Part 35: Keitaro Miura 2
Finally! Now that I’m in control, I’m going to make you bastards eat your Miura vegetables!
Chapter 35: Keitaro Miura 2
Music: LONER (Azusa Chiba)
Better take advantage of that.Consider American Weapons
(They came ashore during the air raid. They’re enormous. Must be over 30 meters tall. Instead of wheels, they move on long, leg-like appendages. Quite a terrifying sight, like something out of hell…)
It’s still there, hiding behind all those elaborate curtains. That Sentinel… It’s what brought me here.Consider Sentinel
(Why were just the Sentinel and I brought here? That thing is beyond me. I’m no expert… but I know it’s capable of some extraordinary feats. Time travel, though…)
Let’s take a quick look at Miura’s flowchart, because I find it useful to make a small point about the way many of this game’s “branches” work. While he has a whopping six branches here, that really just means they all start from the same place. In terms of accessing these branches, you have to do them all in a set sequential order because you won’t have the right keywords otherwise. It’s a little weird visualized like this.
Consider Time Travel
(A story about traveling through time to the future. It only ever felt like a far-off fantasy… But on that day, at that moment… That fantasy became a reality.)
Music: Emotional Storm (Yoshimi Kudo)
The Sentinel rears up…
Electromagnetic rounds are offline… Output’s dropped by 50% in both electromagnetic battering rams… 
The kaiju let out an ear-splitting, unearthly roar.
But I’m not about to just sit here and die. I still have two minutes before I hit my operating limit. Might as well give it everything I got.Suddenly, everything flashes and shakes…
Where’s the enemy…? Did I… lose?
Music: Ennui Vibes (Yoshimi Kudo)
The air raid… Everything was just on fire… 
What the hell’s going on? …… The last thing I remember… is being surrounded by those new American weapons, and—No. It can’t be…
Consider American City
These high-rise buildings are common. …Was I captured? And they got my Sentinel, too? They must have done it when I lost consciousness. Brought me to the mainland as their—No, wait. If the Sentinel just reached its operating limit… then not very much time could have passed.
It’s not my homeland. Somehow, I ended up on U.S. soil.
I’ll face the enemy even without my Sentinel… 
The Sentinels are top secret. It can’t fall into enemy hands.
Considering everything it’s been through already… I can’t expect it to perform at full capacity.Use Sentinel on Sentinel
That’s the kind of issue that becomes a national crisis. But what can I do? I can’t activate now, let alone initiate self-destruct.
(I should probably go lie low until the Sentinel recovers. But not because I’m afraid. My country, my little sister… I’d give my life for them at the drop of a hat. But I have to be smart right now. And that means waiting for the Sentinel to be up and running.)
I should get out of here before American soldiers show up. I’ll stay out of sight until it’s the right time to move.
…But something’s off. These signs show both kanji and the English alphabet. Ashitaba Printing, Ashitaba Bank… Why are they named after my hometown…?Oh Miura, you pure, sweet idiot.
Sure! The one at Sun Mall?
Nah, the one at Joyland. Let’s go try out those big new SEGA machines that came in!
(But their language doesn’t sound foreign to me.)
Yeah! Ugh, he’s sooo amazing. 
Right!? I watch everything he’s in.
(Though that’s quite a bit of exposed leg…)Stop being so repressed, Miura! Get with the times! I mean, you don’t actually know “the times,” but still!
(It almost seems like a different dialect. But it’s definitely Japanese.)
Where in the world am I?
(It *looks* like Japan, but everything seems off. This is all just a terrible dream…) Music: Deafening Silence (Mitsuhiro Kaneda)
(…Right? Right… It’s nothing to worry about. Just my brain acting up. That’s why my surroundings appear to be different. We knew what the risks were going in as Sentinel pilots. Professor Douji made it all very clear to us.)
Oh, hey Shu.
…But appears to have a girl’s haircut. Hm.
This one has a particularly strange hairstyle…
It looks like… I’ve finally gone crazy.
What is this room?
Music: Mutual Telepathy (Composer: Kazuki Higashihara, Arranger: Rikako Watanabe)
Some guy with weird hair hit me with his bag.
Either I’m still seeing things… or someone removed me from the Sentinel. Whoever it was brought me to some kind of lab.
The Sentinel has its own spatial projector as well… But that’s highly confidential military technology… …… It’s about baseball. I’m not in a military base, am I?
It’s all in my head… It’s just an illusion… 
Takatoshi-san used to let me listen to his.
There are way more than I saw at the Hijiyamas’.
Lots of textbooks lined up here.
So I really am still in Japan then… Consider History Book
…! This can’t be right… Music: Impending Doom (Mitsuhiro Kaneda)
Surrender…? We lost the war? 1945… that’s this year. August 6th… atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima… 140,000 killed… Three days later… second bomb dropped on Nagasaki… 70,000 killed. …All from just two new American bombs?
1964… Tokyo Olympics. How far does this go? Wait… 
I-It has to be fake. When was this printed? It says here… 
Wait, wouldn’t it have been printed in 1984? Because it’s a calendar?
(It’s so cold…)
That’s all that was in the fridge. ……
*coughing* Wow… Not a big fan of soda, I take it? (Some kind of carbonated beverage? I had ramune once at a festival in Tsutsuji, but I was just a kid.)Music: Mutual Telepathy (Composer: Kazuki Higashihara, Arranger: Rikako Watanabe)
Consider
1985… Am I still in Japan… but in the future?
I’m Shu Amiguchi. And we’re at my apartment in Kamazumi. …Keitaro Miura. So… how did I get here? I called a taxi and brought you over after you got knocked out.
Guilty. You know, you really pushed Ogata over the edge. He was already pissed from being chewed out. If he gets in trouble one more time, he’s getting suspended. Be real nice if you two could work things out peacefully.
What… year is it?
Afraid you got knocked into a coma for the last few years? Relax. You didn’t get hit *that* hard.
Oh nooooooooo!
Anyway, I realized immediately after posting the last update that I forgot to add the relevant connections to the board! Let’s do that!
We only added two new details. The first is an important connection between Ei, 426, and Ryoko. I considered making it orange because we don’t really understand the nature of it as of yet, but the colors are very convoluted and it doesn’t really matter. The second is a romantic connection between Ryoko and Ida, as icky as that is to think about. At least it’s clearly pretty one-sided.
And here’s the current board in its entirety.