A write-up for Shuu's recent dungeon.

FORMAT

The dungeon ended up being a sort of mini-heart game. For those who haven't encountered them before, a heart game is a trip through a symbolic landscape representing a person's personality and self, not necessarily focused around issues, though their issues tend to come to light. But usually the main idea is exploration and understanding. Often there is a True Heart, an area or NPC that represents the true self, unmediated and uninfluenced by other anxieties or issues. The core of who the person is. So, that's the framework I was working with when I designed Shuu's dungeon.

In heart games it's sometimes possible for interactions to impact the person's personality and self, but I decided to focus on the exploration/understanding part in Shuu's dungeon. So there wasn't really a way to permanently alter him, though it could be possible to push him toward one way of thinking over another. NPC interaction was meant to be the focus of the dungeon.

The nature of the heart game basis also means that a lot of details were symbolic in some way. A lot of it is somewhat obscure and only noticeable by the canon familiar, but it does mean that this is going to get long because...there's a lot of symbolism to explain to the non-canon familiar.

The dungeon was physically laid out with a central hub plus six areas, three of which were visited. Each area included one or more NPCs formed as an aspect of Shuu or someone close to him, and each area represented a different area of Shuu's personality and was loosely focused around an internal conflict of some kind. There were five open areas and one locked area. The locked area represented the True Heart. This was accessible, but it required a certain trick, and I think I didn't highlight that enough in my area descriptions. Oh well. I'll describe it as I go on.

INTRO

I'm starting this from the post title because it's Symbolic. (Everything is symbolic.)

So, in Holiday Star, a sidequel to Hatoful Boyfriend, there's a section where the antagonist attempts to trap people using storybooks that metaphorically exposed and attacked their core conflicts, trying to trap them in a dream dimension forever. Shuu's storybook is as follows:

Once, there was a chrysalis.

The chrysalis was all alone. It didn't know how to grow up, so it stayed a chrysalis forever.

One day, a butterfly came along. The butterfly said, "Let's be friends! I can show you how to become a beautiful butterfly like me."

The lonely chrysalis was happy. Because it wasn't alone anymore.

But...its friend the butterfly disappeared soon after. The lonely chrysalis was alone again.

It didn't know where to go anymore. It didn't know what it wanted to do anymore.

The lonely chrysalis shrank, and hardened. Nothing will ever come out of it now.

Poor chrysalis. Poor chrysalis.

Now, Holiday Star isn't compliant with the canon timeline I'm taking Shuu from...but I think the truth and efficacy of his storybook can be demonstrated by the fact that, of all the characters attacked with storybooks, his is the only one that worked. Seemed fitting to quote a bit for it for another deep dive into Shuu and His Exciting Issues.

Anyway, keep the imagery here in mind because it'll become relevant later.

Now for the post text itself.

There’s a new door in Liminal Space, a sleek futuristic looking metal door that slides silently open when people approach, and slides silently shut when they move away. When open, cold air pours out of the doorway, along with a murmur of layered voices: a cheerful man shouting “Hey, Isa!”; a haughty teenager deferring to “Dr. Iwamine--”; a cultured woman’s voice saying “Run along now, Utsuro…”; on and on and on.

And beneath them all, the constant flutter of birds’ wings.

Here we go, the opening text in the dungeon post itself. The thing I want to highlight the most is that the various voices all use a different name. The cheerful man using "Isa" is Dr. Kawara, the teenager using "Dr. Iwamine" is Sakuya, a student in the game, and the woman's voice is Isa's mother, using his birth name. Isa's shown up before as a name that a couple overlays have used. Utsuro (more properly, Ichijou Utsuro), his birth name; Isshiki Mishio, a canon past alias; and Wallenstein, an AU alias, have not appeared in-game. (Yet.)

The point of using the various names was mostly to highlight that Shuu has secrets and a layered past. Alternate names aren't really unusual--plenty of people have them for overlays--but I wanted to suggest that Shuu's alternate names are really names he's used, and not just conveniences for infiltrations.

LOBBY

Beyond the door lies a perfectly circular white room, lit by uncompromisingly bright fluorescent lights. The air has the cold and sterile feel of industrial air-con going full blast. The only sound is what you make and the ever-present buzz of the lights.

Evenly spaced along the white wall are six doorways. Five of them stand open and one of them is shut. Above the doorways are labels that read:

[DEPARTMENT OF CARDIOLOGY]
[DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY]
[DEPARTMENT OF PULMONOLOGY]
[DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY]
[DEPARTMENT OF IMMUNOLOGY]
[DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY]

Going through the door landed all the dungeon-traversers in the lobby, a round room with six doorways, five open, and one shut. A hub area where all areas were reachable. I prewrote little hallways from the hub to the areas proper, but I think if I were to redo the dungeon I would dispense with the hallways and just have each doorway lead directly to a new area. Hmm. Oh well.

The area-naming convention of DEPARTMENT OF... was one of my very earliest ideas. Shuu identifies himself pretty strongly as a medical researcher (albeit a horribly unethical one) so I wanted to bring that patina of SCIENCE!1 to the atmosphere. The five open areas are all named after areas of medicine, chosen for relevance to his actual work and/or relevance to the area's significance. Yay symbolism!

The DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY breaks from the medical theme because it is the locked door; the True Heart. I'll explain why I picked Astronomy in particular later.

Oh, and everyone became birds because...well, I figured if everyone was going to dive into Shuu's subconscious, everyone should match the world he's used to. I've used this mechanic for the other heart game I've run in the past and I like it because it's an initial reminder that the players are in someone else's world, that plays by someone else's rules.

I also wrote up little hints for what each area might've held but again, if I had to redo, I probably would have strengthened these or made them more obvious somehow. Oh well.

From the DEPARTMENT OF CARDIOLOGY comes a faint, steady beeping, as if from a heart monitor.

From the DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY comes a faint clicking and tapping--the sound of someone working on a computer.

From the DEPARTMENT OF PULMONOLOGY comes the endless rustling of paper. Lots of paper.

The DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY is completely silent. However, there is a faint scent of fresh blood...

From the DEPARTMENT OF IMMUNOLOGY comes a mixture of sounds--faint music, clinking glasses, muffled laughter. A cocktail party.

The DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY remains closed and silent.

Moving on to the first area!

DEPARTMENT OF CARDIOLOGY

(the study of the heart and its action and diseases)

The machines mark off a clear circle in the infirmary, filled with soft but bright light from an unseen source. The machines that form the area's walls are difficult to identify, all blocks of matte black threaded with flickers of lavender circuitry.

Within the bright clearing is a chess table flanked by two futuristic chairs that look like floating black eggs with seats cut out of them. The table is arranged mid-game, with a key card placed in the center. Seated in the chairs are two figures:

On the left is a haggard but cheerful rock pigeon in a hospital gown (brightly patterned with butterflies), hooked up to all kinds of monitoring equipment. He looks extremely ill, but still seems energetic.

On the right is an imposing white crow with bright blue eyes, dressed in a simple white jacket. He turns his piercing gaze on Feli when he appears, but otherwise seems unruffled by his appearance.

The rock pigeon waves at Feli, beaming. "A visitor! I wasn't expecting visitors. Were you expecting visitors?"

This last line is addressed to the crow, who says, "'Expected' isn't the right word. Anticipated, maybe."

This area represents Shuu's conflicted feelings about the Digital Frontier. Yeah, it was big enough that it has its own area, and the conflict it represents has been simmering along gently ever since. And that conflict is between his memories of Kawara Ryuuji, his beloved and tragically dead mentor, and SAGE.

So to explain this area I have to backtrack a bit and explain Digital Frontier. In the Digital Frontier, Shuu infiltrated as ISA, a reclusive and mysterious CRYPTO program who had been created and mentored by SAGE (before everyone knee he was Hermit). He was the sole witness to SAGE's final battle against the Lovers and the Devil. The important bit, though, is that ISA's relationship with SAGE almost perfectly parallels Shuu's relationship with Ryuuji. The main difference? Ryuuji died. SAGE "died" when he disappeared, but he came back. So. Yeah. Once Shuu was himself again, the whole experience of being ISA struck him where he's most vulnerable with extreme precision. The fact that SAGE came back just rubbed salt in the wound.

And, even worse, Shuu was claimed by SAGE when SAGE asked ISA if he would do anything to help SAGE. Basically, in his eyes, taking advantage of his love for Ryuuji, as filtered through the ISA overlay, in order to nab a pawn for himself.

Shuu would never phrase it this way, but it was horribly violating. Ryuuji was, and still is, an intensely important person to Shuu, one he has complicated and deep and twisted feelings about -- a bird he admired and loved so deeply he had absolutely no idea how to cope with Ryuuji's death, and in a way still doesn't. SAGE asking ISA to be his was taking advantage of those feelings in the cruelest way imaginable (though I guess it's debatable whether SAGE knew what was going on, since it was ROSE who set that Jaunt in motion, and presumably ROSE who selected the important infiltrators). And Shuu doesn't really know how to cope with that. He doesn't even know how to think about that. He could barely cope with Ryuuji's death. He has no idea how to cope or even talk about Ryuuji's death being used against him like this. Feelings are hard and he hates that they exist.

Anyway, all of this is background for why Ryuuji and SAGE appear together in this area, because this area is mostly about Shuu's feelings about being one of the Travelers, and most of his feelings have been hijacked by this helpless roiling misery that is the tender spot of Ryuuji and Syn's intrusion on that through SAGE's existence. That's why this area is CARDIOLOGY, for the heart in all its metaphorical squishy feelings and love sense.

The haggard but cheerful rock pigeon is Kawara Ryuuji, appearing as he did in his last moments -- wasted and extremely ill. Cheerful and awake, because I wanted him to be interactive rather than just a sleeping patient. He has a butterfly-patterned hospital gown because *points up at the storybook* he was the butterfly, the friend, the one the chrysalis loved and aspired to be like.

The white crow with blue eyes is, of course, SAGE. Or at least a representation of SAGE, more accurately the influence of Syn on Shuu's psyche as embodied in the form of his impressions of SAGE. I picked crow because corvids are well-known for their intelligence, and also white crows are super creepy.

NPC SYMBOLISM!1 (c+p from notes)

• Ongoing struggle from Digital Frontier: Hermit as representing the undeniable intrusion/imposition of Syn on Shuu’s life paired w/ Ryuuji as representing that he doesn’t have much to return to anyway.


• Ryuuji on the left for heading toward the past, SAGE on the right for heading toward the future--though both are hopelessly intertwined because THANKS FOR NOTHING, DIGITAL FRONTIER.


• Paired for feeling taking advantage of; ISA used his Ryuuji-feels against him to make him consent-but-not-really to being marked and he feels really...upset about that. Partly because SAGE made him feel feelings, partly because it used something he’s really sensitive about against him, partly because he just feels very, idk, taken advantage of and it’s dumb and he hates it

DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY

(the study of the essential nature of diseases)

As you proceed down this hallway, you become certain that it's night time here. There are no windows, but something about the increasing harshness of the lights -- the way your steps echo hollowly -- makes it feel like you're stuck in those lonely dark hours when only the dedicated or desperate are still at work. The sound of tapping and clicking continues relentlessly.

Signs of habitation begin to appear as you progress, the detritus of many late nights. Takeout containers, empty coffee cups, old pens -- all of these and more gradually appear, just one or two at first, and then more and more clutter.

Just as the mess is thick enough that you have to pick your way with some care, the hallway opens up into a large, futuristic laboratory. Equipment whirrs and sleeping computers hum, the sound of grim tapping and clicking continuing from no source in particular. However, despite being seemingly still in use, the lab is an utter mess. The trash you’ve been seeing hits critical levels in this place, crowding table after table and overflowing onto the linoleum floor.

At the center of the mess is the sole computer in use. A trio of monitors cast a sickly glow on a young-looking Chukar partridge in a lab coat, currently asleep with his head down on a table crowded with empty Red Bird cans.

This area was meant to be sort of the positive aspects of Shuu's personality and the things he associates with happiness. So, a big lab, lots of funding, tasty research projects. The problem is that he hasn't been very happy in Syn to date. Between the kerfuffle over Ryuuji/SAGE in his mind, and being forced to wander through world after world without any research to occupy him, Shuu has never really been happy among the Travelers except for when an infiltration made him happy. So his beloved lab is in poor state: dimly list and full of garbage.

The sole NPC here is Isa, which is to say Shuu when he was a teenager working under Ryuuji. This is when he was happiest and least-evil (for lack of a better term) so that's the persona that sits in this area. Given everything about Shuu's happy-center being in poor condition, Isa is very tired and sleep-deprived, surrounded by empty Red Bull Bird cans. He's overworked, grumpy, and cranky, but basically harmless, enthusiastic about his research, botany, and all of Shuu’s canon’s research interests. That's why this area is called PATHOLOGY, because Shuu primarily identifies as a pathologist.

The project he's obsessed with is researching Ryuuji/SAGE, trying to figure out a solution to the emotional conundrum that represents. But he hasn't really gotten anywhere. I left it deliberately vague what he wanted to figure out about those two because Shuu himself doesn't know, he just keeps worrying at the problem like a scab. Is it time to move on from Ryuuji? Is there someway he can accept SAGE in a Ryuuji-like place? Can he forgive SAGE for (probably) not having anything to do with his Digital Frontier infiltration? Can he find a way to deal with how much Digital Frontier hurts?

Shuu hates feelings and that's why he views this whole debacle as a problem to be solved personally and internally rather than something that could benefit from help. Because feelings are horrible.

DEPARTMENT OF PULMONOLOGY

(the study of the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the lungs)

Nobody came here, but this place represents all the negative/unhappy things going on in Shuu's life. It's big because there is a lot of negativity going on. So this area is themed after all the things Shuu hates the most: tropical island in the blazing sun (outdoors, also Ryuuji contracted the disease that killed him on an island), set in an ocean of paperwork.

The sole NPC would have been Shuu's most hated persona: Isshiki Mishio, public defender, on a dock surrounded by endless piles of paperwork overflowing into the ocean. Personality-wise he would have been gloomy, restless, totally miserable. This area has had a lot of use lately.

This area is PULMONOLOGY for that idea of drowning in an area/profession he absolutely hated and was unsuited for.

DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY

(the study of disease in a population)

As you proceed down this hallway, the scent of blood slowly, but surely, grows stronger. Tarps quickly appear, crumpled and empty, unpleasantly stained -- as if someone had tried to hastily wipe them clean but hadn't quite gotten everything.

The tarps appear more and more frequent. As they pile on each other, they also seem to grow taller and more solid, as if hiding something...

Eventually, the piles grow so high that they take over the walls completely. You're walking down a narrow canyon defined by bloody, rustling plastic, the ceiling having long since vanished far overhead.

At the far end of the canyon, the walls veer away from each other, leaving you facing a small room. There’s space for a desk and a medicine cabinet and a couple beds. It looks absurdly normal, a high school nurse’s office transplanted from god knows where. Though its walls are not walls, but heavy curtains.

There’s no one actually visible, but from behind one of the curtains comes a heavy scraping sound, followed by a loud clank of metal and rush of flame over the curtain’s top. A deep voice follows, saying, "Now, that one, Labor-9. Quickly."

And that's followed by a wheezing, breathy sound that almost, but not quite, sounds like speech.

"Hh...hhh...hyu..."

Did you know Shuu was sorta evil? Now you do! Yes, this area is all about Shuu's worser aspects. The deaths. The human research subjects. The attempted genocide. The murder. All that fun stuff. This area is EPIDEMIOLOGY because that's how Shuu attempted his grand act of evil in the game, by spreading a highly contagious disease intended to wipe out the remnants of humanity. For reasons.

The area was structured with this sort of closed off nurse's office because Shuu is actually quite aware that he needs to be careful about letting slip his ethical lapses. So it was meant to be this alarmingly normal little tableau presented to throw people off the scent, as it were. This is also why all the corpses are covered and why the NPCs were so busy. They were trying to burn evidence of what he'd done. Mind you, the nurse's office isn't a very good at what it's supposed to do, because Shuu keeps letting creepy slip through anyway. Oops.

The primary NPC was Shuu himself, albeit a more mad scientist-inflected version of himself. I meant for him to be rather creepy, obviously trying to present a polite/normal veneer and sorta failing. (The real Shuu is much better at this.) He was meant to look like normal Shuu except a bit bloody, as if he'd made an obvious but incomplete effort to clean himself up. Just a weird and alarming bird in general.

The other NPC was a cyborg named Labor-9 from the game. His mad science helper. I won't go into more details because spoilers.

NPC SYMBOLISM!1 (c+p from notes)

• EVIL. Lack of ethics/morals. Creepiness.


• Self-awareness, self-loathing, self-mockery


• Self-preservation, conspicuous and careful niceness

DEPARTMENT OF IMMUNOLOGY

(the study of the immune system)

Another area that nobody visited. This one represented forgotten or rejected things. I wanted somewhere where more of Shuu's past could be poked at, basically. There are a lot of things in life that Shuu has chosen to reject, ignore, or set aside and this is where that all gets dumped. The area was themed along an extremely fancy penthouse apartment being slowly boxed up for storage. This was also where it was possible to visit his thoughts about his previous infiltrations.

This area is named IMMUNOLOGY because ignoring/discarding things he doesn't want to think about is his primary coping mechanism when it comes to feelings. La la la emotions suck.

The main NPC here was themed after Ichijou Utsuro, which is Shuu as a child. (After his parents died, Shuu signed over his inheritance to his uncle and vanished, resurfacing as Isa Souma in Ryuuji's lab.) Utsuro would've been a quiet and dour chick, ripping photos out of a photo album and pasting them in photo-side down. There would have been half-open boxes surrounding him, each one representing an infiltration.

There was also a secondary NPC, this being Ryouta, Ryuuji's son, very important for plot reasons that I won't go into. Ryouta represents Shuu’s nascent/minimal awareness that he needs to maybe. Move on. And change. And accept some things instead of just chucking it all in boxes and ignoring his feelings as hard as possible. Very tired, annoyed, and disheartened, because despite this awareness, Shuu refuses to even talk about his feelings and continues to chuck 'em all in boxes he can ignore. So Ryouta has a contentious relationship with Utsuro but also kind of pities him. Which...kind of makes him Shuu's own self-pity/loathing/awareness in a way. Ah, heart games.

NPC SYMBOLISM!1 (c+p from notes)

• the past, memories, austerity, rejection of worldly things


• feelings of being out of place, isolation, anti-social, inability to relate to or socialize


• sorrow, patheticness, the past, discarded things, things he doesn’t want to think about

DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY

(the study of objects and matter outside the earth's atmosphere)

This area represents the True Heart and was an area where people could get closest to interacting with Shuu's "true" self, unburdened by his various amounts of baggage and current circumstances.

I picked Astronomy for this area for a number of reasons. First, the break with the medical theme makes it clear that this is something different from the other areas. Second, astronomy is the study of things that are far away and beyond the earth, but also a study that's dislocated in time. The images we see in telescopes are in a very real sense form the past, since to have traveled light years, the light carrying those images must've been emitted an incredibly long time ago. And it's a study of the future, if you believe humanity's (birdnanity's) future is in the stars. Third, going a bit further afield, space and stars show up specifically in Holiday Star as a place where old sins come back to roost, and as a place where the dead wander; the past and future intertwined. Fourth, in one of the side comics, there's a small and sweet anecdote of Ryuuji taking Isa out of the lab to go stargazing and watch a meteor shower -- Ryuuji was interested in all fields, all kinds of knowledge; he looked outward and beyond his specialty -- so there's some personal significance to Shuu too.

So objectively but also within the context of Hatoful Boyfriend, the stars are a liminal area where time and space intermingle, literally and metaphorically beyond the immediate world and its concerns. And, given Shuu's characterization as a chrysalis in his storybook -- a thing between stages, that has chosen to never grow or change -- a liminal area seemed fitting for him. Because the stars also reflect the truth of being so very small and so very alone, and that's what Shuu is. Small and alone with no idea how to let go and move on. But there's a comfort, too, in being alone to contemplate the universe and pursue knowledge without interruption from mundane concerns. And at his heart that is the state of being Shuu longs for the most.

In keeping with all those themes and the storybook, this area would have been a black starry void in which one could, by starlight, find a large chrysalis. The Chrysalis is the True Heart NPC.

To access this area, since it was locked, players would have had to get an keycard from any one of the other five areas. In each one there was an NPC holding or placed near a key card, and some would have let theirs go more easily than others. My fault for not highlighting that enough, but so it goes. The keycards were placed like so:

DEPARTMENT OF CARDIOLOGY - On the chess table, held by no one. Ryuuji would let anyone take it as Isa-kun needs some more friends. SAGE would not care one way or another; it’s irrelevant to his purpose/mission.

DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY - Isa would be wearing it and reluctant to let anyone have it. Would only give it away to someone who he felt would be understanding of the Chrysalis. (You'd have to persuade him or steal it from him. He’s not strong, it would be easy to swipe the card by force.)

DEPARTMENT OF PULMONOLOGY - Located on a pile of paper on Mishio's desk, unminded. Mishio doesn’t care about the keycard. Take it! Fuck everything up! Learn the horrible truth! He’s so miserable he doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore.

DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY - Blood-spattered, jealously guarded by Shuu. Has to be taken by trickery or force.

DEPARTMENT OF IMMUNOLOGY - Held by Ryouta. He'll give it to people freely since maybe they can help or do something to shake up Shuu's life. Utsuro will be really upset by this since the keycard leads to something that oughtn’t be disturbed, but can't actually stop anyone due to being a child.

Q&A

That's it! I'm sorry for wrapping up his heart so abruptly and cutting everyone off and I hope this write-up can help make up for the lack of leisurely exploration time a little.

If you have any questions about what happened or about some aspect of Shuu's heart, feel free to ask it here! Thanks for participating in his dungeon. :>