Bread, and all variations of the aforementioned

Cycle 1 | I1-5: Good

Video Playthroughs

This chapter is a visual novel.

If you cannot play in-browser, please watch the video playthroughs or read the transcripts.

Bread Crumb 5: Be Good

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Text Transcripts

The comic pages are in greyscale with a few red details.

Creak

Alright, Bien… Bien thinks to himself, standing by the entrance of their house. Dad probably didn't even notice I was gone…

I'm sure it'll be fine…!

He tip-toes inside, looking around him cautiously. His jacket and backpack are covered in blood, his footsteps leaving behind a trail of it on the floor. He starts creeping up the stairs when…

"Bien."

Bien doesn't need to look behind him to recognise it's Bon at the foot of the stairs, staring up at him in irritation. "I noticed that you were gone."

Bien turns around, clutching the strap of his backpack. "Hi! What a coincicdence, seeing you here," he sputters out.

"In the house. Where we live." Bon says expressionlessly. "What's in the bag?"

Bien wags his tail and forces a smile, the rest of his posture stiff. "I didn't kill another cat!"

"It's covered in blood."

"It's catsup."

"You're covered in blood—"

"It's catsup."

"Bien."

"Haha… that's me, alright…"

Bien makes a break for it, running up the stairs, his wings popping out.

"Bien!"

He guns for his room and slams the door shut, barricading it with his body.

"Open the door!" Bon knocks furiously.

"Make me, old man!" Bien retorts, holding the bag close to his chest.

Bon sighs. "You're going to turn eighteen next year."

Bien stops in his tracks. Still clutching the bag, he slowly opens the door, peering at his guardian like a mouse in a hole.

Bon crosses their arms, speaking firmly but with less aggression. "Do you remember what that means?"

"I have to pay taxes," Bien answers, avoiding looking at Bon straight on.

"What? No." I don't even pay taxes.

"It means they're lifting your Exile. The Court is going to try and get you to assimilate to life with the rest of the Living, and you'll have to take care of your self."

With his head tilted towards the floor, Bien's eyes look up at Bon, brows furrowed. He doesn't say anything in response.

Bon continues, face scrunched up in annoyance again. "You can't cook, you can't clean, you aren't strong, skillful or intelligent, and worst of all, you kill anything that moves." They reach for the bag and Bien reluctantly relinquishes it, embarrassed.

"Getting them to let you leave Virguen in the first place took a lot of negotiation," Bon emphasises as they turn away they leave, sparing just a glance to see Bien with his arms crossed, seething in resentment. "If they see you as a danger to society, they're just going to send you back here again."

"I am tired of repeating myself. If you bring another dead animal into this hou—"

Bien runs up and hugs them from behind, interrupting their lecture. Bon is surprised for a moment, before their expressions softens as they look back at their son, his head hung low and with tears forming at the corners of his eyes.

"What am I supposed to do out there?" Bien asks, voice barely above a whisper. "Living here with you is all I've ever known… Why can't you come with me?"

"Oh, Bien…" Bon turns to face their son, gently ruffling his hair. "You probably won't even notice that I'm gone. I'm sure it'll be fine."

Bien can't say anything in response, only sobbing as he looks at Bon directly.

"No matter what happens…" Bon adds…

⁂

"Be good."

Bon's words repeat themselves only as a memory, as Bien wreaks havoc in the War, smiling widely and saluting at the people dying at his hand.

End of Be Good

Intermission 1 Part 5: Good

➤ Text Transcripts

This is a visual novel update. The chapter is in full colour. Unlike the usual painted style, the visuals in this chapter are rougher, simulating traditional art textures.
Transitions between scenes will be marked with an asterism, like this: ⁂
Visual novels updates are written in second person. "You" are Bien in this update.

Intermission 1 Part 5: Good

Your corpse lies on the ground, a scene shown once before in SIU.

"Bien," a mysterious voice calls you. "Wake up, Bien."

You open your eyes, the sky's dull blue being the first sight you've seen in years.

The voice continues, "I am—"

⁂

—going to stop you there," Sar interrupts. "No flashbacks, and no dreams. Not unless I say so."

⁂

You open your eyes.

You found yourself in a strange, colourful bed, the pillows and blankets embroidered with patterns of flowers and stars and a variety of kitschy decorations hanging on the ceiling looming over him. You appear groggy and confused.

Bien: Augh…
Sar: Dzień dobry.
Sar: Did you like the magic trick?
Bien: Wh…
Bien: Wha…?
Sar: The magic trick.
Sar: Well, tricks.
Sar: I was going for something simple, though you did try to kill me[1],
Sar: so I switched our positions around retroactively.
Sar: It's basically Uno Reverse, as a magic trick.
Sar: Hmm, I suppose you don't know what Uno[2] is.

It takes a moment for you to register what's happening. You look besides yourself, vision still unclear.When it finally adjusts, you soon realise that Sar is sitting next to the bed, embroidering a large, blue cloth with patterns of constellations.

You screech in shock upon seeing him, but Sar pays no heed to your reaction, continuing to speak with a friendly smile as if you hadn't just screamed at his face.

Sar: By the way, I'll need to replace your spinal cord.

You pull the blanket up, covering your chest with it as a vain attempt of shielding himself from Sar. Sar looks right at you with a smile. The bird from before pops up from behind Sar's back to snip the thread Sar was using.

Sar: You can think of any questions you want to ask while I put this away.

The strange man, or "Sar" as he called himself, exits the room, presumably to put away the cloth he was embroidering while you were unconscious.

You lie back down, your head throbbing. You stare up at the ceiling of the circular room, making out what appears to be a glass window with an image of a sun.

The room itself is full of a variety of odd trifles and trinkets, although everything was too undefined for you to properly make out. You could vaguely hear the distinction between colours, but not any particular details.

At most, you could recognise on the shelves more books than you ever imagined even existed.

This place, wherever it is… sounds different.

A difference different from the "different" that outside was, which was also different from how Virguen sounded…

Ach, these comparisons are aggravating your migraine.

The colours of the room were grating, like the outside (well, you're assuming the place with the stairs was outside?), but… scratchier. Full of gaps.

Both distinct from the clearcut monotony of home, which only ever took on this loud, garish quality when you were already overwhelmed.

A Demon's manner of perception, which according to your father was an essential source of power, felt like nothing more than an inconvenience that made everything too noisy.

While you contemplate your observations, Sar re-enters the room and stands by the side of the bed.

Sar: Jak się maaasz.
Bien: … uh.
Sar: Ha, just kidding. That's "How are you?", but nobody actually says that.
Sar: Well, nobody is left to say it, but even when there were others, nobody else said that. Sar: Did you notice all those posters and graffiti outside?
Sar: There was this one time, when I was still alive, when I sneaked back there.
Sar: Mind you, this was a monumental task, considering you typically weren't allowed to go back in (Anselir) once you were moved to Maldevara.
Sar: I took a bunch of photographs to study when I went back to Neofrene.
Sar: When I showed some of the other Judges, they called some of the posters that weren't in English "creepy gibberish".
Sar: I said it was just in a different language, and they all gave me this weird, surreal look.
Sar: What do you mean, a "different" one? I recall one of them asking.
Bien: [ Geez. This incessant rambling is familiar. It's like another Ava. ]
Sar: Perhaps had I been nicer then, I would have tried to discuss further, and discovered something obvious far earlier,
Sar: but instead I just got annoyed and moved on from the conversation.
Bien: [ Ava, and… wait. ]
Sar: I was the only (Anselirian), so nobody would have understood if I spoke a foreign language.
Sar: I only ever had to speak in English, so it took me a while to realise.
Sar: Nobody in Maldevara remembered any other languages besides English anymore.
Sar: They didn't even realise anything else existed.
Sar: That's strange, isn't it?
Sar: The Marginals hadn't even taken over Maldevara for a century yet at that time for them to have eradicated the previous culture so quickly.
Sar: And shouldn't some Maldevarans from before the takeover still have been alive at the time?
Sar: Even if they were too old to pass on how to speak Maldevaran languages, surely at least the existence of them would be known, yes?
Bien: I remember why you look so familiar now.
Bien: You look like Media.
Bien: [ And you yak on and on like him, too… ]

Anthony pauses for a moment. His smile doesn't move, but his eyes look more tense, but the hardness disappears just as soon as it starts.

Sar: Media looks like me.
Sar: I was previously the High Judge.
Sar: Per its little habits, when I died Media stole my appearance, and a good number of my quirks.
Sar: I started copying some of its own mannerisms as a scathing mockery at some point, but it stuck.
Sar: I discovered these birds listen to me more intently when I speak more like it though, so I bit the bullet and unlearned all the profanity and crudity of my living days.
Sar: F… Fu… F-fu-…fff…
Sar: Funbuns Hastings New Zealand.
Sar: See? I can't even swear anymore.

This information is incomprehensible to you, as you do not know what profanity is.

You are given three choices of questions to ask Sar.

Who are you, exactly?

Sar: How polite of you to ask.
Sar: You can call me Sar[3], and as I have said I was the previous High Judge, before I died.
Sar: When I was alive, I used to have these visions of the future.
Sar: I won't bombard you with all the details yet, but that gave me a loose plan to follow.
Sar: I died, evidently, but I'd already set it up so that my ability could… let's just say "expand",
Sar: so not only can I perceive the future now, to an extent I can reach out to it.
Sar: It's still a fairly limited ability, but one way it manifests is the ability to swap the positions of things around in the future.
Sar: Well, the nature of time and space being the mess that it is, even if it supposedly happens "in the future" it's perceptible retroactively.
Sar: Say, "earlier"[4] you saw me getting split in half "before" I switched us around, even though I supposedly decided that in advance.
Sar: Swapping things around in space is an extension of the very nature of space,
Sar: which because of the Marginals has been dislodged from time.
Sar: so you get a lot of these inconvenient non-chronologies.
Bien: … I see.
Bien: Ah… I actually think Ava told me about something like that.
Bien: That even though it feels like we're talking "in real time", we aren't actually communicating in order.
Bien: Or… something.
Sar: Tak, dokładnie tak.
Sar: Isn't this nice? You're adapting very quickly.
Sar: Good job.
Bien: …
Sar: You know, you're very quiet when people speak, even though I know you don't really process what you're told.
Sar: Or maybe you're quiet precisely for that reason.
Bien: …
Bien: My father says I shouldn't speak until there's a break in the conversation.
Sar: That's good.
Sar: Właśnie to w tobie lubię.
Sar: The High Judge now was the opposite when we met.
Sar: He always interrupted when he didn't like what you were saying, and would never let an argument go.
Sar: Though I already fixed that.
Bien: The High Judge…
Bien: That's, uh, the Bird.
Bien: You know him?
Sar: Quite well, in fact.
Sar: See, you might not recognise me but you shouldn't think of me as a stranger.
Sar: I know the people you know, even Bon Maldevaran.
Bien: You know m—
Sar: Let's not derail too much discussing our mutual relations yet.
Sar: Point is, you and I are more intimately linked than you're aware of.
Sar: And we share the same enemy, which is why we ought to be friends.
Bien: I—
Sar: Let's continue.

Where is this place?

Sar: This is my… domain, you could put it that way.
Sar: {My domain} which is in [Gdyskoti] which is in (Anselir).
Sar: (Anselir is the country I was born in and was originally north of Maldevara [with Gdyskoti being the border adjunct to Jesenne {with this specific place being a Maldevaran-Anselirian embassy, although I've repurposed it into a storage room.}])
Sar: The items {here} are a variety of things I've collected primarily for research purposes.

You find the explanation too wordy and confusing, but decide not to contest it.

More than the content, the frequency was off. It was clearly still in English, but almost like it was coming out as crackling instead of speech.

You chalk it up to being an effect of… whatever it is that made this place sound so weird as a whole.

Sar: Have you ever heard of (Anselir) before?
Bien: Not really… I don't really think about specific places much.
Sar: See, the Marginals had taken over Maldevara for about half a century before the remaining (Anselirians) were moved there.
Sar: In the brief overlap in which they governed over both countries before they were totally separated…
Sar: Well, we had this embassy here. And [Gdyskoti] and Jesenne were right next to each other.
Sar: I was a child then so these weren't the type of questions I asked,
Sar: though as I grew older I was becoming bothered by how people treated my inquiries.
Sar: Remember what I said about those posters, how Maldevarans thought the language was just gibberish?
Sar: I'd sometimes ask about (Anselir)'s culture, where all the stuff went. I read an economics book when I was twelve and asked about "imports".
Sar: I wanted to see if I could get some nostalgic items from my childhood back, old fairytale books and toys…
Sar: I got in trouble for reading state-unapproved media, and nobody answered the question.
Sar: Do you understand what I'm trying to point to here?
Bien: No.
Sar: You'll remember soon enough, little demon.

What do the birds do?

Bien: Um, these birds.
Bien: I used to see them a lot in Virguen. That's where I live. Er, lived.
Bien: They'd usually knock on the windows and say these really cryptic things.
Bien: They never really made sense, and they bothered my father a lot. He'd always kill them as soon as he saw them.
Bien: He didn't really like talking about them, so it was too hard to ask about it.
Sar: That's a good question, Bien.
Sar: Most people in your situation would be a little more than freaked out, you know, this is highly unfamiliar to you.
Sar: And they'd ask things like, "What do you want from me?" or "How do I get out of here?!"
Sar: Asking the right questions is actually a very important skill.
Sar: And so is keeping calm in unfamiliar situations.
Sar: <3
Bien: … thanks…
Sar: These birds, put simply, are Marginals.
Bien: Oh. That actually explains everything then.
Sar: To be specific, they're "proto-Marginals". They resemble the forms of the earliest Marginals, before they evolved to their current state.
Sar: They have just about the same abilities, but their capacity for cognition is much lower, so they don't have particularly deep identities, and a primitive ability to reconstruct objects.
Sar: While a complex Marginal like the Media can simultaneously hold millions or even billions of objects into existence at a time, a proto-Marginal is likely only able to hold on to a handful, and that's including these bird-like bodies they take.
Sar: They utilise memories to reconstruct objects as all Marginals do, and you can create desired objects by feeding them with something related to what you want to make.
Sar: The birds that visited your home… it's possible they were sent by the Media specifically to torment you two, considering your checkered history.
Sar: Or not!
Sar: These things are quite abundant. The Marginals can use them for small tasks here or there, but they're relegated to the equivalent of wild animals and are mostly independent.
Sar: It's entirely possible the ones you have seen simply lived there and were just asking to be fed, or for attention. They get bored quite easily.
Sar: They aren't intelligent enough to remember entire languages, so they often just repeat strings of words they have read or heard somewhere.
Sar: That can explain why they only speak in meaningless balderdash.
Bien: …
Bien: That makes sense…

You touch a lock of your own hair to look at it. It has returned to its naturally bright red colour. You figure the "magic trick" Sar showed you was turning the "proto-Marginal" into something like a magical hair dye, then.

You feel… a bit disappointed.

Sar: You don't seem very impressed with the answer.
Bien: Ah, I guess I'm not used to people having the patience to explain things to me.
Bien: If you were Ava, he'd be like, "I already told you this, bluh bluh!" or "These nefarious creatures escape description as they are actually a metaphorical analogy for etcetera etcetera…"…
Bien: Even my dad would probably take it as an opportunity to lecture me about something or another…
Bien: Oh, wait, what happened to Ava anyway?
Sar: Hmmm.
Sar: That's a bit of a more complicated question to answer, so we'll get back to it when you're more well-rested.
Bien: …

The truth is, you found this situation a little bit more than suspicious.

You have no idea who this guy is, and he was answering things, albeit with a lot of segues still, pretty clearly.

No mind games and no insults.

It seemed a bit too convenient.

You kept a calm demeanour, though. Whatever it was with the position-swapping he did earlier evidently made it too troublesome to fight him again, especially now that you were too dizzy to really focus on battles of any kind.

… besides, you like being complimented on how well-behaved you are.

You stay as still as a corpse, which is an analogy that isn't very analogous of anything because you are a corpse. It's like when lyricists rhyme words with themselves. It communicates nothing substantial, except perhaps for the irony you feel in knowing that you're more restless now that you're Dead than when you were Alive. This makes the analogy twice as wrong, so it cancels out into being a proper analogy again.

For such an incoherent analogy to be employed in your perception might pulverise your skull to dust faster than the discordant input that permeates this "domain". You're getting kind of sick of analogies.

Sar was the clearest thing in the room, despite still having the same jittery quality to his appearance than you were used to. Still, focusing on him in your perception was less of a headache than identifying anything else in this room.

You had more questions buzzing in your mind, and you did consider asking about how and why you were even led here to begin with, but it was getting harder and harder for you to speak in your condition.

Sar: I'm sure you're vaguely aware, but time and space have been separated from one another due to the Marginals.
Bien: Hmm-mmm… Ava told me that…
Sar: I'm sure you're sick of analogies by now, but think of time and space as the "eyes" of reality.
Sar: The world is at its clearest when viewed by both.
Sar: Since the two have been dislodged, different sections of reality are perceived by different "eyes".
Sar: We can call these sections "measures" for convenience.
Sar: You grew up in Maldevara, which is almost totally in the vision of time.
Sar: (Anselir) is primarily in the vision of space.
Sar: Without going into depth of why exactly, that means that this "measure" is incompatible with your existence.
Sar: That, by the way, explains why everything sounds different to you.
Bien: … oh.
Sar: By "tethering" you to this particular measure, you'll be able to exist here without a hitch.
Bien: So…
Sar: So I'll have to replace your spinal cord.
Bien: …

This information is incomprehensible to you, as you do not know what a spinal cord is.

Sar: I almost forgot the most important thing! Why you're here.
Sar: Put simply, I want to stitch the fabric of space-time back together and reunite the universe.
Sar: Ava and I have the same aims, more-or-less, and she brought you here so the three of us can cooperate.
Bien: I don't care about the fabric of space-time, to be honest.
Sar: I know.
Sar: But you do want to kill the Media, which is essential to our goals.
Sar: I have the knowledge to bring this plan into fruition, and you have the strength to make it so.
Sar: Though you haven't fully realised your ability yet.
Sar: What do you say?
Bien: Uh…
Sar: Say yes.
Bien: Yes.
Sar: Good job.

Sar quickly morphs the MargiBird into something, but you don't see what it is before…

Sar: Now go to sleep.

You fall asleep.

⁂

[1] This would not have worked, because I am already dead.

[2] Uno is a shedding-type card game that is played with a specially printed deck. The "Reverse" card is a special card that switches the directions of the order of play.

[3] Short for Anthony.

[4] Signifiers for time are used for communicative convenience and are not to be taken literally.

⁂

Remember when you were asked what you remember about yourself?

You said you are Bien Maldevaran, son of Bon Maldevaran.

Created as a successor to the Herald of the Apocalypse, you were taken from Hell to be raised on earth.

That's an interesting answer, Bien.

Nobody outside of your childhood home knew you, so there was no point of reference in which you could contest this.

By the way.

This might be unpleasant, so if you want to get it over with quickly…

be good.

End of Intermission 1 Part 5

➤ Notes

➤ Credits

I1-5 OST: rolypolyphonic - Fermata

➤ Further Reading

Built from the remains of destroyed artifacts and effigies stuffed into a drawer of memories after a war of religious prosecution, the discordant mish-mash of saints and sinners comprising this statue may appears as a mockery of faith, and yet is his continued existence not evidence alone of its enduring nature?
And he had in his right hand seven stars. And from his mouth came out a sharp two edged sword: and his face was as the sun shineth in his power.

Help Wanted

Boy

Helper for rice and vegetable dealer

- 16 or above
- At least high school graduate
- With pleasing and hardworking personality
- Can lift heavy objects
- Not afraid of vegetables
- Bring biodata and gromada clearance

➤ Found Updates

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