The basic driving force behind this heart was that the memory Lambda took was so overwhelming she needed help "snapping out of it." Which is what you were doing at the endpoint of the heart! The heart was structured as branching paths that eventually led to the same two places—this was in part because there was a concrete goal of the heart run and thus I wanted it to be linear to a degree, but it's also significant that everything led back to the parts of her that are most "fundamental."


THE SEA OF FRAGMENTS

This was the starting point of the heart, and also representative of the detached "Observer" aspect of Lambda. THE NPC here had no real investment in anything; she was "ancient" and bored and just looking to be entertained, or even better, to maybe see something new. She was the aspect of the heart most willing to hand out (honest) information freely, because she felt no urge to hide anything and was interested to see what people would do with it.

Changes:

- None! This wasn't an aspect of the heart that could be truly modified.


AATHER

This area's pretty simple—it's representative of her self specifically in Aather and her feelings about the people there. It was a mash-up of Wonderland and Three's Cove, mostly, because those are the two realms she's familiar with, simply enough.

The Hall of Doors had a door for each team! Ruby, Citrine, and Onyx were on the ceiling because she's had no real memorable interaction with anyone on those teams and thus considers them teams that "have nothing to do with her." All the teams with shut doors are teams where she either has a fairly significant relationship with someone on the team or just a passing familiarity with the team as a whole, but not a very strong concept of how they actually function as a team. If she had significant-ish CR with anyone on one of those teams, there would be a picture of them on their team door! The pictures gave you feelings if you touched them, but no one did.

Kunzite, Jasper, Coral, and Carnelian all had open doors because those are the teams she knows best, and the inside the room would be a representation of how she views the team. Jasper looked neat and mechanical at a glance, but there were stuffed animals all over the floor in between the beds—because they are a team that can get pinned as ruthless at a glance, but they're secretly moe :), and as far as she can tell, they're close enough in their own way. No one went inside Coral or Carnelian, Coral was gaudy and sparkly but very warm and cozy, and Carnelian was really messy because she thinks they're basically a trainwreck. A REALLY LIKEABLE TRAINWRECK but yeah a trainwreck.

The inside of Kunzite was the largest, of course. There was a bed for each member of Kunzite, and some of them had extra things on them—those would've been memories, had anyone touched them. Lambda also had a bed for herself, but it was different from the others. It was very fluffy and comfortable and cutesy because she's very happy and comfortable with her place on Kunzite! But there was also a bunch of crap under the bed that represented all the things she keeps hidden from everyone else, basically. There were vaguer things, like periods of frustration or distress (the glass) and her... murderous tendencies (the bones), but also specifically there was the memory she took like an IC month ago foreshadowing what she would remember later, which had been a source of a lot of anxiety for a very long time but she never mentioned to anyone but Nunnally.

The basement had more general Kunzite feels. A lot of it was just the same as their actual basement or taken from their entry to Hatter's basement design game and doesn't need an explanation—though as an Easter Egg the sheet music set up on the piano was a song Sakuya had played for her that he said reminded him of her. The stuff on the fireplace mantel—the mini-pie, the chalice, and the vials—all contained memories that were vital to the formation of her identity on Kunzite. The chains on the window were the most abstract thing in this section and a little tricky to explain, but basically they were representative of her ties to who she used to be vs. who she could be in Aather. Lambda has already changed significantly in Aather, but has trouble actively embracing further change because... well, she's not totally at the point where she can admit she should. Touching the chains gave you senses of that—she's proud of a lot of what her old self was and had, she doesn't know what she'd do next if she did change, etc.

Going into Kunzite and coming back out to the Hall would get the door to the next section where you could reach it.

Changes:

- Qamar cut open a pillow on Lambda's bed and dropped it on the floor. This theoretically could cause a bit of irritation or discomfort regarding her place within Kunzite, but Rabi and Ruka put in back on the bed and positioned it so the rip wouldn't show, so it's negligible.

- Bolin adjusted the chains so a little more light could get through, so she'll be a little less hung up on holding herself up to the standards of her old self.

- Nunnally sorted the stuff under the bed into neat piles, so those feelings and such will remain hidden, but feel slightly more "organized" rather than a jumbled mess. She also took the memory lollipop, cleaned it up, and wrapped it with a paper that read "The worst is over. No matter how lost you become or remember becoming, you will never be truly alone. ♥" and put it under her pillow. She'll be more open about that memory, and feel a lot more secure about it.


CANDY FOREST

This was largely a representation of playfulness and also surface presentation. Everything here was in the form of candy, because, well, it's Lambda! If you actually tried the candy, though, it was very sweet and tasty but not super filling because it's a more superficial part of the heart.

The gingerbread house largely covered presentation. The plush dolls on the bed were people she'd openly fawn over, the candies on the table represented pieces of her outward persona (cheerfulness, ditziness, brattiness, etc.), the mirror and vanity represented hiding true feelings or covering them up. She uses a lot of her outward presentation and silliness to have fun and forget about heavier stuff! That's what the scales with the invisible weight represented. You could balance it out by filling up one side with stuff from the room (I assigned each item a different point value, and you had to get them to add up to 15), and making the scales balance was the way to the next part of the heart.

The forest was pretty simple! It was just one big representation of her genuine predisposition towards silliness, playfulness, and innocent pranks. And it was very silly. You had to get past all the traps and reach the end to get to next part of the heart.

Changes

- Battler covered up the mirror with a bed sheet. This compels her to falsify what she's thinking or feeling less. Since he simply covered it up instead of breaking it, her ability to do so isn't damaged and she could uncover it if she felt she needed to—she just won't feel the urge to as much.


WITCHES' TEA ROOM

... okay so this part of the heart was horribly ill-planned to be honest. Buuut it was a pretty simple representation of Lambda's involvement in Beatrice's game. It was the tea room where a lot of the game is played out in canon, and through the windows you could see reflections of the various events that have played out on the game board that Lambda actually remembers. The game on the chessboard had initially almost reached a stalemate before being abandoned, which represented Lambda's goal in pushing the game into an eternal tie that she was never able to see through. The box for the chess pieces included the rules to Beatrice's game, and also held a black pawn that contained a memory of the time she tried to bribe Ange, which served as a pretty succinct description of her initial goals in her involvement in the game. To get to the next room, you had to place the pawn on the board.

Changes:

- Erika played the game out to a stalemate, which might've revitalized some of her attachment to her initial goal, but then Beatrice finished off the game by adding the pawn, so she's pretty accepting of the outcome the game did reach.


PLAYROOM

As one can guess, this room covered sadistic tendencies. All the damaged dolls represented her fondness for toying with people and hurting them, and the various doll parts her love for the grotesque. Most of the dolls here were of canon characters because her sadistic tendencies don't get to come out much in Aather, though there were representations of Battler and Erika's Aather selves (not of Beatrice, though, because she has come to more or less consider Beatrice off-limits in Aather; Battler's was mostly clean because she messes with him a bit but not overly much, and Erika's was even worse off than the canon version because their relationship is more rife with antagonism in Aather than it was in canon). A Lambdadelta doll was seated at the table in the center of the room with Bernkastel, who she wholly considers her partner-in-crime when it comes to these things. The tapes just had memories of her getting her sadistic jollies pretty much.

Changes:

- Seth organized the doll pieces—essentially a representation of violent tendencies—into neat stacks and put them under the table. She also took the Erika dolls and left them in the center of the heart, which. Will not only greatly decrease Lambda's desire to fuck with Erika, and also be responsible for other changes I mentioned in the section in question.

- Beatrice got rid of the Battler and Ange dolls. Any desire to fuck with them or enjoyment from toying with them is pretty much gone.

- Nunnally took the Kunzite dolls out of the bins, gave them little sleeping bags, and put them in front of the TV. On top of it being stupidly adorable, she might be a little more likely to regale Kunzite with tales of her murderous exploits... I guess...


GAME ROOM

The NPC here was bbbasically a representation of a lot Lambdadelta's sadism and cruelty. The idea behind having to play a game (with dangerous stakes, though this could be sidestepped via further "inspection" of the heart a.k.a. finding the chips hidden places) to advance was two-fold—for one, the NPC just wanted to force people to play with her and see people potentially get hurt! The other, which Kit actually guessed at, was to try and keep people from getting any further into the heart. (If you explicitly asked her about what was beyond her room, she'd even try to talk you out of bothering to go there, claiming there was nothing of importance there at all.) Lambda's cruelty is genuine, but she does often project an exaggerated caricature of herself that keeps people from getting too close to who she really is, and making herself out to be one-dimensional heartless monster with no depth of character is sometimes part of that. This NPC served as a reflection of that projected persona and thus... was a one-dimensional asshole who didn't care about anything but seeing people suffer. She absolutely is an important part of the heart, but also is definitely not the end-all-be-all of the heart she claims to be. Also, if you asked her about Lambdadelta's motivations or feelings at large, she'd often lie about them.

Changes:

- Kit left a Kunzite gemstone with her, but it doesn't have much impact because this part of the heart is too Complete Monster to be Jesused.

- She ended up having a big blue/red guessing game with Nunnally, so when she wakes up she will suddenly be aware of a lot of Nunnally's past although she won't know exactly how or when she learned all of that. Nunnally also let her lick up some of her blood so that might give her vaguely more interest in sadomasochistic play with her... (unsure)


CORE

This is where the innermost... well, core aspects of herself—her past, her desires, what motivates her, her worldview—lie, the things about herself that she doesn't reveal to people very readily but are some of the most genuine aspects of who she is. I don't know if I'd precisely call it her "true heart," but it's close enough.

One thing I should note is how this section of the heart dealt with portraying her past. I play Lambdadelta on the interpretation that she is the witch born from Takano's struggles and absolute willpower—however, Umineko is always purposely vague about its connection to Higurashi, and even in her heart I wanted to keep in line with that and not make all the references to that especially explicit. Not to mention since Bern and Lambda largely serve as metaphorical representations anyway, I wanted to prioritize capturing the concepts, ideas, and significance behind what happened rather than getting across the literal events that took place in her past, because that's the part of it that's really significant to her.

The study represented the role hard work played in the past, and her own personal value of the concept. The papers on the desk held excerpts from Higurashi describing the idea of "certain willpower" and overcoming suffering through determination and hard work—the key was underneath that because it was this mindset that let her escape the "Hell" she perceived herself as trapped in. (Parts of the excerpts that referenced explicit events were blacked out, because again to her it's not what literally transpired that is necessarily significant to her but what it all meant and amounted to.) On the bookshelves there were textbooks, a sort of shout-out to the intense amount of studying she did to achieve her goals, and also fairy tales and success stories because at the end of the day she is kind of in love with the concept of people who try their best and never give up in the face of adversity triumphing in the end and getting a happy ending. :(a

The living room was more about her desires and feelings in general. The couch and coffee table area was devoted to her vague desire for companionship. Lambda puts a lot of weight on the idea of finding like-minded people who can really stand equal to her and see through to and understand what kind of person she really is. The cat was the obvious symbolism here, that was Bern!! She was there because Bern is very important to Lambda and also functions as a symbol of the importance she puts on companionship as a whole. She was a huge jerk and hated everyone because Bernkastel is a huge jerk and hates everyone... pretty simple. The tea set also represented desire for companionship—there was one teacup for her (black tea with sugar and milk), one for Bern (Umeboshi tea), and a couple saucers laid out with no cups, symbolizing the idea that she has some expectations or hopes for company that have yet to be fulfilled. In the bottom of the coffee table was a diary that contained a transcription of the part of the Memoirs of Lady Lambdadelta TIP where Lambda grants Beatrice's wish and becomes her guardian—a story that followed along the same lines as everything else here, ultimately tying in to her desire to find like-minded individuals and other witches.

The drawers and the mirror were the other part of this room. The mirror represented self-awareness, and functioned like a normal mirror—because in spite of everything, Lambda is pretty self-aware at her core and has a pretty thorough understanding of herself, even if she is outwardly dishonest about it. The scrapbook in the top drawer was also related to this: it contained the scene where Lambda and Erika talk on the balcony about how to make a bully, which is a pretty telling scene for Lambda because it's pretty much... her indirectly describing how she ended up the way she is—she's not really deluded into thinking it's her natural "right" to step all over people, she can identify that for the coping mechanism it is. All the parts of what she said that she considers telling about herself were highlighted. On the other hand, the stuff Erika said about how she and Bern are inferior because they can't look at the truth of what happened to them directly isn't highlighted because she can't accept that!!!1 The second drawer originally also had some stuff Erika said to her in Aather (... this wasn't really intentionally the Erika corner, it just seems to be the case that a large portion of her personally revealing conversations have happened with Erika...) that pretty much painted her as a pathetic loser... They were crumpled up and put in a lower drawer because she vehemently denied and ignored it, but it still bothered her enough to be represented in the heart. :'| The final drawer was essentially the Feelings Repression Drawer. Lambda deals with unpleasant feelings by forcibly pushing them away, not dwelling on them, and otherwise bulldozing past them, thus all the feelings that are hard to deal with were shoved away in a drawer that's hard to open.

The final part of the heart, of course, is the Logic Error room. Again, this was a symbolic representation of what she went through rather than a concrete thing that happened—the stuff she went through was so terrible, isolating, and confining that it manifests as "being locked away in room for a hundred years with no way out." Of course, this was a part of her past, something she had already escaped—however experiencing the memory itself was so traumatic that she was having trouble recovering from it. Letting her out of the room helped her to basically re-sort it as a memory of the distant past and move away from it, so she wasn't so immediately overwhelmed by it and caught up in it. It basically mitigated the short-term effects of the memory, though the long-term effects still remain to be dealt with.

Changes:

- Everyone who went here let Lambda out of the room. This helped her to recover from the immediate trauma of the memory, like I described above.

- Qamar crushed doll Bern's eye on the desk... That didn't really do anything, but it was sure a thing.

- Battler ripped up the pieces of paper in the second drawer, so her amount of regard for what Erika said has been reduced to zero.

- Seth took the thread that represented a desire to be understood out of the bottom drawer and left it in the Umeboshi teacup, which Nunnally then threaded through a needle and left between the teacups. She'll feel this desire much more strongly and desperately rather than simply pushing it away when it can't be fulfilled.

- In the part of the scrapbook where Lambda says that she thinks Bern is the only one who can understand her, Nunnally underlined "only one" three times and put a question mark under it. :') MAYBE BERN ISN'T THE ONLY ONE EVER WHO CAN UNDERSTAND ME?!?!

- Seth also left the Erika doll on the sofa, which is going to... boost Erika to being intrinsically important existence in Lambda's life, haha. It won't necessarily change the nature of their relationship, but it will make Erika a lot more important and will cause Lambda to put more weight on the vague sense of companionship that exists there.




THAT'S EVERYTHING I CAN THINK OF THAT WAS IMPORTANT... Though if I appear to have missed something you're curious about, or you have any other questions, just ask! Or if you need any clarification, I kind of just rambled off everything I could remember, so. ;;

Finally, I want to thank everyone so much for playing! ♥ I had a really great time running it, and you all made it super fun and interesting to do.