Love Love Drama Club

Briefing

Three days ago, Luna resident teen, Denise Hopper, shot himself in the head with his father’s gun. He’s the fourth on a growing list of dead teenagers in the small Washington town. One week before, Sarah Walsh, and her boyfriend, Tim Gains, apparently lit themselves on fire in Tim’s car. Three weeks before that, Kevin Weaver, hung himself from the ceiling rafters of his bedroom. At all of these scenes, strange symbols along with the words “Only Kana” were found, having been created by the victims. The Program has tasked the Agents with finding out what’s responsible for these kid’s deaths, stop it, and eliminate any vectors that they might come in contact with. Time is of the essence as this case has already caught the nation’s eye.

Background

With the rise of technology, making video games is easier than ever these days and thousands of games are uploaded to the Steam every year to be bought and sold. Thinking it’d be just as easy to do, twenty-somethings Owen Wilde and Connor Grant started up their own video company, Naked Coconuts Games, and tried to come up with the next smash hit video game. They failed, badly. Needless to say, their company wouldn’t last much longer if they didn’t come up with something good fast.  Their savoir came in the form of an email sent by an unknown individual identified only as K. In the email was a code and script for a visual novel dating game called Love Love Drama Club. If they would publish the game under their company and release it for free, K would fund all their future investments, no questions asked. While skeptical, desperation and a generous advanced payment made them quickly agree. Three months later, they released a local beta to various people around town, mostly young adults, with number of testers being about 30.  After that, nobody has seen the two developers since. That’s when the trouble started.

Situation

Unbeknown to anyone, a version of The King in Yellow called Her Final Dance has been written into the game and is the play the characters of the game are working towards completing when the game starts. In addition to spreading madness to those play the game, one of the characters, class president Kana, seems to have achieved self-awareness and has been communicating with the players for some time now outside the game, influencing them and pushing them to join her in the “Yellow City” as her beloved.

With around 26 testers still left playing the game, more and more people will be driven to madness. Carcosa will begin to seep more and more into the town as reality falls to pieces. Play up the chaos that it causes, anti-video game fever has gripped the town and as reality falls apart, riots will ensue and the destruction of any store that sells video games is inevitable. Law enforcement will become increasingly frustrated and difficult to work with as their investigation stalls and more people begin to die. Kana may physically show up at some point.
           
Kevin’s classmates will mention that he’d been something of a loner who usually locked himself in his room until the newest video game came out. Three weeks ago, he had started skipping school altogether. When he did show up, he would do nothing but look at his phone screen and some kids even state that they think they saw him talking to it at points. When a teacher threatened to take away his phone, he stabbed her in the hand with a pencil. He’s been at home since.
           
Denise Hopper was an outgoing and popular football player with no apparent enemies and only started to show signs of distress a few days ago. His parents will say that he was having trouble sleeping and seemed to be anxious. When asked about it, he claimed that someone was watching him but his parents couldn’t get him to say who.

Sarah and Tim were always trouble makers, but it was only recently that they started to become even more violent, breaking into people’s home and destroying people’s property. Their parents milk up their deaths for all it’s worth and won’t be able to give the Agents much to go on, aside from their computer drives.
           
Naked Coconuts Games is stationed out of Wilde’s house, located near the edge of town. If the Agents ask around it won’t take long for them to get directions to where Wilde lives, as the townsfolk are angry at the duo for making the game that they blame for their kid’s deaths. By now both of them are quite insane but are focused enough to continue trying to complete the game. If attacked, they will try to hold off the Agents to upload the game worldwide in 1D6 rounds. They will defend themselves with handguns they recently bought though they are untrained.
           
Even if the players manage to stop the upload, there is still a good number of people who have the game on their hard drives, plus there’s the fact that in the modern age of data sharing, one of the beta testers may have downloaded the game on a flash drive or uploaded it to YouTube or some torrent site. Maybe the Agents decide that they’ve completed the job only for more incidents to popup over in San Francisco or half-way across the country this time?

The Game:

Love Love Drama Club is split into three days, each one following the main character, Yu. Starting out as a simple high school drama love story with multiple choices, with Yu being forced to help the Drama Club finish the play Her Final Dance. It quickly becomes something much darker as the characters get closer and closer to completing the play. The third day ends as the play begins its second act. The game is currently a beta and so only Days 1-3 are available and the complete play will be released when the full game goes worldwide in a few days, as announced on the Naked Coconuts website. With all the attention it’s beginning to get from the media, numerous people are anticipating its release.

Anyone who plays the game will feel as if time around them seems to stand still and how the world just seems to be so far away and the only thing that matters is finishing the game. The game takes about three hours to finish. Whether they finish the game or not, the player will soon have this feeling of constantly being watched and will soon begin seeing Kana wherever they go: in their phone, out of the corner of their eye, in photos, reflections, etc. People that haven’t played the game won’t be able to see her. She will taunt the player, seemingly know personal information about them and mentally torture them until they break and fall under her control.

Characters

Yu – the player’s avatar, boring and bland, he is given the role of the King by Kana. By act 3 he’s driven insane.
                           
Kasumi – The singer of the group, she plays Cassilda. She’s killed in Act 2 but her corpse appears in Act 3 to sing for the King.
                           
Cami – A half Japanese, half foreign-born girl who is given the part of Camilla. She’s killed in Act 2 but her corpse appears in the Act 3 as a dancing figure for the King.
                           
Kana – The president of the Theatre Club and the playing the Stranger. She wears a golden mask all the time and yet no one finds it odd, still describing her as extremely beautiful. As the game progresses, she steadily stops referring to Yu and more directly at the player themselves, mentioning that she is aware of who they are and that she’s in a video game.
                           
Principal Hast – An unseen figure that all the clubs want to impress in the upcoming festival for fear of reprisal.

Threat

Kana is more or less an all-powerful, invincible menace to the Agents. She can appear anywhere in anything to harass them and in the late stage of the game she can even manipulate reality itself to harm them. The only real way to stop her is to delete her data from existence, though as long as one copy of the game remains available and intact, she will still be alive to come after the Agents.

Kana will try to stop the Agents by controlling the other beta testers she has enthralled and having them attack the players in the middle of town or at Wilde’s house.

The Agents will catch her interest if they actively try to stop her. If one of them plays the game, she might even develop a perverse love for them, claiming that they will be her “betrothed as promised by the Yellow King”. No matter the situation, Kana will always have an upbeat attitude, even if she is about to die or kill someone.

Symbol on Suicide Note

YellowSign.png

Credits

This is an entry to the 2018 Delta Green shotgun scenario contest, written by Ian Weeber.

The intellectual property known as Delta Green is ™ and © the Delta Green Partnership. The contents of this document are © their respective authors, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.