[Slow Reading] Seabed, Part 5: Room 008 (TIPS 1)
A/N: Since this series stopped for a while and now is re-starting, here's some links to the previous parts if you want to review them:
Hello, and welcome back – at long last – to the Seabed Slow Read!
For a few little
administrative points: I wasn’t intending to let this sit for as
long as it did, but sometimes life just gets the better of me, and
the daily grind redoubles its efforts. I’m not great at picking
things back up once I’ve started them and loss the thread, so
please bear with me as I get re-acquainted with the workflow here.
Part of my
motivation for doing this is that I’ve enjoyed great support on
ko-fi, and while I don’t feel good specifically saying ‘pay me
and I’ll do this thing’ (a la patreon) because I wouldn’t want
to disappoint people if I fail, I still wanted to have a goal to show
some appreciation for the people who tipped me so generously. I spent
some of the money on helping a friend afford a plushie in Wave 2 of
the OJ plushie kickstarter, and I’ve been trying to spread the love
a little by giving others ko-fis along the way, but the rest of it
will be put towards (hopefully) commissioning sprites so I can tinker
around with making an OJ VN myself.
In order to make
this easier to keep up with, I’ll probably simply the detail a bit
and try and smooth out the process so it takes less work. A slightly
less detailed analysis that actually gets done is better than one I
never start, being the theory. Also: I am actually still blind to
this game! I haven’t played it since I stopped doing these the
first time, because I always sorta wanted to come back to it and have
a fresh view.
Jumping back in,
last time we unlocked the first TIPs section of the game. Honestly,
TIPs and similar things (like, say, the ATEs in FFIX and skits in the
‘Tales Of’ series) are one of the things that excite me most
about video games as a storytelling medium, allowing for short breaks
into deeper world building or character interaction without slowing
down the pace of the main plot. Other mediums don’t necessarily
have the same level of compartmentalisation, due to being – for
want of a better word – two-dimensional. In a book or a movie, you
can do one of two things: you can go forward, or you can go back. You
can’t have a little bit of content adjacent and off to the side, to
be pursued at the reader’s own leisure; they must
go through whatever’s there to get to the rest of the piece, even
if it’s not fully relevant. Things
like that, and the ability of reactive storytelling (where a game
will branch depending on player action) are things that really excite
me, since they’d be difficult to execute in a purely literary
medium for logistical reasons.
Here’s
the TIPs selection screen, by the way:
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| Under the water |
As you can see, it’s to do with a room 008 in Narasaki’s Clinic, if we’re to take anything from the scene and chapter titles. I don’t believe we’ve run into Narasaki yet, although she’s listed as a significant character in the steam page synopsis of the game, so I’m sure we’ll run into her at some point.
Before
even beginning to read, we can start thinking about the significance
of 008 as a number. It’s only one digit away from being 108, a
number noteworthy for its connections to Buddhist tradition, which is
worth keeping in mind in any piece of media originating in Japan, but
there are other possible connections as well. 8 is often a stand-in
or signifier of infinity, so 008 can be read as
‘nothing-nothing-infinity’; in a game that seems to be centred
around three main characters or perspectives, it might end up being
indicative of their fates. That’s a somewhat spurious theory,
though.
When
we begin the scene, the music is a repeating trill of piano notes
that reminds me somewhat of ‘stock’ hospital themes in TV dramas
– something like Casualty, although that might just be my memory
playing up. There’s also a ‘mystical’ sound that I’ve learned
to associate with temples or drops of water falling into a still
lake, although it’s difficult to describe it acoustically without
knowing what produces it.
 |
| Narasaki clinic? |
The unknown narrator tells us about the corridor we’re in: it’s apparently stale and humid, humid of course being yet another of those water-themed words the game likes to use. It’s early in the morning; the speaker is tired, probably as a result of that, but is going about their daily task of inspecting the room equipment. They’re apparently very used to the job, since they pull out a bunch of keys bristling with ‘about fifty keys’ from their pocket and find the one for room 008 without breaking their stride, and before they actually reach it. Perhaps it’s just a very long corridor.
 |
| Room 008 |
As soon as they open the door, they give us a slightly unsettling metaphor: the ‘room sucked much of the fresh air inside, almost like it was breathing’. Having played many a video game, and thus beaten many sections where you go inside a creature’s body and/or fight a boss battle in a womb allegory, ‘living’ structures always rub me slightly the wrong way. That’s also not the kind of metaphor you usually make about a room if there isn’t some genuine history between it and you; it seems to me like the narrator has some reason for jumping to the thought of the room being alive.
They
go on to describe the room as ‘murky and dust-riddled’, and they
enter ‘quickly’. Having a murky, dust-riddled room in any medical
setting seems very odd to me; my experience is that beds and rooms
are in far shorter supply than patients, and few places have rooms
lying around that they don’t use day-to-day. Is this a place that’s
being avoided for some reason? The narrator seems keen to go about
their business and get done as fast as possible, so there’s
potential. (On a side note,
this is the second time we’ve seen the word ‘murky’ that I can
recall: the last time was when Sachiko and Takako were talking about
her odd reading nooks).
They
mention that ‘the table and sofa were covered with white sheets,
making them look like ghosts’. This line seems particularly
significant – enough so that I think if I went back and dug out the
preliminary notes I made for this scene almost half a year ago, it
was one of the things I earmarked back then. I distinctly remember
writing the line ‘a storage room for ghosts’ in my notebook, and
thinking it was a nice turn of phrase if nothing else. Ghosts,
though, are very interesting. Considering that memories seem to be a
very large part of the game’s themes, it might be wise to point out
that when you consider the word ‘haunting’ or ‘haunted’, it
usually relates to ghosts (typically when dealing with places), or,
when applied to humans, to memories, sins, or dreams, all of which
might turn out to be relevant as the story unfolds.
Further
narration gives us a little bit of detail and some time frames: the
room has been a storage room for ten years, and the narrator hasn’t
set foot in it for half a year. They go about taking inventory,
noting a shelf filled with dishware, and a shelf full of thick,
hardcover books.
“I spotted a
case wrapped in a piece of cloth with checkered design – in it,
there were forks, spoons and knives.”
Seems innocuous, but this description was offset in a different
paragraph, which makes it feel somewhat more significant to me. I’ll
be on the lookout for a checkered cloth in the main story.
The
narrator seemingly notices something out of place with one of the
dishes, and mentions the previous owner of the room made the dish
when she was in elementary school as a member of the pottery club –
palm-sized, shaped like a tulip, and coloured in ‘reddish brown –
like rusted iron’. The colouration seems significant. Given that
the owner of the room hasn’t been there for ten years, and it’s a
medical setting to boot, the rusted iron comparison might be a hint
towards a degradation of health from somebody who was previously
strong, i.e. a person rusting away. It’s not quite
the colour of blood, although iron does bring blood to mind –
anybody who’s been around fresh blood knows it has a somewhat
metallic taste and smell, and there’s a certain amount of iron in
blood in any event, but blood itself usually dries black and is
brighter in hue when fresh.
It’s
mentioned that the maker of the dish received help from her
supervisor, who was a professional potter, and was satisfied with the
piece in all aspects except the colour. This seems oddly specific for
a random member of medical staff to know, so we might deduce that
there’s a connection between the narrator and the previous owner of
the room – which somewhat fits in with my avoidance theory, that
this particular room is somehow associated with painful memories for
the narrator and they’ve been trying not to touch it since. I don’t
think it’s happy circumstances, anyway.
The
narrator, believing they might have missed something, remembers that
the room’s occupant actually made three dishes in her sixth year of
elementary school: one that was presented to her grandfather, and two
that she kept for herself and later stored in that room, consisting
of the rust-coloured dish and a green one that seems to have gone
missing.
Before
we get into the matter of cups disappearing from a place completely
full of dust, locked by a key held by the narrator, and which that
narrator hasn’t opened in half a year, I have an inkling that the
previous owner of the room might have been Sachiko. So far in the
story, she’s the only character who’s shown any interest in
books, and who is thematically associated with them; furthermore, she
was previously mentioned as reading books in her grandmother’s
room, which was where the shelf containing the books she ‘lost’
were. (The books, upon further inspection of that passage, were
specifically noted as being in reddish-brown covers, the same shade
as the dish). So evidently she kept contact with her grandparents
enough that she might present her grandfather with such a dish. The
missing green cup, by the way, might indicate
Takako, who has green hair.
It’s a circumstantial hypothesis, but until I have anything better
to go on, and we learn more about the checkered cloth or who did what
in elementary school, it seems as likely as any other.
Two
books are also missing from the room; the narrator searches the
entire place for missing articles and notes them down, as well as the
date (not given to us, sadly, or else we’d have a solid point of
reference in terms of time). After that, the narrator locks the
‘murky’ room – there’s that word again – and notes that the
whole thing took them an hour. They return the keys to the duty room,
and go about their other business for the day, ending the scene. The
fact that they return the keys to the duty room, however, is a way of
telling us that they’re not the only person with access to them,
which means we can’t jump to any supernatural conclusions yet.
Well,
that was a relatively short scene, but it’s a nice way to gently
ease myself back into this after so long. Hopefully there’ll be a
next one, since I’m looking forward to finally
getting to continue reading the story myself. Until then!
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| The end of TIPs |
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