Summary
: Welcome to Tsuki. This chapter is where Tokio’s story really starts picking up, to the point where I kind of wonder what the point of Yume and Hana even was.
: Once the building shows up, there’s a really loud jackhammer noise that starts playing in the background.
: “What the fuck… shit… a nightmare…”
: Tokio smokes a lot more in Tsuki than he did in Hana or Yume.
: “9 o’clock…? It’s not morning yet… I’ll sue your ass…”
: Let’s check on Red.
: “He looks terrified…”
: And, of course, Tokio’s inbox.
From: Slash
To: Tokio Morishima
Subject: Found The Bat
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 3:21:14Attacking Scolba is actually pretty hardcore. So it took some time, but by reverse-hacking the system I was able to pull up the user access logs. There were all kinds of things in place. People using proxies and jamming things up, but with their raw IP data totally visible, etc. So anyway, here’s what I found out.
: If this seems cringy and dated, keep in mind this game was probably being written within three years of the original release of the movie Hackers.
: As soon as we finish reading the email, the construction noise starts up again and we’re kicked off Tokio’s computer.
: “And it fucking starts again…”
: And now, one of Tokio’s more memorable lines.
: “Goddamn… this is so annoying, I can’t take it. …Wanna go for a drive?”
: Come to think of it, isn’t this how Francis York Morgan crashes his car in Deadly Premonition, by being on his laptop while driving?
Maybe he’s special, or maybe all turtles are like this, but Red seems to be a real coward. He just wants to spend his days floating around, and if anything disturbs that, he gets all sensitive and starts flapping around in his tank, and then stops eating. He’s a hassle, but he’s still lovable.
How about The Bat? The only thing I know is that he’s one fucked up dude. I doubt whether he actually has anything to do with Kamui. Why did he break into the chatroom that one time? Either he’s a hacker using Kamui as a front, or a cracker who actually believes all this Kamui bullshit. One or the other.
Other assumptions:
Real name: “Komori”, or something “bat”-like in Japanese. That’s why he uses the name “The Bat”.
Age: Little punk around 14 or so.
Blood Type: AB
Personality: Like a rat or a bird or something. Has a mix of indecision and cunning.Fuck, I’m bored. Anyways, I got his email address. I doubt he’d reply, but I’ll try getting hold of him.
: “Placebo… I’m getting sick of this shit.”
From: Tokio Morishima
To: junk@kipple.ne.jp
Subject: Hello, CQCQTo The Bat,
This is Morishima, the guy you picked a fight with a few days ago. You shouldn’t have busted into our chat like that. Now I have your mail address. I don’t know who you are, what you’re trying to do, or whether you’re a crazy fuckstick or a full-on crazy fuckstick.
Get back to me. Let’s talk about your homie Kamui.
: “Anyway…”
: The construction noises start back up.
: “And it fucking starts again… Jesus fucking Christ, man…”
: “This… motherfucker… head… hurts…”
: Poor Red.
: You can probably tell from the subject line of the email who The Bat actually is, but it’ll be real clear a bit later.
From: junk@kipple.ne.jp
To: Tokio Morishima
Subject: parade
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 9:00:00~Guessing Game~
What’s the answer?
[#1]
At the last moment, an intrusion,
an old witch, a wink.
Oil fries, nobody’s there.
Just Joan the slut.
Mom, dad, yourself.
A stick, a log, a stone, dead.
Made a slave by the bad guy.
It’s gotta be you or me…Who’s missing?
: This riddle is going to be repeated a few times, so I’ll just refer to it as “Joan the Slut”.
: Incidentally, when I read this while recording, I immediately thought of the infamous “It’s just me, Gabe Newell” video.
[#2]
Old Mother Twitchett
likes kisses.She turns over
her long tail
and with one eye,
stares.Give her a kiss
on her cute little mouth.
As thanks,
she’ll share her tail.Old Mother Twitchett… who is it?
[#3]
There was a crazy family
riding a crazy horse
running like crazy.Where did they get to?
[#4]
Some brothers picked up a corpse
and buried it in a stone grave.Who killed and ate the kid?
: “What the hell is this…? The Bat’s address… a guessing game? The fuck is this about?!”
: “Oh my god, shut the fuck up! Fucking seriously…”
: “This kind of thing pisses me off. OK, fine… so I have to play a game, huh?”
: To be fair, this is pretty much how I react to any game that has a dumb bullshit puzzle.
: Tokio opens his blog post with the “Joan the Slut” riddle copied verbatim, so I won’t bother reposting it.
At the last moment… is it me or him?
An intrusion… is it me or him?
An old witch… maybe him?
A wink…?
Oil fries… what the fuck?Who’s missing? Who the fuck?
I don’t fucking get it!!!
: “Yup.”
: “Your husband, huh… he ‘used to’ smoke these… so you mean he’s…?”
: “If they sell them there.”
: “Yeah, I guess so. I’m going home… the construction should be done for today by now.”
: “But like… I hate playing games. Fuck… why the hell do I have to do this…?”
: “Ah. Hold on… maybe Erika could… yeah, she’d be better at this than I would.”
From: Tokio Morishima
To: Erika Yukawa
Subject: Just GuessingI got a weird email from that guy called The Bat. I’ll forward it to you. What is this guessing game? Do you get it?
I have no idea. Let me know if you figure it out. Also, from now on, I’m gonna encrypt my mails. I’m using a program I used to use at the news agency. Are you able to read this?
From: Tokio Morishima
To: S. INOHANA
Subject: Get It OnHas a guy called “The Bat” ever been involved in the Kamui case? He’s able to mess with systems on the net, and apparently doesn’t want people digging up stuff on Kamui. He contacted me online and told me not to fuck with Kamui.
He also sent me some sort of riddle. He also seems to know about that thing at Babylon. Let me know if you know anything.
At the last moment, an intrusion, an old witch… is this some sort of poem? Searching all over the net got me nothing. Nothing in the encyclopedia, either. Nothing in the newspaper database. Not even anything in the fucking Farmer’s Almanac.
Construction is finally finishing tomorrow. About fucking time.
: “Are you even awake…? OK brother, I’m gonna go to sleep, too. Getting woken up like this every goddamn morning… we need us a fucking break, you know?”
: “Sleepy… sweet dreams…”
: “Hm…? It’s already night… it’s been a while since I slept like that…”
: “Morning, sleepyhead. Hehe…”
: Looks like Red’s doing a lot better with the construction done.
From: Erika Yukawa
To: Tokio Morishima
Subject: Re: Just Guessing
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 22:10:48This guessing game is a riddle. You’re probably supposed to look for keywords from this text. I don’t know the answer, though.
More importantly, who is “The Bat”? The version of that encryption software you’re using is too old.
From: S. INOHANA
To: Tokio Morishima
Subject: Investigation Required
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999Looks like nobody named “The Bat” was involved with the Kamui case in the past. But I agree that he should be marked for the future. Find out who he is and report quickly.
It’s about time you sent some info worth the price I paid you.
: “Keep looking, keep looking, keep looking… maybe if I get this quiz right I’ll win a trip to Hawaii. Fuck! Fuck this… I need food.”
: I think I said this exact line at least twice during the Persona 5 LP.
: “At the last moment, an intrusion…”
: “Excuse me? What does that mean…?”
: “Fuck if I know…”
: “Is it about someone’s personality?”
: “Like someone who’s intrusive?”
: Like a certain turtle-hating bartender who should shut the fuck up before he gets mauled by a chinchilla again?
: “Like ‘someone who intrudes at the last moment’…”
: “So you’ve been listening, huh? But no, it’s not about someone’s personality.”
: “I guess.”
: “It’s like this…”
: Tokio repeats the entire “Joan the Slut” riddle here, so I’ll cut that.
: “I’ve heard that somewhere before…”
: “What, seriously?”
: “What do you mean?”
: “Old word games. In English. Some of those words come from these games.”
: Here’s what I like about this: when I was recording this, I actually went “Wait, is this a real thing or is this something Suda made up, how the fuck are you supposed to even get to there from Joan the Slut?”
: He managed to make it work even in English without it being painfully obvious the way a lot of that kind of stuff was in Persona 5.
: "OK then, can you figure this out? It’s a riddle… the question for this one is, ‘Who’s missing?’ "
: “The blind man.”
: “Really?”
: “Definitely. The blind man is missing.”
: “You’re a genius.”
: “I like to do what I can.”
: “I’m going home.”
: “What does this mean, and what is The Bat trying to do? I still have no idea.”
: “If there’s one thing that I know for sure, it’s that my nerves are totally on end, and I want to pluck the feathers from that “Bat” or “Chicken” or whatever-his-name-is asshole, and those feelings are growing by the day.”
: “I’ll get Erika to help again…”
: “Those goddamn pig-fucking asshole sons of bitches are finally finishing that construction.”
: Well, that confirms it. The Bat is almost certainly Sumio. It makes sense when you realize that Big Dick also got all those weird emails, one of which referred to him as “Chinchilla” - a name only Sumio and Kusabi would know.
: “A fairytale? What a fucking dickhead…”
From: Tokio Morishima
To: Erika Yukawa
Subject: About The BatRemember when our chat at Scolba got disrupted? Around the time of the Kamui case. You got dropped from the net and couldn’t get back in. When that happened, some guy replaced you and interrupted our chat.
The guy’s handle name was “The Bat”. He started talking to me suddenly and told me not to look into Kamui. For some reason he also knew about Babylon. So I hired a certain net detective to find his mail address for me. I mailed him, and got that weird riddle mail.
I figured out the first one. I also figured out how to solve it. Probably. It’s from some old Mother Goose thing. You know Mother Goose? With the right materials, the remaining three should be solvable, too. Feel like getting together to solve some riddles? Get me back. Let’s hook up and win that trip to Hawaii.
: “The noise is finally gone… looks like the construction is finally finished.”
: “She bought a Mother Goose book. We put the book and the mail from The Bat together and started looking for the answers to his little game.”
: “Without titles, it was hard to search them out, but this is what the first one is based on…”
: This is apparently a nursery rhyme dating back to the Victorian era, but damned if I could find anything on it.
: “What a fucked up poem. So here’s the riddle…”
: He repeats Joan the Slut again, verbatim.
: “The ‘blind man’ is missing. So literally, the blind man.”
: “Even the bartender knew this rhyme. That dude’s surprising.”
: “Maybe he really likes Mother Goose?”
: “I wonder… he does seem a bit weird. So next is this one.”
: Tokio repeats the second riddle, the “Old Mother Twitchett” one.
: “I’ve heard that before.”
: “Really?”
: “Old Mother Twitchett, right…?”
: “Yeah.”
: “Hold on…”
: “Oh, I’m waiting.”
: “OK, so… Old Mother Twitchett was… hm… ah, here it is. It’s from this poem, look. What was the question again…?”
: “Who is Old Mother Twitchett?”
: “Ah, I see.”
: “What is it?”
: “The direct translation of the original poem says this:”
: I also looked this one up, and did find a single website that had a version of it. Warning: Some godawful goddamn 90s-ass web design.
: “What the hell does that mean?”
: “The poem itself is a riddle.”
: You know what I just fucking remembered? Remember Gabriel Knight 3 and the godawful geometry management puzzles? That came out the same year this game did.
: I can only imagine the kind of bullshit puzzles that Jane Jensen would’ve put in this if she worked on it. You know what, fuck it, give me a 24th Ward Heinous Crimes Unit novel by Jane Jensen.
: “A riddle, huh?”
: “Listen. One eye, leaves its tail behind… therefore… Old Mother Twitchett is…”
: “Huh?”
: “A needle and thread… so what about the question…?”
: “I don’t know… but it looks like it means that a needle kisses thread.”
: “The fuck kind of kiss is that?”
: “Let’s leave that for now. The answer for #2 is ‘needle and thread’. What’s next?”
: “Um… here’s the third one…”
: Tokio repeats the third riddle from earlier.
: “A crazy family… there’s gotta be a poem with a crazy family and a crazy horse somewhere.”
: “Another fucked up poem.”
: “Quit complaining and search for it.”
: “Whatever.”
: “I can’t find it.”
: “Me neither.”
: “Wait, hold on…”
: “Waiting.”
: “It must be this.”
: “Which one?”
: “It’s a bit long.”
: This is the only one of these I had heard of before, and it’s only because of The Wolf Among Us. Too bad Fables was such a piece of shit comic.
: “Hm. That sounds right.”
: “So where did the ‘crazy’ family end up?”
: In what’s probably Telltale’s worst game outside of Hector: Badge of Carnage.
: “Hell.”
: “That’s the answer. Nice work!”
: “Now for the final problem.”
: Erika repeats the last riddle, which we’ve already seen.
: “Some brothers picked up a corpse and buried it in a stone grave.”
: “There should be a similar poem somewhere…”
: “Come on, hurry up.”
: “You keep looking, too.”
: “I am.”
: “Brothers and a stone grave.”
: “Brothers and a stone grave…”
: “Picked up a corpse…”
: “Is this it?”
: “What?”
: “I’m not 100% sure.”
: “Show me.”
: “OK, here it goes. The poem says…”
: “That must be it.”
: “OK, now we’re getting the hang of it.”
: “So who ‘killed and ate that kid’?”
: “Mother and father… so, ‘the parents’.”
: “Right.”
: “Awesome.”
: “Wow, we got all four.”
: “Let’s try lining the answers up.”
: “I have no idea what that means.”
: “Me neither.”
: “I wonder if this really means something?”
: “What is he trying to say?”
: “The Bat… is it really worth chasing after him?”
: I mean, it kinda depends what Batman we’re talking about, because half of everything Batman kinda sucks.
: “I don’t know… but I feel like it is.”
: “A gut feeling?”
: “Something like that.”
: “But after all this work… what if it’s just some creepy loser messing around?”
: “Don’t even say that.”
: “I mean, these answers, they don’t seem to mean anything.”
: “I know. But there must be something. There’s meaning in there, somewhere…”
: “Do you really think so?”
: “Yeah!”
: “You think it has something to do with Kamui?”
: “I think so, yeah.”
: “Why?”
: “I think so…”
: “You think so?”
Maybe I’m letting The Bat get to me too much.
Like Erika says, maybe he’s just some crazy fuckstick with no relation to Kamui… but for some reason he took the trouble to hack that chatroom and follow me on the net. The Bat gets to me because I’m scared. Even now, I’m still somehow scared of Kamui. In the same way, I can somehow feel a kind of terror in this guy, too.
Erika doesn’t get that. Because she didn’t talk to The Bat. Either way, I got my keywords. Now I just have to wait for the door to unlock.
: We’ll see what The Bat’s response is in the next update.