PersonS {A Rejected Title and a False Explanation}

>Browse the stacks and keep your ears open for Dr Shoseki. What kind of books do you like to read? Or perhaps try to research the town, or even see if you can find the "really obvious" attack on the one "they" already killed in the news (assuming you can access internet from these computers).

> Look around; they may just be buried in book somewhere and are actually here.

Your choice in books has generally been limited to whatever was actually available, when you even felt like and felt safe enough to read in the first place. You've learned to appreciate what you can have, more or less. A few books here seem like they might be interesting, but you guess you're already getting a pile of them from Nene whenever she gets around to that anyway.

This doesn't seem to be the kind of library that has general-use computers in it, but it is the kind with chairs, and you happen to have brought your own. The file from this morning hasn't changed since then. The school network is password protected, but you guess what said password is in two tries.

You try looking for anything unusual that's happened in Greenhaven recently. It seems judging by headlines that a little over a month ago there was a strange murder, which catches your eye initially. But the more reputable news sites have articles so banal as to make you wonder why they bothered reporting it at all, much less with a title suggesting it was unusual. An elderly man died of multiple wounds late one night, and it's been ruled a likely robbery gone wrong. However, there's a little more to it...

Digging a little deeper into the story by looking it up just by its title, you find a few conspiracy-theory-centric sites claiming to have the "real" version of this story, which was at some point rescinded by the original source. They don't agree on what was changed, only that something was changed. There are claims that the wounds were unusual somehow, but exactly how is muddled. It seems many of them agree that the man in question was decidedly seen alive a few minutes before he was found dead, but the coroner's report placed his time of death at least an hour earlier. There is no indication in these versions of the article of even the possibility that it was a robbery, and a decent number of them quote evidence that nothing was stolen.

Your laptop actually doesn't have the best of batteries, and you were unable to find any accessible outlets in this room either, so you have to turn it off for now. It's just as well, as you can see through the window someone finally walking toward the library. It's a tall, trim man in nice but what you would generally classify as "old person clothes," white, with completely white hair, no facial hair and no evident bald spots. Your first thought on seeing him and guessing that he's the librarian is to wonder why he's supposedly retired. He looks like, you guess, a very healthy 50-year-old? Anyway, he notices you, looks a little surprised at first, and hurries the rest of the way in.

"Hello there, sorry I'm so late," he says cheerfully, walking up. "You wouldn't be..Mr. Perell, would you?"
"..Right." He offers you a hand to shake, so you stand up and shake it.
He nods. "Well, I am Dr. Shoseki. Pleasure to meet you." His speech is a little...strange. There's a trace of a southern accent there, but it seems like it was originally much stronger, and was deliberately trained out over time. There's also the fact that he seems to insistently use last names rather than first, which strikes you as a generally older-person thing to do. He starts toward the office after the handshake, retrieving a set of keys from his pocket. "Pardon me. I thought since your flight was so late you would just opt to sleep in this morning and come in Monday."

There are two desks facing each other inside the office, one a regular "teacher"-style wide desk with a rolling chair behind it, while the other is a smaller model with a more rudimentary wooden chair. Dr. Shoseki gestures to offer you the latter, while heading straight for the former and taking a seat, leaning back a little bit. You take the indicated seat, and briefly notice a framed doctoral diploma on the wall behind him which reveals that his first name is "Kain." So...neither of his names seem to match his accent or appearance at all. The dates on it look strange...but, he's started talking.

"Well...I got a chance to take a look at your transcripts on..hm..last Wednesday, I believe it was? Since we are so close to the end of a semester, I will just sign you up for the same level required courses--Math, English, Science--you were taking at the last school. Shouldn't be too hard to catch up on a few days or so. For the others...this also allows you an opportunity to try out some of the more advanced or extracurricular courses without any long-term commitment if you'd like. If it's too late for a proper grade in one of those courses, or you don't do too well, they can just treat it like it never happened anyway."

"We have..." he thinks for a moment. "We have a lot of classes here. It's probably easier to just go from what you'd like to take than list them all out. So..what sort of classes are you interested in, Mr. Perell?"

>

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SpoilerHooray, his text color doesn't look awful here!

like as in "level one social link. level seven social link." that sort of thing

Oh, okay. I'm planning to avoid doing that. Thinking of the adventure as a "game," I want to present information in an intuitive sort of way, and not tell the "player" anything the main character wouldn't reasonably know. So, there will be narration resembling "so-and-so likes you a little more now" and "so-and-so trusted you with an important secret," but it'll never display as a number exactly. I mean, when was the last time anyone could quantify how much another person liked them with a number and know it was accurate?

After the "true" reason relationships are important is revealed there will be a way to more or less directly check how strong a bond is, but it'll also be in a more qualitative way.