WMG / Virtue's Last Reward

Warning, Spoilers Off applies to all Wild Mass Guessing pages so all spoilers below are unmarked. Please post speculation about Zero Time Dilemma HERE, on its own page.

Zero III is the 9th Man.

• Because why not?
  • How about it's an A.I. based on his personality?
    • Jossed, Zero III is an A.I. created by Zero II, who is a future version of Sigma.

New characters

• Phi- Santa's daughter
  • Unlikely. The game takes place just a year after the first game. Unless time travel is involved, Santa is too young to have a daughter Phi's age.
    • Considering revelations made late in the game, it's possible for this to be true, although it's never confirmed nor denied.
    • It's actually not. While the game takes place 40 years later rather than a year later as is believed, Phi is one of the three characters who actually comes from the 'present', along with Clover, Alice and Sigma's consciousness.
    • Also Jossed anyway, Phi's parents are revealed in Zero Time Dilemma.
• Sigma- Ninth Guy's son
  • No word on this, but it's unlikely.
    • Not specifically Jossed, but they do have different surnames.
• Old Guy- ?
  • Junpei.
• Jumpsuit masked guy- Seven(???)
  • Jossed. He's a clone of Sigma.
• Alice lookalike- Seven/Lotus's (Just Lotus?) daughter
  • The Alice lookalike seems like it will be the "Alice" that appeared in the end of game one. It will probably explain whether she is in fact an ancient mummy or whatever.
  • It has been said that her body is composed of Ice-9, so this can be considered confirmed.
  • It is indeed the Alice who appears in the ending of 999, but she denies being the ancient mummy and gives a (relatively) mundane explanation for her appearance in the desert.
• Magician Guy- ?
  • New character.
• Blond Boy- Old guy's grandson (This one is confirmed)
  • Apparently not. A newer trailer said they weren't really related, but hang out together.
    • I'd call it confirmed; he's an adopted grandson, but that's close enough.
• Pink Hair- Somehow related to clover
  • Confirmed to be Clover herself.
• Redhead woman- ?
  • Another new character.

New character expies

Sigma- Junpei
Jumpsuit masked guy- Seven
Alice lookalike- Lotus
Pink Hair- Clover
Redhead woman- Akane

The characters of the first game were developed to distort what you would expect them to be by their appearances and mannerisms. These characters, in suit, will have opposite personalities to the expied characters.

• Eh, this one was more or less true. Sigma and Junpei were a lot alike (at least in terms of basic personality, their story/history differs wildly), Seven and K were both big amnesiacs, Alice and Lotus weren't too different, Pink Hair ended up being Clover, and in terms of temperament Akane and Luna weren't too different, even if, like Sigma/Junpei their backgrounds weren't alike.

Luna (the orange-haired woman) is a Cute and Psycho

"Not really what she seems to be, according to some rumors."

• We can safely say this is Jossed.

Luna is a Red Herring.

In the anime promo, the camera notably lingers on her when Sigma asks "Who would do such a thing?" While she will turn out to have her secrets, she won't be responsible for the new Nonary Game — instead, she exists to make players think she's an Expy of Akane.

• More or less confirmed. She's an AI who is working with Akane, but she isn't actually responsible for the AB Game.

Junpei is Zero the 3rd

The bunny motif, the betrayal theme of the third Nonary Game, it all seems to point to him.

• Jossed

Clover will be unsaveable in Extreme Escape Adventure: Good People Die.

As an unescapable Player Punch.

• Alternately, saving her will be very difficult, and typically involve a Sadistic Choice.
• Thankfully Jossed.

K is Ace.

Thank about it, what better way is there to punish the creator of the original Nonary Game than to have him participate in another, similar game? You know, while I'm at it...

• Jossed

K is one of the 9 people from 999, barring Clover or The 9th man.

Because why else would they put in a character who has amnesia, and whose face is hidden?

• To hide the fact that he's a clone of the protagonist, perhaps?

Zero-3 will change depending on the ending.

It's a stretch, but it would be interesting.

• Actually ends up applying to another character. Yay Schrödinger's Gun!

The funyarinpa will make another appearance

Simply because it's too good a line to waste.

• Jossed. It actually doesn't come back until the third game.

The game will suggest that June is pulling the strings.

And it will turn out to be just a cruel tease by the writers to make us think that Junpei had actually found her.

• Actually, she IS pulling the strings once again. And the punch comes when Junpei states that because of what has happened, the Akane he cared about was gone. Ouch.

The ecchi promo game will somehow be plot relevant.

Maybe Zero 3's motivation is simply to see Clover's breasts?

• ...Jossed.

Extreme Escape Adventure: Good People Die will lack a Golden Ending.

There may be a True Ending among all the Multiple Endings, but there won't be a single Golden Path that leads to an unambigiously happy ending where everyone gets saved. Instead, the endings will either be bittersweet or complete downers. The player will be faced with unavoidable Sadistic Choices no matter what they do.

• Jossed. Everyone does get saved, but it's still more than a little bittersweet...

Aksys WILL localize Good People Die, and has just been screwing with us.

Recently, the following quote appeared at the end of a post on the Aksys main page:"Bonus: You might want to pick up the next Nintendo Power, on stands on 2/28, for a very special announcement....."I'm thinking this might be the announcement that they are going to go ahead and localize it. I mean, they do still have that mystery game in the fall, and they know the demand is there... (A man can dream, can't he?)

• Sweet Nonary Jones, CONFIRMED!

The characters, like in 999, will also be based on the Enneagram.

Tenmyouji is a Reformer (1), K is a Helper (2), Dio is an Achiever (3), Alice is an Individualist (4), Quark is an Investigator (5), Clover is (again) a Loyalist (6), Sigma is an Enthusiast (7), Phi is a Challenger (8) and Luna is a Peacemaker (9).

• Confirmed, although their specific numbers aren't mentioned.

K is Zero, but he doesn't know it.

He wanted to play his own game, so he gave himself amnesia.

• Very close to the mark - while the theory was right, it is Sigma, not K, who is the amnesiac (or more accurately, younger version of) Zero.

The creator of Zero III is...

June. That's why it refers to Clover as Cleaver (an Axe Ending reference only June would know about) and is a rabbit (Sub Ending reference that June would also be the only one to know about). Furthermore, the designation of the number III implies that the second Zero, if they aren't June or Santa, would at least be aware of their identity as the original Zero. Lord Gordain and Ace never used the moniker in their games. Therefore, June is either working with Zero or is Zero.

• Confirmed. June is working with this Zero.
  • Clover as Cleaver in the English version only, in Japanese she's Yotsuba-kun. Much like Akane's fake name of 'June' being a clever translation. (Junpei mentioning as a child June was the last time he saw her.)

Sigma is a Homestuck fan, and his favorite character is Nepeta Leijon.

How else do you explain the cat puns?

• Pawsibly a better explanation than that purr-vided by the Hidden Files.

Clover is Obfuscating Stupidity.

Most people have noticed how incredibly brain dead Clover is in this game, especially compared to the last Nonary Game. You'd think that for someone who works for a secret agency by using her esper powers to prevent terrorist bioweapon attacks she'd be a little smarter or more educated. However, due to her presence in the last two Nonary Games as well as her powers with the Morphogentic Fields, Zero picked her to work with him in the NEXT Nonary Game/Mission in the Mars test facility. She was already told of everything by Akane and is merely faking surprise at the info Tenmyouji/Junpei tells her. Her purpose in this game is to prep Sigma about knowledge of the past Nonary games as well as let him feed off her weaker esper powers all while remaining under the radar with her "stupid girl" facade. Zero's future purpose for her is unknown, but undoubtedly important. She is far smarter than she appears in this game, and Zero knows that. However, too much suspicion cannot be drawn to her, as her being forced into coughing up details will ruin the current game's purpose. Therefore, she hides her inside knowledge and smarts by pretending to be dumb.

• All of the specifics here are Jossed, though it's possible Clover still is Obfuscating Stupidity and it's just never stated.

Sigma was born with one functional eye

That explains why he did not notice it was missing.

• It is stated in the Golden Ending that Sigma lost his eye and his two arms saving a random girl. That element will also appear on the next game, according to Word of God.
  • Not relevant, the WMG is that Sigma was blind in the eye he lost, not that he only ever had one eye.
  • Also, this was retconned. Sigma lost his eye and arms saving more than one person, and only one of them was a girl.

Phi survives/escapes in every timeline.

I don't remember the specifics of each timeline, but I recall not seeing Phi among the bodies in Alice's ending, and in K's ending she is injected with the tubocurarine antidote, and so can no longer be killed by the bracelet. We see her escape in her own ending as well as Dio's.

• Jossed. Her body is among the dead in Clover's Ending and she is killed by the bombs in the Sigma and Alice Endings.

In the epilogue, Akane is Addressing the Player.

The player is the uncontrolled variable. Despite Phi, Sigma, and the real Kyle having already gone to the past, "Kyle" has a "spare" consciousness inhabiting him, and Akane tells him that he will also be going to the past. Her words make it clear that, despite having no knowledge of what went on in the Nevada Test Site, he will be going back to save the world, and he too has the power to travel through time and through worlds. Since this consciousness can do such a thing and has all knowledge of what went on in the game, it stands to reason that the player will be taking an active character role in the story.

As a variant to the above, the mysterious character is Blickwinkel

• It may serve the same purpose, but unlikely. The writer was actually surprised that people outside Japan knew that Ever17 even existed.

Luna is based on a real person, a Free The Soul cultist who is responsible for unleashing the Radical-6 virus.

Consider the possibility that robot Luna was based on a real person. When the group finds the memory card containing a transmission from the Nevada Test Site, a female voice that sounds incredibly like Luna responds that she "killed them all" (referring to six others in the Test Site, and the "six billion humans" in the world), implying that she deliberately released the Radical-6 virus. Now consider that Luna is the only person that Dio votes "Ally" against, that Dio's fall from grace within the Myrmidons was due to sexual dabbling with a woman, and that Free The Soul tends to clone its most important members. Luna is either an identical copy of this cultist, or has enough similarities to her that Dio is reminded of her and is unwilling to vote against her.

• Sigma, at one point, sacrifices himself to be practically mutilated to save a woman in the Nevada Test Site. This could mean that Sigma, in one way or another, cared deeply for this woman over the course of the game and, weather or not he did in fact manage to keep her alive, wished to keep her in his life in one way or another, and made Robot Luna a 'Mother' to his 'Child', in a way, making her his wife regardless if Kyle accepted her or not.
• She wasn't a Free the Soul cultist, but yes, Luna is based on the woman in the Dcom test site recording who could have stopped Radical-6 and chose not to.

None of the AI characters ever actually broke Asimov's Three Laws.

Asimov's Three Laws actually do allow robots to sacrifice some people if, by doing so, they save more people than they sacrificed; when presented with a Sadistic Choice in which people get hurt no matter what they do, sufficiently intelligent robots are supposed to figure out which option that is least harmful, and then do that. (In Asimov's stories, being forced to actually make such a decision can end up causing the robot to break down shortly afterward, but some of them *can* make those kinds of decisions.) Because the Nonary Game deaths were the only way that they knew of to save billions of people from the Radical-6 virus, there's no need to invoke the Zeroth Law directly; the First Law, properly interpreted, is enough.

Speculation on the nature of timejumping

Sigma and Dr. Klim are the same person, differentiated by 45 years worth of mental information consisting of memories and probably other components of a human mind developed during that time. Likewise, Sigma from one timeline is the same person as himself in another excecpt for that information, which differs in each timeline. Sigma's ESP allows him to displace that information across time and space.

What happens when a jump occurs depends on if every one of his jumps was a 'swap' or not. If they were all swaps, then the relevant information from the person at Point B is removed and put into the one at Point A, and the one at A believes himself to be the one from B and vice versa. If the jumps were not all swaps, then for some of them the information at Point B is sent to Point A without removing it from its original location; the person at Point B continues with whatever he was doing, and the one at Point A becomes A + B (or A + some of B depending on the state of his memories).

Alice and All-ice

All-ice mentioned in 999 is actually Alice after she traveled back in time after Another End.

• According to Word of God the entire All-Ice business was nothing but an Urban Legend in the first place. It's in the game to get you thinking about Ice-9 and how a change in inanimate matter can be contagious via the morphogenetic field.

Quark is Is Akane's son

Due to the Timey-Wimey Ball nature of the game and the fact that everything is interconnected in the game it would stand that Junpei just finding Quark in the middle of a thunderstorm isn't a random thing. What happened was that Akane got pregnant intentionally so that Junpei would wind up raising Quark. The reason for this is that Akane does know/knows/will know that Junpei will be heartbroken once he finds out what Akane has done to make sure that they can change the past. So when that happens Junpei might either commit suicide or just waste away. So she makes sure that he has something to live for so she gets pregnant. It also allows her to have a child with Junpei in a very roundabout way. This is also the reason that Luna saves him in most endings while letting others die. She was programmed that no matter what make it so that Quark survives. Akane is willing to let herself be killed, let Junpei and the others dies but as a mother she cannot let Quark die.

• According to Word of God, Quark isn't intended to be anyone in particular, but the author likes the idea of him being the grandson of one of the 999 characters.

Quark is Dio's son

We know Dio had some dalliances with a woman, and that's why he fell out of graces with the Myrmidons. But what if, horror of horrors, this perfect clone being created in a perfect way actually fathered an imperfect child as well? When the woman he had been with presented him with his son, he panicked, slew her, and left her the child to die... only to be found by a salvage man named Tenmyouji... Support? Quark and Dio have the same hair color, and usually the same eye color as well. (Dio's eyes appear blue in some shots, but appear to be brown like Quark's in the official art.

• According to Word of God, Quark isn't intended to be anyone in particular, but the author likes the idea of him being the grandson of one of the 999 characters.

Dio votes Ally against Luna because he's more cautious

One odd thing about Dio is that he will vote Ally in the first AB when going down the Golden Path. Seems to go against everything we've seen from his personality so far. However when you think about it, in this timeline before the game started he got decked from behind, in this timeline and only this timeline. He then woke up inside the AB Room with no idea how he got there and how he succeeded in getting accepted into the game. This means he knows someone else in the group knows that he's not meant to be there. So he votes ally to make the others be more trusting of him. He doesn't think he needs to this in the other timeline because he believes he has fooled everyone and can just blame the betray on Quark. In the Golden Timeline he knows someone has good reason to betray him but doesn't know who. He can guess it won't be Luna because she looks far to frail to knock him out so he takes a gamble on voting ally on the first round so whoever knocks him out might reconsider his opinion along with making him seen better in the eyes of everyone else.

• Jossed. The creator stated on his Twitter that it's due to Dio having a crush on Luna.
  • That can be his sole reasoning. He has to at least justify it to himself. Liking Luna and thinking she's the kind of person who wouldn't betray him exactly fits in with Dio's alternate train of thought in this timeline.

Radical-6 is derived from Hinamizawa Syndrome.

• The similarities between them are unsettling, and we already know that there was scientific exploration into the Syndrome. Perhaps someone in Zero Escape's past tried to use it, or a more controlled variant of it, for his/her own ends?

The cat Dio saved was the one that cursed Sigma.

• Just to tie everything together.

Everyone has low level multiple timeline awareness abilities like Sigma and Phi.

That's why everyone's ally and betray answers change at the same time yours does, because like Phi they also vaguely remember when you picked different answers.

The events of the Zero Escape series take place in Sburb.

There's plenty of weird time shit going around, and the disaster with the annihilation reactors all exploding takes place on 4/13/2029.

• I thought I remembered at least one person trying to contact the outside and failing. If the story were taking place in the Medium, all communications devices would work freely regardless of their location. (Unless Zero programmed them to only pretend they were trying to call out in the first place.)

Radical-6 was created by Brother...

...as a means of connecting to everyone through the morphogenetic field. It's heavily implied that Brother has esper abilities, and for him to be as influential and long-lived as he is, he may be as strong, or stronger, than Akane. We all know that the symptoms of Radical-6 alter the brain's perception of time, and the stress ultimately leads to suicide. But what if that's not really the case? What if the virus grants access, however limited, to the morphic fields?

Consider what Quark says when he gets infected. He shouts about how if he could just kill his body, his soul would be free. Sound a lot like Free the Soul's message? There's no way a virus could influence the words a person would say. So what if contracting the virus allows a person to access the morphic fields, thereby allowing Brother to urge that person to suicide? Remember that Free the Soul wants to cleanse the Earth by killing all those people whom they consider to be worthless. By using Radical-6 as a method to give Brother access to their minds, he can kill with ultimate efficiency, as he can spare anyone he knows to be loyal to him and his cause. Also, remember how it's mentioned that there was suspicion that the people who decided to use the annihilation reactors to cleanse the virus were already infected? What if that was true, and Brother used his access to their minds to detonate the reactors and create nuclear winter? Hell, what if that was his goal for the virus all along?

There is a time branch where all this is faked.

Phi said it. THEY were Schrodinger's Cat, in the box, and the world will change one way or the other when the box is opened. In the first time branch, Radical-6 happened, and the Annihilation Engine explosions that turned the world red. In the second, these things didn't happen; but the cast has to make it look like it happened for the time travellers, so what they saw would be the same.

• We've already seen this can work, because Akane and Kyle can trade places as K depending on if Akane lives or not. Phi also comments on how everything about Radical-6 could be faked, but why do that? There is a motive with Tricked Out Time.

One of Sigma's alternate selves is Little Mac.

Have you seen their characters next to eachother? This troper thinks that they look remarkably similar. Sigma just happened to win the genetic lottery when it came to height, meanwhile Little Mac lost that battle and due to his insecurity about it went into boxing instead of studying for college. As for the difference in names well, unless it was planned beforehand who's to say S Igma wasn't namedspur in the moment. Alternatively, Little Mac is a stage name or he changed his name to distance himself from family (considering we don't know much about Sigma's family, there could be bad blood there.)

It's possible considering the multiverse theory. Of coursethis is also Just for Fun.