Obligation To Keep
is an Armored Core/Doki Doki literature Club crossover by Blackout42.
The story begins with Strayed, the playable character of Armored Core: For Answer, arriving in Japan in the year 2016 through a time travel accident. After establishing relations with the Yakuza, Strayed, named James Klein in his day to day life, eventually meets Sayori, one of the main characters of Doki Doki Literature Club!, setting off the events of the visual novel, with the exception that Strayed is a violent super-soldier with no regard for human lives.
This fanfic has examples of:
- A Million Is a Statistic: James’s casual and dismissive attitude towards his own kill count, which exceeds over one billion people.
James: It is foolish and wrong to feel remorse in our line of work.
- Abusive Parents:
- Natsuki's father is implied to nearly beat her to death.
- The training James receives from his stepfather breaks his arm and even gives him a heart attack at one point. However, James accepts it as necessary.
- Adaptation Expansion: Happens to both the Armored Core and Doki Doki Literature Club world.
- In the game series, as well as Armored Core for Answer, there are very few details regarding what the world is like such as: "how do civilians live?", "what Lynx do outside of combat?", "what do people eat?", and the power dynamics of their mercenary society. This fanfiction explores several of these concepts.
- Most civilians are slaves to the mega corporations.
- Lynx tend to focus their lives entirely on combat, with little room in between, either looking for combat contracts, or maintaining their equipment.
- The primary food source is a variant of "Soylent Green". Non-irradiated corpses are reprocessed into cheap and mass produced food. This is noted to be well known and accepted.
- Lynx can and will be racist towards unranked or unaffiliated Lynx, known as “irregulars”. May regularly uses the word in a derogatory way when speaking to or of James.
- In the original game, Doki Doki Literature Club existed in a vacuum where there were only three main settings (Club room, Sayori’s house, playable characters house) and five characters (Monika, Sayori, Natsuki, Yuri, “Player”). This fanfiction introduces dozens of minor side characters, including other school students and faculty, [[spoilers: enemy soldiers for James to kill, aptly named side characters (The Colonel, The General, ect), and one recuring character named “The Investigator”, an intelligence analyst and spy.
- In the game series, as well as Armored Core for Answer, there are very few details regarding what the world is like such as: "how do civilians live?", "what Lynx do outside of combat?", "what do people eat?", and the power dynamics of their mercenary society. This fanfiction explores several of these concepts.
- Badass Longcoat: The preferred style of Lynx outside of a NEXT. Though James’s emotional inclination towards the trench coat is never stated, May skips happily while wearing hers.
May: Ah, I do so enjoy being well dressed for an occasion.
- Bio-Augmentation: One type of augmentation given to Lynx. As a standard, Lynx have skin capable of resisting heavy caliber machineguns, and high density, oxygen rich blood.
- Cunning Linguist: Due to augmentation enhanced memory, Lynx are known to be fluent in the twenty most common languages.
- Cyborg: The other type of augmentation Lynx receive. Includes metal bones, mechanical joints, computer systems integrated into their nervous system and brain, and full on limb replacement.
