Afterparty

[latinumsbetter]

[After Zvei walks down into the earth and it closes over his head, and Typhon gives his goodbye...the Phantasmal Bar finally flickers out of existence. Quark breathes out a slow breath.]

Alright. The bar downstairs is going to be open. Stop in. [That is not a request.]

Riful, let's see what we can do about that thing you need.

[He'll give Leb a squeeze--before she detaches from him. He makes eye contact at least once with all of his employees, and then he turns and walks out of the Arena. So...post trial, the bar downstairs is once again open. The employees are around at different times, and Quark is once again behind the bar. There’s been several of the extra togas gathered and folded to be used as blankets. There's food and drinks and places to sit and think or talk or whatever one would like to do.

There are two more drinks that are made and sit just behind the counter to accompany with the other two that are usually remade and replaced every day.

The door is open.]

Comments

[yourheroine]

The Aoi before coming here...her world was a video game. Shinichi said it was bad to look at other people's lives like they were just routes to complete in a game, but that was where we were. Even if nobody else would believe Aoi, it was the truth.

If Shinichi hadn't decided to be Aoi's friend, there wouldn't be anybody to tell Aoi that was wrong. Without what happened there...even if it was just a video game, I wouldn't be your Aoi if it didn't.

[latinumsbetter]

Maybe so.

[he tilts his head to look at her]

Is that important?

[yourheroine]

Yeah. It's important. No other Aoi cared about somebody for real like I did about Shinichi and Miyuki.

Aoi made a lot of mistakes to try and keep these memories. Even if Aoi never killed anybody...I can't take back what happened.

[latinumsbetter]

And what happened, exactly?

[yourheroine]

...Aoi asked God to update the universe so Shinichi and Miyuki would end up together.

That ended up being why Miyuki killed me and Shinichi in the next route.

[latinumsbetter]

[....sorry say what???

Quark stares for a moment, blinking.]

Wait...so you're dead, too?

[girl he thought you were like from a video game??? Hold up.]

[yourheroine]

[Aoi nods.]

Technically there are a couple routes where Aoi dies, but this one wouldn’t have happened without Aoi’s update. After Miyuki killed me and made her own update, Aoi spent a lot of time in the space between the game and reality…

Then I ended up here.

[latinumsbetter]

[Okay, hold on, he has to process this.]

...so if I'm understanding you right, you updated the game so that those two people would get together. One of them killed you and the other person for it, and then wrote her own update, and you got stuck in the data. And that's when Athena found you.

That about cover it?

[yourheroine]

[Aoi nods again, but she looks far more ashamed. Will Quark hate her if he knows everything she did?

Lying about it will definitely make Quark hate her if he finds out later, though. Aoi remembers how lying went for her before.]

Well...Aoi asked to cut out all the scenes where Miyuki ended up with somebody besides Shinichi. It worked. Miyuki's route had a happy ending. But then...

Aoi didn't remember what happened when THEY reset the game to play another route. Miyuki did.

[latinumsbetter]

...who's THEY, exactly?

[yourheroine]

The one playing the game.

[...]