The Predecessor

Steps

1. Start

Zahirah and Emil will be in charge of teaching the character or to work during the first day. During a moment where Emil is away, Zahirah will let slide that the desk where the character is, belonged to someone else. Also, the character will make a note on the phone saying that one of the drawer only opens in a certain way, mainly because the previous owner of this desk was used to open it their way for years.

2. Name drop

During an early discussion in the 1st third of the game, Zahirah will finally give a name, Jelena. She will also say that Jelena told her right before security escorted her out that she didn’t know how she got caught. Zahira does not know what Jelena was even doing, but Jelena “found something horrible”. We don’t even know if it’s related to the company to begin with.

3. Found reports

Accessing the 2nd third of the game will mean being able to freely browse the internal drive. While useful documents will be grouped in the same directories, the player will find a report deep in other directories with hashed names. Finding this document needs to actually take time if you don’t know where to look.

This document contains the following informations:

• Emil Felder flagged something wrong with Jelena’s activities
• He was rewarded for this, with the condition to keep quiet about this
• Automated correlation analysis have been implemented across all project management submissions following this incident.

The character will send a message to Zahirah telling her that we found something.

4. Handover infos to Zahirah

The next office session, Zahirah will ask what the character found, but since we’re mute, we can’t answer. She will also see from seeing our facial expression that this is serious. She will then say that we should meet at the bar after work. The rest of the day will proceed normally.

Once at the bar, we send them the informations and she will not see what we found. She will express how upset she is (cry, yell, smash fist to the table, etc), telling you that she misses Jelena every day since she got fired, then after a while, she will give a directory name and a password, saying that Jelena told her once that she managed to use the internal drive as her own, password protected. She used it to share movies with Zahirah, so she gave her the password. Zahirah will say that there should be something there but she didn’t have the mental strength to check herself.

5. Jenela’s directory

Mechanically speaking, once this phase is done, the specified directory will show up in the internal drive the next office session. The password will work, and the player will find several movies files, and a (lengthy) note:

• She found out what other branches were doing, especially the task force, which seems close to anonymous even for Pythia Solutions employees because of how discreet this branch is.
• She got both furious and horrified, but since she needed the money and couldn’t find a decent job elsewhere, she decided to start sabotaging.
• The note will then explain how to sabotage all possible tasks in the game, with a visual tutorial each time and their effects (note: this will need to be defined someday)
• Finally, it says that since she couldn’t keep this for her, she decided to talk to her 2 most trusted friends, Zahirah and Emil.

6. Handover conclusions to Zahirah

Same process as before: Zahirah will pick up your facial expressions, will ask you to speak (directly at the bar), you give the infos, and she won’t like it. But she will thank you, all while warning you that if you pin a mistake over her, she will make you regret it.

After that, she will simply stop talking to you until you get to the Empathic Path. When you will say “Thanks”, Zahirah will smile, which will be the sole occurence in the whole game.

Reward

The player can now sabotage tasks in files related to a living thread