Fanfic / The Fury of a Shattered Mirror

This page assumes that you've played Disco Elysium and Slay the Princess. Spoilers for these games will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Un jour je serai de retour près de toi.
Fanart by moid does art on Twitter. Commisioned by ICastTrish.

ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN - You done with your little pow-wow session, brother-man? Ready to wake up and smell the shit-smeared roses?
Because you won't like what you see out there. It's not the same track you're used to, stuck on loop.
LIMBIC SYSTEM - It's *worse*.

The Fury of a Shattered Mirror (stylized as THE FURY OF A SHATTERED MIRROR) is a Fusion Fic between Disco Elysium and Slay the Princess, written by ASpooky on Archive of Our Own.

The basic plot comes from Slay the Princess, and is much the same as in canon (path in the woods, cabin, princess, you have to slay her or the world will end), except this time, "you" are Harrier Du Bois, lieutenant double-yefreitor of the Revachol Citizen's Militia, recovering alcoholic and amnesiac, and the proud owner of twenty-four voices vying for attention in your head — and that's not even counting the new additions.

As of January 28th, 2024, it has the unique honor of being the most popular fanfic for Slay The Princess on AO3, leading the pack in terms of word count, hits, kudos, comments, and bookmarks.

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THE FURY OF A SHATTERED MIRROR contains examples of the following tropes:

• Accidental Pun: Interfacing describes Soona's final readouts of the Swallow as "annotated heavily in the scrawl of a woman possessed". The Spectre, currently observing the vision, can only go "Heh."
• Adaptational Nice Guy: In a sense: in THE MOMENT OF CLARITY, the Voice of the Hero wanted to free the Princess mostly for the same reason as the other Voices, to just get the torment over with one way or another. That's still true here, but THE ACT OF FUTILITY has it being more for Harry's sake, knowing that he can only take so much more of this before being completely annihilated, and having promised Volition not to let Harry lay down and die. The Voices in general aren't quite as devastated as they are in THE MOMENT OF CLARITY, having had Harry and his Skills to talk to for most of those loops.
• A Day in the Limelight: With the blend in formats, there's very little of Disco Elysium's usual background description (ex: clicking on a mailbox leads to bringing up the dialogue window, where the description of the mailbox starts with MAILBOX: as if it's a character speaking) which has Skills chiming in. Instead, like Slay the Princess, the Narrator provides His narration and other voices fill in the gaps, though Harry's library of Skills finds a lot more to comment on. Since the Voices and the Narrator can hear and respond to them, the Skills have active dialogue with them and are more individualized.
  • The Skill Inland Empire, particularly, gets to shine in this fic. Harry's imagination is far more cognizant of the whole situation than the rest of him, or of any of the Voices. Not only does it have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory but it seems to know something about things that haven't happened yet.
• Alien Geometries: The cabin becomes this in the later chapters, of course, but Harry, who studied architecture as part of his training, can't help but notice something off about it even from the first visits:
  VISUAL CALCULUS [Medium: Success] - The floorplan of this cabin doesn't make sense. With the only interior space you've seen being the room you just left, this staircase, and a basement on a lower level, the interior dimensions don't match the exterior ones -- and you definitely saw more than one window on the near wall as you approached the cabin earlier.
• All Elections Are Serious Business: Not exactly an election, but the first inaugural session of "Mind Parliament", which Harry holds to decide if he should slay or save the Spectre, is taken very seriously by all involved, even the Narrator.
• All for Nothing: Played for Laughs with Mind Parliament, which takes up five minutes of Harry's time and nearly gives the Spectre a panic attack from thinking she scared the sanity out of him, only to end up a tie vote.
  RHETORIC - ...This was a huge waste of time.
  • Played considerably less mirthfully at the end of THE ACT OF FUTILITY: Harry goes through the motions (and is implied to have been doing so for god knows how many loops), but with only the Voices and no Skills he lacks the ability to free the Nightmare from her cabin.
• All Part of the Show: Drama convinces Harry to think of his meeting with the Damsel as this, resulting in him acting out the role of "overblown Knight in Shining Armor" the whole time. Once he drops the act and confesses that he doesn't really love her, the Damsel, thinking she's failed to make Harry happy, is Driven to Suicide.
• Ambiguous Gender: Harry's Skills are (individually) referred to sometimes as "he", sometimes as "they".
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • How exactly the Voices are connected to Harry is unclear; they seem to think of themselves as part of him, but occasionally refer to "feathers", and have no memory of Elysium. Reaction Speed picks up on how this is weird, because last time he checked Harry wasn't a bird. It's implied they were attracted by the traces of the Long Quiet inside Harry, but nothing has yet been confirmed.
  • The Narrator's connection to the world of Elysium is also a mystery: He doesn't know what reál or Dolores Dei are, but seems to at least recognize the concept of the Pale, if His horrified reaction is anything to go by. Despite many variants on the Narrator hearing and seeing plenty about Revachol and the world beyond, he also only seems to become aware that Harry is from outside when Harry is stripped of his skills and a broken shadow of himself - another echo, you might say.
• And I Must Scream: Harry is increasingly aware of the Construct containing a woman, or something like one, pounding on the walls of her prison. After surviving the Nightmare's vision he and his assorted headmates realize that she's become this monstrous through long, painful, unrelieved isolation.
• Anger Born of Worry: In the Flash Sideways scenes to Revachol, Jean is furious at Harry for seemingly getting himself killed and even more tetchy with everyone around him, but it's clearly hiding a deep sense of anguish over his missing partner.
• Arc Words: "Take a step forward." It recurs in both THE SPECTRE and THE NIGHTMARE, and seems to pertain to Harry's nature as the "Infernal Engine" and how it might be the thing to salvage this whole mess.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • A subdued example with one of Harry's questions to the Nightmare: if she has control over the layout of her Eldritch Location, why does it look so hostile and lifeless? She has to pause a moment before answering, and Pain Threshold remarks the question struck a nerve "she didn't know she had".
  • And later, Harry gets her again with a far simpler question:
    YOU - "...Are you okay?"
• Armor-Piercing Response:
  • The Voice of the Hero and Half Light deliver one to the Voice of the Cold, who has been bickering with Half Light about their contrasting views on slaying the Princess:
    VOICE OF THE COLD - Must you derive such joy from the thought of killing her? It's clouding your judgement.
    VOICE OF THE HERO - As if you haven't been saying pretty much the same thing? Sure, this one's a bit more... forceful about it, but the end result would be the same, wouldn't it?
    HALF LIGHT - This stone-cold son-of-a-bitch feels the passion of life and violence all too well. He's just hiding it deep down inside -- but it's there regardless. Same for her, same for you, same for *everyone* -- it is a fundamental aspect of the self. To tear out that piece and cast it aside would be to die while still living.
    VOICE OF THE COLD - ...
• Astral Projection: A rare case of this being done on someone else's behalf — Harry uses the nature of the Construct to project the Echo out from his mind and back as a physical presence in the world.
• Bad Liar:
  • After killing themselves to escape the Narrator's "reward", Drama prompts Harry to tell a convincing lie about why they're suddenly acting so strange. The check, unfortunately, fails:
    YOU - Oh that? Icy over there was talking about the office party I just came from. It got *really* dull, felt like being trapped in a void forever, you know what I mean? ...Not that you *would* know -- you weren't there. Definitely weren't. No sir.
  • The Princess is still this to a T, with Flux Et Reflux's attempts to seem like she was there from the start so transparently bad that even the Voice of the Hero got suspicious the second she piped up.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Discussed. After having met the Voice of the Smitten and the Damsel, Drama suggest that Harry should lean into the kind of story he appears to find himself in, and play up the role of the "dashing hero". Half Light is outraged, asking if they should really play the hero around the creature who stabbed them to death, but Drama notices that element just makes it even better, as in order to write a really good romance story, there should some tension between the two leads.
  ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - *Sexual* tension, baby.
  DRAMA - No, no -- this is a period piece, you'll want to limit it to *maybe* a double entendre at the most.
• Beyond the Impossible:
  • Inverted, in a sense. The highest difficulty a check can be in Disco Elysium is 20. The check for Harry to stop himself from kissing the Pale in the guise of Dora is 30.
  • And it happens again in THE ACT OF FUTILITY, with a Pain Threshold check of 36, among others.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The Limbic System cautions Harry that, if he keeps helping the Princess, he'll be destroyed, and what little is left of him "returned to the sea". Volta do Mar, the same technique that kept Harry safe from another Princess' influence, literally translates to "return from the sea".
  • The Echo's name as a skill, Flux Et Reflux, is a Latin phrase translating to English as "the ebb and flow" — one of the titles the Narrator gives for the Shifting Mound.
  • Like in canon, Half Light speaks Ancient Greek at a few points in THE NIGHTMARE, calling the void around the basement stairs "χάος" (the term for Primordial Chaos), and reacting to the description of the Nightmare's appearance with "αἰκίστρια" — "agony". After the Nightmare presumably it's Half Light which quotes a passage from Marcus Aurelius that can be translated as: "Look at the speed of universal oblivion, the gulf of immeasurable time both before and after, the vacuity of applause, the indiscriminate fickleness of your apparent supporters, and the tiny room in which all this is confined."
• Birds of a Feather: Plenty of the Voices quickly find pals among the Skills: Drama and the Voice of the Smitten, Savoir Faire and the Voice of the Opportunist...
• Blood Oath: At the start of the second run, Harry tries to sign the Narrator's "voucher" with one of these, but a flashback from Half Light results in him clumsily smearing the paper, and he ends up having to just use a pen.
• Blunt "Yes": When meeting the Damsel, Electrochemistry points out that it looks like her "tits" are bigger than last time. Immediately, Volition responds by groaning in exhaustion, the Voice of the Smitten calls him out on using this kind of vulgar language about a lady, but Perception admits, begrudgingly, that it does indeed look like its true.
  VOICE OF THE HERO - It's a good observation, but is that really how he had to go about expressing it?
  ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Yes.
• Body Horror: An inverted example of Played for Horror with the Echo's true form. She's as abstract and bizarre as the other skills, looking "like she's being disassembled and reassembled at the same time", but that bizarreness makes her immediately familiar to the skills.
• Breather Episode: Chapter III: The Echo is a bit meandering and doesn't contain anything like the amount of fear, pain, or anger of the other chapters. Because the Princess is Flux Et Reflux, another of Harry's Skills, and none of the original Skills or the Voices dwell on her enough for the Narrator to realize what's up, he wants Harry to search for her and is aggravated by every delay but not truly angry and fades out without a lot of stress. Harry and the Spectre forgave each other in the previous chapter, so now they're both pretty well inclined towards the other. Everyone gets to see a change in scene, even if it's all memory, and Harry gets to sit down, have a cigarette, and show the Princess the Sevenfold Sunrise. She's still frustrated by not getting to escape but is glad of the respite.
• Brick Joke: In their first meeting with the Princess, a failed Suggestion check results in the skill telling Harry to be completely honest about why he's here, saying that "honesty is the best policy" (and brushing off Harry's response that "I don't think you've ever said that, actually"). Later (earlier?), when Harry tries and fails a check to convince Kim his plan to enter the Swallow isn't an elaborate suicide attempt, Kim still relents in the end, believing that what his partner says about what he heard from the anomaly is real. As Suggestion notes, "Honesty *was* the best policy, this time."
• But Thou Must!:
  • The Voice of the Opportunist outright forces Harry to ask the Spectre what she can "bring to the table" with the whole possession business, because:
    VOICE OF THE OPPORTUNIST - We have to at least ask. If we didn't, I'd be kept up at night wondering what kind of sweet deal we could've made, wouldn't you?
    VOICE OF THE COLD - No.
    VOICE OF THE HERO - I wouldn't either, I'm not really interested in 'net worth'.
  • Inherent to Harry's memory of how he came to the Construct: since it's just him recalling things that have already happened, there are never any options to opt out or choose something different.
• Call-Back: The Voices reminding Harry who he is in THE ACT OF FUTILITY is an echo of the skills doing the same in the opening chapter.
• The Cameo: The Shivers check in the flashback shows where a number of characters are while the Shifting Mound's song shakes the church apart:
  • Cuno, Cunoesse, and Annette huddle in the Whirling's shed for shelter.
  • A concerned Evrart Claire (or is it Edgar?) makes a call to a mysterious third party.
  • In La Delta, Joyce Messier, implied to be somehow sensing the energies released by the Swallow, fights the urge to step out into the open air 37 stories up.
  • The Phasmid waits out the storm under a pylon in the collapsed Sea Fortress.
  • Coalition Warship Archer hovers above, not yet noticing the events at the church — though we already know what will happen once they do.
  • Precinct 41 goes about its working day, ten minutes before they receive the call about Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Du Bois' disappearance.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
  • As in canon, the Princess runs on this, but it's notably subverted at one point: after slaying her in the second run, Harry questions if she's really dead, which would normally trigger her change into the Razor, but Endurance's insistence that yes, she's dead, you just stabbed her in the heart keeps her down. Some unselected options show uncertainty that probably would have led to her rousing, but Harry's familiar enough with death that one moment of doubt isn't enough to make him think she's not gone.
  • The skills will occasionally take advantage of this in a similar way to the Voices, by materializing objects inside Harry's jacket pockets. Electrochemistry uses it to conjure a bottle of painkillers, and Inland Empire uses it to pull out a "Perikarnassian chi-ro" (essentially a cross charm) after Harry meets the Spectre. Lampshaded when he breaks out his modestly respectable leger, which is big enough that he really should have felt it in his pocket.
  • It's all but outright stated that the Mother of Silence Tiago worshiped was a form of the Princess. He looked into the Swallow hoping to see something that would let him forget, and the Princess was changed by that perception.
  • After Perception fails to, well, perceive the Nightmare, the other skills chime in and describe her appearance, essentially creating a "mental picture" of her that Harry can properly see. and
• Cluster F-Bomb: When the Detective dies the first time, and is then immediately reborn, Half Life is livid and lets out a long string of profanity, having experienced death, which is the scariest possible scenario it can think of.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Electrochemistry has become this incarnate 57 days into Harry's latest fling with sobriety, to the point of going downright rabid when the Narrator goes to pour Himself a drink.
• Comically Missing the Point: While trying to figure out a compliment for the Spectre, a failed check causes Rhetoric to abruptly get sidetracked by "a certain phrase" from Coalition propaganda around the end of the Revolution, leading to Harry musing to himself if she might be the spectre of communism. The Spectre is confused but decides to take it as a compliment, the Voice of the Opportunist agrees despite not knowing what that means, and the Narrator is apoplectic at the thought of any form of the Princess being associated with communism.
• Commonality Connection: In the Echo chapter, the Princess talks about how she only seems to make things worse, which seems to strike a chord with Harry even if he's not Sorry Cop right now. The third The Hero and The Princess chapter has Harry consciously realize that the Princess is in a position a lot like his, but worse in that she's amnesiac and thrust into a bizarre situation and trying to keep up, bluffing with an empty hand, just as he was after losing his memory. Not that realizing helps.
• Composite Character: With Harry as Maxwell's figurative demon, the Princess starts to change early on: Harry's first meeting with her initially has her as the demure, skittish Princess you encounter if you don't take the knife, but she eventually starts giving the cold, pragmatic speech about trust that you hear if you do take the knife.
• Crazy-Prepared: After hearing about the Volta do Mar and how it can protect from the effects of the Pale, the Voice of the Skeptic starts composing one in his head almost immediately, which ends up coming in handy when Harry almost dies of Pale exposure.
• Cutting Off the Branches: A few facts of this Harry's run through the events of Disco Elysium are established over the course of the fic:
  • The prologue mentions him having 4 confirmed kills, meaning he managed to take out Raul Kortenaer. A comment from Hand/Eye Coordination in the second CHAPTER I seemingly confirmed that he shot Korty rather than using the Spirit Bomb, but the check in the flashback to hear the sound coming from the hole in the world has a bonus labeled "Heard your tie (may he rest in peace)", implying that "Spirit is eternal" was completed and the Horrific Necktie destroyed in the fire; this was later confirmed by Word of God to be a Series Continuity Error and was fixed.
  • He kept in Kim's good graces (to the point that Kim refuses to believe Harry is dead despite him having fallen through a hole in the world) and convinced him to join Precinct 41.
  • Much to Electrochemistry's dismay, Harry has been sober since the events of the game (though he still smokes).
  • He got rid of the Expression and briefly flirted with Ultraliberalism before giving up on it. Which makes it all the stranger when those two things recur with a vengeance in his second run...
  • A mention of a "weekly leftist book club" in THE SPECTRE implies that he decided to undertake the Communist Vision Quest and got in good with Steban and Ulixes.
  • Despite Conceptualization's objections, the anodic dance club ended up being named No Truce With The Furies.
  • Harry's flashback to his last moments in Martinaise reveals the thoughts he had internalized by the end of the game: Col Do Ma Ma Daqua, Cleaning Out the Rooms, Motorway South, Jamais Vu (Derealization), The Insulindian Miracle, Searchlight Division, Waste Land of Reality, and Finger on the Eject Button.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: As in Slay the Princess, being killed causes Harry to reappear, intact, back on the path in the woods in time for a new chapter. However, unlike the Long Quiet, Harry is a mortal being to whom death isn't an abstract — he feels some phantom of each pain, even the ones he doesn't remember receiving.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: The Skills are even less inclined to take the Narrator's guff than the Voices; at multiple points, Authority outright commands Him to be quiet, and He listens.
• Distracted by the Sexy: The very first thing Electrochemistry says upon seeing the Damsel is "...Are her tits bigger?" It even gets Perception and Visual Calculus in on it, which turns it into a Running Gag: Visual Calculus still can't tell whether or not it's the dress pushing them up once Harry gets closer, and Perception gets its answer when the Damsel hugs Harry.
  PERCEPTION (TOUCH) [Easy: Success] - ...Based on the pressure against your chest right now, it's official -- they're *definitely* bigger.
• Do Wrong, Right: In the first meeting with the Princess, Hand/Eye Coordination critiques the Princess' knifework as terrible while she's in the middle of stabbing Harry to death.
• Double Entendre: Invoked by Drama while setting Harry up to "play the part of the Hero" with the Damsel: when Electrochemistry starts being... well, Electrochemistry, Drama reminds it that since this is a period piece, they'll have to keep the sexual content to this trope at most.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Two in quick succession, when the Voice of the Smitten ends Harry's life in response to the Damsel ending her own upon learning Harry didn't actually love her.
  • This is, of course, the inciting incident for THE SPECTRE.
• Due to the Dead: Harry does this twice for the Spectre: once immediately after he kills her with a Libation for the Dead, and once for her ghostly self by giving her body the Stations of the Breath.
• Eat the Rich: At the start of Harry's second run, thanks to a bonus from the Overinsistent Vocabulary thought, Rhetoric is much more vocal in its support for slaying the Princess:
  RHETORIC [Medium: Success] - She's a *princess*. Slaying a member of royalty isn't even really a crime at all -- it's a public service. Normally this would entail an open-air execution (guillotines are traditional but a firing squad works too), but covert assassination works just as well.
• Eldritch Location:
  • Inherent to the setting, of course, but THE PALE turns it into even more of one, filling it with the eponymous "enemy of life and matter". The path in the woods seems to go on forever, Harry starts hearing apparitions of his actions from alternate timelines, and both he and his surroundings start to degrade into nothingness. It's somewhat subverted, though, in that whatever the stuff is, it's not the actual Pale; Harry doesn't experience any memory bleed-through like the Paledriver, only near-Death of Personality, and even that happened far quicker than the Pale usually takes effect.
  • The Narrator's "eternity of bliss" also gets this treatment, with Endurance noting that Harry's mind isn't the only thing being "fuzzed out"; his pores are less defined, his heartbeat and breaths come less often and less strongly, and he can no longer feel hunger. It's described as him becoming like "a caricature of a human form".
• Epic Fail: The -2 penalty to Perception from Breakerbox Of The Soul leaves it utterly floundering during THE NIGHTMARE. It immediately fails an easy check and isn't certain if Harry tastes dirt after faceplanting on the path in the woods, and fails almost every other check it makes in that chapter, resuling in it straight-up not being able to perceive the Nightmare.
• Exact Words: At the start of THE SPECTRE, Inland Empire tells the Voice of the Opportunist, who's fretting over whether or not the Princess is really dead, that "Her bones still rest in a mausoleum of old wood, undisturbed for eons." And that's true — for her bones, anyway...
• Expospeak Gag: In response to the Spectre appearing:
  INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - A Class-II Necroplasmic Entity. More colloquially known as --
  VOICE OF THE HERO - A g-g-g-ghost!
• Feel No Pain:
  • The Voice of the Cold brings its Personality Power to bear when Harry has a seizure as a result of the Spectre's possession. The result is a new thought, Breakerbox Of The Soul, whose temporary research bonus removes Health and Morale alerts — translating to the story as Harry distancing himself from the pain he's feeling enough to (somehow) stop the seizure, and later, to haul his body towards the door despite the Narrator's Killer Game Master ploy.
  • Zigzagged with Psycholocomotor's Prayer, which has the temporary research bonus of making it so that Health damage taken doesn't reduce Endurance.
• Flat Character: Played for Horror with the Pale, the result of the Damsel's Death by Despair. She's essentially a barely-sentient Empty Shell, and the only thing she can even think about is using her shapeshifting to make Harry happy.
• Flat "What": When Harry fails a check and asks if the Princess is the "spectre of communism", Reaction Speed, the Princess herself, and the Voice of the Hero all ask "What?"
• Forgiveness: The Spectre forgives Harry for killing her in the previous chapter, and Harry forgives her for accidentally killing him in this one. His memory is just Ripple-Proof enough to make him reluctant to kill a later incarnation as a result.
• For the Lulz: Electrochemistry throws its weight behind letting the Spectre possess Harry, if only because it would "liven up the place" from its current state of sobriety.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the prologue, the Ancient Reptilian Brain mocks Harry's Death Seeker tendencies: "Why else would you have come here, past the inner edge of the world?" This is the first hint at how Harry ended up in the Long Quiet: going into the 2mm hole in the world.
  • When the Voice of the Hero muses on the Princess' name possibly being "Princess Princess", Inland Empire comes up with an image that sounds remarkably close to the Shifting Mound's true form:
    INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - Yes, you can imagine it. Princess Princess, princess of princesses. An exponential royalty, presiding over the heavens and the earth. An infinite fractal tangle of frilly dresses and shiny jewelry.
  • In THE DAMSEL, Harry's flask has turned into the Flask of Love and Anguish, and, to the horror of the Skills, is filled with sparkling apricot juice, foreshadowing the form that the Pale takes in the next chapter.
  • While observing the meeting about saving Harry from the Swallow, Rhetoric notices that Soona at one point refuses to mention the Pale by name, even in the context of it manifesting inside where the church used to be. Half Light muses that she's trying to push it out of sight, out of mind — "but it will come all the same." The Narrator seems oddly perturbed by that statement...
  • The Mythology Gag to the call with Dora listed below, a moment that's essentially an act of emotional (and possibly physical) self-harm on Harry's part, foreshadows Half Light's "The Reason You Suck" Speech while trapped in the Nightmare's Psychological Torment Zone.
• The Four Loves: An Elysium-flavored variant is mentioned in THE DAMSEL. When the Voice of the Smitten describes the vision of Precinct 41 as "a gathering of people who love you, in their own ways", Encyclopedia enumerates the six types of love described in Perikarnassian philosophy: familial, friendship, romantic, sexual, brotherhood, and love for the world.
• Freak Out:
  • Half Light has an extended one at the start of the first CHAPTER II; being Harry's fight-or-flight response, it's completely thrown off by going from a literal life-or-death situation to a path in the woods. It doesn't calm down for a while.
    HALF LIGHT [Heroic: Failure] - FUCK-SHIT-ASS-COCK-FUCKING-SHIT-FUCKING-FUCK -- YOU *DIED*. WE *DIED*! This is WRONG, you should be DEAD, you *are* DEAD.
    [...]
    VOICE OF THE HERO - Does He not remember what happened? I'd say it might be best to keep it that way, but I don't think this one's letting it go anytime soon. Poor guy's traumatized.
    HALF LIGHT - *FUCK*!
  • And it does it again when it realizes who exactly Harry's let into his body:
    HALF LIGHT [Formidable: Success] - FUCK! GET YOUR MITTS OFF ME YOU PIECE OF SHIT DO-GOODER! Can't you feel there's something *wrong* with us?
    VOICE OF THE HERO - Oh boy, here we go.
• From Bad to Worse: THE ACT OF FUTILITY is already an utter nightmare from the start, but it manages to get even worse when Harry fails to do the one thing that could possibly end the chapter (freeing the Princess), leaving no option but for both of them to fall down into some new, terrible place.
• Fusion Dance:
  • In the prologue, while the Shifting Mound is doing... something to Harry's soul, Inland Empire detects something worming its way into him, something that "flows like tar, but shimmers with a thin film of oil". From the way successful Shivers checks start to speak in a voice that is definitely not La Revacholière, it's implied this was some form of the Long Quiet.
  • It's implied that the Voices have taken on aspects of the missing skills in THE ACT OF FUTILITY; the Hero assumes Volition's reassuring tone, the Broken starts making cryptic declarations similar to Inland Empire, the Opportunist detects a lie in the Princess' voice...
• Giving Up on Logic: Not intentionally, but much of Logic's dialogue comes from failed Impossible passive checks, since everything Harry's encountering on the path in the woods is such a massive Outside-Context Problem. It gets even worse after Harry starts internalizing Flagrant Disregard Of Reality, which gives it a whopping -3 penalty.
  LOGIC [Medium: Failure] - Oh for *fuck's* sake, like things weren't already hard enough for me as it is.
  • It's curiously subverted in THE NIGHTMARE when the Voice of the Hero gets fed up with the Narrator's Fantastically Indifferent attitude toward the spatially impossible basement. The Narrator tries to shut him down, but Logic chimes in and, to the Hero's great satisfaction, says plainly that "None of this makes any goddamn sense."
• A Glitch in the Matrix:
  • Certain moments in THE DAMSEL seem to indicate that, however Harry is linked to the setting, it's not as solid a link as it might seem: after Harry tries to touch the mirror, the Voice of the Smitten still worries about having "a feather out of place", and for Harry, the mirror doesn't disappear, allowing him to catch a glimpse of something behind him before it vanishes the second he blinks. Later on, the Smitten's attempt to open the basement door with The Power of Love fails, forcing Harry to kick it open.
  • The next chapter continues this: the Narrator describes the cabin as looking the same as the Damsel's, even though it's become a lookalike of Harry's home from when he lived with Dora, and the Voices can see the mirror over the doorway when Harry can't.
  • THE ECHO pushes it to truly odd levels: Harry still can't see the mirror when it appears in the church, and when he throws the knife at it on the suggestion of Flux Et Reflux, Inland Empire insists it's lost to them, even though they could very easily walk over and get it.
  • And it all goes completely tits-up in THE ACT OF FUTILITY: the skills are just gone, leaving it up to the Narrator and the Voices to keep Harry moving, and even then he's unable to free the Princess herself, resulting in her dragging him down into the pit. Interestingly, a few of the Voices are missing as well; the Stubborn, the Contrarian, and the Hunted, who were there in THE MOMENT OF CLARITY, are absent here.
• Godzilla Threshold: The Narrator elongating the cabin to try and kill Harry pushes Half Light to let the Spectre possess him in order to get Harry moving.
• Grammar Nazi: While some of the Skills are having a discussion over whether to trust the Voice of the Opportunist, Encyclopedia briefly chimes in to remind Savoir Faire that it's "mutualistic", not "mutually parasitic".
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": Just for the record, Harry is talking about a white check here.
  YOU - Why has it gotten harder?
  ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Formidable: Success] - Well, --
  RHETORIC [Easy: Success] - Shut the fuck up.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Tiago was left nigh-catatonic when a change in the 2mm hole in the world put him face-to-face with the Shifting Mound, upending everything he thought he knew about his "Mother of Silence".
  TIAGO - In the end, he ends up speaking to you alone, a single sentence whispered with a hoarse voice:
  "I heard her sing, homes."
  "...She isn't supposed to sing."
  • Harry is an utter wreck by the time THE ACT OF FUTILITY rolls around: missing all his skills, his memories, and left with no other option but to free the Princess... which he fails to do.
• Hidden Depths:
  • When Harry asks the Narrator for a fun fact about Himself, the Narrator, after a few moments of reluctance, actually does confess something:
    THE NARRATOR - ...Writing. I enjoyed... writing. Storytelling overall, really - but I was always the best at writing. To pen a word and have a thousand meanings attached, to capture a fragment of the world to preserve for all time...
    It was my calling. And I... I enjoyed it immensely.
  • The Voice of the Cold, when prompted, actually gives a fairly clear and evocative description of the path in the woods in THE ACT OF FUTILITY.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The Nightmare tormenting Harry loop after loop ends up coming back to bite her in THE ACT OF FUTILITY, since with him so thoroughly broken, he can't even start on the massive skill checks he'd need to free her, leaving them both to tumble even deeper into the darkness.
• Honor Before Reason: While searching for the Princess through the vision of Revachol, Harry takes a moment to stop and fill out a missing persons form for her... or try to, anyway.
• Hope Spot:
  • It initially seems like Harry and the Spectre are going to be able to make it out of the cabin in spite of the Narrator's meddling, succeeding despite everything on check after check to keep going... until they don't.
  • Similarly, the narrative dangles the chance that, even when he's so late in the game that he's being actively Mind Raped by the Nightmare, Harry might be able to show her compassion and avert the Moment of Clarity. It fails, and Harry and every voice in his head is plunged into the darkness.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Pale, as her name suggests, has taken on a lot of the aspects of her namesake: she lacks a real identity of her own, instead being a constantly-shifting cloud of human shapes solely focused on pleasing Harry, and she's become somewhat unstuck in space and time — Harry offers her his flask from outside the cabin, and she's somehow able to take it.
• Hypocritical Humor: The Voice of the Cheated is immediately untrusting of the Echo, skeptical of her showing up at the same time they end up stuck in the basement — something which, as Reaction Speed points out, could easily be applied to him as well.
• Implausible Deniability: Whether to save face after its Epic Fail or just because it genuinely believes it, Perception doggedly insists the Nightmare is nowhere to be seen once they enter the basement. The facts that the Narrator says she's there and that their organs are shutting down are surely unrelated.
• Infodump: Encyclopedia gives one about various Elysian cultures' beliefs regarding ghosts when Harry meets the Spectre, but it's quickly subverted by Logic remarking that the Spectre, like most things they've seen so far, probably isn't going to align with any Elysian perspective on the universe.
• Insane Troll Logic: A failed Suggestion check to convince the Narrator to let him out of the cabin results in the skill telling Harry to just threaten to walk out.
  SUGGESTION - He's not actually holding you in this room physically -- only the implication of an endless void imprisons you here. It's probably not even really there. Call His bluff.
• Insistent Terminology: Lampshaded In-Universe by the Overinsistent Vocabulary thought, gained from a Rhetoric passive check about the Narrator's use of this trope.
• Irrational Hatred: Half Light has nothing but seething bloodlust for the Princess from the moment it sees her, and most of its dialogue about her is ordering Harry to kill her. Later, this switches to a blind and absolute terror of her as an unstoppable monster. It's implied that this is due to Harry somehow subconsciously picking up on the Princess' nature as an Eldritch Abomination.
• Jump Scare: In-Universe, Reaction Speed gets quite the fright the first few times the Spectre pulls her Nightmare Face.
• "Just Joking" Justification: In the first CHAPTER I, Harry tries to brush off him saying he's come to kill the Princess with this. Tries.
  THE NARRATOR - The Princess shifts uncomfortably for a moment, clearly not believing you. Can you stop trying to reassure her and focus on the task at hand, please?
• Just Think of the Potential!: Rhetoric's argument for letting the Spectre hitch a ride out of the basement: if she really is the spectre of communism, that's 0.001% closer to building communism, and if not, she's still an actual, real-life ghost, something that would revolutionize science as they know it.
• Killer Game Master: When Harry and the Spectre start their climb out of the basement, the Narrator throws all caution to the wind and begins doing everything He can to stop them: causing Harry's leg to freeze in place midway up the staircase, making him feel too exhausted to open the door, and pulling a Wraith by elongating the hallway far enough that Harry wouldn't be able to make it in his current state.
• Knew It All Along: Turns out Harry was never fooled by the Echo's transparent attempt to pretend she was one of his skills. He was just Playing Dumb to throw the Narrator off the scent.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • When the Narrator chides Harry for "wasting time asking questions'', Rhetoric is left aghast:
  RHETORIC [Easy: Success] - Questions are not a waste of time. Questions are how you *operate*. You can't make a decision until you've asked all of your *questions*. That's how this works.
  • After a failed Suggestion check sees Harry telling the Princess that he's here to kill her (without having taken the Pristine Blade), the Voice of the Hero wonders why Harry had to pick the "least bad option" from a list of completely insane non sequiturs. Volition just comments that he'll get used to it.
  • When the Narrator continues to insist that slaying the Princess will lead Harry to a "happy ending" even after Harry has seen what that ending entails, Rhetoric and Drama proceed to ruthlessly mock His Manipulative Bastard act.
    RHETORIC [Challenging: Success] - 'Happy' ending -- is He *really* hiding His true intentions in a bit of wordplay? No one actually does that in real life.
    DRAMA [Easy: Success] - Only supervillains of the cartoon reels and cheap paperbacks do. Though you could pull it off if you wanted to -- all it takes is the right delivery.
  • After a failed roll from Flux Et Reflux, the Voice of the Cheated takes an absolutely brutal shot at Disco's check system:
    VOICE OF THE CHEATED - And another thing - have you guys been rolling dice? Is that what's happening? We're being put in harrowing life-or-death situations and you fucks feel like leaving it up to a dice roll? What is wrong with you people?
    VOICE OF THE HERO - Is that what that noise is? I didn't want to say anything about it, thought it might be rude to mention.
    YOU - Wait, you're *rolling dice*? Is that what these checks are? I always thought it was some kind of abstraction of the concept of adversity or something -- what the *fuck*?!
• Late to the Realization: After God only knows how many iterations (not even counting the prior chapters), the Narrator finally figures out Harry isn't supposed to be here when he fails to free the Act of Futility. Other versions of him had seen Harry's memories of Revachol but were seemingly unable to comprehend what this meant. Seemingly he only catches on when Harry, like himself, is a shadow of a person.
  THE NARRATOR - ...You can't free her.
  And you... aren't them. And they aren't you. And you spoke of a life... before...
  ...
  Who are you? What are you?! How did you get here?!
• Laughing Mad: The Act of Futility is left doing this after Harry fails to free her.
• Layman's Terms: In the second Esprit De Corps vision of Precinct 41, Soona's explanation of the 2mm hole in the world and what might lie beyond it goes completely over Jean's head; another lieutenant, who seems to have followed better, clarifies that she's saying it might be possible for them to follow Harry through the hole and get him out.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • There are a number of nods to the Art-Style Clash between the two games: since Slay The Princess is Deliberately Monochrome save for the odd Splash of Color, Perception routinely fails to identify the colors of things around Harry, and Inland Empire describes the Princess' blood as "the only color in the world"; Half Light also calls her large, cartoony eyes "unnatural". It starts to bleed into a variation on the Musical World Hypothesis when the Spectre is unable to identify the things reflecting off the magnetic tape reels representing Harry's skills, until Inland Empire tells her it's color — and even then, she struggles to identify any of the colors except for red. It's outright confirmed in the lead-up to the Nightmare when Perception has a Freak Out trying to identify the color of the Princess' eyes... and realizing it can't tell the color of anything that isn't on Harry; according to it, the scenery has color, it's just somehow impossible to tell what colors exactly.
  • In his first appearance, the Voice of the Cheated is left furious after witnessing a failed check, thinking the skills have been literally leaving their fates up to a roll of the dice the entire time. Volition insists it's more complicated than that, but the Cheated insists they find a way to stop having to deal with random chance whenever they want to do something important. This is, of course, reflective of the differences between choices in Disco Elysium and Slay The Princess: the latter is a visual novel where making a choice is as simple as clicking an option and watching the consequences play out, while the former, being an RPG, has elements of randomness in the form of skill checks. The thought Harry gets from this exchange, Flagrant Disregard Of Reality, even suggests that Harry might be able to do as the Cheated says and throw away the checks.
  • Harry losing his skills in THE ACT OF FUTILITY includes losing Perception, Savoir Faire, and every other skill involved in physical actions, which means he's reliant on the Narrator and the Voices to describe him seeing or doing things in order to make it happen... and that he's unable to use those skills to free the Princess.
• Lemony Narrator: The Narrator leans hard into this during THE SPECTRE, seldom missing an opportunity to call Harry and his actions "asinine" or "inane". To be fair to Him, Harry's actions in this chapter include thinking the Spectre is the avatar of communism and spending five minutes zoning out to hold a "Mind Parliament", so it's clear he feels like the Only Sane Man.
• Let Me at Him!: After allowing himself to get possessed in The Spectre, Harry questions if "anyone['s] *seen* the little murder gremlin, actually?" since Half Light hadn't spoken up about the situation. It turns out Volition had been struggling (and soon failing) to keep both Half Light and Electrochemistry under wraps, who want to panic and flirt respectively.
• Lying to Protect Your Feelings: Something bad has obviously happened to Kim and the others by the time THE ACT OF FUTILITY rolls around, but the Voice of the Hero refuses to tell Harry, instead just saying they're fine — after all, telling him about what happened to them is what broke him in the first place.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Aside from the Princess' own habit of trying to chew off her own arm, Flux Et Reflux offers a surprisingly easy check to let Harry do this when he finds himself chained in the basement — though since she is the Princess, it shouldn't come as a surprise that that's her first option.
• Loved I Not Honor More: La Revacholière initially begs Harry not to go into the Construct, where she cannot follow him, but when he insists that he has to save its occupants, she relents, saying that's why she loves him, and tells him that she will be awaiting his return.
• Madness Mantra:
  • During THE NIGHTMARE, Harry's checks start to receive repeated penalties with the same description: "Damned". It eventually culminates in the attempt to snap Half Light out of its weird doomsayer fugue state, which has the penalty five times over.
  • One of Harry's already chosen options in THE ACT OF FUTILITY is just "I'm on a path in the woods...", etc., repeated over and over again.
• Magibabble: After a failed Encyclopedia check to remember anything Harry might know about ghosts, the skill yields to Inland Empire, who rattles off a long string of this that boils down to "You should help her with her Unfinished Business." Logic calls it a bunch of nonsense, but Inland Empire has been on the money about far more momentous stuff before, and the ritual it has Harry do to make the Spectre's body more corporeal does actually seem to work...
• Mercy Kill: In the lead-up to THE SPECTRE, the Voice of the Hero ends up being the one to kill Harry, since the Narrator refuses to narrate for them and Harry doesn't have it in him to do the deed himself.
• Money Dumb: It's mostly because he doesn't really know what money is, but after seeing Harry's memory of his favorite kebab stand, the Voice of the Opportunist wonders about selling the Spectre's tiara for enough money to get "a couple".
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Authority is quite against letting the Spectre in and wants Harry to grab her and show her he's boss - but when she's actually there, he becomes deferential and wants all the other voices to speak of her with respect. It helps that she's polite.
  AUTHORITY - I offer you a warm welcome to our venerable house, Your Majesty -- you will be treated as a guest of honor, but see to it you cause no trouble.
  • When Harry becomes too exhausted from the Spectre's possession to open the door out of the cabin, he decides to rest for a moment, and takes the opportunity to show the Spectre and the Voices some of his memories of Elysium. It's quite a sweet moment (and one that offers another vision of Precinct 41 courtesy of Esprit De Corps) that even the Narrator joins in on... but an observant reader might notice the check to get off the floor getting harder and harder...
  • The tense, dramatic flashback to Harry entering the Swallow and coming to the Construct is capped off by Drama congratulating the other skills on the "reproduction" like a director at the close of a play.
• Morality Chain: It does nothing to stop him from slaying the Princess, but at the start of the second run, most of Harry's skill checks that relate to doing so have the same modifier: "-3 Kim wouldn't approve".
• Mundane Object Amazement: The Voice of the Hero is entranced by the way water flows around an upside-down cup in Harry's memory of a sunny afternoon spent washing dishes. Inland Empire, of course, joins in.
  VOICE OF THE HERO - What makes it flow like that? It's kind of mesmerizing.
  INLAND EMPIRE - No one knows. It is one of the great mysteries of our time.
• My God, You Are Serious!: The Spectre has this reaction when she realizes that, yes, the guy who just slew her for money and a vague notion of "saving the world" is trying to wheedle his way into a reward for saving her from the basement where he killed her. She settles on very sarcastically offering Harry her tiara (though it dissolves into nothing and reappears back on her head the second it leaves her hand).
  ?Will this cover it, my esteemed murderous associate
• Mythology Gag: Plenty, to both games:
  • The fic opens with, once again, a comatose Harry being berated by the inhabitants of his Paleo-Mammalian Cortex. Subverted in that he's not comatose; he's just deep in the "textured nothingness" of the Long Quiet.
  • Endurance and Physical Instrument would like to remind you that Harry used to be a gym teacher.
  • Inland Empire and Perception describe the Long Quiet in the same way as the omniscient narration does in Slay The Princess:
    INLAND EMPIRE [Legendary: Failure] - You are alone in a place that is empty.
    PERCEPTION (HEARING) [Impossible: Failure] - It is quiet here.
  • When the Voice of the Hero describes the Princess' voice as hypnotizing, Volition initially worries that it's dealing with another "compromised" voice in Harry's head. Its only response when the Voice of the Smitten shows up is a long-suffering "Oh god, there's two of them now." And once they meet the Damsel and the Pale, the Skills actually do become compromised, including Volition once the Pale takes on the form of Dora.
  • After asking her about her name and getting a Non-Answer, Harry tries to come up with a name for the Princess. One failed Conceptualization check later:
    CONCEPTUALIZATION [Formidable: Failure] - Guinevere Rözovy Baudelaire.
    YOU - Man, we gotta have a talk about this.
  • The Voice of the Hero, meanwhile, says that she looks more like a "Nichole", in reference to her voice actress, Nichole Goodnight, while one dialogue option lets Harry float "Shifty" as a name, a popular Fan Nickname for the Shifting Mound.
  • Electrochemistry at one point tells Harry that despite her weird, spacey demeanor, the Damsel isn't high on anything, calling back to the infamous cocaine addictions of Revacholian royalty you can hear about from René and the statue of Filippe III.
  • When the newly-freed Damsel asks Harry what he wants to do, his first response is, of course, to sing karaoke with her.
  • Once the Narrator returns from getting a drink, He sarcastically apologizes for being gone, something Rhetoric quickly calls out. The Voice of the Hero adds that "Even I could've told you that, and I'm terrible at spotting liars"; in canon, he made a similar remark in the face of the Razor's attempts to convince them she didn't want to stab them.
  • Similarly, when Savoir Faire claims that Harry's memory troubles are just part of "the look", Suggestion comments to a confused Voice of the Hero that it's a different thing from the Expression; the Hero was equally confused by the Long Quiet flirting with the Razor by giving her "The Look", which was itself a reference to the Expression.
  • The Pale's touch is described as burning Harry's flesh, and her kiss as feeling like drowning; both are references to the Burned Grey and the Drowned Grey, Princesses who you could get from the death of the Damsel or her analogue, the Prisoner. Later, Inland Empire mentions a scent of "deepwater brine" as a sign of the Spectre's presence, another reference to the Drowned Grey.
  • The ✤250,000 "voucher" the Narrator gives Harry is very obviously just "THE EVIDENCE" from the original game repurposed for the situation. After Harry signs it, Savoir Faire has Interfacing put the net worth counter from the Ultraliberal Vision Quest back up.
  • During one of his attempts at buttering Harry up, the Voice of the Opportunist calls him "Harrister", a nickname only ever used once in the game by the Ancient Reptilian Brain. Who deploys it once again after Harry dies trying to escape the cabin.
  • Before heading to the cabin to meet the Spectre, Volition offers Harry a check to "get your shit together"; one of the bonuses is listed as "Ghost of the Volumetric Shit Compressor".
  • While marching down into the Spectre's basement, Half Light tells Harry to "Be ready to claw out her heart if you have to." In the lead-up to the Wraith, the Spectre does just that to the Long Quiet, and even here she half-threatens to do it to Harry a few times. Inland Empire also notes that spectres are much easier to deal with than wraiths, which is definitely true here. The climax of the chapter is a Whole-Plot Reference to that other chapter's, with the Narrator elongating the hallway beyond the protagonist's ability to escape and the ghostly Princess piloting his body to freedom, narrating her own actions the whole time to stave off His influence — except here, it's a joint effort of Heroic Willpower between Harry and the Spectre, and she's just not as good at it as the Wraith.
  • After asking her about her name and getting a Non-Answer, Harry tries to come up with a name for the Spectre. One successful Conceptualization check later, the skill says that her name should be vast and oceanic — "feather-light, free, and everlasting". Beyond being a reference to the Shifting Mound's nature, it's also a reference to the lyrics of "Want To Be Free" by Sea Power, who contributed to Disco Elysium's soundtrack, with a trip-hop remix of "Want To Be Free" — "Burn, Baby, Burn" — appearing in the game's finale.
  • Conceptualization calls the sensation of the Spectre's possession "ice in the veins" — a line from "Reflections" by R.S. Thomas, the poem that opens both the game and the fic, which Harry can quote to Tommy Le Homme.
  • While trying to wrangle the Spectre possessing Harry into something comprehensible, Interfacing mentions attempting to sync sines with her, much like you had to do with Noid to get him to help you contact Coalition Warship Archer in the Moralist Vision Quest.
  • When Harry asks the Spectre why she keeps calling him "killer", she reminds him that he didn't exactly stop to introduce himself before stabbing her in the heart. The following dialogue tree references just about every name or title Harry can pick up over the course of the game: the Law, lieutenant double-yefreitor Harrier Du Bois, Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau, Tequila Sunset, and "Harry. It's Harry. Why the hell were there so many other options here?" The Spectre, for her part, decides to just stick with "killer".
  • The Pristine Blade is once again tossed somewhere, though down the stairs instead of out the window, and then again at the mirror in the church.
  • When the Spectre asks what the world is like, one of the dialogue options has Harry saying "It's basically just a bunch of apes duking it out on a ball."
  • The Flagrant Disregard Of Reality thought, devoted to letting Harry dispense with the skill checks and just do things, mentions a couple Intentionally Unwinnable checks in the original game — opening the bunker on the coast, dodging Korty's Last Breath Bullet — and outright calls them "bullshit".
  • When Inland Empire prompts Harry to turn back in the flashback, the following dialogue tree is similar to certain ones in the Tower route: a series of greyed-out options forming a brief monologue on the futility of trying to resist, and a final option to fulfill the inevitable.
  • Shivers briefly refers to the nascent Shifting Mound the same way she does: "solitary lights in an empty city."
  • Some of the potential names for the case Harry doesn't pick are references: THE HERO AND THE PRINCESS, DICK MULLEN AND THE FRACTURED GLASS, APOCALYPSE COP'S REDEMPTION...
  • Something the Shifting Mound says to Harry is the direct inverse of a line she can say to the Long Quiet: "You are more like a person than you are like me."
  • When Harry arrives on the path to the Nightmare, a terrified Half Light starts doomcrying about being "cast down into the abyss". Conceptualization then chimes in with a very familiar refrain:
    CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] - Falling, falling, falling still...
  • The Voice of the Hero advises Harry to take Pristine Blade to meet the Nightmare, saying one way or another, it'll at least give them more options — the same advice he gave the Long Quiet in the Shifting Mound's heart.
  • This time around, it's Volition that keeps Harry from stepping off the stairs in the Nightmare's basement rather than the Narrator.
  • When Endurance and Electrochemistry join in on the Voice of the Paranoid's chant, the Hero tries to join in, like when he'd occasionally take over while the Paranoid talked to the Long Quiet. He's just as bad at it here.
• No Name Given: As in Slay the Princess, the names assigned to the Voices seem to be non-diagetic and there for the convenience of the reader. Everyone always calls the Princess the Princess, though there are more Title Drops for her chapter variants in this fic, but she doesn't have a dialogue tag name except when she's Flux Et Reflux. The Narrator actually says that Harry should call him the Narrator and signs a fancy N on the repurposed letter, so he seems to have embraced the 'name'. The Skills also don't seem to be named. Between them and the Voices a lot of nicknames are tossed around.
• Non-Answer: The Narrator refuses to tell Harry anything he doesn't already know when asked who He is, just repeating His spiel about being Harry's "guide" and keeping him on task to slay the Princess.
  COMPOSURE [Formidable: Success] - He's nervous about this subject. Either He thinks you won't like the answer or He doesn't want to dwell on it much longer.
• Non-Indicative Name: Discussed by Dual-Booted Ghost In The Machine, the thought Harry gets from letting the Spectre possess him: it mentions that he was originally going to call it "Ghost Cop", but he's not a ghost and the Spectre's not a cop.
• Not So Above It All: At one point in the second CHAPTER III, Harry has to kick down a locked door. Flux Et Reflux, AKA the Echo, AKA the Princess gives a bonus to the check, with the description being a gleeful "Yeah! Kick that thing!"
• O.C. Stand-in: Some of the RCM personnel shown in the Esprit De Corps segments — Berdyayeva, McCoy, Apricot Pidieu — are canon characters only briefly mentioned in passing.
• Odd Friendship: Though there are some hiccups, several of Harry's skills take to the Voice of the Hero, especially when he manages to urge Inland Empire to say something comprehensible. Authority in particular is always calling him "recruit", and Volition comes to think of him as another voice of reason.
• Off the Rails: Each CHAPTER III Princess is an Original Generation unique to the fic:
  • For the Damsel, Harry tells her that he doesn't truly love her, causing her to commit suicide out of despair, at which point the Voice of the Smitten does the same. The path in the woods becomes choked with the Pale, the cabin is transformed into a replica of Harry's old place on Voyager Road, and the Princess has become a Humanoid Abomination composed of pure Pale, who is essentially the logical extreme of the Damsel's nature as a Flat Character: a Perpetually Protean entity with no will of her own, just the desire to be someone who makes Harry happy... and unfortunately, one of those someones is Dora, and Volition is still powerless to resist her. The two embrace, and the Shifting Mound takes the opportunity to grab them both.
  • For the Spectre, Harry lets her possess him, forcing the Narrator to get them both killed by warping the dimensions of the cabin and causing Harry to succumb to exhaustion. Harry wakes up in the basement of the cabin, a chain around his wrist and a 25th voice in his head — Flux Et Reflux, or the Echo. When Harry leaves, the world outside the cabin has transformed into a faded memory of Revachol, eventually leading to the old swingset by Harry's crashed motor carriage, where Harry and the Echo briefly sit together and chat before the Shifting Mound takes her away.
  • For the Nightmare, Harry chooses to stay with her in the basement instead of killing or releasing her. In Slay the Princess this choice results in the Moment of Clarity, and this Princess is almost exactly the same as her, with the same kind of description and most of the same lines - but he is different, with his skills and memory shattering, so this chapter is called the Act of Futility. Harry is unable to free the Princess - he couldn't even with his skills, the checks required are higher than anything in his game - resulting in them tumbling down together into the depths of the Construct. The experience leaves Harry all but completely destroyed, with the Paleomammalian Cortex the only voices remaining in his head. Despite it all, though, Harry picks himself back up, and, guided by Volition, Empathy, and the Long Quiet himself, finds his way back to what remains of the cabin. In its depths is the Abyss, the Clipped-Wing Angel to the Moment of Clarity's Invincible Villain, left a broken shell of her former self. Knowing that slaying her wouldn't make a difference anymore and saving her is impossible, Harry removes the shards of her mask from her face, offers her a drink of water, and shares a short, sad laugh with her before the Shifting Mound comes to bring them both back to the light.
  • Even besides all that, some of the chapters result in Harry gaining two new voices when they would usually only give one; for example, his actions in the lead-up to THE SPECTRE (namely, killing the Princess for a promise of payment and then killing himself to escape the cabin) yield the Voices of the Opportunist and the Cold.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Volition has one in the prologue when it initially seems like Harry's amnesia has relapsed, so to speak.
  • Rhetoric has one that's played for some pretty Black Comedy:
    RHETORIC - You don't *know* that she's going to stab you --
    

    .I'm sorry... I'll try to be quick

    
    RHETORIC [Medium: Success] - -- No, yeah, she's definitely gonna stab you.
  • Multiple of Harry's skills have one when the Narrator says that his death meant "an entire world has been damned to oblivion", initially thinking He means Elysium before Esprit De Corps reassures them.
  • The Voice of the Hero has an outright panic attack once the Skills fill him and the other Voices in on the nature of the Pale — and the fact that they're in it. Shortly after, Endurance has one itself when the Skills realize that, due to Pale exposure, Harry hasn't been breathing for almost two minutes.
  • Everyone taking up space in Harry's head panics when it becomes clear that the Narrator isn't going to let them leave the cabin alive with the Spectre in tow.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • In The Damsel, Empathy begins lacking skill checks and slowly slipping into a dazed "love" with the Damsel, which isn't noticed until the Voice of the Hero points it out and reveals it may have been compromised.
    EMPATHY - But it's okay to love. She loves you. You should love her back.
    VOICE OF THE HERO - Alright, I'm putting my foot down. I didn't want to step on any toes, being the 'new guy' and all, but there's definitely something up with this one.
    VOLITION - ...*Shit*, you're right. I didn't even notice. How long have they been like this?
  • The Voice of the Opportunist starts getting uncharacteristically worried when it seems that Harry is going to let the Spectre possess him, fearful of losing the advantage of being invisible and inaudible to her.
  • After the showing of Harry's memories, the Narrator immediately starts in with the snippy Passive-Aggressive Kombat, but actually drops the act in a rare moment of genuine emotion.
    THE NARRATOR - Are you quite done now? Finally sorted through all the memories of a world you apparently don't care about saving?
    VOICE OF THE HERO - Why do you keep going on about this? What about our actions so far would have you think we'd even consider killing her now?
    THE NARRATOR - ...Didn't you see how beautiful the world is? The people, the places - freeing her would destroy all of them, all of it. It would be the end of everything you know and love. Does that sound worth it to you? Hm?
  • Half Light hates and fears the Princess, and in the Spectre chapter is very upset about Harry letting her possess him, let alone allowing her to take over for various Skills to pass hard checks. But near the end of the chapter, the Narrator's trick and impending death makes Half Light panic and make what he calls a Deal with the Devil, letting her take over.
  • The Narrator's demeanor cracks again at Harry's final question in THE ECHO:
    YOU - ...Do you know how I could get home? You didn't let me leave, before, even when I did what you asked.
    THE NARRATOR - ...Ask something else.
    VOICE OF THE OPPORTUNIST - But-
    THE NARRATOR - Just - ask something else.
    RHETORIC [Legendary: Success] - He doesn't know. More than that -- He doesn't understand.
  • The Nightmare path is the first where Volition pushes Harry to slay the Princess along with the Narrator (though it is somewhat justified, since in this route the Princess really does become something incredibly dangerous):
    VOLITION [Legendary: Success] - You can. She *killed you*, she's enraged, and she probably *could* end the world. If there's no one else that can do this--
    THE NARRATOR - There isn't.
    VOLITION - Then she has to die. You have to slay her, to keep all you know safe.
  • Half Light is usually the first skill to feed into the role of Apocalypse Cop, but THE NIGHTMARE sees it embrace this side of itself, at the expense of its role as Harry's self-preservation instinct, as well as being downright cruel to Harry, insisting that he has no chance against the Nightmare and viciously berating him during her Mind Rape. Considering that its lines start lacking skill checks just like Empathy with the Damsel, it's implied to have something to do with the influence of the Nightmare herself.
  • Played for Laughs when the Paranoid and the Hero just about order Inland Empire to say something comprehensible, and it actually does.
    AUTHORITY - You actually got him to spit out something sane? At this rate you'll be angling for a promotion in no time, recruit.
  • When Harry starts considering sealing himself in the basement with the Nightmare, Shivers/the Long Quiet, who usually only speaks a couple words at a time, outright begs Harry not to do it.
    YOU - Why not?
    SHIVERS - ...It will hurt. More than anything. For all of you.
• Outside-Context Problem: Harry, with his "unconventional" attitude, borderline-supranatural detective skills, and his existence as a human being with a past who can't choose to ignore fatigue and injuries and so is susceptible to some things that the Long Quiet usually isn't, sends the events of Slay The Princess completely Off the Rails. Conversely, Reality Is Out to Lunch within the Construct to a much higher degree than even Harry is used to and he and his Skills struggle, particularly Logic.
• Painting the Medium: The whole fic is formatted using CSS to appear straight out of Disco Elysium itself, complete with skill checks, both passive and active, and gaining thoughts over the course of the story. For a few more specific examples:
  • The Voice of the Hero is initially aligned to the center with his name in standard capitalization, as in Slay The Princess, whereas all the other voices (including, curiously, the Narrator) are aligned to the left and have their names in all caps, as in Disco. It's described as a Poke in the Third Eye for Harry, but Interfacing is able to somehow wrangle the Hero into a "more comfortable shape", and after that, he and all the other voices are formatted Disco-style. In addition, even after that, the Narrator and the Voices have their text emphasized with italics or bold text (or both) - and break up their lines with hyphens, whereas the Skills are emphasized with *asterisks* -- and break up their lines with em dashes.
  • The Princess' text is aligned to the right, lacks a name, and is colored in pink (or red when she gets angry), all of which hearkens back to her own case of this in her home game. (In Slay the Princess her normal speech is rendered in white, but it has to be changed here since the Disco Elysium workskin has default white text.) Harry tries to make her words more comfortable like with the Hero, but the check is Impossible, and fails. When the Spectre possesses Harry, he's initially completely unable to hear her, but Interfacing wrangles her successfully this time, aligning her to the left (though still colored and nameless); when she's possessing Harry's skills, their text turns pink as well, and any skill checks she makes are dyed pink and have the result text giving "HER" instead of "YOU" as the speaker.
  • The narration in the prologue — implied to be coming from the Long Quiet himself — is nameless, italicized, and center-aligned.
  • In the first CHAPTER I, the Narrator essentially starts bickering with Harry's task list, hastily appending a task to "Slay the Princess" after Rhetoric comes up with one to "Question the Princess". Later, Harry jogging to the cabin at Coach Physical Instrument's insistence completes a secret task: "Get your morning jog in".
  • A very interesting case of this arises from a mechanical difference between Disco Elysium and Slay the Princess. In Disco Elysium, a CRPG, interacting with objects lets you essentially "talk" to them as unique entities; for example, even before the Inland Empire check, investigating the Hanged Man's corpse has "THE HANGED MAN" listed as the speaker for the descriptions of the body). However, in Slay the Princess, a visual novel, any descriptions come exclusively courtesy of the Narrator and the Voices. Hence, in this fic, the Skills are a lot more active than usual in order to fill in the gaps in the Narrator's... narration. Harry even gets a thought during THE DAMSEL, Personal Airspace Violation, that directly comments on this, and it returns in THE ECHO once the Narrator leaves Harry alone on the image of the beach at Martinaise.
  • As the Pale starts to degrade Harry's mind more and more, the difficulties for his passive skill checks start to become higher and higher, and dialogue choices start to be replaced by just ellipses, symbolizing how much harder it's becoming to think.
  • The Voices' influence on Harry is shown by the modifiers they give to various checks: for example, the check to stop the Voice of the Smitten from pulling a Romeo and Juliet has a -5 modifier from the Smitten himself, and the Voice of the Cold, with his Lack of Empathy, tends to give a flat 0 modifier to demonstrate how detached he is — making it all the more telling when he starts giving bonuses to Harry recalling memories for them.
  • During Mind Parliament, Interfacing rejiggers the UI so it shows the Voices in proper alphabetical order (as in "HERO, VOICE OF THE") to make the voting easier and more fair. Near the end, the Voice of the Opportunist somehow puts himself back to normal to try and sneak in an extra vote (since his prevaricating made Rhetoric just mark him down as "abstain").
  • While possessing Harry, the Spectre comments directly on aspects of the game's UI, like reacting in surprise when a bunch of "Task updated" notifications pop up, or mentioning seeing the Thought Cabinet and task lists.
    CONCEPTUALIZATION - Is this how you keep track of your trains of thought? You're really trying to figure us all out, aren't you?
  • Flux Et Reflux retains the pink text from her earlier selves, and though this site can't show it, the red used to highlight her name is a different shade than that used for Physique skills. She also gives massive penalties to checks involving Harry trying to figure out where she came from. Once Harry projects her out of his head, her lines go back to being right-aligned, though they keep the name. The skill profile given at the end of her chapter has additions from her in pink; it also shows her to be Harry's new Signature Skill, reflected in her physical appearance by the crown used to designate such in the game.
  • At the beginning of THE NIGHTMARE, Harry essentially fast-forwards through the Narrator's dialogue In-Universe, with the dialogue choice outright offering the option to "[Skip his warning.]"
  • The Voice of the Paranoid's Survival Mantra, once he gets going, is constantly behind the dialogue in dull grey, repeating over and over again and only stopping when either the Nightmare or the Paranoid himself interrupts it (though the latter stops when Endurance and Electrochemistry start shoring him up). According to Word of God, the month-long hiatus between Chapters I and II of the Nightmare route was at least partially because of the time needed to learn the CSS necessary to make this work.
  • Interestingly, at one point in THE NIGHTMARE, the Voice of the Hero and Volition speak in perfect unison, with their nametag even having the "X and Y" format that sometimes occurs in Slay The Princess — something that never happens in Disco Elysium. What exactly this means remains to be seen.
  • As Harry descends into the nightmare that precedes the Act of Futility, the fic leaves a long, long space of empty background to represent the endless loops that he'll go through. Something similar happens in the chapter itself, when, as Harry and the Princess fall into the darkness, the background itself fades to black.
  • Additionally, the chapter preceding the Act of Futility starts with countless "I'm sorry" repeating in loops and multiplying until it dissolves the entire background into white, once again representing the loops Harry goes through. And if one looks at the page's Cool Code of Source, it's shown that it's actually multiple different Madness Mantra repeating that compose the white background, implied to be the Skills themselves having their own mental breakdown:
    • "The endless maze. A dark forest, devoid of life. An island on the sea of stars. Hot coals raked across every surface. Rotting from the inside until you turn hollow." — Likely Shivers.
    • "No sight. No hearing. No taste. No smell. No feeling." — Likely Perception.
    • "Tendons stretch, bones grind, organs rupture -- but you live on." — Likely Endurance.
    • "10-33. Repeat. 10-8. Repeat, please. 10-9. Acknowledge." — Likely Esprit de Corps.
    • "An endless dance. Twirling through the eons, a death waltz to the end of time." — Likely Drama.
    • In Gratuitous Greek: "Look at the speed of universal oblivion, the gulf of immeasurable time both before and after, the vacuity of applause, the indiscriminate fickleness of your apparent supporters, and the tiny room in which all this is confined."" — Likely Half-Light.
    • "You are not alone, and this place is not empty. There is a sound -- the harmony of the spheres. You must find its source. You have to keep going. You will make it. It is predestined." — Likely Inland Empire.
    • "Nothing makes sense. There are no laws. Chaos reigns." — Likely Logic.
    • "Eyes everywhere. Every time you turn your head -- more eyes. You can ’t keep them in your vision, only on the periphery. You are watched. You are watched."
    • "Hit and kick and punch and jab and struggle and hit..." — Likely Physical Instrument.
    • "There is no winning. You can’t bargain with something like this. You can’t talk your way out, you can’t -- you *can’t*." — Likely Rhetoric.
    • "Scrounge for a weapon -- *your* weapon -- but it won’t make a difference. Of course it wouldn’t. No piece of steel and sulfur could help you now." — Likely Hand/Eye Coordination.
    • "The singularity at the heart of a black hole. All vectors point inward. Time and space bend and twist until they become one -- to proceed forward is to fall even further. There is no escape." — Likely Visual Calculus.
    • "Endless pain. It isn’t constant, but that just makes it worse -- knowing during the reprieve that it will flare up again. Physical pain, mental anguish. It will not end." — Likely Pain Threshold.
    • "Keep it together, keep it together...you can’t keep it together. You are a wreck." — Likely Composure.
    • "There is no knowledge that could help you. This is beyond anything that’s ever been written. The facts of your current situation slip through your fingers like a sieve." — Likely Encyclopedia.
    • "You are nothing. A worm in the sand, beholden to forces beyond your capability. Your achievements are meaningless." — Likely Authority.
    • "Grand machinery chugs away at the edges of the world, each turn of a cog crushing you beneath its weight. The tension grows, the chain tightens, and the memory is dumped in anticipation of the next operation." — Likely Interfacing.
    • "Find something to distract yourself. Anything. This is -- it’s unbearable. Get *something*. Anything at all." — Likely Electrochemistry.
    • "Words fail you. You can’t describe you way out. There is no vocabulary that would even come close." — Likely Conceptualization.
    • "You are unravelling at the seams -- but so is she. She is destroying you both." — Likely Empathy.
    • "Dodge and weave and duck and twist and dodge..." — Likely Savoir Faire.
    • "Take a step forward." — Likely Volition.
    • "Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves." — Likely the Voice of the Paranoid.
  • By the time of THE ACT OF FUTILITY, the skills have all vanished; any time they would chime in, there's just empty space, and any attempted skill checks just return an error message and a blank result box (with the exception of the Shivers check to see what's in the mirror, whose result box reads "NOTHING AT ALL"). There are also a few moments where a notification pops up, but they're all redacted.
• Pet the Dog:
  • The first time he meets the Princess and asks about what she's been eating, Esprit De Corps prompts Harry to offer her a flask of strawberry punch he's been carrying around to help wean himself off alcohol.
  • Pretty much everything Harry does for the Spectre is to make up for slaying her in a fit of Ultraliberalism: using a cross charm to make her more solid, performing the Stations of the Breath for her corpse, and offering to kill himself.
  • When Harry and the Echo are sitting on the vision of the swingset at the Martinaise beach, two checks come up — an Easy Conceptualization check to "remember the sunrise", and a Formidable Inland Empire check to "imagine a sunrise". Harry chooses the latter, and the check succeeds, meaning that the Echo and the Voices get to bear witness to Harry's best rendition of the Sevenfold Sun Miracle.
  • Even while dying of multiple organ failure, Harry still tries to give the Nightmare his flask. Of course, she then immediately tosses it into the void...
  • Later, during the Nightmare's Mind Rape, an extremely difficult Empathy check lets Harry realize that the agony he's feeling isn't his own — it's hers. After seeing the events of CHAPTER I and the Nightmare's inception through her own eyes, he tries one last time to comfort her. She refuses it.
• The Power of Apathy: After making the decision to question the Narrator, Harry twists His arm by threatening to just plonk his ass down and let the Princess escape. The Narrator tries to remind him that if the Princess escapes, she will (supposedly) end the world, which (supposedly) includes Harry, but neither Harry nor the skills are taking that anymore.
  THE NARRATOR - ...You really are that suicidal, aren't you?
  VOLITION - There are good and bad days. *You* definitely haven't helped make this a good day, you know that?
• The Power of Hate: Stated by Empathy to be what lets the Spectre pull Harry to his feet when the Narrator's trying to describe them into submission: her sheer Unstoppable Rage at his manipulation and cruelty letting her essentially shout him down and keep them moving.
• The Power of Trust: Kim is initially baffled at Harry's insistence that he has to enter the Swallow... but at the end of the day, he still truly trusts his partner.
• Precision F-Strike: With Harry dying of exhaustion on the floor and the cabin's dimensions stretched out by the Narrator's bullshit, Half Light finally relents and allows the Spectre to possess it, resulting in the normally cool, collected Princess roaring at Harry to—
  HER - Get the FUCK up!
• The Promise: The Voice of the Hero apparently made one to Volition before the events of THE ACT OF FUTILITY. It leaves him as essentially Volition's replacement once the skill disappears.
• Properly Paranoid: Half Light senses there is something fundamentally wrong about the Princess and constantly urges Harry to kill her. As the Princess is the embodiment of death and change, it is entirely understandable for Half Light to perceive the Princess as a threat, even when the situation is nominally under Harry’s control. By the third iteration, with Harry having picked up the Pristine Blade and not killed the Princess immediately, Half Light realizes that Harry has no chance of winning a confrontation and must flee to survive, as this course of events shapes the Princess into becoming an absolute terror. Unfortunately for Half Light, Harry opts to merely leave the basement and stay in the cabin to make up his mind, leading to him being killed by the proto-Nightmare.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • When the Skills are fighting to keep the Narrator from using Harry's body to slay the Princess, Physical Instrument declares that "This flesh is *OURS*, not *YOURS* -- GIVE. IT. BACK."
• Purple Prose: Harry leans hard into this during THE DAMSEL, at Drama's insistence. It's Played for Laughs both for the nature of the lines themselves and for how sharply they contrast with the Damsel's vacant cheeriness.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": A variant in response to the Voice of the Hero wondering if they really did want the proto-Damsel to kill them:
  VOLITION [Trivial: Success] - No.
  ENDURANCE [Trivial: Success] - Nope.
  LOGIC [Trivial: Success] - No.
  SUGGESTION [Medium: Success] - Maybe? No, probably not. She sure seems to think you wanted that, though.
  HALF LIGHT [Easy: Success] - Fuck no, you should kill her instead.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • After the Personal Airspace Violation thought finishes and Volition gets a bonus to balance out the penalty from Overinsistent Vocabulary, it shuts down Savoir Faire — whose Ultraliberalism got Harry into the mess that leads to THE SPECTRE — with one of these:
    SAVOIR FAIRE [Formidable: Failure] - Money's always a great motivator, but He's obviously pulled a fast one on you -- if you would've known this would be the outcome, you'd never have committed to this --
    VOLITION [Challenging: Success] - Shut *up*, you greasy slimeball asshole! You've already screwed up enough -- now it's up to the rest of us non-insane ones to put the pieces back together. Stick to keeping us from falling on our ass and stop trying to break into venture capitalism, for god's sake.
  • The Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System still love giving these out. On their second appearance, though, they've found a new audience: the Spectre.
  • Harry gives an absolutely brutal one to the ‘harsh’ version of the CHAPTER I Princess, calling her out having the gall to suggest they need to trust each other when she has done nothing but belittle and make thinly-veiled threats towards him. The Princess is so taken aback that she is rendered speechless. According to Pain Threshold, part of the reason why Harry is so scathing of the Princess is that she reminds him of himself when he woke up without any memories.
  • After the Nightmare rejects Harry's last attempt at compassion, Half Light utterly tears into him for everything he feels guilty about and one thing he couldn't possibly have known: his break-up with Dora, his apocalyptic benders, ruining his relationship with Jean and the rest of Precinct 51, his slavish devotion to Kim and his fears he'll fuck that up too... and the fact that most of C-Wing (plus Soona and Egg Head) is currently trying to launch a raid on a Moralintern facility just to rescue him, but set off the alarm and start to engage in gunfire with armored forces. It's that last one that finally, completely breaks him.
• Refuge in Audacity: Even while trapped in a non-Euclidean basement with a Humanoid Abomination and one touch away from death, Harry still finds it in himself to bust a move. Even the Nightmare herself is impressed — though it quickly takes a turn for the worse when she pulls him into a waltz.
• The Reveal:
  • In THE DAMSEL, a Flash Sideways from Esprit De Corps shows how Harry ended up where he is now: he somehow managed to enter the 2mm hole in the world inside the anodic dance club.
  • More details about what's happened since Harry's been gone are revealed in THE SPECTRE: In the month (yes, month) since he disappeared, the Moralintern have torn down the church and began putting up some kind of facility around the Swallow; on the RCM's side, Soona has surmised that Harry might have survived his trip, and Precinct 41, on the orders of Captain Ptolemy Pryce, are planning to find a way inside the Coalition building and, if possible, mount a rescue mission for the lieutenant double-yefreitor.
  • And THE ECHO reveals the full story:
    • After a call from Soona inviting them to an experiment dedicated to finding out what lay on the other side of the Swallow, Harry and Kim arrived to find Tiago sitting, horrorstruck, on the steps of the church. All they could get from him was that his Mother of Silence had apparently started to "sing"...
    • According to the anodic dance crew, things inside the church had felt strange all day; Noid talks about the sines of the place going "rancid", like something fundamental in the space had been torn apart, and Acele's contact mic melted from the inside out when she tried to record some new samples from the anomaly...
    • The experiment began, and immediately things started to go wrong, with whatever sound was coming from the Swallow shaking the church apart even worse than before and causing a storm to begin brewing over the area...
    • At the insistence of Inland Empire, Harry turned back, and heard the Shifting Mound and the Long Quiet singing to themselves from oblivion, split apart and unable to come back together...
    • ...And after getting La Revacholière's blessing and convincing Kim to let him go before shoving him to safety, Harry sent himself through the Swallow and entered the Construct, hoping to reunite its occupants and, in so doing, save everything.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Upon seeing Harry's memory of the Insulindian Phasmid, the Voice of the Hero wonders why it has so many eyes. The Voice of the Opportunist comments that the "best way to make decisions is to see everything you're working with, know all the angles" in a clear bit of Psychological Projection, but Visual Calculus says that he's actually fairly close to right; the Phasmid, being a herbivore, needs a wider field of vision to keep watch for predators.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Harry has this between runs, to an extent; his progress on tasks and thoughts persists, the Voices are still calibrated to fit into his mind, and some of the details remain (for example, Reaction Speed finishes the Narrator's monologue for Him on the start of the second run). Savoir Faire tends to remember that the third stair from the bottom into the basement squeaks and avoids it in later loops. Inland Empire, for its part, definitely has this, as shown by its response to the Voice of the Hero at the start of the second run:
  INLAND EMPIRE [Challenging: Success] - This one hasn't seized your flesh or manipulated your conscious thoughtfields in this or any adjacent reality. You can still trust him.
• Rousing Speech: Volition gives one to the Voice of the Paranoid after they're grabbed by the Nightmare, encouraging them to push past the pain and keep the Survival Mantra going:
  VOLITION [Legendary: Success] - It hurts. Of course it hurts -- *life* hurts. But we keep going anyway. Because for every wound, every blunder, every pain and every injustice -- there is still reprieve to be found. Even if it's far from here, we can still *get* there if we just survive this horror.
  Even in misery is there levity.
  • It should be noted that last line is an inversion of one of Half Light's apocalyptic declarations just earlier.
• Running Gag:
  • Poor, poor Hand/Eye Coordination keeps failing checks to remind Harry that he has his gun on him. It becomes a lot less funny in THE NIGHTMARE, where Harry could really use a ranged weapon.
  • Several chapters have the "Everything goes dark, and you die." line delivered by someone different: in INTERMISSION I it's Perception and Endurance, in THE SPECTRE it's the Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System, and in INTERMISSION II it's Visual Calculus and Half Light.
  • Doorkickers Anonymous. With members ranging from Physical Instrument, to Inland Empire, to the Princess herself.
  • Physical Instrument's desperate attempts to convince Harry to shoulder check the Nightmare into the void.
    ENDURANCE - You do realize tackling someone involves coming into contact, right? You're gonna turn to mush if you try it.
    PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - You'll be fine, son. You can handle a little measly organ failure for at least a second or two.
• Sarcasm Failure: Suggestion finally meets its match when the Voice of the Opportunist weighs in on the existence of the mirror.
  VOICE OF THE OPPORTUNIST - I don't know, He seems pretty sure of himself - that has to count for something, right?
  SUGGESTION [Medium: Success] - No, it doesn't have to. Conviction doesn't automatically mean someone is correct.
  VOICE OF THE OPPORTUNIST - Solid point, solid point - that's why we keep you around.
  SUGGESTION - What?
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Played for Laughs in the first CHAPTER I: After Harry rejects Conceptualization's fancy name for the Princess, it throws a bit of a tantrum and declares that it's leaving. Of course, since it's a part of Harry's brain, it's right back a few lines later to critique the Voice of the Hero's choice of name.
    VOICE OF THE HERO - Hey, you said you were packing up and leaving. You don't get to criticize my name choice after calling it quits.
  • The Voice of the Opportunist and Flux Et Reflux suggest that maybe doing this is what will actually let them escape rather than slaying or saving the Princess, but Harry refuses to leave before he's found and saved the Princess. Or so he says...
• Sense Freak: Pain Threshold becomes this even harder after Breakerbox Of The Soul completes and gives it an absurd +5 bonus, calling the experience of the Nightmare shutting off Harry's organs "grand".
  PAIN THRESHOLD - Pain doesn't *have* to be a bad thing. If you're going to be tortured anyway, why not enjoy it?
• Sharing a Body: The Spectre's ability to possess the skills includes using Savoir Faire to pilot Harry's legs up the stairs, or Perception to taste the hot chocolate he offers her.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the first CHAPTER III, the Voice Of The Skeptic quotes from George Oppen's ''Of Being Numerous'' to strengthen Harry against the Pale:
    VOICE OF THE SKEPTIC - There are things / we live among 'and to see them / is to know ourselves'. / Occurrence, a part / of an infinite series, / the sad marvels; / of this was told / a tale of our wickedness. / It is not our wickedness.
    VOICE OF THE SKEPTIC - We are pressed, pressed on each other, / we will be told at once / of anything that happens / and the discovery of fact bursts / in a paroxysm of emotion / now as always.
    VOICE OF THE SKEPTIC - Obsessed, bewildered / by the shipwreck / of the singular / we have chosen the meaning / of being numerous.
  • The kebabs from Harry's favorite food cart, an unnamed vendor in Jamrock, are referred to as "the Nameless Ones".
  • During the second encounter with them, the Limbic System taunts Harry that he's met his end — "but the end is never the end, is it?"
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The Narrator tries to describe Harry being overwhelmed by exhaustion and collapsing on the floor to die. To say the Spectre isn't having it would be an understatement.
  THE NARRATOR - You can't feel anything at all, actually - you don't even manage to take one step before -
  HALF LIGHT [Formidable: Success] - WHEN WE'RE OUT, I'M COMING FOR YOU NEXT.
• Solar and Lunar: The Shifting Mound and the Long Quiet are given this dichotomy, with Inland Empire dubbing the Princess the "Priestess of the Sun", and the Voices "Emissaries of the Moon"; in addition, the floor of the Damsel's cabin is described as warm, as if it had been in the sun for a while.
  • This is further reinforced by how the world in The Echo, which is based upon Harry, and by extension the portion of the Long Quiet he hosts is described as lit by indirect quarter-moonlight.
• Stepford Snarker: When Harry comes out of his reverie after holding "the first inaugural session of Mind Parliament", the Spectre is panicking, worried that she's "broken" her only ticket out of the cabin. When she realizes he's back, she slips into something resembling her typical Deadpan Snarker attitude, but both the Narrator and Composure note that it's a front.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: The Nightmare's reaction to Harry asking if she's radioactive after she gives him the "I Am What I Am" spiel. As Rhetoric points out, she likely doesn't even know what radiation is (and the Voice of the Hero definitely doesn't).
• Survival Mantra: "Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves." of course makes an appearance, but the thought that the Voice of the Paranoid gives Harry, Psycholocomotor's Prayer, takes it up to eleven by looping Endurance and Electrochemistry in on it as well, strengthening Harry's body even further in the face of the Nightmare's power.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: At the start of the second run, one of Harry's unchosen dialogue options in response to the Princess asking if he's here to kill her is an example of this that would do the Razor proud:
  3. - "What? No way! I'm not here to kill you -- why would you even say something like that? Do I look like the kind of guy who would kill a princess chained up in a basement for a fat wad of cash -- you know, hypothetically?"
• Swapped Roles: At the beginning of THE ECHO, Harry is the one chained up in the basement of the cabin, with the Princess nowhere to be seen.
• Symbiotic Possession: The Spectre takes this even further than in canon, being somehow able to possess Harry's skills. Unlike the primary possession, this does give her control, but in an inversion of Heroic Host, it also lets her use their abilities — for example, possessing Conceptualization lets her understand the image she sees of Harry's soul as a tape computer.
• Sympathy for the Devil: The Nightmare route and what follows is a very bad time for Harry but he picks up on more of her Broken Bird nature than the Long Quiet does and despite not forgiving her, he also doesn't kill what she becomes.
• Take That!: Much like in Disco Elysium, Moralism and its rigid adherence to the Golden Mean Fallacy is not treated kindly by the narrative: Harry's Moralist turn in one loop is what ends up leading to the Nightmare, and him sticking to his guns and refusing to slay her or let her out just gets him stuck even further in the shitpipe.
• Theory of Narrative Causality: Drama invokes this a time or two, saying in Mind Parliament that a misguided hero seeing the error of his ways (saving the Spectre) would be more likely to meet a favorable end than a villain returning to finish the job he started (slaying her), and later that it makes dramatic sense that solving the problem he came to the Construct to solve — the current states of the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound — would open up a way back home for him.
• This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself: Inverted — knowing that Kim's ordered, hyperrational mind wouldn't be able to cope with the chaos of the Construct, Harry shoves Kim away before he can follow him through the hole in the world.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Electrochemistry, for the most part, remains somewhat neutral on the question of slaying the Princess, his occasional moments of sexual attraction to her aside. But when confronting the Nightmare, Harry attempts to shoothe her by offering a gift, in the form of his hip flask. This time the flask takes the form of "the Flask of Fear and Oblivion", which turns out to contain absinthe. Electrochemistry is downright elated that the flask finally offers a decent drink and starts begging Harry at length to at least break his soberity just a little bit and take a sip the flask before giving it to her, seeing how he is probably going to die any way. Violition, however, manages to hold strong, and Harry keeps up his vow of soberity and hands over the flask without drinking from it first. The Nightmare proceeds to study the gift for a little bit before casually throwing the flask away over her shoulder without even tasting it. Electrochemistry reacts with a rare moment of Tranquil Fury.
  ELECTROCHEMISTRY - ...You need to kill this monster. *Now*.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Inland Empire, usually not good for much more than adding flair and creating remarkably prescient imaginary scenarios, becomes essentially Harry's new Shivers (since the current one isn't much good away from Revachol and in fact has been replaced with the voice of the Long Quiet, who so far only makes minor comments) in the Construct, a World of Chaos ruled by story conventions and perception.
  • Inverted by Logic, who is normally very helpful, but unfortunately the Construct doesn't follow the usual laws of reality. It ends up failing a lot of its checks, mostly due to how actively absurd the situation is becoming.
• Title Drop: When Harry finally names the case, three of the options are DISCO ELYSIUM, SLAY THE PRINCESS, and the one he ultimately chooses, THE FURY OF A SHATTERED MIRROR.
• Tragic Monster: The Nightmare is already this in Slay the Princess. Here, since Harry's Skills were able to share the work the Voice of the Paranoid was undergoing to keep him alive, and because he's a person with a past outside of the Construct, he can glean more from her vision than the Long Quiet could. Half Light, being attuned to pain, fills in for Empathy's usual role and spells out the dreadful situation the Princess is in.
• Trauma Button: Between the Nightmare boasting that she doesn't need to get better — "in fact, maybe I'll get worse!" — and her Mind Rape including a vision of her as she "loses everything [she] is", it's safe to say that Harry has his pressed a fair few times in her chapter.
• Uncanny Valley: The Skills, Half Light especially, find the base form of the Princess deeply off-putting, especially her unnaturally large eyes, with Half Light utterly losing it and raving that Harry *needs* to KILL HER *NOW* as soon as he gets close to her, and in certain later chapters taking on a lot of similarities to the Voice of the Broken. It's implied to be just as much Foreshadowing to her true nature as it is a case of Leaning on the Fourth Wall (see above).
• Villainous Breakdown: When Harry fails to free the Act of Futility, she's reduced to alternately wailing and Laughing Mad, clawing desperately at the sides of her pit before dragging Harry down with her. It's implied to be just as much a fear response as it is realizing that she has only herself to blame; see Hoist by Their Own Petard above.
• Wait, What?: Reaction Speed's... well, reaction to the Princess nonchalantly suggesting Harry saw off her arm to get her out of her chains.
• Wham Episode:
  • THE DAMSEL. The origin of Harry's arrival to the Construct is revealed, glitches start to appear in the events of the chapter that raise even more questions about how it all fits together, and the transition to CHAPTER III comes courtesy of the Damsel killing herself, showing that very little is going to go as expected here.
  • INTERMISSION - THE MOTHER OF SILENCE. Hoo boy.
    • Harry finally remembers exactly how he came to be in the Construct, and why — to save the Shifting Mound and the Long Quiet, and hopefully all existence, from the Narrator's plan...
    • The Shifting Mound is finally, if briefly, able to communicate directly to Harry...
    • And the case finally gets a proper name: THE FURY OF A SHATTERED MIRROR.
      ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: The real 'THE FURY OF A SHATTERED MIRROR' starts here
• Wham Line:
  • When the Voice of the Hero first speaks to Harry, a successful Shivers check reveals that someone new is broadcasting to Harry's sixth sense:
    SHIVERS [Formidable: Success] - You can trust him.
  • In THE DAMSEL, when Harry goes to check the mirror, it initially seems that things will play out just as in canon... and then:
    PERCEPTION (SIGHT) [Formidable: Success] - Also, all three of them are wrong -- the mirror is still here.
  • For those who know the lore of Disco Elysium, the very title of CHAPTER III will be enough to set off massive alarm bells:
    CHAPTER III: THE PALE
  • In the same chapter, the Narrator's reaction to the Pale itself leaking into the Long Quiet ("No, it wasn't supposed to be like this!") raises a lot of questions about His place in both universes.
  • The Spectre's reaction to a passive Shivers check while she's possessing Harry reveals something very interesting that links to the first example here: she can't hear the Long Quiet speaking through Shivers.
  • After freeing himself from his bindings in THE ECHO, Harry makes his way up the stairs, and opens the basement door...
    THE NARRATOR - You are standing in... a church.
  • La Revacholière's send-off to Harry ends in a line that has monumental implications for how the end of the story might play out:
    SHIVERS - TELL THEM THEY ARE WELCOME TO MY SHORES.
  • "Five yet remain." This line from Inland Empire comes after Harry's already brought the Pale and the Echo to the Shifting Mound, further showing just how Off the Rails everything has gone.
  • THE ACT OF FUTILITY comes to its seeming end, Harry extending his hand towards the Princess to set her free... and then...
    THE NARRATOR - ...Despite all the effort you can muster being bent toward pulling her free of her imprisonment in exchange for the damnation of all reality, you are... unable to...?
    ...What?
    

    .‎ …No. NO. You have to
    .That's. How. This. Works
• What Could Have Been: In-Universe, Harry's Dialogue Trees still show a number of different choices other than the ones Harry ends up picking.
• Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: After Harry falls and shatters his kneecap, sealing his and the Spectre's fates, the Narrator berates him for not just following the script, slaying the Princess, and living forever in mindless bliss, even calling the slow, painful way He sent them to their deaths "what has to be done".
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: After the genuinely horrifying events of THE NIGHTMARE and THE ABYSS, the Flagrant Disregard Of Reality thought finally completes. Should Harry fail a Red Check with a difficulty of 15 or higher, he gets to reroll it. Only once, but that's still a monumental advantage to have.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: The Esprit De Corps segment in THE SPECTRE reveals that in the short time Harry's been in the Long Quiet, 33 days have passed in Elysium.
  • Later occurrences of this indicate further lost time, with each run seeming to equate to approximately a month.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Flux Et Reflux gives one to Harry when he starts fretting over all the harm he caused to people before he lost his memory, reminding him that he can change and has changed from the man he was, and encouraging him to keep going. It's very clearly filtered through the Echo's remorse for how she treated Harry as the Spectre.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Harry, not being a god, is unable to understand the Shifting Mound when she speaks to him. This also applies to the Spectre while she's possessing him, but Interfacing is able to fix that one.
• "You!" Exclamation: Half Light gives one of these when it realizes that the Spectre is currently riding side-saddle in Harry's psyche.
• You Monster!: The only response the Voice of the Hero can give to the Narrator taking away the hopes of both Harry and the Spectre to escape the cabin in the cruelest way possible.

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