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!ideal world

idol simulator 2kxx » round 02

For a long, suspended moment, you don’t know where you are.

And then, you find that you do.

Opening your eyes, you’ll find that wherever you were a moment ago you’re now in an unremarkable room in an unremarkable building, dressed in unfamiliar clothes.

You are understood to be human
You have your cell phone
You have no weapon
You cannot use unit powers
You can call and text one another
Retained corruptions are cosmetic

Welcome to the music industry, probationary idols. You’ve got a lot of work to do.

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Welcome to ◯◯ Talent Agency! You find yourself in a meeting room in a modern office building, sat around a large central table. The walls are empty save for a large whiteboard with an introductory greeting written on it, and a few colorful posters promoting idol units. Five upturned tea cups and a teapot sit in the middle of the table. In front of each of your places is a piece of paper on which a short list has been printed, reading:

Agenda for Probationary Idols

Orientation – Meeting Room

Hair and Make-Up – Dressing Room

Photoshoot and Interview – Photo Studio

Make your Debut – Stage

Chisato, a petite, self-possessed girl with long fair hair, stands by the side of the whiteboard looking for all the world as if she expects something from you. Wednesday sits in a chair by the wall, fidgeting with her cell phone.

When you are ready to move on, you can go out into the Agency Corridors.

corridors

The corridors you step into are long, white, overlit and entirely empty, but lined with posters and headshots promoting the agency’s talent. You’ll probably see your own face once or twice if you look out for it. Other than the posters and a couple of fire extinguishers in wall brackets, there’s really not a lot to mark it out from any other corridor in any other modern office block – though that might be a curiosity in itself.

There is a door behind you leading back into the Meeting Room.

There are labelled doors further along the corridor: the first leads into the Dressing Room, the second the Photography Studio. A sign on the wall points toward the Stage, at the far end.

There is a small door marked Maintenance Staff Only.

Are you ready for your debut? Of course you’re not. You may be in costume, but you can’t go out on stage like that! Fortunately, here in the Dressing Room, ◯◯ Talent Agency have laid on everything you need to ensure you’re fully prepared. Brushes and boxes of cosmetics are arranged in front of the illuminated mirrors, and a pile of letters in colorful envelopes and small, gift-wrapped packages sit on the one of the tables next to a large bouquet of flowers and a pile of glossy magazines.

A member of Agency Staff in an apron stands by the mirrors, waiting to help out with hair and make-up. Wednesday’s bandmate Hina sits in one of the chairs, brushing her shoulder-length hair – but she starts and puts the brush down as you walk in, turning to you with a smile.

The main exit leads back into the Corridors. An adjoining door leads into the Photography Studio.

There is a door to the side of the room marked Private.

The Photography Studio is a long, brightly-lit room with white-painted walls, its windows blocked with blackout blinds. Two couches and a coffee table are pushed up against one side wall; the other is lined with a high wooden desk, on which two computers sit idling. Aside from that, the only visible decor comes in the form of lights, camera equipment, and a long, pristine-white drape reaching from the ceiling and rolled out across the wooden floor.

A tall, white-haired girl, Eve, is sat on a chair in front of the cameras, dressed in chic casual clothes and a black felt hat. A young Interviewer waits on one of the couches, holding a notepad and pen. A member of Agency Staff stands to one side.

The main exit leads back into the Corridors. An adjoining door leads into the Dressing Room.

There is a door at the rear of the room labelled No Entry.

So, are you ready for your debut? Waiting in the wings for your time to go onstage, maybe it’s all starting to feel uncomfortably real now. Backstage everything is dark and cramped: there’s not a lot to see or do here except wait for your time in the spotlight and listen to the leftover music spilling from the stage, where a group of young women in frilly white dresses are dancing and singing an upbeat song.

Wednesday is here, repeating something over and over under her breath. Another girl, Maya, stands close to her, twirling a pair of drumsticks between her fingers. She is dressed in a frilly green dress suitable only for an idol or a magical girl, but also a pair of narrow-framed glasses. A member of Agency Staff watches over you all, like a shepherd over a flock of extremely frilly sheep.

There is a door back to the Corridors at the bottom of a small flight of stairs. In the shadows, a Ladder leading up to a series of catwalks is just visible.

There are Fire Escapes in both the left and right wings.

You stand in the grand lobby of a forgotten home: vast, empty, echoing and falling to ruin. Paint peels in curling, scale-like flakes from damp walls, and tendrils of vine wind their way along rotting balustrades, their uprights working themselves loose in their fittings. The stairs are buckled and creaking, the air stale with damp and rot. The atrium is dominated by a large fountain, a vast flowering tree sprouting from its basin. Its twisting branches stretch up and out through a shattered wrought-iron skylight, seeking the sun. Broken glass and iron spars lie scatted across the tiled floor.

The ghostly figure of a young woman can be seen sitting quietly on the edge of the fountain.

At the top of the grand staircase, a single door is set incongruously in a bare wooden wall like the reverse side of a stage set, scored across its lengths with support struts and seams. There is a barred gate on the left-hand side of the lobby and a heavy set of wooden doors on the right-hand side. The front doors are thrown open. Another, smaller set of stairs leads downward.

The chapel might have been peaceful once; now it is simply sad. As tumbledown as the rest of the house, with pools of sunlight spilling from the damaged roof, it stands empty of almost everything that made it what it is. A handful of pews remain, a few heavy velvet hangings, a font with a cracked basin containing an inch or two of rainwater: the altar is bare save for a cross and two candlesticks. The walls are lined with family vaults decorated with elaborate stone carvings, one of which is missing its closing slab. The far wall is bare wood lined with seams and struts, with the large central window formed not of glass, but cardboard, painter’s tape, and cellophane.

A black-veiled figure stands behind the altar, hands crossed upon their chest. A body lies in the middle of the aisle.

You can go back through the double door into the Lobby.

A side door labelled Vestry is visible beneath a torn velvet drape.

The menagerie is maze of wooden gates and barred walls, the concrete floor scuffed and still scattered here and there with old, rotten straw. There’s nothing in here that you can see but spiders in the rafters and moths dancing in the dust-filled light, but there’s an uneasy heaviness in the trapped air, which still smells of animals kept too close confined, for all that they’re long since dead. Here, a pen door swings open on its hinges; there, a torn wire screen would give you admittance: three pens stand ready to be investigated more closely. The rest are locked, blocked off – or nothing more than a series of painted flats, stacked one behind another to create the illusion of depth.

You can go back through the menagerie gates to the Lobby.

A small side door reading ‘Keeper’ is visible in a bare, seamed wooden wall at the end of an aisle. There is a claw mark scored across the door.

The scent of beast is at its strongest here. At first glance the enclosure seems to be as empty as the rest of the menagerie – but only at a glance, and only for a single blissful second. Then the heavy shadows at the rear of the den thicken, shift, unfold; you hear something give a hot, heavy snort, and the scrape of claws against concrete as the bears pad out into the slanting, dust-filled light.

If you’re lucky, you might be able to lure them after you. You’ll have to be luckier still if you’re planning on fighting them.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The auditorium is crowded, yes, but the walls are a patchwork of peeling paint and exposed brickwork, the seats worn and ripped and bleeding stuffing, the wooden support beams for the balcony exposed and rotting – and the crowd has one face between them, and that face is Wednesday’s. Their mouths move, but no sound emerges; the cheers and cries are everywhere and coming from nowhere, and their eyes are fixed firmly on the stage. They wave lightsticks, they mouth along to the songs, and they don’t seem to have noticed you at all – but the two black-veiled figures at the back of the auditorium definitely have.

You can go through the side doors into the Lobby, or take the under-stage doors to go Backstage.

There is a pair of double doors at the far end of the aisle.

Wednesday is elegantly made-up and dressed for the stage, in a sweet, ruffled pink-and-white dress. Her hair is in pigtails, tied up with twin white bows.

It might take a moment or two to place what is missing: she looks exactly as she did the day she first arrived in Tokyo-F. The feathers round her eye, the scales on her neck, the ball-jointed fingers of her left hand are all gone. She looks quietly younger, she looks subtly happier.

Wednesday is pacing and muttering under her breath. Distract her?

When approached directly, it becomes obvious that Chisato is more than just pale. She looks washed out, ghostly, like a girl in a picture on a forgotten wall. It’s most pronounced in her hands, when she moves them: the tips of her fingers sometimes seem almost transparent.

Up close Hina seems to flicker slightly, like old film stock, constantly shifting images layered on top of one another. Sometimes a glimpse of another girl entirely can be seen – long-haired, sober – but in an eyeblink or two, she is gone.

The interviewer jerks into motion at your approach. The longer one spends looking at her, the more obvious it becomes how stilted her gestures are, how mechanical. Her eyes, when they blink, are doll’s eyes; her skin is porcelain-smooth; her smile painted on, unwavering.

Eve is a constantly-shifting patchwork, as if reassembled from a collection of photographs, and almost too blandly beautiful – there’s a polished, even airbrushed quality about her that can only be found in the pages of magazines.

It’s hard to make out in the half-light, but the pigment in Maya’s hair and skin and clothes ripple, shift and fade from full color to monochrome and back again, never quite settling, as if she isn’t quite sure if she wants to be seen at all.

The woman is frankly and flatly wraithlike – skin translucent, her tendrils of her hair, like her loose skirts, caught and shifting in an unseen breeze. Her hands are in her lap, resting loosely over the hilt of a spectral knife, dried blood cobwebbed across the blade. Her eyes are hollow, shadowed with the marks of fatigue; her shoulders slumped: she is the weariest woman in the world, and her tired eyes flicker disinterestedly across you.

She bears all Wednesday’s corruptions - the feathered lashes, the ball-jointed arm filigreed with patterns, the starry eyes – and the scar from a rope burn is conspicuously visible across her throat.

[ I'm supposed to what ]

[ ok she's going to talk to the familiar person first, so.

shuffling over along the wall. ]

Ah—Wednesday?

Ah, hello...! It's good to see you again, Shrike-san. Are you looking forward to your debut?

CONGRATULATIONS on your DEBUT, SHRIKE AVANTENGARDE.

We made a poster for you, too.

My... debut?

This is what being an idol is really supposed to be like, huh...

Ah—you... you did?

[Immediately making a beeline for Wednesday-!!]

Wednesday!

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Page 1 of 17

idol simulator 2kxx » round 02

meeting room

corridors

dressing room

photography studio

backstage

l̺̠͖͔̦͎o̼͟b͕̰͓͕̀b̰y̱̯̦͕̦̝ͅ

c̠̖͖͈͓͟ͅh̫͙͟a҉̻̰̠̮̦̱ͅp̮̩̼̻̟̮e͙͢ļ̲͕̝̬

m̖̳̮e͉̫n̢a҉̬̣g̛e̦̲͙̘͢r҉̳͖̹̘̙̮ͅi̤è̦͍͉͖̣̘

d̖̹̭͞e̢̖̪̪̥͖n̸̟̮̬̺̱̬̠

a̫̻̦ṳ̞͕̖̺d̯̼̕i͓̼͔͡ṱ̨̫̭̺o̹͢r̛̰̮̳̗̺̻i̧͔̜͚̬̪ͅų͉̪m̴̞

talk to wednesday

talk to wednesday

talk to chisato

talk to hina

interview time

talk to eve

talk to maya

talk to h̢̜̬̬e̛̟͇r̜̦͘

Re: meeting room

Re: talk to wednesday

Re: talk to wednesday

Re: meeting room

Re: talk to wednesday

Re: meeting room

Re: talk to wednesday