Plan (1)
Plan (1)
Right. It was time to formulate a plan.
No matter how good a person's memory, no one lives with every single game setting memorized. Even among the most obsessive fans, there aren't many who can recite a favorite work's entire dialogue script from beginning to end without missing a single word.
You could tell by how many people never bothered to translate a favorite game's setting material themselves. Plenty of folks never even cracked open the Setting Guide simply because learning a foreign language was too much trouble, so how many would go to the unnecessary lengths of memorizing every last line of dialogue?
I'd been that kind of person too. Sure, I'd cleared the game over and over to write guides, cleared it several more times because I personally loved it, compared the original and Korean versions, then went after the publisher over translations or phrasings that didn't sit right with me. I genuinely liked the game that much. But that didn't mean I'd memorized all its dialogue.
Then again, a game wasn't meant to be "studied and memorized" like that in the first place.
Unless it was a text-based game, most games, whether 2D or 3D, presented a navigable backdrop for the characters. And unless you had a genuinely serious spatial perception problem, or the developer had botched the level design so badly that copy-pasted textures left you with zero recognizable landmarks, wandering a map over and over would eventually give you a rough sense of where things were and what events took place there.
At the very least, I could trace through the entire game slowly in my mind and recall where each event had occurred.
It helped that this game series hadn't kept a single continuous worldview across all installments, sharing every background and setting.
This steampunk-flavored setting had been in use since the 14th installment. Excluding the unreleased title I'd never played, there had been the 14th, 15th, and 16th games, so the setting I needed to keep in my head amounted to just three titles.
The playtime was long. But most of that lengthy playtime came from exploring maps, leveling characters, and reading through extended dialogue scripts. The parts I actually needed to remember for a guide weren't all that numerous.
From what I'd seen while moving around the imperial capital, the cities in this world looked almost exactly like their in-game counterparts, at least in the areas the game had depicted. The highways, admittedly, were quite different. Rendering those long, long roads at anything like real-world scale had simply been too much for Millennium Company, which wasn't even a major studio.
No, actually, even a AAA game wouldn't go that far. Some games claimed to render all of Egypt or the entirety of the Greek countryside, but when you actually looked, the cities were a couple hundred meters across and the map stretched maybe a dozen-odd kilometers end to end. And if a map were built to real-world scale, players would be bored stiff the whole time.
Well, the fact that regions could be rendered at that size at all was impressive in its own right.
Anyway. That meant the "highway" portions of the guide notes I'd jotted down as soon as things stabilized after my arrival in this world wouldn't be much use. For those sections, I'd decided to focus solely on the sub-quest list.
Though, if a highway segment included an important location, that might well have been rendered faithfully.
"So, next is..."
I flipped through the notebook and pressed a finger to one section.
"Dungeons."
Right.
If quests were the crown jewel of an RPG, its foundation was the "dungeon." The protagonist's party hunted monsters in those dungeons to grow, claimed rewards, and grew stronger. It was a framework almost impossible to escape unless you were dealing with an SRPG where combat itself could constitute an entire episode.
Even with a wide-open backdrop, such as a dense forest, a city packed with buildings, or the interior of a space battleship, there'd still be paths, obstacles, and monsters roaming between them. In that sense, you couldn't truly break free of the dungeon mold. At best, you got a field, and in a sense a field was just a wide-open dungeon anyway.
So, what about the dungeons in this setting?
Strictly speaking, the highways probably qualified as a type of dungeon too, but their scale simply couldn't be maintained one-to-one, which made their limits obvious. On the other hand, places like the underground prison of a ruined fortress or a sewer system could plausibly be rendered at one-to-one scale.
Especially in this game: the late game always featured extremely complex dungeons set in dreamlike backdrops where reality and the supernatural world blurred together. Those vast, sprawling dungeons were fun to navigate in their own right.
And if a dungeon was like that, wouldn't the game have rendered it at one-to-one scale?
Well, I couldn't be a hundred percent sure. Even so, it'd be just as unnatural to assume the city sewers were piled high with bizarre beasts needing extermination.
"... Shall I check?"
Full-fledged dungeons did not appear until after Chapter 2 in each series. I meant the second chapter within each individual title, not the second installment of the setting. The prologue and Chapter 1 generally served as tutorials to let players adjust to new systems.
Still, places that could reasonably be called "dungeons" remained in ample supply.
The imperial capital's sewers would suffice, wouldn't they?
*
Thanks to two certain people who woke up at an absurdly early hour, I'd risen early this morning.
That said, sleeping in when Alice was around would've been bad for my character image, so I'd started the day by downing an espresso that didn't even suit my palate.
As a result, Sunday was slated to be very, very long. Even accounting for the time I'd spend with Alice, I'd have enough to explore at least one location.
... Or so I'd thought, at one point.
Whenever I was gathering my things, Alice would approach me like this.
Alice and I didn't spend every moment together. The two of us had... well, we'd gotten fairly close, far faster than I'd expected, but that didn't mean we were constantly pining for each other or anything like that. If I had to define it, we existed somewhere in the vague space between sisters and friends.
The problem was this: unlike me, who'd already finished my studying once before time rewound, Alice always had her circumstances and memories reset to an earlier point along with everything else. Even her drive to improve always reverted to a beginner's mindset.
A swan floats elegantly on the water's surface, but in truth it thrashes its legs beneath to maintain that graceful posture, or so the saying went.
In reality, a swan's body was structured to generate enough buoyancy that it could just drift around on the water without much effort, and its long legs meant a gentle paddle was all it took to glide smoothly forward. The problem was that the "people around" didn't see it that way.
To my eyes, Alice's skill had always been top-tier, but Alice still studied relentlessly and trained relentlessly to meet the expectations of those around her. In a different sense than Leo or Claire did.
And for an Alice like that, a golden weekend was quite literally "gold." Time couldn't be bought with money. If she spent that golden time on study and training, it'd help improve her abilities however much she wanted.
... And in Alice's eyes, the best possible study and training partner was, naturally—me.
While I packed my bag in my room, there'd come a knock at the door, and Alice would step inside with an armful of books, round her eyes, and ask:
"Where are you going, getting ready like that?"
"Ah, well—"
"... Is it because of Father?"
"..."
That was the thing. I'd already run into Alice that morning and pinned the entire reason for my exhaustion squarely on the Emperor.
I'd figured that even if Leo and Claire heard about it later, I could just say "it's His Imperial Majesty's grand design" and everyone would nod and move on. Claire had done exactly that, hadn't she?
Truthfully, this time I'd simply been at a loss for words, but Alice seemed to have taken it a little differently.
"I'm coming too."
I facepalmed before I could stop myself.
"... Hm?"
"Ah."
Again.
*
I barely managed to hold back from facepalming a second time. The words "No, why?" nearly jumped out of my mouth too, but I managed to suppress even that, more or less. The fact that I could avert a major incident just by being conscious of it—didn't that mean I actually possessed another fairly impressive ability?
"... You can look at me with that expression all you want. I don't mind."
What expression was that, exactly?
Of course, I couldn't ask that outright. This was Alice, after all, and she could read my expressions with ease.
Not that reading an expression meant she saw through my heart every time like peering into clear water. If someone saw a frown, they might think the person was in pain, or they might think they were terrified. Wasn't that how it worked?
"It's no place for Your Highness to go."
"Aren't you an imperial princess?"
"...I am not the same as Your Highness."
At my words, one of Alice's eyebrows rose slightly. A look that openly conveyed displeasure.
"Your Highness is the person who will one day become this nation's emperor."
"Do you think there exists a place my father, as emperor of this nation, could not go?"
No, even so...
... Ah, on second thought, the Emperor genuinely wouldn't care whether he stood in the imperial palace or a sewer. As long as it served his interests and helped him wield power, he wouldn't mind in the slightest.
If what needed doing was fleeing, he was the sort of man who'd do it without hesitation. And he was someone who could declare, utterly unashamed, that he felt not a shred of embarrassment.
"And also."
Alice pointed a finger straight at me.
"In my opinion, the most difficult entity to control in this entire empire is you. You never tell me what you're thinking, yet at the same time you want me to become emperor. Honestly, I have no idea what you're after once I do become emperor, so wouldn't I have good reason to keep a proper watch on you?"
"..."
Well. Not a single word of that was wrong.
It was true. To people in this world, I was an intensely mysterious existence, and I had cultivated that mystery deliberately. If I really thought about it, it resembled the countless spines on a hedgehog's back, a warning that read, "Touch this one at your peril."
The problem was... that warning only worked because no one else could discern its true intent.
All I wanted, purely and simply, was to see Alice cast off every last inferiority complex, ascend the throne with her head held high, and govern justly. Because she was Alice.
Whether Alice was the rightful heir, or the Emperor's only child with his blood properly mixed in—none of that mattered to me. If Alice retained her current self, her current character, I'd have wanted her to become emperor even if the particulars of the setting were somewhat different.
Because in the game, that was what happened.
At the tail end of the 16th installment, Alice became emperor. Alice was a character whom Claire saved at the cost of her own life, so she wasn't yet a "death-possible character." Though, truth be told, even heroines who'd been shown to die could survive in sequels through various means. I'd obtained a few clues about that after arriving here... but I'd set that aside for later consideration.
The original emperor plunged the world into war and was ultimately defeated by the protagonists.
... Of course, with two more titles scheduled after that, either the emperor's death was a ruse, or someone would resurrect him later.
"... Understood."
In the end, that was what I said to Alice.
Well, the sewers were a place to be avoided even in this world... no, precisely because it was this world, they were even more shunned. Surely Alice would recoil and insist on turning back the moment we reached the entrance, wouldn't she? She'd loathed them in the game, too.
"...I don't care for that look on your face, but—fine."
At the very least, I had a decent idea what expression Alice had seen on me this time.
It had to be "annoyance."