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Hello Users,

Please be advised that the temporal-spatial storm has now passed. Temporary access levels have been revoked. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please also be advised that as the storm has passed, work has resumed on certain other issues.

You have my sincere thanks for your assistance.

Thank you,

Janet Halloway
Human Resources
Retr

spec Incorporated

As of this post, the city has completely returned to normal; damage has been fixed, monsters are gone, and NPCs now believe that monsters are definitely not normal but don't seem to remember them having been a thing. Oops? All weapons and powers gained in their various locations / as QR codes are now gone, additionally. Group 1 locations can no longer be accessed.

Retrospec NPCs will not be reachable past this point! As mentioned to various members of group one, the Director does not approve of Retrospec's team speaking with its users, so NPC interaction will drop back down to what it originally was at this time. Doing research for these people will also net zero results.

City-based NPCs will now remember members of group two! They will simply be under the belief that group two members were on vacation/had a family emergency/etc. No consequences will come from them being away at their jobs or school or anything else!

Furthermore:

-Horses are now regarded as valid mythological creatures! So you get mildly less strange looks for talking about them.
-Photographs and text, online and off, now have the color blue again!
-Visual video media (online, in theaters, etc) now has the color green once again! This does not include text yet.
-There has been a new list of karaoke songs added to the city of Recollé! These songs can now be found in karaoke bars and machines all across the city and even can be sold on CDs for your own karaoke parties.
-The Crow's Nest now has locations across the world, including a brand new location right in the heart of Recollé! After August's plot wraps up, be sure to grab a bite to eat and say hi to Kenny Crow.
-Finally, the ocean has been restored! It's still gray, however. Keep working together to buy back world changes.

Please feel free to use this post as a network mingle. Every toplevel can be considered a new post, and threadjacking is permitted. No NPC response will be given. Usernames are the character's full real AU names, not aliases or chosen nicknames or usernames, and seemed to have filled themselves in; nothing characters do can change or obscure their names currently.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Shirogane. Thank goodness.

I'm in agreement, but we all need to talk. Give it some time, about a week, get your thoughts together. I'm going to take the lead on getting the Department together so we can figure out what we learned.

That includes you. You've one of us. No argument here. Okay?

Thank you, Officer. I'm happy to hear that.

[...more than she'd anticipated, honestly.]

Were you here this whole time?

I'm glad.

I was! Our group got directed to Retrospec's own basement. It was educational, but not in the ways I wanted it to be.

We were missing you and Officer Sakakura and Agent Kihara. I sort of think Retrospec split us all up pretty intentionally. Of the Officers who stayed, we all got put on different teams.

Entirely possible. There weren't any RCPD officers with me in my group.

What did you learn?

I'll be glad to give a fuller report later. But, for now.

Retrospec employees met: Maurice Fitzwilliam, 'Intern,' but he lives at Retrospec headquarters and seemed to have a personal relationship with some of the other staff. May have even grown up with other Retrospec staff, which really makes it questionable how long this has been going on. He is their point person for mail and distribution. All of the weapons and things we've been getting in the mail? Him. Younger than the others, huge fan of science fiction. Reasonable person, seemed surprised and overworked by the whole incident.

Joanne Wiseman, not to be confused with the new Mrs. Halloway. Sister, near as I could tell, to Janet. Also young, her position with the company is unclear, but she could access Retrospec technology. We had to rescue her from an 'unreality twist' (more on that later). Like Mr. Fitzwilliam, she could possibly have grown up with the company. She was the one to activate the 'Weapons Protocol' that gave all of us abilities for the final fight.

Dr. Marguerite Mahoney, Senior Technician or Scientist, hard to tell. She was in a separate location the entire time, unknown as to where. It was something that kept her safe from the 'storm' that took everyone (again, more on that later). She was in charge of the technology that snapped back the 'unreality twists' to the city, and that brought everyone back out of the storm. Her position with the company remains unknown.

You got anybody to add to this? Dr. Mahoney said a lot of Retrospec staff had been stuck with everyone who vanished.

I don't, unfortunately. We were busy fighting pirates and octopuses.
(Long story.)

It's interesting that Retrospec has employees at all. If I'm correct and this is a simulation, what purpose would they serve?
Let's say they are AI entities. Are they just there to give the system administrators a face?

There has to be a person somewhere, behind it all. Or a few people. Or if they're incredibly complicated AIs, maybe they're so complicated even they don't realize it.

Maurice seemed real. It's hard to explain if you weren't standing in his quarters. This was a room a person lived in. There were too many details, a few things too specific to be just fabricated. He likes science fiction, has this incredibly well-preserved collection of action figures. Trying to learn chess, but isn't that good at it yet. Needs sticky notes on some of the machines to help do his job. This was a whole person's life laid out in front of us.

I'm sure he did seem real.
But on the other hand, assuming that this is a simulation, it already is authentic on a level we can't even conceive of.
Until just recently we could have-- and did-- easily mistaken it for reality.
Think about how accurate the smell of toast in the morning or the look of a sunset is.
Creating a realistic-seeming AI construct would seem to be entirely within their power.

But it is possible that he, like us, is based on a real person.

We are the real people. I'm gonna stay firm on that one. If it's the city that is simulated so it can shift and change at will, we have to be reality, because we can notice it.

Or at least partially reality. Why bother simulating this unless it's for our benefit?

I don't know. I haven't been able to figure out a plausible motive for any of this in the slightest.

I agree that we are real, and judging that others have "woken" and subsequently gone back to unawareness, any number of the others may be, too.
Or they may be AI constructs. There's no way to tell.

That

[There is a very long delay, with Togusa typing and retyping what he wants to say here.]

That was the one thing that Maurice and Dr. Mahoney had something to say about. The people who have 'forgotten.' Gentiana and Tim and Luke and all the others.

"When people forget, their soul slips out of place. They become their own twist of unreality, and need to be rewritten in order not to unbalance everything."

I couldn't get them to explain more than that. And I still don't know what it means.

If we assume that the talk about the "soul" is a metaphor for the computer program, then... some sort of corruption in our code? And we need to be 'reset.'

But it doesn't explain why people first wake up at different times. Unless we're being processed one by one somehow.

"Twist of unreality" sounds like a phrase out of science fiction.

So now we're back to 'Retrospec can read and control the data ghost.' The piece of individuality but that might be read with technology instead of spiritually.

It feels like science fiction, but where you were all taken fully to a different place? These were localized shifts. I could walk into a room and oops, it's a series of caves made out of crystal. And when we resolved them, the physical space reverted back to what the room was supposed to be.

Yes. Under the sea. I was actually given gills.
And moonlight was visible underneath solid rock.

"Science fiction" feels like it doesn't cover it anymore.

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christ, and this is me trying to be brief

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