Roleplay / Airlocked Round Two

"Families argue. You can bicker and fight and be so mad you wanna throttle 'em. But you never stop loving them."

—Queenie

Tropes from round two of Airlocked and its intermission. Please note that the ending twist to Round One is treated as a Late-Arrival Spoiler on this page, as the remainder of the series cannot be discussed without it; similarly, the intermission section will necessarily spoil Round Two proper.

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Round 2

• Accidental Misnaming: Kip can't remember Bolton's name when he talks about the last season.
• Achilles in His Tent: Heart when he remembers more and more of his friends dying, Choromatsu when he's contemplating killing himself, and Clarith when her plan appears to have failed and gotten Queenie executed.
• Action Dress Rip: Roland suggests that Yuuri do this when she can't walk in her formal gown. She declines, her mind going immediately to the rip fraying too high upward.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted. While Rhys's Jack AI is an opportunistic narcissist who would sell out the entire mansion, that's exactly what he was built to be. Not to mention that P.A.L. isn't an AI at all, despite being presented as one. The real PAL seems to be a straight example, though.
• All the Good Men Are Gay: Kip pouts that Choromatsu is "a cute little guy. All the straight ones are. Tragic."
• Amusing Injuries: The result of playing around with the "death orbs" and Church's slippery dance floor antics.
• Angel/Devil Shipping: Both the in-universe fans and Lee herself see the Mai/Lee relationship as this. Mai sees it differently, which Character Development proves right when Lee slowly stops trying to be "evil."
• Anywhere but Their Lips: Kip goes around kissing the winners in congratulations after the bowling game, and while Church gets a kiss on the lips, most of the others get off easy.
• The Artifact: Kip claims that the murder game mechanic in the rules is this and that the program is really just a social experiment and an In Name Only Spin-Off of Airlocked! We know, of course, that this is untrue.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Jack, after having taken over Rhys's body, calls a number of characters by their fan-given nicknames.
  • Junpei's robot arm having a vibrate function was an OOC joke that quickly became game canon.
  • A Kink Meme story talked about an in-universe Troll Fic where one Ass Pull was that C.E.C.E. was human. Not only is an organic character named Cece one of the new NPCs, but a similar reveal happens at the end of the round with C.E.C.E.'s Round 2 counterpart, P.A.L.
• The Bet: Thanks to one of these, Choromatsu ends up promising to wear his official merchandise lingerie the next time it comes out of the dumbwaiter. Just when he thought he was safe, it comes out during the very last roll of the game.
• Big "WHAT?!": Junpei when he finds out that Queenie isn't dead and her execution was staged.
• Boldly Coming: Four different Champions bang Kip during the round. He would have preferred more.
• Boring Insult: Church calls P.A.L.'s withholding information "boring" because he knows all their captors want is a good show.
• Bootstrapped Theme: "Stand By Me," which started as a fourth-wall-leaning joke, indisputably became this following the final trial, in which the remaining Champions chorused it together in the face of their uncertain fates.
• Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Jack, possessing Rhys, considers Rhys's relationship with Angel to be "taking advantage" of her and says the case in which he used his daughter's boyfriend's body would have ended a lot worse (but "more awesome" for Jack himself) had they gone any further.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Takumi describes the group as "demons and drunks and drunk demons."
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: While this doesn't happen to the actual out-of-universe audience, it's done to the in-universe audience, since the game acknowledges and outright tells the Champions that they're on an Immoral Reality Show (even mentioning Airlocked! by name).
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: What the Junpei/Yuuri ship is at first glance. Then you see that they're more than that, with devious, silly, and fiercely loyal natures in common.
• Butt-Monkey: The Jack AI is this in deadland, due to being a self-centred Card-Carrying Villain.
• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": Trials are now "rose ceremonies."
• Calling the Old Man Out: Angel gets to do this to Roomba Jack in deadland.
• Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough: Ardyn is well-spoken and charismatic even when he doesn't actually want to be liked, and Church, who serves under him, is a crude hothead.
• Central Theme: Sometimes, you can keep on doing the right thing and you keep getting hurt. That doesn't mean you should give up trying to be a good person.
• Cerebus Retcon: From the characters' point of view, anyway. The pregnancy test gag from Round 1 returns, but Roland takes it as a sign of things to come and is incensed.
• Chastity Couple: Nari and Cece, in great contrast with nearly everybody else in the mansion.
• Chekhov's Gag:
  • The pregnancy test gag comes back in week one. It doesn't do anything to the plot until week eight, where Nari urges Queenie to use her PIP to clear up her pregnancy scare.
  • During their first real interaction in week one, Choromatsu has to explain to Takumi that the toilet pipes aren't big enough for them, or anyone, to pass through and therefore not a valid means of escape. The entire scene is Played for Laughs. During week six, it turns out that the toilet is how Kip (later disguised as Takumi with a hardlight projector) got in and out of the bathroom to save Choromatsu's life during his suicide attempt.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: P.A.L. is more than happy to do this in some of the executions; the third comes to mind in its absolute excess. He makes a change in the fourth when he won't execute a dead person, though, and starts to do nice things from then on...
• Companion Cube: Rii regains hers before remembering that she was deluding herself into thinking it was her sister. She becomes suspicious of it and worried about why she was putting everyone in danger for a teddy bear.
• Covered in Gunge: When Church slathers the dance floor in lube, he and everyone he drags into sliding around the dance studio gets coated in it.
• Dare to Be Badass: When Clarith takes the choice of saving Queenie out of the Champions' hands and puts it into P.A.L.'s, she does it for this reason, to challenge P.A.L. to do the right thing and stand up to his employers. The others resent her for taking that risk and what they see as negating their own choice, but it gets better when they discover that P.A.L. listened.
• Death Faked for You: P.A.L. does this for Queenie at her "execution." Everyone else just thinks there's No Body Left Behind, but when Queenie decides to return to the Champions rather than run off with him, he lets her go and kicks off endgame.
• Difficulty Spike: invoked Done intentionally for the third case, as the first two were solved in two hours each, a huge contrast with Round 1's going in circles with theories.
• The Dog Bites Back: How P.A.L. paints his taking over the show from Kip. Since they're the same person, he frames it as this in reverse when Kip tries to take the show back from P.A.L., Kip now being the dog.
• Doomed by Canon: Since the same player can't have more than one character make the survivor pool in rounds 1-3, there was never any chance of Finn, Mai, or Takumi surviving.
• Dragged into Drag: Averted; the drag show motive is voluntary. Some do get pushed or encouraged when they're too shy, though.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Price, properly introduced in Round 3, wrote Kip's psychiatric evaluation.
• Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion: Kip wanted to take over all his Champions' worlds, or at least the Earths, to get back into his people's good graces. However, his bosses' betrayal and the Champions' acceptance make him side with them.
• Everyone Is Bi: With the clear exception of Clarith, who only likes women, nearly everyone likes multiple genders.
• Everybody Lives: Week five, where the investigation reveals a preventable death that is successfully stopped.
• Exact Words: The culprit of the second trial claims not to have crushed the victim to death after poisoning him. Nari points out that of course she didn't: he choked to death.
• Excited Title! Two-Part Episode Name!: The one Airlocked! episode we see named in Kip's interrupted Spetflix marathon implies that the show has these. However, the later IC wiki mostly has Western-style episode titles, with the one named in R2 grandfathered in.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
  • Queenie reflects on her own world at the second Truth-Telling Session and stops in the middle of her musing to gasp, "I think my sister's boss is an imposter!"
  • Lee starts out defending Jack for his For Your Own Good justification for keeping Angel isolated and forcing her to kill and betray at his will, then realizes halfway through that that's what her own handlers did to her for the sake of their conspiracy. She stops thinking he's so great after that.
• Faking the Dead: Kip really wasn't vapourized by P.A.L..
• Fight Clubbing: Nishitani starts up something like this for fun. Most of the others are annoyed, but some go with it.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Most of the group becomes this quickly, to the glee of their sympathetic Overseers and irritating P.A.L., who wants them dead by one another's hands.
• First Girl Wins: If you check the timestamps, Ardyn is the first person Church tagged on the intro log. The two of them become an Official Couple.
• Flower Motifs: Roses are heavily featured in the round and were also key to the marketing as seen in the Round 1 intermission.
• Foil:
  • While Clarith is a Nervous Wreck and Mai an Emotionless Girl, they look like Palette Swaps (with white and black hair, respectively, and the same hair ribbon), they've both had to take care of ill mothers and deal with everyone being against them back home, hesitated to open up to the kind and pure souls who started hanging around with them anyway, and have massive issues with hating themselves.
  • Ardyn and Arianna are also this to each other. Both are purple-haired royals who followed a set duty Because Destiny Says So until it screwed them over, but Arianna remains a loving optimist, while the part of Ardyn that wishes he were still like that diminishes every week.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In week two, Cece says that it's only been her, Kip, and PAL until the Champions arrived. PAL, not P.A.L.. Unbeknownst to the players, they're separate entities and the latter is Kip's alter ego.
  • Kip gives Ardyn a kiss on the hand and bows, apparently because of the latter's regal demeanor. It's actually because he's the tallest Champion in the mansion, designating him leader to an Irken like Kip.
• Fun with Flushing: When Takumi tests out all the unfamiliar technology, he takes up a four-person bathroom to flush the toilet over and over.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The cast consists of 10 men and 10 women, which means no coed roommate assignments (though one of the shared bathrooms has men in one of the connected bedrooms and women in the other).
• God of Evil: How Ardyn describes the being he's a Champion of.
• Going Commando: Junpei tries to figure out if Mai is doing this when she reveals that the underwear he got from the regains was hers. She informs him that people generally own more than one set of underwear.
• Harem Seeker: The FAQ for this season and the fact that it's loosely inspired by The Bachelor imply that this round's Overseer is one of these, trying to find true love among the captives. Kip claims that he isn't, but that might at least partially be because of the in-universe excuse that the network couldn't get the rights to actually revive The Bachelor.
• Hideous Hangover Cure: Nishitani gives Junpei some nasty-smelling tea to help with his hangover in Week 2.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: An AI copy of Angel's Archnemesis Dad possesses her boyfriend and all three of them die on Father's Day weekend.
• Hospital Hottie: Apparently, Junpei has a thing for people dressing up in nurse outfits.
• Hostile Show Takeover: PAL pulls one of these in-universe when he wrests control of the show from Kip and Cece to run things himself.
• Hotter and Sexier: While any R18 content has to fade to black or be taken off the community, with the romantic focus of the in-universe game and all the innuendo and teasing thrown around, this round beats out even Trustfell R3 for rounds you really might not want to read at work.
• I Call Him "Mister Happy": Junpei thinks this practice is hilarious. Church, not so much.
• Icon of Rebellion: Orange ribbons, after Roland's death, and joined by red after Kip's. Poppies also appear in the dance studio as a Call-Back to Round 1, where they were the Icon of Rebellion.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: An oddly heartwarming(?) variation in Nishitani's dead letters, where Nishitani essentially tells Church and Ardyn, "I know you two somehow ended up in love for whatever reason, but you'd better not go monogamous, because Queenie needs Church more."
• I Kiss Your Hand: Church does this to the ring on Ardyn's hand. And they wonder why people ship it.
• The "I Love You" Stigma: Yuuri and Junpei deliberately avoid talking about their feelings as "love" for way too long. Ardyn/Church and Nari/Cece also hesitate until very late in the game.
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: Kip's thoughts when he sees Arianna in the deer costume and is hit with Cuteness Proximity.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Roland says this when Nishitani calms him down from his episode in the first week's meeting.
• Interface Screw: Rhys's profile is edited to include Handsome Jack as the Champion Hacker when Case 4 reveals he's still in his head.
• In Vino Veritas: Natsuhi shuts down Junpei's excuse that he was blackout drunk for the Panty Claus incident by saying "a drunk man doesn't lie."
• I Should Have Been Better: Yuuri says this verbatim when she finally remembers her sister.
• It's All About Me: The round's unity-and-friendship overtones are built in large part by the worst antagonists being people with this attitude, like P.A.L., Kip in the first two weeks, Lee post-reveal, and the Jack AI, who won't shut up about themselves or think for one second that they've ever done anything wrong.
• Kill Me Now, or Forever Stay Your Hand: When Ardyn remembers becoming as evil as his profile implies and isn't sure who he is anymore, Church dares him to kill him to escape right then and there if he's really that irredeemable. It almost breaks into an "I Know You Are in There Somewhere" Fight, but Ardyn realizes he'd have nothing to gain and breaks down, asking for help.
• Kissing Under the Influence: Clarith drapes over and kisses Arianna after getting ridiculously drunk.
• Lady and Knight: The shippers among the Champions see Ardyn and Church as an all-male version of this; Queenie sets them up on a date because of it. They're right.
• Last Girl Wins: If you check the timestamps, aside from the NPCs and a few people who hit up the log late, Takumi is the last person Finn tagged on the intro log. The two of them become an Official Couple.
• Least Common Skin Tone: Clarith is confused when she meets Finn because Musical Fantasy Eurasia has a conspicuous lack of black characters.
• Love Redeems: A major theme in this round is love in all forms making people better than they were, from helping with unhealthy coping mechanisms to extending forgiveness to enemies or teaching those who were considered corrupted and betrayed (and we don't just mean Ardyn) to love again.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Cece is disgusted when Kip wants someone to use the bar for this. He and Nishitani do it anyway, and later, Church suggests it only to get shot down by Ardyn (at least for the location itself, anyway).
• Malicious Misnaming: What Kip calling Bolton "Bongo" really was.
• Marshmallow Hell: Queenie smooshes Kip's true form into her chest at the mastermind reveal.
• Meaningful Rename: During the final week, a few Champions decide to take new last names from their found family, becoming Nari Nishitani, Ardyn Tenmyouji, and Arianna Wakasa.
• Mood Whiplash: The drag show "motive" is a riot, with stage fright, silly costumes, and lots of Fanservice. Then P.A.L. crashes the party, kills Kip, vapourizes Junpei's arm, and leaves the Champions with a reminder that they can't really live peacefully together or the network will make them suffer until something snaps.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted in case three. Even Takumi can't hit the right target in the middle of a close-quarters battle on a trampoline floor.
• Non Human Lover Reveal: Cece shows her true appearance (and finally reveals what kind of alien she is) to Nari in private before anyone else finds out.
• No One Gets Left Behind: The reason that Ardyn and Church start a rebellion in the middle of the trial for Nishitani's murder. It at first doesn't seem to work, but the next day, the "executed" Queenie turns up alive.
• No Periods, Period: Averted during Week 4 when it's implied that some of the women aren't in the best of states (the malnourished, bodily messed-up Angel gets off free).
• No-Tell Motel: Deadland is temporarily moved from Mason's Harbour to a low-budget love hotel on a tropical island.
• Not Quite Dead: Junpei at the third investigation, where he appears to be dead and we're told that he is, but he proves to be only unconscious when he loses the Starscourge.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Inverted, It's stressed that this exchange isn't actually visible to the characters, even though we got to see it. However, we find out later that it never actually happened and was just there to fool the players.
• One-Winged Angel: Kip tries to do this when he turns off his hardlight projector and enters the mastermind trial in his true form. In true Airlocked fashion, though, it backfires to comedic effect: the Champions he's come to face all start calling him small and cute.
• People Zoo: Tolresch and Bur were rescued by the network from one of these so they could be trapped in indentured servitude as unpaid interns.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: A delirious dying Choromatsu says this when he's being saved by what he thinks is Takumi.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Kip spends a bored afternoon making some of these up In-Universe. Some of them are groanworthy puns.
• Powers as Programs: The first motive de-nerfs powers (save for Story Breaker Powers like Queenie's mind-reading) and the third does the same, only it also swaps them around (including giving some dead people's powers to the living). However, as the Champions discover, just because Mary got Roland's demon form doesn't mean she got his cannibalism-inducing curse...
• Power Perversion Potential: Church immediately suggests this when he and Junpei accidentally discover the vibrate function on the latter's robot arm.
• Precision F-Strike: Yuuri calls Handsome Jack a bastard during the fourth trial's MTB, when she usually wouldn't use that kind of language. Arianna and Queenie also get to drop rare F-bombs late in the game.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: After interacting on the meme comm and observing the show from the sidelines for the whole round, the crew of the Temerity finally shows up in the last log.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Kip makes it clear on the first day that, while affectionate physical contact is encouraged, sexual assault is a one-way ticket to being Thrown Out the Airlock without a trial.
• Reality TV Show Mansion: This round's space station is one of these.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Ardyn is the blue to his brash, emotional vassals-in-name-only, though don't tell Church he's a red anything.
• Remembered I Could Fly: Very late in the game, Ardyn realizes that just because he doesn't have any swords to use as a Flash Step conductor, that doesn't mean a pen won't do in a pinch.
• Rewatch Bonus: P.A.L.'s character development and apparent Heel–Face Turn make a lot more sense after you read the final investigation. In particular, his getting more sadistic with the third execution (because he was attached to the victim killed by the one being executed), only to start a Heel–Face Turn the next week after he's thanked for the first time in his P.A.L. persona (because he craves approval so badly), and faking Queenie's death and asking her to run away with him when he hadn't seemed interested in her before (played off at first by Queenie being a Charm Person, but even if P.A.L. hadn't been close to Queenie, Kip sure was).
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Referenced in the description for the tattoo parlour, implying that someone will at one point be inked with a spelling mistake.
  "Go forth, and have No Regerts!"
• Sacred First Kiss: Why Choromatsu faints when Queenie playfully kisses him during King's Game. Not that he's complaining, though...
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Kip, who ended Round 1 as an Obliviously Evil Hate Sink, ends up standing up to P.A.L. to protect the Champions and their happiness when he was assigned to make them kill each other. P.A.L. kills him for it. Then, while that turns out to be all staged, he really does stand up to the network to save Choromatsu.
• Sexy Whatever Outfit: When the living's formalwear is replaced by Halloween costumes, Church gets a "sexy Big Bad Wolf" costume. Arianna gets to be a sexy deer, Clarith is Snow White with some of the skirt turned see-through, and Cece and Kip show up in matching lion-tamer and sexy-lion costumes. (Kip is the sexy lion.)
• Sharp-Dressed Man: All the men before their formalwear is replaced by dumb Halloween costumes.
• Sleeping with the Boss: Defied by Cece, who turns down all of Kip's flirting because she reports to him (not that she'd want him anyway, and Round 5 spoilers complicate the issue). At least four different Champions do take him up on it, though they see him as an Authority in Name Only.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Subverted. Queenie has a scare very late in the round and starts imagining raising Nishitani's child now that he's gone, but the PIP's pregnancy test comes up negative. The son of the Empress of Earth also qualifies.
• Status Effects: One sabotage consists of these, including Slow, Cold, and Zombie.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Junpei acknowledges that he and his canon love interest are this, "sometimes together, maybe better apart." Soon after, he finally admits that what he feels for Yuuri is love too.
• Stealth Pun: Arianna's CR chart classifies Mai as a Ronin, most likely due to her sword. In modern Japan, "ronin" is slang for a high school graduate who hasn't been accepted to a university yet, which, the profiles reveal, Mai also is.
• Stress Vomit: Kip looks like he's about to do this when they find the first body, but he manages to keep it down.
• Taking You with Me: Though he turns out to be Not Quite Dead once powers are returned to their rightful owners, Junpei is attacked and presumed dead by Takumi's demons in Week 4, and the dusting of light particles on the floor found near him indicate that he killed it before he was taken out. (The same "ghost glitter" was found near Michaela's body in Case 1, but the demon had taken itself out by knocking the table over onto itself.)
• Tarot Troubles: Queenie gives unintentionally accurate tarot readings during a party that reflect their paths and character development.
• Tattoo as Character Type: Nishitani has an intricate back tattoo to show his powerful position in the yakuza. Lee tattoos conspiracy symbols on herself due to her connection with the Illuminati and foreshadowing how she plans to use everyone to get out. Rhys has a large tattoo with a nipple window to show that he tries to look cool but isn't. Halfway through the round, many of the Champions get sentimental tattoos to show their unity.
• Teen Pregnancy: Turns out to be a Berserk Button for Roland, who transforms in a fit of anger when he learns about the PIP's pregnancy test function and immediately thinks of the younger Champions (even though all of them are legal, some are still 18-19).
• Thanatos Gambit: The Champions deduce that Kip's mastermind trial is this because he has nowhere to go and believes that his betrayal will make them turn on him too.
• Their First Time: Yuuri and Junpei have the luck to do this the night before a physically and mentally traumatizing Wham Episode. Nari gets Arianna to blush when she asks about her and Clarith the day after they get married, too.
• Themed Aliases: Junpei and Church give most of their friends code names of Marvel characters for fun.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Queenie and Ardyn each got one of their items/abilities back that were nerfed for the round, much like Xander with Siegfried, in the ending arc after all they've been through.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Kip's real form is tiny compared to most anybody, and Queenie wants to get back together even knowing what he really looks like.
• To Be Lawful or Good: In the week seven trial, Clarith splits the vote while everyone else is abstaining. She intends it to allow P.A.L. to complete the transformation she acknowledges in him, and though it seems to really backfire on her, it turns out to have worked.
• Trademark Favourite Food: Nari asks for these so she can cook memorial meals for the sympathetic dead.
• Trash the Set: In the end, the survivor pool sets the Fantasy Sweet on fire and escapes before it combusts.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Kip Larimer and P.A.L. are the same person, an exiled Irken just named Kip who became dependent upon affection instead of repulsed by it.
• Villain Takes an Interest: P.A.L. says that Nari would make a good Overseer.
• Was It All a Lie?: Choromatsu corners Roland and snaps at him when he realizes that Roland, who had comforted him in the shock of finding Takumi, was the killer.
• Wham Episode:
  • While it was teased by the mods for a while, it's still a shock for Kip to reveal that they aren't in a virtual reality after all. Later, he adds some backstory for Season One: Bolton killed one of their Overseers.
  • Then there's the fourth motive, which starts with a fun event and ends with P.A.L. killing Kip, destroying Junpei's arm and replacing it with a robot arm, and making it clear that choosing to live in happy harmony when the game's only halfway done will not be tolerated.
  • The fifth investigation. For the first time in the game, a death is prevented, meaning no victim and no trial.
  • The first day of the final week. Queenie is alive!
  • Naturally, the finale too. It had a formal mastermind trial, revealing that Kip and P.A.L. were the same person all along, a set of "good" and "bad" personae for a conflicted man who wanted to conquer their homes to make his people love him again and ended up Becoming the Mask.
• What Measure Is a Non-Unique?: Addressed when Junpei develops a theory that everyone's a clone.
• Who Would Want to Watch Us?: Nishitani complains that being kidnapped for a show is ridiculous because the group isn't even entertaining.
• Wrong-Name Outburst: Junpei accidentally calls Ardyn "Dad" once.
• You Need to Get Laid: Nishitani says this of the prudish, awkward Nari and, later, of Ardyn. Neither is impressed.
• Zero-Approval Gambit: Lee's entire approach to deadland is trying to make people hate her so much that they find a way to escape just to be rid of her. Since it obviously doesn't end up leading to an escape, she starts to doubt herself.

Round 2 Intermission

• Badass in Distress: Most of the captured characters, both dead hostages and living members of the first group into the Q&A, are the most combat- or strategy-capable characters.
• Bad News in a Good Way: The Doctor says with practised cheer, "But they were definitely waiting for us, so some good news. We were right that it was a trap."
• Ding-Dong-Ditch Distraction: Junpei attempts this during the rescue log for the living. Yl'lb is floored by the audacity of the plan and goes to cause a better distraction himself.
• Hilarity Sues: Yl'lb tells the Doctor and Yurika to try and get a lawyer to get back at the network instead of sneak around gathering intel. Naturally, they know that's not going to work.
• I'm Not Doing That Again: Togami when helping people through a window gets his jacket dirty.
• Minimalist Cast: Jane is the only player character who meets Yl'lb at the Temerity. This happened because most of the Champions who stayed behind did so because their players were busy.
• Mood Whiplash: Expected another fun Breather Episode, did you? Deadland goes from silly shopping to investigating disappearances, while the living story goes from Parlor Games to trying to get intel at a Q&A set up to lure them out.
• Mutual Masquerade: At first, the Champions and Yl'lb each think the other is cluelessly working for the enemy. Because they don't know they've all been used and discarded by InterGal 7's conspiracy, the conversation breaks down quickly.
• Poor Communication Kills: Thanks to crossed wires when they were trying to figure out what was going on stealthily, Yl'lb and the Champions each believe the other is helping InterGal 7 hold their loved ones hostage and taunting them about it.
• Quirky Household: Yl'lb Ein's mansion becomes this once the Champions move in.
• Shopping Montage: We finally get to see a trip to Mason's Harbour Costco. Later, the living hit up a space version of the West Edmonton Mall.
• Understatement: After waking up in a cell after a recon mission goes poorly...
  Yurika: ...We may have made a few mistakes.
• We Used to Be Friends: Yl'lb reflects that E.P. used to be kind and helpful to everyone on the network, but then backstabbed him and used fine print in his contract to kidnap Wilhelmina.
• You Know I'm Black, Right?: Jane makes a fearful comment about AIs and Heart just gives her a look.

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