Part 81: Memories of the escape

So, Memories of the Escape. You might not remember it, but we got this thing way, way back when we first got stabbed by Ace at the submarine. All it does is let us redo puzzle rooms for fun without worrying about sudden long narrative bits in the middle.

I'm gonna be honest: I have no idea why anyone would ever use this when playing normally. Until I used it for this I'd never even touched it before. Maybe I'm missing something, I dunno.

Anyway, as you might have noticed from even this one page the rooms here are laid out in a certain order. That order is not "door 1, door 2, door 3" etc. etc. Rather, that order is: the room you start in, door 4, door 7, door 1, door 9, door 5, door 8, door 6, door 3, door 2. You might recognise that order. If not, let me refresh your memory. That is the order of doors for the True Ending, the Safe Ending and the Submarine Ending. Chunsoft really went out of their way to tell you how to get these things, huh?

Ah well, let's go to page 2 and head into the library.



Unlike normal, we get a brief flash of this image before the room panning stuff. To me, it looks kinda like the door that leads to the submarine has been laid over the door that leads to the outside area of Building Q.





[Music: Octal Game]



There's a lot of cool stuff in here that I skipped over entirely last time we were here, so let's rectify that little issue.



Looks like this shelf's all science'n technology.

Oh, and I won't be prefacing each and every one of these with "this is where this is found" because that'd get really old, really quickly. It'd also be boring and tedious. So, let's just bounce from one bit of dialogue to the next. It's pretty obvious when one ends and the next starts too.



Why are you asking me? I didn't even know we had tails to lose. Maybe you should ask a human with a tail.
Mankind's ancestors most likely lost their tails as they were no longer useful and the nutrients required to grow them were better put to use elsewhere.



Huh? Why the hell would a kid be reading a book like that?

Because he's Snake? C'mon man; at some point, you gotta stop questioning these things.





...Besides it's this one that's more of a "why and how do you know this." But, again, he's Snake. You just gotta let him do his thing.

He built a microscope and examined insects, inorganic substances, and other things too small to be seen in detail by human eyes. He then drew pictures of many of the things he'd examined, and published them in a book. I'd hazard a guess this shelf is concerned with natural sciences.



I wonder if this one's got pictures of colourful fish and stuff...



Thinking about the Earth, even when you're on the ocean. Kinda romantic in a way, I guess.



Did a bomb go off near somewhere called "Cambria"?
Wrong kind of explosion. Roughly five hundred million years ago, during what is known as the Cambrian period, research suggests that the variety of



Why that happened is, however, still something of a mystery. There are a number of theories. This book is most likely a collection of them.



Is that some sorta book about hippie chicks?
Uh, probably not, except perhaps tangentially. It's most likely about environmental protection.



Dude, hippie chicks? Really?



This's that Darwin guy, right?
Well, yes and no.



In it, he put forth his theory of evolution.
Yeah, I remember that part. He called it "Natural Selection".
Exactly.



Ammonites are pretty nasty-looking.



We need to hurry it up, or we're going to end up in the pages of a book like that.



I believe that's going to be about electrolysis in an electrolyte solution. These particular laws were set down by Michael Faraday.

As you might have gathered from their names, this is stuff to do with electricity. Rather embarassingly, despite Google telling me this is stuff taught to children, I'm not too clear on the specifics. Then again, as I probably accidentally made somewhat apparent before, I'm not particularly great at chemistry in general.



Man, guess times are tough for aliens, too.
This one says "Cosmic Inflation".





I know it's easy to fawn over Snake being The Man, but Seven's totally a super-cool dude too.



Ah, well, it's a theory that posits an invariant quantum field where conformal transformation can take place...



...Like so. I gotta agree with him here; I looked this stuff up to try and see what the hell Snake was on about. Turns out, it doesn't help.



...And now we have String Theory. Great.

They're just talking about superstring theory. It's a theory of reality where... Hmm. How to explain... It says that all elements of the universe






Oh, I know this one! That's Einstein, right?!



I guess this bookshelf has an astronomy theme.



"Interactions Between Shortwave Energy and Matter"... What else've we got...



Can't say fancy technology stuff an' I get along real well. Keep on talking about that stuff and you're gonna put me to sleep.



Bet that's gonna be serious inheritance tax...



Not to mention most of them were likely reptiles and amphibians. Without hair, I can't imagine they had much need of perms.
That's got nothing to do with this!



I think it's something like a fusion of Greek and Oriental culture...

As far as I'm aware, it's just Ancient Greek stuff in a few different ways. Nothing at all to do with Oriental history. I could be wrong though!



Isn't he just a story? I don't think you're gonna find a guy who didn't really exist in a history book.

Depending on who you ask, Arthurian lore is somewhat based on reality or merely mentioning the possibility will get you a lengthy tirade and/or argument about how it's all lies. So, it is possible that Lancelot was based on a real dude. Even really, really loosely.

...Obviously a fair bit of it is fabricated to be amazing. As awesome as it would be I'm pretty sure stuff like Magical Perpetual Fighting Dragons have never been a thing.



Damn, that thing's huge. Can't imagine anyone's actually read the whole thing... Pretty sure it'd just put me to sleep.



Well, I'd assume it's about European history.



...



Maybe this one's about China's four thousand years of history or something?
Hey, Chinese history and Oriental history aren't the same thing.

Just gonna leave it at that, Junpei? That... does seem like you. Never mind.



This seems like an odd thing to worry about, huh? Well, if we examine it again we get this exact same dialogue as written here. So, you might think there's nothing to see here.

You would be wrong.



(Tomorrow, of course.)

Hey, I didn't promise that it would be great now, did I?



I'd imagine that's a book describing praxeology studies on monkeys. Monkeys are very similar to humans evolutionarily, so I imagine the research was fruitful.



It's called "Correlation of Muscle, Bone Density, and Bone Strength".






This bookshelf must be all medical books.
From what I can tell, it sounds as though these books have been organized by genre. This library must be massive. I'm rather impressed by how well-organized it is.



"Human Anatomy"...
"Regeneration of Internal Organs"...



Maybe they were researching human physical limits across history?



You think they're talking about if you, like, lose part of your body, then you could grow it back?
Hmm...I don't think so...



In other words, they may be talking about cultivating a sixth sense.



Huh. I guess this is a book about the nervous system?



I'm kinda curious about it too. There's gotta be a reason why people connect with each other, you know?

As you might've noticed so far, a lot of the neat stuff here has to do with the books. Makes sense, since this is a library. The next one, though, is super-easy to miss because it's not related to books at all!



I'm not kiddin'! Don't push me!



I don't really see this plan ending well.

...For Junpei.



What's that? Some sort of comic book? Geez, I guess boys really like that stuff, huh?
No, you're thinking of a different sort of robot. This book is talking about automated machinery that's used to build things like cars.



That's a pretty generic title. To be honest, it's so vague, I don't really know what it might be about.



There's another one like that over here...
You mean something like "Primary Number Theory" or "Analytical Number Theory" or "Geometry"?



Nobody said anything about those!
Well, number theory is usually split into 4 chief disciplines. If there was a book named "Algebraic Number Theory", I took a wild guess that the other 3 would be there as well. Looks like I was right.



Conjecture? What's it about, like magic or psychic stuff or something?
Right, I bet it's about jewelry, isn't it?
It may have an odd title, but it's actually a very respectable mathematics book.



Uh...sorry I said anything... Look, let's not get into this right now, okay?



"Indian Mathematics". Hahaha. That's funny.
(Wh-Why's that funny...?)

Yeah, I gotta agree with Junpei here. That's just rude, Clover!



Looks like there are a bunch of books about Japanese culture here. Mostly ones about folklore, though...
Well, folklore can cover a wide range of subjects.



"Folklore" can cover all those things, if you know where to look.
This looks pretty deep.



(So many books here... I wonder what this one's--whoa! What's this? ...Warm...?)



Oh, uh, no... I'm, uh, I'm sorry...
Hey, what's the deal with this sappy stuff...

That's pretty much everything. We'll just finish up here and leave then. If I missed anything you think's particularly note-worthy or interesting then by all means point it out. This room's huge and I already went back and got some stuff after the first run through since I missed it. A bit more wouldn't hurt, and it'd be easy to do too.


But, since we're in the Memory of the Escape rather than the escape itself we don't get a long explanation from Snake about the first Nonary Game. Instead, we get...



(I just can't remember WHAT.)
(Whatever. Time to get back to our search.)

Yeah, we get these little bits in lieu of the longer scenes in every room. All the ones I've seen have been minor variations of this one though, so I don't think there's going to be any particularly exciting or worth going out of your way for.

But, with that done, we can move the SHELDRAKE-5 book, press the red button, enter the DEAD password and leave!



RRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!
Damn it! I can't get it open! This thing won't even budge.



Then, that means...
It's the other door!

Oh, heheh, oops!