999 Alterna Vol. 1 synopsis pt. 2
Please see the start of Pt. 1 below for warnings.
pg. 127: Chapter 3 is entitled "Pandemic," so I assume we're gonna be getting more on that "angel fever" Clover mentioned.
pg. 128: While looking for the DEAD on the other side of Door 5, Junpei opines that he feels he's under additional pressure because "he and Santa were the only men in the group, and Santa absolutely could not be counted on."
pg. 129: Santa lingers on the other side of Door 5 once the others have gone through, smirking, "If I just stand here, you guys all blow up." He then shrugs his shoulders and "skips" across the door when Junpei calls him out on it. Junpei then threatens to punch Santa and is stopped only by mention of the need to find the DEAD.
pg. 132: Junpei preemptively seizes Santa's wrist and slams his bracelet against the reader when they reach the DEAD.
pg. 132: The team comes across a heavy oaken door painted red in the room. Junpei notes that it's the same as a purple door he saw on A Deck and the black door he saw on C Deck.
pg. 133: An LCD monitor is mounted above the door handle. When Junpei touches it, a fanfare sounds, and orange text on the screen asks: "WHAT'S THE NAME OF THIS SHIP?" Junpei is flabbergasted at the thought that they're just going to have to solve puzzle after puzzle to proceed.
A touchscreen keyboard pops up when Junpei presses the "ANSWER" button on screen. Junpei tries to type something, but gets the message: "The red key is required to answer."
pg. 136: The team searches cabins B92 & B93. Santa, though, sits down by the DEAD and does nothing, claiming a "weak consitution." Lotus grabs him by the leather straps around his neck and drags him to the room.
pg. 137: Akane discovers some sort of wooden jigsaw sphere on the bed in the cabin they're searching. Junpei tries messing with it, thinking the red key might be inside, but nothing comes out. Akane is impressed, or pretends to be impressed by his puzzle-solving skills anyway. We learn that Junpei was actually obsessed with Rubik's Cubes in elementary school ("nothing had captivated me so before or since") and was so good at them that he attracted throngs around him during recess. (Apparently, Rubik's Cubes were "all the rage" during Jumpy's elementary school days, so did Junpei go to school in the '80s, and the novel version of 999 doesn't take place in the future, or was there a revival of the fad in his youth?)
pg. 139: Junpei actually complains that being able to solve Rubik's Cubes quickly is not a marketable skill in the workplace.
pg. 140: Akane finds a map of the ship, so it's mummies on the Titanic time. Actually, it's the "Hey, have you heard about the Olympic?" Junpei Hour. Akane counters with a new-to-the-series Titanic rumor: about J. P. Morgan, the "actual" owner of the ship, cancelling his passage on the maiden voyage at the last second, with several of his friends suspiciously following suit. Akane says he claimed illness but instead was enjoying a holiday overseas. (Incidentally, in Googling this, I came up with this page on that gold mine known as Reddit arguing that Morgan got the idea from that Futility book Akane mentions in the game to sink the Titanic to knock off several of his business competitors, who were on board the vessel. I mean, this is 999, after all; let's just bask in the conspiracy theories.)
Junpei goes on to mention that part of the Olympic was repurposed into a restaurant known at the Celebrity Millennium. This is actually true, if by "part of," you mean "just the wooden paneling."
Akane asks, again impressed, asks Junpei how he knows so much about the Titanic. Junpei bluffs with "It's common knowledge," but when he stops to consider this, he's honestly shocked and doesn't know.
pg. 144: Akane mentions how the staircase she descended looked just like the one in the romantic last scene of Titanic. Akane loves Titanic and even has the DVD. Junpei hasn't seen it.
pg. 145: Finding nothing in their cabin, talk turns to Akane's off-and-on fever. Akane says she's never been sick like that before, except for one time she was hospitalized in middle school, right after she moved. Junpei mentions that he's been hospitalized only once, too - with angel fever.
OK, it's time for the big angel fever infodump, so grab a chair and have a drink. Angel fever is an airborne virus. Once you contract it, you get a fever of 104 for two days or more. The virus takes its name from a ring-shaped boil about 10 cm in diameter that forms on the top of the victim's head, which allegedly resembles an angel's halo. I'm sorry, but I can't form this mental image without being reminded of that bagelhead body modification for the forehead that media outlets pretended was all the rage in Japan a few years ago. This is not a threatening or beautiful or evocative hallmark image for your big scary virus. It's goofy.
Anyhow, there was apparently a big epidemic of the Bagelhead Virus "about 10 years ago" (perhaps...nine years ago, would you say, Junpei?). Jumpy claims that "over 5,000 people came down with it in this country alone," which honestly doesn't seem like much in a country as populous as Japan - unless the world has gone through a major depopulation, which is a possibility in an iteration of the 999 universe. The virus has subsided since its peak, but it still claims hundreds of victims a year.
Junpei recalls his period of angel fever infection, which was just one short month ago. Usually, Junpei narrates, when you get angel fever, you take what Junpei refers to as a "vaccine" (I guess it's a therapeutic vaccine, not a preventative vaccine?), then you sleep for several days and wake up all better. In rare cases, however, the victim just gets worse, and the illness travels to the brain - which was just Junpei's luck. He was hospitalized for two weeks, and for half that time, a week, the side effects of the medication made him feel "like I was caught between a dreamworld and reality." He had numerous nightmares - that his town had been drowned by a tsunami; that he was seeing his parents "brutally murdered" by muggers. No one else around Junpei came down with angel fever, so he's puzzled as to how he got it. Akane, you didn't give Jumpy a life-threatening illness as part of your death game, did you?
Anyhow, the memories & discussion lead Junpei to a breakthrough, though: he recalls how Clover mentioned previously that she had fallen ill with angel fever once. There's a high probability that Snake, being Clover's brother, contracted the fever as well - and it seems very suspicious that four people in a group of nine would have had this one specific virus. Could this be the link among them? Junpei starts to hurry to the other cabin to check with Lotus & Santa and find out. Akane, though, doesn't express such enthusiasm over the idea: if that's the case, she says, "then we may be under quarantine."
(Incidentally, during this segment, Akane mentions how Jumpy used to eat leftovers from other kids' lunches at elementary school. Ew.)
pg. 149: Apparently, according to Akane, the angel fever virus never leaves your body; it just goes dormant. Junpei mentally likens it to the chickenpox virus lying dormant in the nerve cells. He then recalls how shingles can occur from the chickenpox virus resurging during times of low immunity in the body; I presume the reader is supposed to draw a parallel to the angel fever virus and what's happening to Kanny at this point.
Akane herself, though, draws a different parallel. She floats the theory that, as the angel fever virus isn't thoroughly understood, scientists might have made a recent big discovery about its nature - something, perhaps, like that it eventually resurges in a new form, like shingles from the chicken pox virus. Given the already-devastating nature of angel fever, however, this new form might pose a terrible threat. Perhaps that's why they've been rounded up. Junpei is skeptical, objecting that they'd surely have more than nine people under quarantine if that were the case, given all the angel fever carriers out there. Akane counters that since Junpei was hospitalized, he had to have been at least a "level 3 case," of which, she estimates, there are probably fewer than 100 in Japan - compared to about 10,000 level 1 cases. When you take into account that most of the level 3s probably died...and that, as Akane says, it "wouldn't be surprising" for the virus to have changed significantly in level 3 cases as opposed to level 1s... "So what are you saying? That 'cause we got to level 3, we've got some sort of horrible biological weapon in our bodies? That's why we've been quarantined?" "It's just a guess, but..."
Jumpy's initially doubtful, but the more he thinks about the numbers, the less he can deny it. "But what about the game?" he interjects; "The Nonary Game - what's its purpose?" Junpei then speculates, though, that there might indeed be no purpose to it - it might just serve as a distraction while the study group gathers data on them. Or perhaps, he considers, it might serve a darker goal. "Human potential in extreme situations is virtually unlimited," narrates Discovery Channel Junpei; if the group were expressly forbidden from escaping, the interdiction would merely cause them to focus all their efforts on finding a way out until they succeeded in breaking free. "But now? All of us were instead desperate to survive the game Zero had laid out for us - to run down the rails on which we had been set." Their captors, Junpei thinks, wanted them to be so focused on following Zero's orders that all other thoughts were blocked out of their heads - that they wouldn't think of unforeseen ways of escaping, and therefore would only wind up wherever their captors wanted them to be in the endgame. "This was a trap. ...We'd taken the bait Zero'd left in the form of the Nonary Game - and were walking toward our deaths."
Despite this being an internal monologue, Novel Junpei, like Game Junpei, talks to himself frequently, and Akane's caught at least a bit of his thought process. He then brings up that though Zero's told them to "look for a door with a 9," they haven't seen any such door; the only end planned for them might be death. Akane freaks out a bit and asks him not to say such things, pleading that it's not like him to give up so easily. "We haven't seen each other in nine years!" Junpei spits; "What do you know about me?!" "Nothing!" says Akane, "But when we were in elementary school, Jumpy, you--" She then again collapses with her fever.
pg. 154: Junpei steadies Kanny and guides her to a bed. She coughs several times, and Junpei observes that her symptoms sure look like angel fever. Once you've had angel fever, though, you're supposed to have developed immunity and be unable to get it again. (This runs a bit contrary to his implied chickenpox-related conclusions from several pages ago.)
Anyhow, Akane appears to be delirious and is calling for Jumpy, piteously crying, "Where are you?" Akane then starts talking about the rabbit story, and it's mentioned how they died after Akane had worked so hard to care for them. The rest of her classmates wouldn't even go near the rabbits' bodies after their deaths out of disgust, but Junpei helped Akane make graves for them and cried over them with her. (It's not expressly mentioned here that the rabbits were murdered, though Akane mentions that Jumpy also "got angry" with her, so I assume we'll learn something happened later.) Akane says that she never got to thank Junpei properly for his kindness then, and she does so now. She then muttters in half-delirium that "...back then, Jumpy, you never gave up...right to the very end!..." Junpei is briefly confused, wondering if she is referring to the time with the rabbits, or something else.
Akane remains in the room to rest; Junpei goes to get her something to drink to soothe her throat but remembers that the room doesn't have a refrigerator. He starts to go to the other cabin but turns back to check on Akane one more time - only to see her body appear to be transparent, the opposite wall clearly visible through her. He blinks, and the "illusion" is gone; he chalks up his apparent momentary visual lapse to the fact that he must be gettin' tired.
pg. 157: Junpei wonders, as per Santa's earlier words, if it might not have been easier for them all to have died earlier, to spare them the horrors that were surely waiting ahead - with only death at the end anyway. "And even if I did manage to escape," Junpei continues, "all I had waiting for me was the prospect of a dull workaday life consumed by the rat race. Just whiling the days away, with no hopes or dreams for the future...if long years of that were all that was in store for me, then dying here and now would be far easier."
Junpei then turns around from this internal soliloquy...to find Akane vanished from the bed.
pg. 158: Lotus bursts in announcing that she's found the red key (taped behind a picture frame in her cabin - of a funyarinpa?) while Junpei's tearing the cabin apart in search of Akane. They run to cabin 93 to check for her, though Lotus says she would've noticed had Akane come in. They ask Santa - who's sitting on the couch, entranced by the painting, which is of a funyarinpa - if he's seen Akane, but he completely ignores them and gives no response. (Lotus attests that he didn't help at all in searching cabin 93. "Do you really want to survive?" Lotus rages at him, but given his previous thoughts, Junpei feels as if the question has significance for him.)
Lotus suggests they check the hallway of locked doors again to see if one of them will open, then dashes out into the hallway. Junpei tries to rally Santa again, whereupon Santa blurts out that he knows where Akane's gone - "but I won't tell you for free." He instead asks Junpei to tell him what he sees in the funyarinpa painting. Junpei replies that it's "just a pattern of dots," whereupon Santa launches into all the morphogenetic field folderol (whereas he just feigned a headache in the game). When Junpei professes unfamiliarity with this, Santa then starts explaining Jung's theory of synchronicity, the idea (in the words of Jung expert Roderick Main, not Santa) that "the structure of reality includes a principle of acausal connection which manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of meaningful coincidences." Junpei & Santa explain it thusly: "You mean, like when something pops into my head and it randomly happens...or when I accidentally end up doing the same thing as someone else?" "Half right...but half wrong. Synchronicity isn't an 'accident.' It happens when information is sent from someone or something far away through a special field." He then launches into a tale about the alleged "hundredth monkey effect," where monkeys on a single island started washing the sweet potatoes they ate, and after the number of monkeys on the island washing their potatoes hit a hundred, monkeys throughout the region, and then throughout the world, spontaneously started exhibiting the behavior. (The entire tale is now claimed to be an urban legend, and...well, there's too much to capsulate here, even given 999's apophenic streak; look it up if you're interested.) He then talks about the funyarinpa TV experiment, explicitly identifying it as an experiment by Sheldrake.
At this end of all this, Junpei asks Santa what this has to do with Akane's disappearance, and Santa says, "Nothing at all" - this picture on the wall just sparked his memory. Junpei then says that Santa's gonna make him die of a burst blood vessel before the bomb gets him.
pg. 167: Lotus comes back; she's tried all the doors, and even tried the key in them, but they won't budge. The red oaken door presumably leading to the next room she hasn't tried; she was saving that for when they all got back together. Santa suggests they leave, and Junpei's all "not without June," of course, but Santa says "she's not here" - and since Junpei didn't guess the thing in the funyarinpa picture correctly, he's not obliged to tell where she went. He relents, though, and gives his answer: "The other side." Junpei then loses it and punches Santa so that he flips over the sofa.
Believe it or not, this punching is plot-related. As Santa takes a tumble, something falls out of his pocket - a little piece of silver metalwork, the "size of a bean" but intricately worked, in the shape of a four-leaf clover, with an "R" engraved on the back. Santa angrily snatches it back from Junpei, telling him to keep his hands off it - "though it might make a nice present for June in heaven." Despite a punching and Junpei's angry words, Santa continues: "But I'm right, aren't I? No way she'd've been able to escape a closed-in space like that if she weren't a ghost. So June's a ghost." Junpei flies in to deck Santa again, but Lotus holds his arms behind his back, citing that they have to look for June.
Meanwhile, Santa (his saliva tinged with blood: "I must've split the inside of his mouth. Good") decides this is an excellent time to start in on the story of Alice. In his version, however, he claims that the passengers on board the Titanic saw a ghost before the ship sunk, and that the ghost was that of the mummy - who was said to have been uncommonly beautiful, just like Akane.
Junpei, unable to take any of this anymore, runs out into the hallway and starts shouting for Akane. It's fruitless, of course.
pg. 173: Lotus suggests that Zero abducted Akane by way of a secret door. Junpei starts to go look for it, but Lotus nixes the idea: it'd be sure to be locked. Lotus, who is being very calm and methodical in this scene, states that Junpei has looked all over for her and shouted for her, she clearly isn't nearby, and they simply don't have a couple hours to search for hidden passageways. It would be better if they used the key to move to the next room; there might be a hint to June's whereabouts there.
This calms down Junpei greatly, and he agrees to go along with Lotus's plan. "This was no time for thinking that it would be easier to die here, or for any other gutless thoughts. Even if death were the fate in store for me, I couldn't stand to be killed without having discovered what was going on. I wanted to find out what was happening - then I could die."
pg. 174: Lotus inserts the key into the monitor, and a fanfare plays. There's still, though, the matter of answering the monitor's question: "What's the name of this ship?" Junpei presses the "ANSWER" button on the touchscreen again - whereupon a skull mark appears on everyone's bracelets & a beeping starts, just like with the RED/DEAD countdown, and an 81-second timer appears on the monitor. Oh, dear.
Junpei nervously types in the "Titanic", but a buzzer sounds - that's wrong. (Lotus is particularly vexed at this, as she, like Akane, identified the staircase as being from the Titanic movie.) He then tries the "Olympic", but that's no good either. Santa's come flying out of cabin 93, demanding to know about the skull on his bracelet; Lotus is almost panicking. There are 40 seconds left.
Lotus asks if there were any other ships made like the Titanic. Junpei then remembers that Akane, in her own Titanic talk, mentioned that it was one of "three sister ships." What was the third? Junpei racks the morphogenetic field - er, his brain, and just as Santa actually offers to take over, with 20 seconds left, Jumpy enters the correct answer: the Britannic. The screen flashes "OK," the lock opens, and the bracelets return to normal. Lotus, overjoyed, asks Junpei how he knew the answer, but he's at a loss to explain: "I was more shocked than anyone. I had never even heard of the Britannic before. How did I know it was the answer?" He shrugs it off, though; he has to focus on finding Akane.
pg. 180: The group arrives in the galley. Junpei starts yelling for June, but it's no good. Lotus, meanwhile, is disappointed that they're not at the exit; Santa smirks that Zero "ain't gonna let us get out of here that easily."
There's a locked green door, and another monitor with a question: "What's the name of the scaaaary illness with which all nine of you have a close connection?" (No, I don't know what's up with the kiddie speak.)
Junpei, of course, has the answer right away. Lotus is shocked at the mention of angel fever, whereupon Junpei starts filling her in on his conversation with June about the subject. Lotus listens with a tense, wary expression, confirming that both Junpei and June reached level 3. Junpei turns to Santa and asks if he's had a brush with the disease; Santa confirms that he caught it from his little sister. (Junpei, meanwhile, is shocked to learn that an irresponsible person like Santa has a little sister.) Santa doesn't know what level case he was, but upon confirming that he was hospitalized for two weeks, Junpei concludes that he could only have been a level 3.
pg. 183: Santa takes a frozen package of what looks like hot dogs and wonders aloud if they can eat them, but sniffs them and determines they're no good. (Can you do that with frozen food - tell if it's bad by smelling it? Frozen food doesn't typically have much of a scent in my experience.)
Santa, though, has a more useful contribution to make to the conversation ("Sorry to derail your precious train of thought"): Upon hearing that Junpei got angel fever just last month, Santa chimes in that angel fever cases are overwhelmingly children - in fact, he doesn't believe that there's been a single case in anyone over 25. For a person in their early twenties to get it is exceptionally rare. Plus, the first case of angel fever appeared only twelve years ago - so it's highly unlikely that Lotus herself has ever been a carrier of the disease. (He makes another tired crack at her age during this deduction, to which Lotus again objects.)
This is the cue for Lotus's backstory, and it is far different than in the game. Indeed, Lotus never had angel fever - but her daughter (singular) did, at level 3, nine years ago. "......Did she die?" Lotus stares off into the middle distance, nods, and says: "Probably." Nona (no Ennea here) disappeared, shortly after her angel fever cleared up.
She disappeared in an incident where 16 children "living in the city" vanished in one night, then returned two days later (attesting that they had been "kidnapped by spacemen"). Lotus's daughter, however, disappeared the same day but did not return. She went to the police, but they wouldn't help her - because she was a single parent, and because novel Lotus works in the mizu shoubai, Japan's nighttime entertainment industry, which includes everything from pubs to hostess bars to less-reputable stuff. (Which is the explanation here for Lotus's outfit, I suppose.) Lotus believes the police assumed she took the opportunity of the mass abductions to abandon or do away with her own child ("I was outright told: 'You're the reason your child is gone - aren't you?'"), though no charges were apparently filed to that end.
Angered, Lotus launched her own investigation. She researched the backgrounds of the other children who were abducted and discovered they had a few crucial points in common with Nona: they all had had level 3 angel fever and had all gone to the same hospital for their illness & hospitalization. It didn't take much for Lotus to find this out, but it went unreported in the mass media, so she presumes that they were under pressure or had been paid hush money. (She thinks the police ended their investigation of the incident prematurely for the same reason.)
With her daughter gone, Lotus lost her reason to live. Junpei looks at her right arm, and though they were hidden by Lotus's bangles before, he now notices several scars near the wrists. Lotus's attempts at suicide, however, were all unsuccessful - though she made so many she says the doctors at the emergency ward would exclaim "You again?" when she was brought in.
Lotus had a particularly strange incident occur to her, however, during one of her hospitalizations, when she couldn't sleep and went to the hospital's back garden: she saw a young girl - a girl who looked like her daughter, except high-school age - sobbing underneath a tree, repeating over and over: "I don't want to die. I don't want to go away." Lotus presumed she was one of the hospital's many end-stage cancer patients - and wished desperately she could trade places with the poor girl. The girl sees Lotus, and says to her, "Now I know - the joy of being able to wake up in the morning and realizing that, oh, I'm alive today; how wonderful it is to be able to have a body that's healthy." "It was then that the scales fell from my eyes," Lotus says; "I made up my mind right then and there - that even though my daughter is probably gone, it does no good to sit around crying for eternity. I have to live - for my daughter." Lotus apologizes for burdening Junpei with "the rantings of an old woman," then draws herself up and goes to search for the next key.
pg. 191: Junpei asks Lotus what happened to the girl under the tree that one night. Lotus says she doesn't know - when she asked about her at the hospital reception desk to thank her, she was told there was no such patient. She showed the staff a photo of Nona, since she looked so much like the girl, but this led to nothing.
"Nona?" Junpei asks. (Lotus hasn't mentioned her daughter's name before; I've been using it for convenience. No, there is no mention of Ennea.) Lotus explains that she was a fan of the song "Ue o Muite Arukou" (released as "Sukiyaki" in the U.S.), by the artist Kyu Sakamoto, and goes into "nona" being a Latin prefix meaning "nine." "Like the Nonary Game, then," notes Junpei, realizing, rather belatedly, that there have been an awful lot of nine-related things in the game so far.
Returning to other matters, Lotus thinks, perhaps, that the girl she saw in the garden that night was Nona's ghost. She believes she feels her spirit watching over her at times - "pushing me forward, telling me: 'Hang in there, Mom!' I'm not going to let her down. I'm going to survive...and get out of here. I swear it."
Junpei takes heart in Lotus's story and determination. Contrary to his previous attitude, he swears not to give up, and to live "for Lotus; for her lost daughter; for Akane; for the other players; for Dad; for Mom; for my teachers; for my friends" - OK, he kind of overdoes it, but he's out of the doldrums, is what I'm saying.
pg. 193: Santa waltzes in; he's found the key. He wasn't really searching for it, he explains; he just happened upon it while he was looking for something to eat.
pg. 193: Lotus mentions that Santa's sister must have had a time of it with a brother like him. "She's gone," he replies. "Died from angel fever." Junpei notes that "His reply was instantaneous, delivered with his usual poker face. But it was then I realized - that even though I'd always thought of him as cold-blooded, I could see that his eyes were filled with deep sadness. Maybe he'd shown me a glimpse of the real Santa. Maybe the rest was just him putting up a front."
pg. 194: The group fits in the key, types in "angel fever," and goes to take off - when they hear the sound of a door opening behind them. "Jumpy! Thank goodness!" It's Akane, who flies into Junpei's arms and just sobs. Akane starts in about being left alone and being so frightened, which utterly confuses Junpei: "Where have you been?" "What're you talking about, Jumpy? I was asleep, in the bed - in cabin 92!" Junpei has no explanation, though he doesn't think that Akane's lying; he resolves, however, to belay such considerations until they get out of here.
pg. 197: Another Part 9, more mysterious narration: "......Was it nine years ago? I heard them talking, and I realized everything. How could this be? Was this some sort of trick? Who could be behind it?
......God. That was the only answer that came to me."
pg. 201: Chapter Four: Where? (or The Search, in the Japanese underneath), and the group arrives in the infirmary. In addition to the three numbered doors, there's one door with no marks and no handle. There's also a whiteboard on the wall with a message: "Today's death toll: 1".
pg. 206: Snake's group came out an orange door, if anyone cares. They found their first key in a dresser drawer, and the second in a shaker behind the bar. Zero's game in the novels is turning out to be a lot like the old Nickelodeon game show Finders Keepers. (I do hope Zero moves on to GUTS and works in the Aggro Crag at some point.) Their monitors asked the same questions as did the ones in Junpei's group, both of which Snake answered handily.
pg. 207: Clover confirms that both Snake and she had angel fever, with Snake catching it from Clover nine years ago. Clover's case got only to level 1, but His Majesty got to level 3 - because he hasn't physically suffered enough with losing his sight and an arm, apparently - and earned himself a two-week hospitalization.
Clover then starts apologizing for always being a burden to her brother, claiming that it was her fault that he lost his sight - he tried to save her from falling off a cliff when she was seven (no car accident here, I guess). She goes on that Snake even became unable to play his beloved guitar, at which Snake tells her not to say any more, "a rare note of harshness entering his tone." (I've looked online, and I don't see anything claiming that it's impossible for the blind to learn or play guitar - unless this is referring to Snake's false arm, which is not yet confirmed as appearing in the novels. Then again, Snake's false arm seems to function more or less just like a normal arm in 999 - it allowed him to hold a man in a death grip until they both were incinerated, at least - and in the dystopian hellscape of Virtue's Last Reward, it's claimed that its Snake plays or learned to play the harp. Then again, Virtue's Last Reward also postulates that a consciousness of a 22-year-old can be transferred to the body of a 67-year-old without said consciousness noticing any changes in voice, skin texture, muscle tone, joint function, physical stamina, eyesight, hearing, or height, not to mention the effects of any physical injuries that have occurred in the space of 45 years, and is therefore is not to be taken as an authority on anything in this physical plane.)
As for how Ace is connected, well, hey!: you get three guesses as to the name of the company manufacturing the treatment for angel fever, and the first two don't count. "I......work for a certain pharmaceutical company," Ace offers; "it was the research team to which I belonged that developed a vaccine that was effective against angel fever." "So you work for Cradle Pharmaceuticals?" Santa says. Snake tries to warn Santa off, reminding him that they've decided not to say anything too personally identifying, but Santa counters that it's clear now that Zero didn't choose them at random, so what does it matter. Snake, though (I think - the attribution isn't clear), tells him, "Enough. This isn't the time to argue," whereupon Santa backs down ("as if fearing he'd get punched again," notes Junpei, making Santa the second person in the morphogenetic field after Jumpy to quail at the threat of a lesson in physical pain from Snake).
As for Seven, he can't remember his connection with angel fever, because the novel has decided he has memory loss after all - at least for stuff that happened earlier than nine years ago. Junpei, meanwhile, finally clues in that something important must've happened nine years ago, since that time frame seems to be popping up frequently in their discussions of angel fever. Please forget what I said about novel Junpei being sharper than game Junpei.
pg. 211: Lotus asks how the other group found out the true name of the ship. Snake smiles slightly and says that he, naturally, couldn't see the staircase that misled everyone else; instead, when he woke up, he noted the pervasive antiseptic & medicinal smells through the vessel. He also felt that the walls of the ship were rather old, so he theorized that they might have been on a hospital ship that had been active during wartime. When Clover mentioned that the staircase was straight out of the movie Titanic (does the novel take place in the future, too? If so, why are there still so many avid fans of this movie?), he concluded that they had to be on the Titanic's sister hospital ship. (Incidentally, in explaining his heightened senses - in a response to a comment by Lotus that she couldn't smell any antiseptics - he also mentions that he can tell Lotus had a bourbon & water and a pizza with plenty of basil last night for dinner.)
pg. 217: While searching for the innards of the RED, Junpei turns over recent strange events in his mind and identifies Snake as a dubious character, finding his preternatural composure to shade "beyond admirable into suspicious" and "his extraordinary sense of smell" to be "indisputably threatening." This is the first time in human history that anyone has been threatened by a sense of smell.
pg. 218: As Junpei is traveling down a long corridor, his attention is arrested by a single black door amidst all the white ones. He feels that something must be behind it, but it doesn't open.
pg. 222: Time to go search for Snake and Clover. Junpei is the first to go after Clover when she bolts ("We can't leave two people behind!"), followed right along by June - then Ace and Seven, each with a variation "guess we've got no choice." Seven pulls Santa along before he can respond (no "couple of idiots" line here). Lotus comes along at Seven's prompting because she "can't open a door by myself."
pg. 224: Jumpy & June go back to search the rooms behind Door 4 for Snake, noting that his mysterious disappearance was just like Akane's before. They don't mention this to the larger group or Clover, though - which really makes no sense, considering how close the parallels are in this continuity. (Even if Snake hadn't disappeared, it seems implausible for someone in their group not to mention, "Hey, June disappeared for a good chunk of time during our search. She thought she was still in the cabin, but we sure couldn't find her. Zero might be snatching & grabbing people temporarily, so be on the lookout.")
Anyhow, Lotus, who was supposed to stay with Clover, follows Junpei and Akane (leaving Clover with Santa) to propose teaming up with Seven and going through a door. Akane's the one who ends the argument by bringing up Door 9, not Junpei.
Junpei's mental run-over about realizing that only five people can go through a number 9 door is a little more explicit: "We couldn't save ourselves without sacrificing someone else. In order to save ourselves, we'd have to let our comrades die. Could I really do that?"
pg. 230: Novel Santa has, of course, abandoned his post and left Clover alone to sob. Santa is found looking at the RED in front of Door 3, where he pops "who do you think put back the RED?" quiz, which novel Junpei is unable to answer, after dismissing both the possibilities of Snake and Zero. Santa offers that it was "one of the eight of us"; when Junpei counters that the person would've fessed up if so, Santa answers: "Man, you're naive. Ever occur to you that one of us might be lying?" Junpei protests that there's no reason to lie about finding the RED. Santa: "Well... Might be awkward for them if they got found out." "What do you mean, 'awkward'?" "Dunno. ...But I can hazard a guess. ...They probably had something to do with Snake's disappearance."
Junpei simply stares at Santa in reply, whereupon Santa turns away from his gaze and issues a word of caution: "Trust someone in this game, and you lose. Your closest confidant could wind up stabbing you in the back." (Santa, don't set us up for Virtue's Last Reward, please. But: Why is Santa seemingly warning Junpei against June here?)
pg. 234: Lotus makes her "someone's gotta be sacrificed" play. Jumpy can't figure out all the bracelet/door combinations to confirm the idea that all seven of them can't make it through, so he goes to the "Today's death toll" whiteboard, located in the corner of the room, to do some combinatorics. When he gets there, he sees that Today's Death Toll has been updated from 1 to 2. That's just mean, Kurashikis. (Or maybe Ace did it just to be a smartass.) Junpei quickly wipes it away with his palm so that Clover doesn't see it.
Then we get three pages of number combinations laying out the idea that not everyone can go through the doors. Seriously, three of the pages are just covered with groups of numbers showing all the different ways the players can be split.
(Incidentally, if this is supposed to be a largely period-accurate replica of the ship, then what is a whiteboard doing here in the first place?)
pg. 240: Novel Santa is noncommittal to the idea of sacrificing someone, as he is to any idea offered in the course of the novel. Lotus nevertheless counts as an "aye" ("Well, we'll just count that as 'yes'"). The voting otherwise goes as in the game. (Lotus is more forceful than gleeful here, though - no giggling.)
pg. 242: Ace, at the end of his "I'm staying behind" speech, adds that "I'm the oldest of us. I'm the slowest, and the slowest-witted, and I'm obviously not a threat or capable of gutting you all later the one most likely to become a burden up ahead. Am I right?"
pg. 244: When June looks to Jumpy for support in her last pleas for Ace, he can't find any words of support to offer her, "hollow and fake" or otherwise: "I was painfully aware that she was asking for my help, but I could find no advice to give."
pg. 245: For some reason, Soporil-Beta is called "Mandraine/Beta" here. Don't know if that's a change they made for the novel or for the English game vs. the Japanese game.
pg. 246: June appears to be a bit more frantic at Ace's evident sacrifice, and Junpei notes, as he looks at Ace going to sleep, that "it was just like he had settled into his deathbed..." Despite the dialogue being pretty much identical for most of the scene, there's a greater sense at this point that Ace's decision means curtains for him.
I do have to say that the novel gives a strong sense of things getting steadily worse for the group. Snake seems to navigate the game handily and makes things easy for his group, then he's taken away. Lotus has an inspirational backstory that seems to give her strength to survive the game, but she goes into overdrive utilitarian mode. Someone appears to actually sacrifice themself and die. Worst of all, Jumpy & June are going to be ~SEPARATED~ coming up.
pg. 248: Lotus brings up that they have to choose doors without being reminded of it by Santa - who, speak of the devil, has been working out who can go in which door while the "obnoxious human drama" about Ace was unfolding. Door 3 is flatly off the table, since they don't have the numbers to do it. Akane has tears in her eyes as they realize they'll be separated etc. etc. etc. I didn't have patience for this in the game, and I don't now.
pg. 253: Junpei asks Akane to go through door 8 with Lotus because he feels that she's the most dependable of the other players and thinks that her motherly instincts and love for her lost daughter will lead her to watch over Akane. Er, Junpei, did you miss the part just now where Lotus abandoned a sobbing Clover to talk to you about betraying the other members of the group? Did you forget Lotus's "I'm not their babysitter" line when Akane was having a fever attack before? I know we've got to get to True Ending party formations somehow, and in the game, that happens through info Junpei won't get here (the idea that you've gotta be able to talk with Clover instead of her being stuck in a room with Science Boy), but...c'mon.
Meanwhile, Santa is glad to be in a different party from Junpei, since it means he won't get punched.
pg. 255: And we've come to another Part 9: "Junpei's thoughts reach me: 'Do your best, Akane.' And I cry out in prayer: You, too, Jumpy - don't you give up, either! I wonder if my thoughts got through to him?"
pg. 256: And we go out with a Part 0, with a person whom the reader is led to believe is Zero but who is probably Ace from the first Nonary Game thinking that the participants are taking too long and need some "new terror" injected into the proceedings, as he looks at a gun in his inside pocket. "It is when we are staring death in the face that we unlock our true potential," says probably-Ace, and that's the end of Vol. 1.
Vol. 2...coming soon?
.
pg. 127: Chapter 3 is entitled "Pandemic," so I assume we're gonna be getting more on that "angel fever" Clover mentioned.
pg. 128: While looking for the DEAD on the other side of Door 5, Junpei opines that he feels he's under additional pressure because "he and Santa were the only men in the group, and Santa absolutely could not be counted on."
pg. 129: Santa lingers on the other side of Door 5 once the others have gone through, smirking, "If I just stand here, you guys all blow up." He then shrugs his shoulders and "skips" across the door when Junpei calls him out on it. Junpei then threatens to punch Santa and is stopped only by mention of the need to find the DEAD.
pg. 132: Junpei preemptively seizes Santa's wrist and slams his bracelet against the reader when they reach the DEAD.
pg. 132: The team comes across a heavy oaken door painted red in the room. Junpei notes that it's the same as a purple door he saw on A Deck and the black door he saw on C Deck.
pg. 133: An LCD monitor is mounted above the door handle. When Junpei touches it, a fanfare sounds, and orange text on the screen asks: "WHAT'S THE NAME OF THIS SHIP?" Junpei is flabbergasted at the thought that they're just going to have to solve puzzle after puzzle to proceed.
A touchscreen keyboard pops up when Junpei presses the "ANSWER" button on screen. Junpei tries to type something, but gets the message: "The red key is required to answer."
pg. 136: The team searches cabins B92 & B93. Santa, though, sits down by the DEAD and does nothing, claiming a "weak consitution." Lotus grabs him by the leather straps around his neck and drags him to the room.
pg. 137: Akane discovers some sort of wooden jigsaw sphere on the bed in the cabin they're searching. Junpei tries messing with it, thinking the red key might be inside, but nothing comes out. Akane is impressed, or pretends to be impressed by his puzzle-solving skills anyway. We learn that Junpei was actually obsessed with Rubik's Cubes in elementary school ("nothing had captivated me so before or since") and was so good at them that he attracted throngs around him during recess. (Apparently, Rubik's Cubes were "all the rage" during Jumpy's elementary school days, so did Junpei go to school in the '80s, and the novel version of 999 doesn't take place in the future, or was there a revival of the fad in his youth?)
pg. 139: Junpei actually complains that being able to solve Rubik's Cubes quickly is not a marketable skill in the workplace.
pg. 140: Akane finds a map of the ship, so it's mummies on the Titanic time. Actually, it's the "Hey, have you heard about the Olympic?" Junpei Hour. Akane counters with a new-to-the-series Titanic rumor: about J. P. Morgan, the "actual" owner of the ship, cancelling his passage on the maiden voyage at the last second, with several of his friends suspiciously following suit. Akane says he claimed illness but instead was enjoying a holiday overseas. (Incidentally, in Googling this, I came up with this page on that gold mine known as Reddit arguing that Morgan got the idea from that Futility book Akane mentions in the game to sink the Titanic to knock off several of his business competitors, who were on board the vessel. I mean, this is 999, after all; let's just bask in the conspiracy theories.)
Junpei goes on to mention that part of the Olympic was repurposed into a restaurant known at the Celebrity Millennium. This is actually true, if by "part of," you mean "just the wooden paneling."
Akane asks, again impressed, asks Junpei how he knows so much about the Titanic. Junpei bluffs with "It's common knowledge," but when he stops to consider this, he's honestly shocked and doesn't know.
pg. 144: Akane mentions how the staircase she descended looked just like the one in the romantic last scene of Titanic. Akane loves Titanic and even has the DVD. Junpei hasn't seen it.
pg. 145: Finding nothing in their cabin, talk turns to Akane's off-and-on fever. Akane says she's never been sick like that before, except for one time she was hospitalized in middle school, right after she moved. Junpei mentions that he's been hospitalized only once, too - with angel fever.
OK, it's time for the big angel fever infodump, so grab a chair and have a drink. Angel fever is an airborne virus. Once you contract it, you get a fever of 104 for two days or more. The virus takes its name from a ring-shaped boil about 10 cm in diameter that forms on the top of the victim's head, which allegedly resembles an angel's halo. I'm sorry, but I can't form this mental image without being reminded of that bagelhead body modification for the forehead that media outlets pretended was all the rage in Japan a few years ago. This is not a threatening or beautiful or evocative hallmark image for your big scary virus. It's goofy.
Anyhow, there was apparently a big epidemic of the Bagelhead Virus "about 10 years ago" (perhaps...nine years ago, would you say, Junpei?). Jumpy claims that "over 5,000 people came down with it in this country alone," which honestly doesn't seem like much in a country as populous as Japan - unless the world has gone through a major depopulation, which is a possibility in an iteration of the 999 universe. The virus has subsided since its peak, but it still claims hundreds of victims a year.
Junpei recalls his period of angel fever infection, which was just one short month ago. Usually, Junpei narrates, when you get angel fever, you take what Junpei refers to as a "vaccine" (I guess it's a therapeutic vaccine, not a preventative vaccine?), then you sleep for several days and wake up all better. In rare cases, however, the victim just gets worse, and the illness travels to the brain - which was just Junpei's luck. He was hospitalized for two weeks, and for half that time, a week, the side effects of the medication made him feel "like I was caught between a dreamworld and reality." He had numerous nightmares - that his town had been drowned by a tsunami; that he was seeing his parents "brutally murdered" by muggers. No one else around Junpei came down with angel fever, so he's puzzled as to how he got it. Akane, you didn't give Jumpy a life-threatening illness as part of your death game, did you?
Anyhow, the memories & discussion lead Junpei to a breakthrough, though: he recalls how Clover mentioned previously that she had fallen ill with angel fever once. There's a high probability that Snake, being Clover's brother, contracted the fever as well - and it seems very suspicious that four people in a group of nine would have had this one specific virus. Could this be the link among them? Junpei starts to hurry to the other cabin to check with Lotus & Santa and find out. Akane, though, doesn't express such enthusiasm over the idea: if that's the case, she says, "then we may be under quarantine."
(Incidentally, during this segment, Akane mentions how Jumpy used to eat leftovers from other kids' lunches at elementary school. Ew.)
pg. 149: Apparently, according to Akane, the angel fever virus never leaves your body; it just goes dormant. Junpei mentally likens it to the chickenpox virus lying dormant in the nerve cells. He then recalls how shingles can occur from the chickenpox virus resurging during times of low immunity in the body; I presume the reader is supposed to draw a parallel to the angel fever virus and what's happening to Kanny at this point.
Akane herself, though, draws a different parallel. She floats the theory that, as the angel fever virus isn't thoroughly understood, scientists might have made a recent big discovery about its nature - something, perhaps, like that it eventually resurges in a new form, like shingles from the chicken pox virus. Given the already-devastating nature of angel fever, however, this new form might pose a terrible threat. Perhaps that's why they've been rounded up. Junpei is skeptical, objecting that they'd surely have more than nine people under quarantine if that were the case, given all the angel fever carriers out there. Akane counters that since Junpei was hospitalized, he had to have been at least a "level 3 case," of which, she estimates, there are probably fewer than 100 in Japan - compared to about 10,000 level 1 cases. When you take into account that most of the level 3s probably died...and that, as Akane says, it "wouldn't be surprising" for the virus to have changed significantly in level 3 cases as opposed to level 1s... "So what are you saying? That 'cause we got to level 3, we've got some sort of horrible biological weapon in our bodies? That's why we've been quarantined?" "It's just a guess, but..."
Jumpy's initially doubtful, but the more he thinks about the numbers, the less he can deny it. "But what about the game?" he interjects; "The Nonary Game - what's its purpose?" Junpei then speculates, though, that there might indeed be no purpose to it - it might just serve as a distraction while the study group gathers data on them. Or perhaps, he considers, it might serve a darker goal. "Human potential in extreme situations is virtually unlimited," narrates Discovery Channel Junpei; if the group were expressly forbidden from escaping, the interdiction would merely cause them to focus all their efforts on finding a way out until they succeeded in breaking free. "But now? All of us were instead desperate to survive the game Zero had laid out for us - to run down the rails on which we had been set." Their captors, Junpei thinks, wanted them to be so focused on following Zero's orders that all other thoughts were blocked out of their heads - that they wouldn't think of unforeseen ways of escaping, and therefore would only wind up wherever their captors wanted them to be in the endgame. "This was a trap. ...We'd taken the bait Zero'd left in the form of the Nonary Game - and were walking toward our deaths."
Despite this being an internal monologue, Novel Junpei, like Game Junpei, talks to himself frequently, and Akane's caught at least a bit of his thought process. He then brings up that though Zero's told them to "look for a door with a 9," they haven't seen any such door; the only end planned for them might be death. Akane freaks out a bit and asks him not to say such things, pleading that it's not like him to give up so easily. "We haven't seen each other in nine years!" Junpei spits; "What do you know about me?!" "Nothing!" says Akane, "But when we were in elementary school, Jumpy, you--" She then again collapses with her fever.
pg. 154: Junpei steadies Kanny and guides her to a bed. She coughs several times, and Junpei observes that her symptoms sure look like angel fever. Once you've had angel fever, though, you're supposed to have developed immunity and be unable to get it again. (This runs a bit contrary to his implied chickenpox-related conclusions from several pages ago.)
Anyhow, Akane appears to be delirious and is calling for Jumpy, piteously crying, "Where are you?" Akane then starts talking about the rabbit story, and it's mentioned how they died after Akane had worked so hard to care for them. The rest of her classmates wouldn't even go near the rabbits' bodies after their deaths out of disgust, but Junpei helped Akane make graves for them and cried over them with her. (It's not expressly mentioned here that the rabbits were murdered, though Akane mentions that Jumpy also "got angry" with her, so I assume we'll learn something happened later.) Akane says that she never got to thank Junpei properly for his kindness then, and she does so now. She then muttters in half-delirium that "...back then, Jumpy, you never gave up...right to the very end!..." Junpei is briefly confused, wondering if she is referring to the time with the rabbits, or something else.
Akane remains in the room to rest; Junpei goes to get her something to drink to soothe her throat but remembers that the room doesn't have a refrigerator. He starts to go to the other cabin but turns back to check on Akane one more time - only to see her body appear to be transparent, the opposite wall clearly visible through her. He blinks, and the "illusion" is gone; he chalks up his apparent momentary visual lapse to the fact that he must be gettin' tired.
pg. 157: Junpei wonders, as per Santa's earlier words, if it might not have been easier for them all to have died earlier, to spare them the horrors that were surely waiting ahead - with only death at the end anyway. "And even if I did manage to escape," Junpei continues, "all I had waiting for me was the prospect of a dull workaday life consumed by the rat race. Just whiling the days away, with no hopes or dreams for the future...if long years of that were all that was in store for me, then dying here and now would be far easier."
Junpei then turns around from this internal soliloquy...to find Akane vanished from the bed.
pg. 158: Lotus bursts in announcing that she's found the red key (taped behind a picture frame in her cabin - of a funyarinpa?) while Junpei's tearing the cabin apart in search of Akane. They run to cabin 93 to check for her, though Lotus says she would've noticed had Akane come in. They ask Santa - who's sitting on the couch, entranced by the painting, which is of a funyarinpa - if he's seen Akane, but he completely ignores them and gives no response. (Lotus attests that he didn't help at all in searching cabin 93. "Do you really want to survive?" Lotus rages at him, but given his previous thoughts, Junpei feels as if the question has significance for him.)
Lotus suggests they check the hallway of locked doors again to see if one of them will open, then dashes out into the hallway. Junpei tries to rally Santa again, whereupon Santa blurts out that he knows where Akane's gone - "but I won't tell you for free." He instead asks Junpei to tell him what he sees in the funyarinpa painting. Junpei replies that it's "just a pattern of dots," whereupon Santa launches into all the morphogenetic field folderol (whereas he just feigned a headache in the game). When Junpei professes unfamiliarity with this, Santa then starts explaining Jung's theory of synchronicity, the idea (in the words of Jung expert Roderick Main, not Santa) that "the structure of reality includes a principle of acausal connection which manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of meaningful coincidences." Junpei & Santa explain it thusly: "You mean, like when something pops into my head and it randomly happens...or when I accidentally end up doing the same thing as someone else?" "Half right...but half wrong. Synchronicity isn't an 'accident.' It happens when information is sent from someone or something far away through a special field." He then launches into a tale about the alleged "hundredth monkey effect," where monkeys on a single island started washing the sweet potatoes they ate, and after the number of monkeys on the island washing their potatoes hit a hundred, monkeys throughout the region, and then throughout the world, spontaneously started exhibiting the behavior. (The entire tale is now claimed to be an urban legend, and...well, there's too much to capsulate here, even given 999's apophenic streak; look it up if you're interested.) He then talks about the funyarinpa TV experiment, explicitly identifying it as an experiment by Sheldrake.
At this end of all this, Junpei asks Santa what this has to do with Akane's disappearance, and Santa says, "Nothing at all" - this picture on the wall just sparked his memory. Junpei then says that Santa's gonna make him die of a burst blood vessel before the bomb gets him.
pg. 167: Lotus comes back; she's tried all the doors, and even tried the key in them, but they won't budge. The red oaken door presumably leading to the next room she hasn't tried; she was saving that for when they all got back together. Santa suggests they leave, and Junpei's all "not without June," of course, but Santa says "she's not here" - and since Junpei didn't guess the thing in the funyarinpa picture correctly, he's not obliged to tell where she went. He relents, though, and gives his answer: "The other side." Junpei then loses it and punches Santa so that he flips over the sofa.
Believe it or not, this punching is plot-related. As Santa takes a tumble, something falls out of his pocket - a little piece of silver metalwork, the "size of a bean" but intricately worked, in the shape of a four-leaf clover, with an "R" engraved on the back. Santa angrily snatches it back from Junpei, telling him to keep his hands off it - "though it might make a nice present for June in heaven." Despite a punching and Junpei's angry words, Santa continues: "But I'm right, aren't I? No way she'd've been able to escape a closed-in space like that if she weren't a ghost. So June's a ghost." Junpei flies in to deck Santa again, but Lotus holds his arms behind his back, citing that they have to look for June.
Meanwhile, Santa (his saliva tinged with blood: "I must've split the inside of his mouth. Good") decides this is an excellent time to start in on the story of Alice. In his version, however, he claims that the passengers on board the Titanic saw a ghost before the ship sunk, and that the ghost was that of the mummy - who was said to have been uncommonly beautiful, just like Akane.
Junpei, unable to take any of this anymore, runs out into the hallway and starts shouting for Akane. It's fruitless, of course.
pg. 173: Lotus suggests that Zero abducted Akane by way of a secret door. Junpei starts to go look for it, but Lotus nixes the idea: it'd be sure to be locked. Lotus, who is being very calm and methodical in this scene, states that Junpei has looked all over for her and shouted for her, she clearly isn't nearby, and they simply don't have a couple hours to search for hidden passageways. It would be better if they used the key to move to the next room; there might be a hint to June's whereabouts there.
This calms down Junpei greatly, and he agrees to go along with Lotus's plan. "This was no time for thinking that it would be easier to die here, or for any other gutless thoughts. Even if death were the fate in store for me, I couldn't stand to be killed without having discovered what was going on. I wanted to find out what was happening - then I could die."
pg. 174: Lotus inserts the key into the monitor, and a fanfare plays. There's still, though, the matter of answering the monitor's question: "What's the name of this ship?" Junpei presses the "ANSWER" button on the touchscreen again - whereupon a skull mark appears on everyone's bracelets & a beeping starts, just like with the RED/DEAD countdown, and an 81-second timer appears on the monitor. Oh, dear.
Junpei nervously types in the "Titanic", but a buzzer sounds - that's wrong. (Lotus is particularly vexed at this, as she, like Akane, identified the staircase as being from the Titanic movie.) He then tries the "Olympic", but that's no good either. Santa's come flying out of cabin 93, demanding to know about the skull on his bracelet; Lotus is almost panicking. There are 40 seconds left.
Lotus asks if there were any other ships made like the Titanic. Junpei then remembers that Akane, in her own Titanic talk, mentioned that it was one of "three sister ships." What was the third? Junpei racks the morphogenetic field - er, his brain, and just as Santa actually offers to take over, with 20 seconds left, Jumpy enters the correct answer: the Britannic. The screen flashes "OK," the lock opens, and the bracelets return to normal. Lotus, overjoyed, asks Junpei how he knew the answer, but he's at a loss to explain: "I was more shocked than anyone. I had never even heard of the Britannic before. How did I know it was the answer?" He shrugs it off, though; he has to focus on finding Akane.
pg. 180: The group arrives in the galley. Junpei starts yelling for June, but it's no good. Lotus, meanwhile, is disappointed that they're not at the exit; Santa smirks that Zero "ain't gonna let us get out of here that easily."
There's a locked green door, and another monitor with a question: "What's the name of the scaaaary illness with which all nine of you have a close connection?" (No, I don't know what's up with the kiddie speak.)
Junpei, of course, has the answer right away. Lotus is shocked at the mention of angel fever, whereupon Junpei starts filling her in on his conversation with June about the subject. Lotus listens with a tense, wary expression, confirming that both Junpei and June reached level 3. Junpei turns to Santa and asks if he's had a brush with the disease; Santa confirms that he caught it from his little sister. (Junpei, meanwhile, is shocked to learn that an irresponsible person like Santa has a little sister.) Santa doesn't know what level case he was, but upon confirming that he was hospitalized for two weeks, Junpei concludes that he could only have been a level 3.
pg. 183: Santa takes a frozen package of what looks like hot dogs and wonders aloud if they can eat them, but sniffs them and determines they're no good. (Can you do that with frozen food - tell if it's bad by smelling it? Frozen food doesn't typically have much of a scent in my experience.)
Santa, though, has a more useful contribution to make to the conversation ("Sorry to derail your precious train of thought"): Upon hearing that Junpei got angel fever just last month, Santa chimes in that angel fever cases are overwhelmingly children - in fact, he doesn't believe that there's been a single case in anyone over 25. For a person in their early twenties to get it is exceptionally rare. Plus, the first case of angel fever appeared only twelve years ago - so it's highly unlikely that Lotus herself has ever been a carrier of the disease. (He makes another tired crack at her age during this deduction, to which Lotus again objects.)
This is the cue for Lotus's backstory, and it is far different than in the game. Indeed, Lotus never had angel fever - but her daughter (singular) did, at level 3, nine years ago. "......Did she die?" Lotus stares off into the middle distance, nods, and says: "Probably." Nona (no Ennea here) disappeared, shortly after her angel fever cleared up.
She disappeared in an incident where 16 children "living in the city" vanished in one night, then returned two days later (attesting that they had been "kidnapped by spacemen"). Lotus's daughter, however, disappeared the same day but did not return. She went to the police, but they wouldn't help her - because she was a single parent, and because novel Lotus works in the mizu shoubai, Japan's nighttime entertainment industry, which includes everything from pubs to hostess bars to less-reputable stuff. (Which is the explanation here for Lotus's outfit, I suppose.) Lotus believes the police assumed she took the opportunity of the mass abductions to abandon or do away with her own child ("I was outright told: 'You're the reason your child is gone - aren't you?'"), though no charges were apparently filed to that end.
Angered, Lotus launched her own investigation. She researched the backgrounds of the other children who were abducted and discovered they had a few crucial points in common with Nona: they all had had level 3 angel fever and had all gone to the same hospital for their illness & hospitalization. It didn't take much for Lotus to find this out, but it went unreported in the mass media, so she presumes that they were under pressure or had been paid hush money. (She thinks the police ended their investigation of the incident prematurely for the same reason.)
With her daughter gone, Lotus lost her reason to live. Junpei looks at her right arm, and though they were hidden by Lotus's bangles before, he now notices several scars near the wrists. Lotus's attempts at suicide, however, were all unsuccessful - though she made so many she says the doctors at the emergency ward would exclaim "You again?" when she was brought in.
Lotus had a particularly strange incident occur to her, however, during one of her hospitalizations, when she couldn't sleep and went to the hospital's back garden: she saw a young girl - a girl who looked like her daughter, except high-school age - sobbing underneath a tree, repeating over and over: "I don't want to die. I don't want to go away." Lotus presumed she was one of the hospital's many end-stage cancer patients - and wished desperately she could trade places with the poor girl. The girl sees Lotus, and says to her, "Now I know - the joy of being able to wake up in the morning and realizing that, oh, I'm alive today; how wonderful it is to be able to have a body that's healthy." "It was then that the scales fell from my eyes," Lotus says; "I made up my mind right then and there - that even though my daughter is probably gone, it does no good to sit around crying for eternity. I have to live - for my daughter." Lotus apologizes for burdening Junpei with "the rantings of an old woman," then draws herself up and goes to search for the next key.
pg. 191: Junpei asks Lotus what happened to the girl under the tree that one night. Lotus says she doesn't know - when she asked about her at the hospital reception desk to thank her, she was told there was no such patient. She showed the staff a photo of Nona, since she looked so much like the girl, but this led to nothing.
"Nona?" Junpei asks. (Lotus hasn't mentioned her daughter's name before; I've been using it for convenience. No, there is no mention of Ennea.) Lotus explains that she was a fan of the song "Ue o Muite Arukou" (released as "Sukiyaki" in the U.S.), by the artist Kyu Sakamoto, and goes into "nona" being a Latin prefix meaning "nine." "Like the Nonary Game, then," notes Junpei, realizing, rather belatedly, that there have been an awful lot of nine-related things in the game so far.
Returning to other matters, Lotus thinks, perhaps, that the girl she saw in the garden that night was Nona's ghost. She believes she feels her spirit watching over her at times - "pushing me forward, telling me: 'Hang in there, Mom!' I'm not going to let her down. I'm going to survive...and get out of here. I swear it."
Junpei takes heart in Lotus's story and determination. Contrary to his previous attitude, he swears not to give up, and to live "for Lotus; for her lost daughter; for Akane; for the other players; for Dad; for Mom; for my teachers; for my friends" - OK, he kind of overdoes it, but he's out of the doldrums, is what I'm saying.
pg. 193: Santa waltzes in; he's found the key. He wasn't really searching for it, he explains; he just happened upon it while he was looking for something to eat.
pg. 193: Lotus mentions that Santa's sister must have had a time of it with a brother like him. "She's gone," he replies. "Died from angel fever." Junpei notes that "His reply was instantaneous, delivered with his usual poker face. But it was then I realized - that even though I'd always thought of him as cold-blooded, I could see that his eyes were filled with deep sadness. Maybe he'd shown me a glimpse of the real Santa. Maybe the rest was just him putting up a front."
pg. 194: The group fits in the key, types in "angel fever," and goes to take off - when they hear the sound of a door opening behind them. "Jumpy! Thank goodness!" It's Akane, who flies into Junpei's arms and just sobs. Akane starts in about being left alone and being so frightened, which utterly confuses Junpei: "Where have you been?" "What're you talking about, Jumpy? I was asleep, in the bed - in cabin 92!" Junpei has no explanation, though he doesn't think that Akane's lying; he resolves, however, to belay such considerations until they get out of here.
pg. 197: Another Part 9, more mysterious narration: "......Was it nine years ago? I heard them talking, and I realized everything. How could this be? Was this some sort of trick? Who could be behind it?
......God. That was the only answer that came to me."
pg. 201: Chapter Four: Where? (or The Search, in the Japanese underneath), and the group arrives in the infirmary. In addition to the three numbered doors, there's one door with no marks and no handle. There's also a whiteboard on the wall with a message: "Today's death toll: 1".
pg. 206: Snake's group came out an orange door, if anyone cares. They found their first key in a dresser drawer, and the second in a shaker behind the bar. Zero's game in the novels is turning out to be a lot like the old Nickelodeon game show Finders Keepers. (I do hope Zero moves on to GUTS and works in the Aggro Crag at some point.) Their monitors asked the same questions as did the ones in Junpei's group, both of which Snake answered handily.
pg. 207: Clover confirms that both Snake and she had angel fever, with Snake catching it from Clover nine years ago. Clover's case got only to level 1, but His Majesty got to level 3 - because he hasn't physically suffered enough with losing his sight and an arm, apparently - and earned himself a two-week hospitalization.
Clover then starts apologizing for always being a burden to her brother, claiming that it was her fault that he lost his sight - he tried to save her from falling off a cliff when she was seven (no car accident here, I guess). She goes on that Snake even became unable to play his beloved guitar, at which Snake tells her not to say any more, "a rare note of harshness entering his tone." (I've looked online, and I don't see anything claiming that it's impossible for the blind to learn or play guitar - unless this is referring to Snake's false arm, which is not yet confirmed as appearing in the novels. Then again, Snake's false arm seems to function more or less just like a normal arm in 999 - it allowed him to hold a man in a death grip until they both were incinerated, at least - and in the dystopian hellscape of Virtue's Last Reward, it's claimed that its Snake plays or learned to play the harp. Then again, Virtue's Last Reward also postulates that a consciousness of a 22-year-old can be transferred to the body of a 67-year-old without said consciousness noticing any changes in voice, skin texture, muscle tone, joint function, physical stamina, eyesight, hearing, or height, not to mention the effects of any physical injuries that have occurred in the space of 45 years, and is therefore is not to be taken as an authority on anything in this physical plane.)
As for how Ace is connected, well, hey!: you get three guesses as to the name of the company manufacturing the treatment for angel fever, and the first two don't count. "I......work for a certain pharmaceutical company," Ace offers; "it was the research team to which I belonged that developed a vaccine that was effective against angel fever." "So you work for Cradle Pharmaceuticals?" Santa says. Snake tries to warn Santa off, reminding him that they've decided not to say anything too personally identifying, but Santa counters that it's clear now that Zero didn't choose them at random, so what does it matter. Snake, though (I think - the attribution isn't clear), tells him, "Enough. This isn't the time to argue," whereupon Santa backs down ("as if fearing he'd get punched again," notes Junpei, making Santa the second person in the morphogenetic field after Jumpy to quail at the threat of a lesson in physical pain from Snake).
As for Seven, he can't remember his connection with angel fever, because the novel has decided he has memory loss after all - at least for stuff that happened earlier than nine years ago. Junpei, meanwhile, finally clues in that something important must've happened nine years ago, since that time frame seems to be popping up frequently in their discussions of angel fever. Please forget what I said about novel Junpei being sharper than game Junpei.
pg. 211: Lotus asks how the other group found out the true name of the ship. Snake smiles slightly and says that he, naturally, couldn't see the staircase that misled everyone else; instead, when he woke up, he noted the pervasive antiseptic & medicinal smells through the vessel. He also felt that the walls of the ship were rather old, so he theorized that they might have been on a hospital ship that had been active during wartime. When Clover mentioned that the staircase was straight out of the movie Titanic (does the novel take place in the future, too? If so, why are there still so many avid fans of this movie?), he concluded that they had to be on the Titanic's sister hospital ship. (Incidentally, in explaining his heightened senses - in a response to a comment by Lotus that she couldn't smell any antiseptics - he also mentions that he can tell Lotus had a bourbon & water and a pizza with plenty of basil last night for dinner.)
pg. 217: While searching for the innards of the RED, Junpei turns over recent strange events in his mind and identifies Snake as a dubious character, finding his preternatural composure to shade "beyond admirable into suspicious" and "his extraordinary sense of smell" to be "indisputably threatening." This is the first time in human history that anyone has been threatened by a sense of smell.
pg. 218: As Junpei is traveling down a long corridor, his attention is arrested by a single black door amidst all the white ones. He feels that something must be behind it, but it doesn't open.
pg. 222: Time to go search for Snake and Clover. Junpei is the first to go after Clover when she bolts ("We can't leave two people behind!"), followed right along by June - then Ace and Seven, each with a variation "guess we've got no choice." Seven pulls Santa along before he can respond (no "couple of idiots" line here). Lotus comes along at Seven's prompting because she "can't open a door by myself."
pg. 224: Jumpy & June go back to search the rooms behind Door 4 for Snake, noting that his mysterious disappearance was just like Akane's before. They don't mention this to the larger group or Clover, though - which really makes no sense, considering how close the parallels are in this continuity. (Even if Snake hadn't disappeared, it seems implausible for someone in their group not to mention, "Hey, June disappeared for a good chunk of time during our search. She thought she was still in the cabin, but we sure couldn't find her. Zero might be snatching & grabbing people temporarily, so be on the lookout.")
Anyhow, Lotus, who was supposed to stay with Clover, follows Junpei and Akane (leaving Clover with Santa) to propose teaming up with Seven and going through a door. Akane's the one who ends the argument by bringing up Door 9, not Junpei.
Junpei's mental run-over about realizing that only five people can go through a number 9 door is a little more explicit: "We couldn't save ourselves without sacrificing someone else. In order to save ourselves, we'd have to let our comrades die. Could I really do that?"
pg. 230: Novel Santa has, of course, abandoned his post and left Clover alone to sob. Santa is found looking at the RED in front of Door 3, where he pops "who do you think put back the RED?" quiz, which novel Junpei is unable to answer, after dismissing both the possibilities of Snake and Zero. Santa offers that it was "one of the eight of us"; when Junpei counters that the person would've fessed up if so, Santa answers: "Man, you're naive. Ever occur to you that one of us might be lying?" Junpei protests that there's no reason to lie about finding the RED. Santa: "Well... Might be awkward for them if they got found out." "What do you mean, 'awkward'?" "Dunno. ...But I can hazard a guess. ...They probably had something to do with Snake's disappearance."
Junpei simply stares at Santa in reply, whereupon Santa turns away from his gaze and issues a word of caution: "Trust someone in this game, and you lose. Your closest confidant could wind up stabbing you in the back." (Santa, don't set us up for Virtue's Last Reward, please. But: Why is Santa seemingly warning Junpei against June here?)
pg. 234: Lotus makes her "someone's gotta be sacrificed" play. Jumpy can't figure out all the bracelet/door combinations to confirm the idea that all seven of them can't make it through, so he goes to the "Today's death toll" whiteboard, located in the corner of the room, to do some combinatorics. When he gets there, he sees that Today's Death Toll has been updated from 1 to 2. That's just mean, Kurashikis. (Or maybe Ace did it just to be a smartass.) Junpei quickly wipes it away with his palm so that Clover doesn't see it.
Then we get three pages of number combinations laying out the idea that not everyone can go through the doors. Seriously, three of the pages are just covered with groups of numbers showing all the different ways the players can be split.
(Incidentally, if this is supposed to be a largely period-accurate replica of the ship, then what is a whiteboard doing here in the first place?)
pg. 240: Novel Santa is noncommittal to the idea of sacrificing someone, as he is to any idea offered in the course of the novel. Lotus nevertheless counts as an "aye" ("Well, we'll just count that as 'yes'"). The voting otherwise goes as in the game. (Lotus is more forceful than gleeful here, though - no giggling.)
pg. 242: Ace, at the end of his "I'm staying behind" speech, adds that "I'm the oldest of us. I'm the slowest, and the slowest-witted, and I'm obviously not a threat or capable of gutting you all later the one most likely to become a burden up ahead. Am I right?"
pg. 244: When June looks to Jumpy for support in her last pleas for Ace, he can't find any words of support to offer her, "hollow and fake" or otherwise: "I was painfully aware that she was asking for my help, but I could find no advice to give."
pg. 245: For some reason, Soporil-Beta is called "Mandraine/Beta" here. Don't know if that's a change they made for the novel or for the English game vs. the Japanese game.
pg. 246: June appears to be a bit more frantic at Ace's evident sacrifice, and Junpei notes, as he looks at Ace going to sleep, that "it was just like he had settled into his deathbed..." Despite the dialogue being pretty much identical for most of the scene, there's a greater sense at this point that Ace's decision means curtains for him.
I do have to say that the novel gives a strong sense of things getting steadily worse for the group. Snake seems to navigate the game handily and makes things easy for his group, then he's taken away. Lotus has an inspirational backstory that seems to give her strength to survive the game, but she goes into overdrive utilitarian mode. Someone appears to actually sacrifice themself and die. Worst of all, Jumpy & June are going to be ~SEPARATED~ coming up.
pg. 248: Lotus brings up that they have to choose doors without being reminded of it by Santa - who, speak of the devil, has been working out who can go in which door while the "obnoxious human drama" about Ace was unfolding. Door 3 is flatly off the table, since they don't have the numbers to do it. Akane has tears in her eyes as they realize they'll be separated etc. etc. etc. I didn't have patience for this in the game, and I don't now.
pg. 253: Junpei asks Akane to go through door 8 with Lotus because he feels that she's the most dependable of the other players and thinks that her motherly instincts and love for her lost daughter will lead her to watch over Akane. Er, Junpei, did you miss the part just now where Lotus abandoned a sobbing Clover to talk to you about betraying the other members of the group? Did you forget Lotus's "I'm not their babysitter" line when Akane was having a fever attack before? I know we've got to get to True Ending party formations somehow, and in the game, that happens through info Junpei won't get here (the idea that you've gotta be able to talk with Clover instead of her being stuck in a room with Science Boy), but...c'mon.
Meanwhile, Santa is glad to be in a different party from Junpei, since it means he won't get punched.
pg. 255: And we've come to another Part 9: "Junpei's thoughts reach me: 'Do your best, Akane.' And I cry out in prayer: You, too, Jumpy - don't you give up, either! I wonder if my thoughts got through to him?"
pg. 256: And we go out with a Part 0, with a person whom the reader is led to believe is Zero but who is probably Ace from the first Nonary Game thinking that the participants are taking too long and need some "new terror" injected into the proceedings, as he looks at a gun in his inside pocket. "It is when we are staring death in the face that we unlock our true potential," says probably-Ace, and that's the end of Vol. 1.
Vol. 2...coming soon?
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