Malik's heart happened here!

And here is a very quick and dirty writeup that I did late at night and am too lazy to go back and proofread.

START: You are in a dark room. You are all alone, as far as you can tell; you can't exactly look around or move to find out. You're on your belly on a cold hard surface that feels like stone-- your feet and hands are bound tightly, and there's the taste of leather in your mouth. Off in the distance, you can hear a rustling sound that's subtly inhuman, like a snake slithering across stone.

The conceit of this heart is that, well… it's YGO and there are two people in Malik's head. Qamar basically has free reign in Malik's soul room, though his heart is actually more like a soul room++. He has to allow this, but he's going to allow it on his terms. The basic mechanic is that where you choose to let him cut you determines where you go.

…Unfortunately, only Shes played along, and he didn't play along very well despite knowing the basic mechanic via seeing memories, so everyone else got their back sliced and got sent to Qamar's pathway. And the only reason Shes didn't get sent along Qamar's pathway was that he's one of the people who got a +1 boost. (Judai would have, as well, had he let Qamar cut him.)

Basically, if you let him cut your face, even if he haaaates you, he'd send you to the section of Malik's heart where he can't appear to protect anything. It's the most open and trusting part of the heart… and incidentally, the barest and most minimal.

But that's not where most people ended up, so let's talk instead about Qamar's path. :)

THE TORCH ROOM: You find yourself in a small room lit by red torches that are pulsing in an oddly rhythmic way, like a heartbeat. The walls are made of stone, as is the floor, and you can see no doors, though there's an odd marking across the room from you. What you can see is knives. Many, many knives strewn about, some in piles, some scattered across the floor. There's a sour taste on your mouth and your head feels like it's swimming.

This room is Anger, one of the two main emotions driving Qamar's existence. Instead of lots of meaningful things that are very deep, it has emotion. There are knives that will attack you, and your only way out of the room is to bleed. The only really meaningful thing that people could trigger in here is the smear of Carnelian paint. Qamar hates Carnelian and doesn't trust them! He is angry because he believes they want to kill him.

You… couldn't really change anything in here except drop amplifiers. And nobody tried anything unexpected. You could try to fight the thing that appears once you open the fear door, because something does (you can't see it because all the torches went out) but, uh… you… you can't win. And it's a good thing that nobody tried.

THE LACKING IN TORCH ROOM: Were you expecting there to be a floor there when you stepped through? Because, whoops, there isn't.

You fall a short distance to land on something cold and hard. It feels like stone, but everything around you is dark. There's a weird buzz in the air; you can't tell if it's auditory or not. Your breath seems a lot louder in the room. And where you landed on the ground, it feels… wet? You can hear something that sounds like breathing behind you; it's quick and arrhythmic.

The other emotion fueling Qamar's creation is fear. Like the other room, this is a whole lot of emotion and nothing interactive or meaningful to the heart. This room is dark, it's inexplicable, it's intended to be scary. There is no way to win. The only way to get out is to try to help the child or to ask for help yourself, or both. In that event, Qamar shoves you at the door.

Unlike the anger room, where the monster that appears is something unbeatable and powerful, there is no monster here. There's fear. You can kill some fear very easily-- just by sticking your arms out with intent to hit, as Rin discovered-- but it can't be defeated, it's still there. Again, there's really nothing you can do to change anything without the amplifiers-- Fear, even moreso than Anger, is scripted and cannot be changed. It can only grow, it cannot shrink.

So let's move on to the path that Shes started off on.

THE HALL: You find yourself in a very, very long hall made entirely of black stone-- you can't see the other end in the flickering torchlight. What you can see is that you're standing on a thin rock ledge just barely big enough for your feet, and that there's a chasm below.

Something's glinting in the chasm. In fact, many things are glinting in the chasm.

The ledge goes around both edges of the chasm and on into the distance; you could probably shuffle along it if you really wanted to.

This is essentially the main part of Malik's soul room: an area without NPCs that represents the mind of the person. This is also where we get traps. The first chasm, for the record, is knives. :D YOU COULD HAVE JUMPED IN, IF YOU WANTED TO. I… don't know why you would have wanted to.

Then we come to the feast! Rin ate some of the meat on the table and got burned for her troubles; there was also koshari and wine available. All of them had effects. There's also jewelry, which Shes snagged and took with him as he went gallivanting off to the rest of the heart; this is a coping mechanism, and where Shes dropped it will take on coping mechanism aspects.

Then we have the second chasm! The second chasm is water. There was actually a super secret item in the water. :) But it's a secret.

The left path was obviously Qamar's; he'll heckle anyone who comes that way, but it's easier to see. The right path is Malik's main personality's; as he is completely blocked off from what they experience when Qamar is in control, anyone traveling that route will neither be able to see nor hear. As Rin experienced. While burned. Fun times!

Shes did get Qamar to send him to Malik's path, so I'll put that up, as well.

THE WINDOW ROOM: You find yourself in a clear, well-lit room with two large windows, one on either side. The air smells like sand and brine. The walls look to be stone painted over in white. There's also a door in the opposite wall; it's large and decorated with a strange language. It also appears to be locked with a simple sliding lock mechanism. In one corner is a table with a few small trinkets sitting on top of it, but otherwise the room appears to be empty.

This room is Hope! As Qamar has Anger and Fear, Malik keeps the emotions that Qamar can't really experience. But… it's a very, very empty route. Each of the objects did something, but Shes only touched one before he moved on.

THE BEACH: You open the door onto what appears to be a beach populated by incongruous trees. The sky is blue and cloudless, and the sun is shining bright. The water is lapping gently at the sand, and there are one or two shells visible, half-buried in the sand.

Across the way from you is a large black door standing in the middle of the sand.

This is Joy/Freedom. It… it is super empty. But at least it's pretty! Shes put a booster here, which is great. It should relax Malik a little bit and let him experience a little more happiness. There is something you can trigger here, but it did not happen.

THE DOORWAYS: You walk/stumble/fall into a well-lit room with white marble walls and a red marble floor. There are eight doorways in the hall; you are standing in front of one. The three across the room from you have green writing on them, but you can't read it. The three behind you all have red writing on them. The two on either side of the room, perpendicular to you, have black writing on them and are covered with thick black metal chains.

The room isn't empty, though. There's a fountain off to the side that's splashing clear water into a marble pool with minutely detailed tiling on the rim. There are also clean-looking bandages on a single chair (black and metal) next to the fountain.

In the middle of the floor, there's a senet set with the pieces and the board plated in gold. Will you play?

Have a diagram.

This is the other segment of Malik's soul room. The bandages can be used to heal, as can the water, though there was a bit of a secret to the water. For reference: moon red is Qamar's path, sun red is Malik's path, star red is their soul room. The black doors could not be opened by anyone at any time, no matter what; they're parts of the heart that are blocked off from anyone. This is mainly because there are some things I didn't want to have accessible to heart runners, but partially just because Qamar wouldn't have allowed it.

The senet game is a bad decision game! Losing means you lose a body part. On the other hand, if you win, Qamar will send you anywhere, even Malik's path, which is only accessible that way if you didn't unlock it in the beginning. He won't take orders in terms of "send me through this door" because you can open them yourself, but if anyone had asked him to, say, send them directly to the representation of how Malik views sex… he could have done that.

Judai won on his first try because he is a protagonist.

Okay, changes! The major change here is Judai dropping the booster near the bandages. This… doesn't actually have any effect on the stability of either personality, since they're really well balanced at the moment and are in a healthy equilibrium as compared to canon. But since it's their soul room, and they share it, their awareness of each other is amped up a bit. There might be some more carryover emotions that they can't really explain otherwise.

THE MAZE: The door opens to a dimly lit, narrow area. From the twists, it looks like it might be a maze of some sort… (You are facing NORTH; the path immediately turns EAST.)

This… is pure symbolism. And for some reason Shes went through the whole thing, which is kind of… okay, you weirdo. IT'S LONG. AND COMPLICATED. It's basically how Malik navigates interpersonal relationships. The easiest ones are closer to the door; the others are hard to find. The two objects in the maze, if you got that far (WHY, SHES?) were the empty book and the golden key. They don't really do anything on their own; there's no door to unlock or anything. But you could write in the book to make things easier.

Shes dumped both objects in the doorways room, which might make interpersonal relationships slightly easier to navigate. Or it might not. It's less that he doesn't have access to it and more that he doesn't have the emotional base (that empty book!) to really connect with most people.

I should also note that the people's names that appeared in here (the few who did) were more symbolic than… literally this person. Of course, if there was only one name, there's some sort of uniqueness to the ease of that relationship for whatever reason.

OBJECT ROOM: You find yourself in a room divided down the center. One half is black marble, the other half is white marble. The white side has what appears to be black veins, or roots. Both have small objects lined up along the wall. There is also a shelf pushed along the back wall, straddling the area where the marble is divided. It's basic, made of bare, untreated wood, and it is completely empty except for a small vial of dark liquid.

Pretty obviously a memory repository! The shelf, for the record, is memories that both personalities share access to. Putting memories on the shelf would allow Qamar to experience the emotional components of Malik's interactions or Malik to experience Qamar's memories… at all.

Rin put her enhancer on the motorcycle memory, which is linked to hope and resignation to his duty and an assortment of emotions that will now be amplified. He'll also be thinking about motorcycles a lot. Damn you, Aather, where are your bikes?

THE BOULDER BEACH: You step through the door onto a beach. The sun is low on the horizon and the sky is a bright orange. The water is gentle; there are waves lapping up against the shore, but they're small. There are large boulders and three mushroom clusters scattered along the beach; each cluster of mushrooms is circular and perfectly formed so that you can't see into the circle. There does appear to be a gap in each of them large enough to squeeze through…

There's a fourth mushroom circle, but it looks like someone's taken an axe to the mushrooms; they're nothing more than stumps, and they appear to be oozing blood.

Each mushroom is a mini-map of how Malik's doing re: certain aspects of his life in Aather. The bloody stumps is, I feel, both the most obvious and the least-- it's his family, more specifically their lack. There was a way to heal them over, but it didn't happen.

Going back to the beginning and in order now! The first mushroom cluster is Carnelian. It is… damaged on the inside, the light's dim, etc. There are three nails in the wall, two of them all the way in, one of them half out… Judai pushed it further in, so Malik's going to trust Ling less, at least for a bit. But Judai also dropped the booster in team, which means that Malik's going to regain some of the initial team dere that got worn off by cynicism and awareness of how they felt about Qamar.

The second mushroom cluster is pretty much a representation of the maze. If you looked down, you could see knives representing various interactions Malik's received that helped him, but not even the sharpest knives could cut through the invisible wall.

The third mushroom cluster is A SEX DUNGEON! …Well. The equivalent. It is well lit and cozy because it is a total coping mechanism and has been super enjoyable thus far, and Shes dropped a booster here s-so uh. Yes. Thank you, Shes, for improving Malik's sex drive and his reliance on it as a way to get human contact. This… wasn't something I expected, so it's not the method that the heart would have given to get Qamar to be okay with sex as well, but it might do something there.

--

AND THAT'S IT. I know I skimmed a ton of stuff; if you want to know more/if I forgot something you did/whatever, here's where you ask. :D