For sure. If that turns out to be the case, there’s no way my button’s ever going to willingly have a relationship with her.
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Although i do hope the incident is clarified soon , so we can be sure how will we be interacting with our parents rather than guessing and being uncertain.
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This is the first demo in a while that has actually managed to capture and keep my interest! I am really enjoying the subtlety of the superpowers in this world and your writing style suits the setting well. Glitch had my whole heart as soon as I met her.
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I really loved the update, I did notice a few typos but I’ll post those later. The flow felt really good, though I’m looking forward to asking Rosy to explain Kent’s file, and I’m also so curious about who’s controlling Button, at least whether Valero is and whether Valero is the mystery person from the subway route.
I will admit I tried like 12 times before finally beating Kent. Vindication 
. I do think it was dodgy that Kent didn’t say he was a Ment when he realised he could read Button’s mind, but since he’s an empath I’m wondering if he’s just used to tuning people out? Obviously it doesn’t justify not mentioning it, especially given his reaction to Button being pissed off was to very obviously enjoy their anger, but I’m kinda curious.
And since people are wondering about the Mum, my guess is that she and Button got into a fight over Button wanting to do something the Mum didn’t want them to do, as pretty much every teenager and their parents get into, but Mum actually physically controlled Button to prevent them doing it instead of just letting them be. It’d explain why Button apparently has enough of a relationship to see their father, or at least Nick thinks Button would be ok with it, but there’s no mention of their mother at all.
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@SourPeaches Sometimes the images are slow to load! You can check your MIV Files on the Stat screen if a profile doesn’t load correctly during the narrative.
@Redhood53, you can blur text by clicking the gear/flower locking icon at the top of the text screen (there should be a “blur spoilers” option).
@PhoenixKnight and @moonfungus As for why the loo . . . the reason is actually somewhat meta (and a slight spoiler): Normal writing rules mean that toilet scenes aren’t described. Most people don’t want to read about someone having a bowel movement. Thus, when the text skips ahead to Button washing their hands, the reader assumption is probably that they did actually go to the bathroom. Yet it’s not described. So what did Button actually do, that they didn’t realize they did?
@Servant_of_choices The incident with your mom is clarified before you interact with either of your parents. The reason for the teasers isn’t so much to string you guys along, but rather me awkwardly trying to balance real-time narrative with the need to explain a lot of backstory. My goal is for you to feel like your understanding of Button’s parents shift in the same way that Button’s understanding of them shifted–to innocent references about Hope being glad you made a friend and rolling her eyes at your brother and Dad, to “wtf happened”.
@CynicalCream Your relationship with K doesn’t change during the assignment itself, but it will change when you talk about the assignment with K later. If you had Sally threaten the dogs, or sprayed K with hot sauce, prepare to take a relationship hit unless you play your cards right
@fisheye Sorry that the Uncle Gary part bothered you! The idea with Gary (named after my own uncle, who is actually great, so sorry Uncle G) is that he’s an extremist who considers Ment abilities to be unnatural, and a conspiracy theorist who sees Button’s Zero as a birth defect caused by modern technology. He’s not opinionated–he’s crazy.
As for why embarrassed Button can’t stay back, chosing the option “Well, this is awkward” does do that and sets your reaction to “embarrassed”, but I took another look at it after your comment and will make the chose clearer. Maybe something like “Well, this is awkward. And humiliating.”
@forestnymph I’m so glad that someone got asked out by Glitch! I was a little worried that I hid that option too much, but I figure it made sense to lock it behind that particular option. Glitch really likes it when you ask them to throw the match, because it means that you see Glitch, and not Nox, as the real power.
Also, there was a bug with avocado toast not triggering correctly because I misspelled avocado in the code. So sorry about that to my millennial breakie peeps–it’s fixed now.
Thank you everyone for pointing out all the bugs and issues! I’m working on fixing those things today–this update was definitely a lot rougher, writing wise, due to there being so many branching paths and me being ready to move on to more exciting things. Chapter 2 was basically a glorified tutorial.
Now the real game begins 
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Got it boss. So incident clarified before the unwilling lunch dad , great!! Its going to be an awkward as hell lunch 
. Also to be fair it is K who took relationship hits this time , if players chose those options its pretty much because we all wanted to hit that relationship , not cool K not cool.
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Just alerting you to a typo I found:
In chapter 2, if you select that the other team plans on turning out the lights, there is a missing word here:
Sally chews her lip contemplatively. “Darkness will Kenna more likely not to see it. You’re sure that the cord will be long enough?”
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I’m kinda thinking that K didn’t think they were doing something wrong because they didn’t know that MC had a 0 on the Pollard’s. They might have thought that MC was letting them into their mind voluntarily.
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Sorry that logic is flawed , not to mention she had full access to mc’s brain she is also an empath , pretty damn sure she could have read what mc feels about unwanted mind prying and whether mc was willingly doing that or not.
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You know, now my brain is thinking of all the possibilities of what Button did. This could very well be just a simple field test like Baam mentioned…but now I’m thinking of all the things that could of happened and my blood is pumping! I’m between being incredibly terrified and excited.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I think that no matter what really happen, Button won’t ever be able to trust her again.
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Enjoyed the update a lot—even though it’s pretty short from a “single playthrough” perspective, it’s immediately obvious how much work and thought went into this just from the sheer variety of options available.
One small-ish thing I’d like to point out is that the requirements for the hybrid personality checks seem a bit high. With one of my MCs, I stuck pretty hard to a morbid/humor split, with one major exception (I got a hefty, and definitely unintended, boost to confidence by explaining where Latvia is…which seems a bit off to me in its own right, TBH, more on that later), and still ended up with 66% morbidity and 36% humor—not enough to trigger the hybrid response or even the dedicated morbid response.
The system seems balanced around the assumption that you’ll pump every available point into one or two of the stats at the complete dismissal of the third one, which would be a fair assumption except that there are a lot of decisions in Chapter 2 where it’s not clear which stat is going to go up. Like I said, I didn’t consider explaining where Latvia is to be a particularly confident move; my MC was confident she knew the answer, sure, but in my mind it wasn’t really an expression of an overall comfort or certainty with her position in life. (It’s worth noting that you don’t get a similar confidence boost for later saying that you’re super smart and aced the entrance exam on your own merits.)
I’m starting to suspect something like this as well, actually. From what I can tell, K does not at any point display any level of understanding or awareness of why the MC even could have a problem with what happened, even if you selected options in Chapter 1 that very plainly laid out how much you don’t want your mind read. (There’s even an option where you explicitly think “please don’t be able to read my mind”, which I chose.) K actually seems genuinely confused in several versions of the scene, regardless.
Unless they’re playing dumb just to be an even bigger asshole than we already think they are (which seems…phenomenally uncool, and not really consistent with what we’ve heard about K, from either the characters or the author), I have a hard time seeing how they could have heard the MC’s inner monologue and still felt like they did nothing worth getting upset over.
Of course, if I’m wrong and K really was reading our mind, still felt like they did nothing wrong, and then had the audacity to play innocent…pretty sure I stand with the “nothing they can possibly say would justify their actions (and also I feel zero remorse over what I did)” crowd. Just don’t see how somebody could have so little regard for someone’s privacy and emotional security and still be an RO worth pursuing, at least not without a significant amount of character growth.
If I’m right, though, I look forward to the tables being turned and my MC being the one who feels terrible about what happened. (And also learning how K is able to tune thoughts out so completely, 'cause that seems super relevant and significant for the MC, especially the one I’d planned to have romance K.)
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Or maybe the hybrid stats aren’t a bit high. Maybe they’re completely unbalanced, using random numbers that seemed to work ok for me while playtesting. Not that I would ever admit to such careless coding, of course. 
I plan on completely redoing the personality gains, since I tried experimenting with fairmath and didn’t like it. I need to redo the whole shebang to make hybrid stats work better. Until then, I’ll reduce the hybrid checks by 10.
As for the speculation about K . . .
K is twisty, and I love that their reaction to meeting Button again is making people go “hmmm”. It should.
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Well you’re saying that uncle Gary is plain crazy because of his conspiracy theories about ment abilities and MC’s zero score being a side effect of technological advancements. But what if, he is actually pretending to act out crazy so that the ments don’t know he’s actually part of the resistance against ments or something but the ments aren’t actually taking his thoughts serious as they consider it some ramblings of a crazy guy. That would be hilarious.
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Okay so I absolutely love this game and have spent too much time either thinking about it or rambling incoherently to anyone stuck in a car with me about it to not leave a comment at this point. Very rarely is there a game where I actually want to go back and try all the options instead of just sticking to one path, but the amount of time I spent yesterday going through every option in the new update was ludicrous and I loved every second of it.
Also! I have a theory! In regards to K! Which I’m not actually sure if that’s a thing you’re allowed to share in the forum because I never post anything but it was either this or attached some string to a cork board and bribe my brother into listening to me rant for several minutes! Anyways, my feelings on K at this point are that I’m pretty sure they’re not actually a Ment. The reaction they have to Button being upset at them in the new update seems rooted more in genuine confusion than an attempt to pretend you weren’t snooping through your neighbors thoughts for an entire car ride. Now that could just be ‘I don’t understand why you would be upset about me invading your mind and not telling you’ but that seems just unnecessarily callous, and so the more probable reason in my opinion would be K wasn’t able to read Button’s mind at all and so actually has no idea why they’re acting weird now. Also, in the RO info in the initial post it’s mentioned that K “relies more on their athleticism and gymnastic skill than their mental abilities while in the field” which honestly has always made me a bit suspicious of how powerful K really is. Relying on physical abilities would be both a decent cover for not having mental powers and also the only option one would have if that was the case.That and while I’m not an expert on mental powers, if I personally was going to pick one to fake it’d being an empath. It wouldn’t be exceptionally easy and you couldn’t manipulate emotions which would be a giveaway, but if you got good enough at picking up body language and other cues you might be able to fake picking up someone’s emotions in a pinch.
That’s about as coherent as I can make that. Now back to creating a playlist for my Button because this game is all I’m going to think about this week.
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If you mentally flirt with them again after finding out, which my MC did because they didn’t really care about their mind being read, they still don’t react and act confused. Also their dad is the mayor, someone with influence who could easily fake Ment abilities on the documents for them. Maybe K not being a Ment looks bad for them, either way I’m still into them lol.
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It would be more intriguing for my poor mc if Uncle Gary was actually onto something and there was at least some faint hope on the possibility of a technological or medical solution to the mc’s problems.
Uncle Gary’s conspiracy theories could have a core of truth depending on whether in this world Ments have always existed throughout history or if they are a more recent phenomenon. I mean maybe in this timeline the Roswell UFO was real and the government tampered with and maybe deliberately released something they shouldn’t have and the water fluoridation in the US really has a more nefarious component to it in this world? 
Anyway fictional conspiracy theories are fun! 
I also hope my mc would have beaten that telepathic bully up good as it is the least they deserve for attempting to maim him. And now we also know why the mc cannot have nice things or a life of their own, like Kent, despite coming from a family that is likely to be just as wealthy and influential. 
I’m guessing this, no way to know if a Ment covertly infiltrated the compound after all. But I would at least like an option that is less negative towards Uncle Gary even if he is a crazy old coot my mc would probably like him as at least it means there is one other person in his family who also isn’t a hugely important celebrity or world leader either. Even if Uncle Gary isn’t totally broken like him and at least free to lead his own independent life then, providing he was nice to my mc while he was younger then in many ways my would feel closer to and look up to Uncle Gary more than his own parents.
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I think i would just be filled with rage and hate everybody if i lived this MCs life.
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This…this actually would make a lot of sense actually. Especially considering one of the things you can notice about his profile when discussing it with Glitch.
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Saint nick helps Mc shield and check his mind against involuntary control.
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And wow possibility of K not even being a ment never crossed my mind , good theory guys let’s see what wilde have in store for us though.
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