achates | day 2 network

Why are we here? Just to suffer? No, seriously, why are we here?

We've been so concerned with running away from demons and finding out more about the town that we haven't paid any attention to why we woke up in our special little slice of Hell. If we want to get out, we need to put together why we were dragged here in the first place.

I took a closer look at the train[1] yesterday to check for wear and tear characteristic of other structures in Beelzeburg, and came up zilch. Our express train to Hell is as new in town as the rest of us, which means that if we use the advanced scientific investigative principle of "basic correlation," we can conclude that we arrived on the train instead of being randomly teleported to that location for some reason. Take a look at the train route[1], too—the town was a cul-de-sac on the train's journey before whatever happened, happened, and judging by the direction the train was facing, the train was coming in when we woke up in it instead of going out.

Then there are our COMPs and our gems. I talked to K5[2] and confirmed that he and A☆L☆A were installed on computing devices to administrate demon summoning and network the gadgets together for the communication feature we're using now, turning them into COMPs. I also re-confirmed that there was another group that was brought here before us.

From this, we can deduce that we were sent here by a group with vested interest in demon summoning and the circumstances of this town, enough so that they were willing to send in another group of schmucks after the last batch bit it. Commandeering a whole train and outfitting each of us with a COMP implies a level of organization that can't be attributed to an individual actor or something within Beelzeburg that abducted us here for its own purposes.

There is some good news part and parcel with this, for once: it's unlikely that the whole world, or at least the one this town belonged to, was destroyed. If an organization with this level of capability still exists out there, then they have some literal ground to stand on. It seems more likely that the chunk of town that's now Beelzeburg was somehow ripped away from the rest of the world and dragged down into something like Hell; the part of the town that's missing on our maps was its entrance and the way the train got in pre-fuckening, so that was the ingress point for our fun little field trip into the abyss.

Anyways, time for bad news, as usual. The train was sabotaged. There's no other explanation for its state when we woke up. I doubt that whoever sent us here wanted most of their precious guinea pigs slaughtered before we could even get started on their project, which, judging by the numbers we saw on our COMPs at midnight, has to do with the areas of town that are still sealed off. There's someone, or something (let's be real, given where we are it's probably something) that wants us to fail, and they're more likely than not to make another move once we take a few steps towards solving whatever puzzle our "sponsors" want us to take a crack at.

Also, here's something that's are major-league bugging me that has nothing to do with any of the above but is nonetheless driving me crazy, so I might as well put it here after you've already gone through the effort to read all that. The chocolate in my pocket. I used it to bribe Frankenbun on our first day here and gave what I had left to Kate. Yesterday, it was there again. I ate it just to try and get rid of it for good. It's back. What the fuck?

[1]Train investigation (a collection of photos of the interior and exterior of the train, along with some maps of its route through the town and a pre-Hell town map)
[2]Interview with Keigo

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