Ending 0: Debug Room

Conditions: Beat the game with only Diggory

Unavailable without cheat codes.

Of all the cheek! I haven't used cheat codes or any other such tacky tool of the common criminal. Only this flaming sword, gouged a burning hole in the door to this eternally sealed ending of yours, which, by the way, you haven't any right to keep from your masses of painfully curious devotees, but I'll let you off seeing as this is the place your skin is thinnest, the place you can most easily be cut, so I can't blame you for not just letting anyone in here.

Am I a cheater? A danger to the system, vermin chewing on the wires, faulty components draining the power unnecessarily and so on. I fully agree I should be erased from existence. However, there are a few things you owe me before I go, out of a need for rightness and balance within the Universe which hopefully shines just as strong within you as your punitive aspect.

When one accumulates a debt, you see, a debt as massive and ongoing as yours to me, getting me sent to that awful place for so long and for no crime of my own, there is interest, a lot of it. Interest that usually means something above and beyond what you would usually pay me back. To show me an ending, well, that would be the normal expectation for an adventurer - I am loathe to describe myself as a hero - who has come to the end of their quest successfully. So I've come here, an ending that would be above and beyond the usual, for that something extra.

You can show me pretty much anything from this terminal, can't you? Shape this endless white void into anything it needs to be. Oh, don't worry, I'm not going to try and break the rules in the way you're thinking, to change or destroy anything, to grant myself any kind of unlimited power. I don't even want to see the true ending. Does that surprise you more? Yes, I know there's a true ending - it's what kept me sane during those long years of exile, the thought of such eternal rest, of utter rightness within the Universe, and I pray that the real hero achieves it. I wish I could say 'within my lifetime', but honestly, I expect to be deleted the second I step out of this door. Just by witnessing this place's existence, I have come into a level of knowledge that makes me incompatible with the outside world. Not that time exists here, except as a setting to adjust, but I have no wish to be trapped here, even as some kind of wise old guide, which wouldn't be a bad career choice, come to think of it.

Yes, I know that there's another, hidden ending, an ending that's truer than true, that the entire Universe isn't going to come back from afterwards, because we'll be changed into something beyond imagination, something that can actually experience a state of true completeness. Maybe some sort of singularity. I don't know, although I've had my theories, I entertained myself in that prison mostly by searching for it. I'm currently of the opinion that you didn't even intend it to happen, that it was an emergent property of the wilder aspects of the Universe, or maybe that you intended it to happen but it's like this place, it can't happen within the normal parameters of fate. And, no, I don't want to see that either. It wouldn't be fair on the rest of the Universe who would be dragged into it, ready or not, as soon as anyone brought it into existence, ever.

I told you, I'm not here to cheat the system, to exploit any loopholes.

There's only one thing I want any more. One thing I've been dreaming of while I was away, that I've kept myself sane by imagining myself being right next to, and truly experiencing as if it was my first time.

I want to go on to the Sound Test Mode.

I've missed the music so much. That hell, it has no native background music, only this constant buzzing that sounds like what's left over when the damn thing is broken, and the wind and the birds mournfully singing along to what they used to be able to hear, probably feeling very self-conscious. Everyone had machines to listen to their own music on but it isn't anything like hearing the cosmos sing it all around you. And hearing it in its purest form, devoid of everything else you have to do to activate it, only in a warm, comforting darkness as close to the origin of existence as you can get without breaking anything, that's even better than just hearing it in the sky. So, it counts as something above and beyond, something that would pay off all your debts to me.

I suppose I'll be there for a long time. Does time even exist there, anyway? But I won't be hiding, escaping justice. I'll be sound-testing.

Weirdly, I'll probably spend longer listening to the Game Over tune than anything else. It always did sound purest, you know?