Kaitlyn knew firsthand the risks of hyperfixation. How focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else could hurt or entirely ruin a person's life, not to mention their mental health. She'd done it herself, after all, when studying to ace her classes and hunkering down in lab.
But right now, she didn't particularly care about all of that. She was pissed.
I know how to balance things. I know how I can keep my mental state healthy. Which is exactly why I know that I'll be able to recover after doing all this.
Checking her Progress Report confirmed what she'd already suspected—she had indeed earned Philip's bad ending. The appearance of forward progress was cold comfort considering what it had actually entailed.
The first thing she'd done in the new loop was text Philip. Before even getting dressed, she'd already shot a message over to her old tutor under the pretense of clarifying what subjects he taught. The wait felt like it lasted for an eternity as she stared at the screen. But within five minutes, her phone buzzed.
Looking over the completely standard reply, she couldn't help but sigh with relief. Thank goodness. That means he's out of there… Hopefully that means there weren't any lasting consequences for all that.
But despite the relief that his response brought, she still wouldn't feel entirely satisfied until she could see for herself that the guy was alright. So as soon as the restaurant opened, she got herself a table at Chella's. It was the first day of the loop, meaning she wasn't exactly flush with cash for the venture. But it had already taken most of her self control not to beg someone to drive over to his house or, barring that, run over like a maniac. She'd be damned if she waited any longer than necessary to check on him.
Thankfully, the raven-haired server was back at the restaurant, serving customers with the same professionalism as ever. As usual, not a single spark of recognition registered in his eyes. But for once, Kaitlyn was a little glad. She didn't want to be remembered as the one who'd visited such a tragedy on his family.
Kaitlyn couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief. Good. See? Everything's fine. No need to worry. If he hadn't been here, then… well, I don't know what I would've done. Something incredibly stupid, probably.
Not that her current plans were much smarter. The idea of taking on the game itself was not only one of the most ambitious things she'd ever done, but also possibly the riskiest. There was no way to know if it was even possible.
How do I even begin to interact with it? That's like asking how I can change the very fabric of reality itself. Even if this is a game, it's a very real one. It's not like I've found some developer mode or settings screen hidden away somewhere.
Regardless, she swore to try. The worst case scenario was that it was impossible and she'd just be wasting her time. But at best? Maybe she could get an advantage, or even find a way out without completing the remaining endings.
…Not like I really expect that. I'll honestly just be happy if I manage to piss the game off and break something.
But as her initial anger gradually cooled, Kaitlyn realized that she didn't have to limit herself. There were plenty of things about this world, its rules, and its limitations that she didn't yet understand—Philip's bad ending had made that clear. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to shore up her knowledge in that department as well.
This is still a game, after all. A super realistic one, but still a game. It probably has exploits to sniff out.
And so, she began throwing herself wholeheartedly into investigating the game's mechanics. Everything else—lab, endings, work, and even Kate's Kitchen—all of those extraneous activities were put aside for now. They weren't getting abandoned, though. She was just carefully placing them on a shelf to be revisited later. That's all.
I don't really need the money, if we're being honest. It's nice, but if I'm not building out the Kitchen or working on my hobbies… then I'd rather have the extra time. I can always go back to Fink if that changes, though.
The first thing she looked into was the game's rules. Details on what might cause the Enforcers to crack down on her weren't exactly forthcoming, despite all of her searches, and she didn't particularly want to test that kind of thing by trial and error. But her latest interaction gave her some good insights into that. Instead, she directed her attention to other ways the game might limit her. For example, traveling.
Using her baking prowess, Kaitlyn successfully bribed people into giving her rides to each of the off-campus locations she'd visited before—Vinny's house, Philip's house, even the hospital from Vinny's bad ending and the beach from Philip's romance ending. However, things started getting strange when she requested rides to other places. When it came to other places unrelated to the endings, people always came up with some sort of excuse or last-minute complication as to why they couldn't take her there. It didn't seem malicious or even intentional. But after about the fifth time it happened, Kaitlyn began to think her suspicions had some merit to them.
Maybe the game is trying to keep me hemmed in? I mean, it would make sense. I never really thought about it since it's so realistic…
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If she tried to force the issue, she could usually get to the destinations she wanted—after a steady stream of setbacks and obstacles ranging from traffic to unexpected closures or even more dubious complications. Her reward was usually a completely normal bookstore or cafe or other building that seemed completely normal and forgettable. The most interesting thing about her investigation was that, as her destinations ranged further out, she was faced with increasingly unbelievable and heavy-handed interventions.
After a bit more investigation, she managed to uncover a few other locations that did seem more easily available to her. A small handful of restaurants that she recalled Heather mentioning at some point and an animal shelter nearby were the main ones. She made a few attempts to simply walk to her destinations as well and subvert the majority of the game's obstacles. However, any slight lapse in focus during the trip had her somehow arriving at a familiar location instead of where she'd intended.
Yeah, definitely intentional. Good to know, though.
She also looked into any exploits she could leverage. Most of her inspirations came from researching other games and the wide variety of glitches people had discovered in them. However, her inability to reload saves at-will or exit the game at all meant there were plenty that stayed out of her reach. The seemingly one-to-one physics of the world also didn't give her much hope for getting the movement glitches to work.
She did try wedging herself into particularly narrow corners and repeatedly jumping on strangely sloped surfaces, though. It accomplished little more than making her feel silly. Especially when Heather walked in to find her standing atop a small bucket and yanking upward on its handle.
Eventually, she gave up on her dreams of clipping through solid walls and flying through the air unsupported. But the majority of her time was spent investigating how to actually break the game.
Between her classes, working at Fink, and talking with Ian, she'd accrued quite a bit of knowledge about programming. It certainly wasn't enough to qualify her as some sort of genius, but Kaitlyn felt very confident in the foundations and breadth of her knowledge. It meant that she had a lot of options to look into.
Let's see… She frowned at her open laptop, chin resting on one hand. Exploits are one thing, but I think I need to look up actual hacking, too. I doubt the game would leave me a step-by-step guide of how to break it hidden somewhere, but maybe if I just adapt the ideas a bit…
The weeks passed by in a blur of research, research, and more research. As she'd hoped, there was a fair amount of information available on the topics she looked into. Most of the so-called "hacking" she initially found fell more in line with social engineering than anything really technical—not particularly useful for her purposes. But there were other options as well. Malware, DDoSing, man-in-the-middle attacks… In fact, the sheer variety and apparent ease of executing some of these options made her feel a little uneasy.
Dang. Is it seriously that straightforward to do some of this stuff…? No, it can't be. There's gotta be easy ways to protect against it. I just have to hope that the game slacked off a little in that department.
Regardless, there was one thing in common across everything she saw. She needed an in, some way to interact with or backdoor into the workings of the game itself. Without that, she'd be dead in the water.
It wasn't exactly an easy ask. Her leading idea was to try experimenting with the few truly game-like elements of the world. So far, she'd encountered four: the end of cycle screens, her Progress Report, the forced resets, and her Notes app.
The end of cycle screens and Progress Report were the most tantalizing options. After all, if she could change them to add endings that didn't belong, then she'd be over the moon. The issue was that she had no way to directly interact with them. They didn't take any inputs, unless she counted what she'd done that loop as an input. Even with the Progress Report, she could only pull it up as a static screen when closing her eyes. That meant they both seemed like dead ends.
That left the forced resets and the Notes app. Although she could control the resets with her words—specifically, by mentioning the time loop—she wasn't entirely sure how to use that to her advantage. Besides, with how quickly they triggered, who knew whether she'd have a chance to say or do anything that would actually influence the game?
And testing that seems… unpleasant. She grimaced. I'm happy to do it if I think anything will come of it. But without that… it sounds like a quick way to get myself paralyzed over and over again.
That only left the Notes app. That, at least, seemed pretty straightforward. She could put lines of code directly into the thing, after all.
…Whatever I put in here gets carried over from loop to loop, she reasoned. It's one of the only things that can do that, aside from me. And I control what's in it. So logically, if this IS like a game, that info has to be stored, read, and retrieved somewhere between this loop and the next. I wonder if I can take advantage of that…
As it turned out, there were ways to do just that. Many ways, in fact. But whether or not they worked depended on a lot of other variables. What language the game was coded in, what said code looked like, whether the inputs were sanitized or validated… There were a whole slew of reasons why those approaches might fail. Reasons that, given how blind she was, meant there would be a lot of trial and error involved.
…Well, at least it's something. Kaitlyn rolled her shoulders, stretching from the slight hunch she'd found herself adopting. And I need to start somewhere. Might as well start with the simple solutions and go from there. If I can't get this to do something in a few loops… then maybe I'll look into more extreme options.
Of course, she'd keep researching and learning in the meantime. There was every possibility that there were other, better options her searching had yet to uncover. But it was a start.
She checked the date on her phone. By this point, the end of the loop was quickly approaching. While she had hopes of finding an exploit she could use at any point, the resets presented a promising testing opportunity she couldn't afford to pass up.
Alright. Time to start making my name as a force to be reckoned with.
Cracking her knuckles, she got back to work.
***
Cycle 37 Complete!
Ending: Under the Radar
Total Endings Unlocked: 12