell casting summons an alien being

Julienne becomes obsessed with mathematics and fractals

Julienne works on the Langford Spiral until she fully comprehends and bonds with it

Desiree meets up with Hammerman and Loop

Black Sun releases pirated copies of Kankakusakujo software, in a bid to kill them.

SPIRAL
Desiree finds the parrot

Desiree, Hammerman, and Loop are exposed to the parrot

Julienne activates The Spiral, using secret code within pirated copies of Kankakusakujo software to render a crude version of the fractal, allowing servitors to come through and wreak havoc.

POST SPIRAL
Desiree goes into a coma

Loop stagnates at a mental age of 13, not being able to handle the manifestation of the fractal. He forgets all about it.

Julienne blames The Spiral on Black Sun, making hackers universally hated and reviled. Kankakusakujo gains major favor with governments.

Julienne passes the PARACITE Act to keep anyone else from finding the tomes

Hammerman builds an AI of Desiree to replace her place at the Black Sun.

Without the real Desiree’s guidance and focus, Hammerman defects to Julienne’s side. He still runs Black Sun.

Julienne’s megalomania grows, she starts the second half of her grand plan – to become a god.

 
Act I/Disk 1 starts

Jakob is asked to get pizza

Jakob meets Ollie, she takes him to the Pizza place.

Ollie ditches Jakob, she XYZ

Jakob meets Desiree

Jakob is given the disk with the Parrot by Desiree who tells him to give it to Hammerman without looking at it

Jakob is dropped back home by Desiree. She tells him to call her when Hammerman has recieved the code.

Jakob installs the game (perhaps after finding that Hammerman isn’t available)

Cutscene: The Parrot is released on the internet again. Act/Disk 1 ends.
[Jakob is making a microwave meal, while installing the game. The progress bar goes up, the microwave counter goes down, and Jakob sits back, Desiree runs through the streets, having crashed her car, away from the “tax collectors”, a cybernetically enhanced private police force. She turns, cornered. The timer on the microwave runs out just as the game finishes installing. Jakob gets up to get the microwave. Desiree draws her gun. There is an explosion, and the power goes out in Jakob’s building. The tax collectors look up at the large spiral of energy wheeling into the sky. Desiree vanishes into the shadows. Ollie looks on, intregued. From her perspective, there are two spirals. Jakob is left, in the darkness, to decide what to do next.]
Act/Disk 2 starts

Jakob gets out of his apartment, chased by short lived fractal avatars. [They can’t exist for long – no organic processor in Jakob’s computer. They’re just shadows of the actual avatars.]

Jakob calls Desiree. She gives him a place to meet her – the Blind Tiger.

Ollie and Jakob meet back up. You control Ollie for the next bit.

Jakob meets Loop in real life. He gives Jakob access to the Blind Tiger.

Jakob meets Desiree at the Blind Tiger, after getting Loop’s pass.

They Talk about Hammerman and plan to meet him at his apartment, except that they don’t know where it is.

They Go to the apartment.

It has been ransacked, and Hammerman is nowhere to be seen.

They find clues in the ruins as to what has been going on.
[Hammerman was busy summoning a servitor to get to Julienne so he can finish work on the rift generator]
Clues:
– Incinerated Book. Desiree thinks she can find another copy.
– Film Camera. Loop thinks he can develop it. The lens is shattered, and most of the mechanisms inside are destroyed.
– Copy of Kagi to Mon* (The Key and The Gate), the same videogame Desiree gave Jakob.

Ollie and Jakob, left behind, are arrested by tax collectors for trespass and acts of vandalism against the Pasture.

– Desiree finds the original tome. She learns of the Langford Spiral. It no longer functions for anyone. She is accosted by more tax collectors. She has a flashback to seven years ago.

– Loop discovers the photos contain pictures of Julienne and a fractal servitor, larger than life and twice as deadly. He has a flashback to seven years ago. He knows Julienne. She was the original fourth member of Black Sun. Hammerman’s superior. What has happened?

– Jakob explores the darknet again, and sees what has happened to Black Sun. It’s in ruins, and glitching out. The fractal really did a number on it. He finds SOMETHING important in Hammerman’s online logs – the location that Hammerman was going to.

– Ollie plots her escape with Jakob. It is in this section she reveals she is part of the Flock. They escape with their necks intact, after Ollie blasts the tax collectors with an emp gun.

The four meet up again. It is at this point they have a clearer idea of what is going on. They know they must confront Julienne and save Hammerman.

———

Hammerman puts the final piece on the Rift Generator, in his own GUI style. Probably a cutscene. Julienne talks to him from the shadows. It hurts him.

———

The party travels to Kankakusakujo HQ. It is on an island off the coast of the city, much like Alcatraz. They get on a boat and ride away to it.

The party discovers the truth behind the Flock’s technology – it’s all organic.

Julienne talks directly to the party. She says that they are too late, and that they are surplus to requirement. She instructs Desiree to give up the tome she is carrying.

Hammerman is left behind to “deal” with the party. He lets slip the location of the Rift Generator, and that he’s betraying Julienne, not to worry.

Hammerman absconds. We don’t see him again until the end of Disk 2, but he promises he’ll fix everything.

———
Julienne wants to remake the world in her image, she also screwed up society a lot.
Hammerman wants to remake things into a cyberpunk setting proper, where hackers have the upper hand. But he’s so unstable he can’t control that. Only Julienne can handle the raw reality warping powers of the fractal. He betrays her at the end of Act II, looking to the player as if some Deus Ex Machina has come to save the poor weak protagonists with some overpowered Gary Stu, wielding his katana like a pro and stabbing Julienne in the back, momentarily catching her off guard and stopping her from incinerating the protagonists. He raises his katana to destroy the rift generator… and stops. “No.” he says, “I can fix this. I can fix everything.”. Julienne is busy regenerating, and he’s going up to the ‘pilot’s seat’. He doesn’t finish her off. He can save everyone. He turns on the rift generator…

…and controls the fractal himself.

The whole city shifts into the fractal dimension… under his command.

Begin Act III. You’ve already lost. Hammerman is barely able to control the power he wields. Julienne is stripped of all her power. She’s realised how much the fractal was controlling her, because it’s controlling Hammerman right now – sending his hero complex spiralling out of control. He’s tilting at windmills so hard that the dutch angle looks conservative compared to him. He’s got ultimate power, but he’s fighting against himself trying to find a villain to fight, when he’s no longer a hero.
[02:30:02] Khato: Reality is so broken, so fundamentally cracked that the entire game is bugging out. It was happening before, under Julienne’s direction, but now all bets are off. You must find and defeat Hammerman, before the fractal consumes him and his fractured psyche echoes throughout the fractal like an infinite number of mirrors, destroying everything it touches.
[02:30:28] Khato: Cue final boss forms, as Hammerman loses it more and more, trying desperately to be a hero.
[02:31:02] Khato: And with each defeat, he becomes more deluded, thinking that if he only fought harder, that he would be able to win the day.
[02:43:20] Khato: Julienne becomes playable at the end of act II, in which you have access to her full array of powers. When you play her in Act III, she still has the equivilent of cantrips. She’s still a sorceress, even though she’s stripped of her fractal powers.
[02:48:45] Khato: I think in Act II, the control of Desiree should end when you say “shoot the bitch”. And then, Julienne’s POV. The bullet glides through the air, slow as you like, and you can redirect it so it shoots Desiree’s leg instead, causing her to fall to the floor in front of you. You then play the next bit as her, showing off the true power of a fractal sorceress. And then Hammerman interrupts.

———

DiSk IiI

Jakob wakes up in his bed. Start Disk 1 over again, but this time everything is glitching out. Turns out that this isn’t the events that were happening, only fractured memories of everyone.

Go through weird reality shit to recover the tome and cast the spell that would banish the fractal. Hammerman stops this. Only Julienne can control the fractal properly. The party must trust her, and she must trust the party.

Final boss fight with Hammerman, trying to talk him down and release the fractal’s grip on him.

Hammerman cannot stand not being the hero. He becomes less and less human as he gives himself more of the fractal’s power. He believes the entirety of reality is against him, and that only by destroying it can be win and be the hero. He is completely delusional. He prepares to destroy all of reality.

The party must make Hammerman and Julienne swap places. Jakob fixes the Rift generator, Ollie tries to reprogram it with Julienne’s help, and Loop and Desiree try to stave off Hammerman’s final assault.

When they do, Hammerman tries to attack Julienne to no avail. She is using all of her power to return reality back to it’s place, but a length of steel cannot hurt her. Hammerman rages, having lost the power to “win” on his own, so he takes it out on Jakob. Loop tries to stop him but is pushed back by Hammerman, almost toppling over the edge of the chasm. He advances on him, corners him. He raises his katana, screaming that he’s the hero and he is going to fix everything once and for all. Fade to black.

Desiree shoots him. He has had his final chance. She did not want to do it, but it had to be done. She throws the gun away, turns away from his corpse.

Julienne finishes returning the party and all of the city to reality. Buildings still show scars from where they were ripped through a hole in dimensions, and as a final action, Julienne decides that the only action she can take that she has any control over is to unmake herself. Everyone tries to talk her out of it, but she cannot be swayed. She has done far too much damage, and it would serve no purpose for her to remain in this reality. She will return to the fractal dimension and make sleep the ancient godlike power for all of eternity, sealing herself away with it – making her first and only sacrifice. The party is left in the ruins of the Kankakusakujo building.

They return to civilisation. The flock machines do not work. Without the fractal, they cease to function. Society must reunite the Flock and the Hackers in order to continue. There is hope for the future. A single ray of sunshine pierces the clouds.

*鍵と門