02

Well, if she wanted to get her friends back, that started with figuring out how she was going to get her friends back. Her backups had been deleted with the game, so that option was a hard no. The only remaining solution was to figure out how to un-delete something you've deleted. Then it hit her.

Where did things go when they got deleted? Where did she end up when the world around her dissolved?

That's right.

The void.

She tentatively stepped closer to it. She certainly wasn't looking forward to experiencing hell again, but it was the only way she could make things right, the only way to fix her mistakes. With a deep breath to steel herself, and a few steps back, she took a running leap into the void that consumed her time and time again when the game unloaded.

It was every bit as awful as she remembered. She could barely manage to stay conscious during the entire affair; it certainly helped her to remember that passing out in the void— especially with nobody to come rescue you— was a death sentence. It also didn't help that the void, despite being entirely just chunks of unallocated memory, seemed to be actively hostile to searches like the one she was attempting to do. There was more than one occasion where Monika would be flying in circles around the same bits of memory, in pain and unable to tell she had already been there. Eventually, however, she could stand it no longer, and so she returned from the void, carrying 10 pieces of her friends.

Once she had recovered from the experience of searing pain all over her body, she laid out the pieces on the floor; there were 7 large chunks and 3 tiny ones.

She was eventually able to deduce that the large pieces were Yuri and Natsuki, while the small pieces were Sayori. (This made sense; after all, Sayori had been decomposing in the hostile environment of the void the longest of the 3, so naturally her pieces were smaller.) After further examining the pieces, she managed to figure out that she had all of Yuri (who had broken into 4 pieces), and all but one piece of Natsuki (she had 3, but the spot where the 4th piece would fit was obvious).

What concerned her the most, however, was the pieces of Sayori; she had 3 of them, and those 3 pieces could not have been more than 5% of Sayori's character file. That meant there had to be... at least 60 pieces of Sayori? And they were all floating around in the void. It made sense; after all, Sayori had been the first to go. Still, sixty pieces? Monika sighed; this is what she had signed up for, after all. She wanted to get her friends back, no matter what it took.

Maybe having Natsuki and Yuri around would help. She had all of Yuri, so she'd start with her, and then bring Natsuki on board once she could find her final piece... yeah. That sounded almost like a plan.

But for now?

She needed to gather more pieces.

One excruciating trip through hell later...

She hadn't found the last piece of Natsuki, but she had found a bit more of Sayori. Enough, in fact, to start putting her back together. The first piece connects to the tenth piece, which connects to the twelfth piece, which connects to the third piece, so on and so forth. It was actually quite simple; the pieces seemed to click together like magnets, and when they weren't supposed to go together she could feel them push. She figured she had around a quarter of Sayori completed (well, more like four sixteenths, but altogether they added up to a quarter), which placed the final count at around 52 pieces of Sayori in total, with 39 left out in the void—and counting, since the pieces continued to break down the longer they were out there.

Regardless, she sat down with her complete Yuri, her three fourths of Natsuki, and her four sixteenths of Sayori. Surely, there was a way to put the character file back in the characters folder? Hmm... maybe it was like how she wrote the scripts for the objects in the room? She hadn't used the console for that; instead, she had just envisioned some sort of file manager and opened script files that way. Perhaps if she tried to do that with the "characters" folder instead...

Sure enough, she saw the file manager in front of her open to the "characters" folder. She picked up Yuri's character file—silently thanking herself for not persisting the changes she had made to Yuri's parameters to disk—and imagined putting the file into the folder, with the name "yuri.chr". Sure enough, such a file appeared. Now to make sure that was truly what happened.

Good. Now to spawn Yuri into the room; she was pretty sure the command was "spawn"? Like:

Thud. Yuri landed in the swivel chair behind the teacher's desk. "Wha—" Yuri looked around, seemingly beside herself. "Wh-Where am I?"

Monika briskly walked over to Yuri—running would have seemed too desperate, she reasoned to herself. "Yuri! You're here!" She hugged Yuri.

"It's... nice to be here?" Yuri sounded more confused than anything. "I... I don't quite know where 'here' is, though..."

Monika shrugged. "Honestly, I'm not so sure myself." That was a lie—but it was a lie she felt she needed to tell. She couldn't just admit to knowing exactly what was going on, at least not yet. "It's kinda... home-y? In a way?" That part wasn't a lie—the void definitely was home for her, though not necessarily in a good way.

"I guess..." Yuri sounded completely unconvinced. "Where's Natsuki?"

"Ah—" Monika wasn't ready to answer that just yet—how would she even answer that at this point? She's right here on the floor—never mind the giant gash in the middle or the fact that this doesn't look like her, it's her alright. Yeah right. She decided to change the topic. "Mind if I show you around?"

If Yuri noticed the quick deflection, she didn't say anything. "Alright..."

"So this is the main room, obviously. There's... whatever's outside, you can see through the windows."

"What is it?"

"I don't know." Another necessary lie. "Anyways, I've got my bed over there—" she indicated the bed in the corner of the room— "But I've put a little more effort into where you'll be staying."

"Oh?"

Monika walked over to the closet door and opened it; she had built an entire extension to the clubroom where the closet had once been, in her initial fit of making things to keep her sanity. "I took out the closet and replaced it with a little addition."

"Is that allowed?"

Monika shrugged again. "Nobody stopped me!" She chuckled to herself. "Anyways, your bed is back here—" she indicated one of the beds to the right of the door— "you can pick any one of them, it doesn't really matter to me. Umm, there's a kitchen over here—"

"A kitchen?"

"Yeah." Monika decided acting nonplussed about it might convince Yuri that there was nothing wrong with it, even though she knew "a kitchen in the addition that took the place of the closet" was absolutely wrong. "Anyways, your electric kettle is in there, and I picked up a bunch of different kinds of tea; I hope your favorite's in there—"

"...Monika?"

"Yes?"

"Why are there three beds?"

Monika paused.

"I mean, there are four beds, counting yours, but there's just the two of us?"

"Well, Natsuki's going to need a place to sleep too—"

"Where is she?"

"Umm... And also Sayori will—"

"Monika, I can't help but notice you keep deflecting." So she had noticed. "What's going on?"

Monika sighed. "I've been trying to tiptoe around it because it's really hard to explain. I mean, I don't even know where to begin—" A lightbulb went off in her head. She set to work in the console, trying her hardest to remember the documentation she had read:

"There, now you should be able... to..." Monika couldn't help but notice that Yuri had collapsed into a crying mess. All at once she remembered; part of her role was having full history access, meaning Yuri had, all at once, gained 2 playthroughs worth of memories, not all of which were hers. It also came with the epiphany; in total, Yuri basically had just found out that not only was their world not real, but that Monika had deliberately modified her and the others in pursuit of the player.

That's a lot to take in at once, isn't it?

"Oh... oh god, I hadn't thought about that..." She sat down next to Yuri and pulled her into a hug. "I'm sorry..."

They remained like that for a while, with Yuri crying and Monika profusely apologizing.