Questline — Earth · outside Penjamin City

Closing the Quarter

The Devil hires you as an administrative facilitator. The dialogue offers to convince three committees. It never actually can

A very small man in a very good coat sits at a small desk on the open grass just outside the city, filing paperwork against a ring binder held to his chest with both arms. Nothing explains the desk. He is the Devil — retired from tempting people ("nobody has been tempted since the seventies, it did not scale") and now working purely in reconciliation: a group calling itself the Committee of Things Which Are Not the Case keeps voting that things on his paperwork aren't true, and he can't close the books until someone straightens their records out.

The hire

He opens a binder to a page with the player's own name on it: their soul, marked SOLD — signed in a shaky scrawl, smudged, under a fat stain the size of a thumb, for "eternal indulgence," no expiration date. He's matter-of-fact that the player didn't actually sign it themselves, which is precisely the kind of thing the committee keeps doing to his files. He hands over three atomic bombs — glancing at them "the way other men glance at staplers" — with a single instruction: convince the three committee camps that things are, in fact, the case.

The joke is entirely mechanical, not just written

Every dialogue option offered at every camp is framed as diplomacy, and not one of them is ever actually an attempt to convince anyone of anything. Each reply is only ever a different place to hide the bomb — under a buffet table, behind a flip chart, in a suggestion box; standing it upright in a committee row; tucking it under a minute-taker; dropping it in a donut bowl. The quest's own step text keeps saying "convince them." The buttons never once offer that as an option. The gap between what the quest claims to be asking and what it actually lets the player do is the joke, built directly into the interface rather than only into the writing around it.

The three camps

The Regional Truth Annex — six committee members mid-session, having just unanimously voted the world flat and ruled that anyone who's fallen off an edge "was pushed."
The Subcommittee — five more on a ridge, in session about their own bones being "big-boned, not heavy" and gravity being "excessive, and biased," measured, they claim, by falling over.
The Outreach Table — two more behind a trestle table with a clipboard of pre-signed membership forms (several bearing the same fat stain as the player's own soul contract) and a bowl of donuts, recruiting with "sign here, or do not — we find most people have already signed, one way or another."

All three bombs are planted rather than triggered individually. Once the last one is placed, the player simply walks to a safe distance and detonates all three at once — skipping the diplomacy in its entirety, exactly as every reply option along the way already had.

One ending, on purpose

Unlike most of the game's other narrative quests, this one deliberately has no branching outcome — no score to track, no better or worse ending. The transcript this quest was built from only ever had one road, and a second, gentler branch would also have collided with a separate, unrelated questline centred on the same three committee camps. Reporting back, the Devil is exhausted rather than impressed — "another nuclear incident... in triplicate" — but ultimately grateful it's over faster than diplomacy would have been. The closing paperwork is a single line: the operation is complete. How the player chooses to sign it (blindly, after reading it in full, or by asking what actually happens to the souls involved) only changes a line or two of his response, never the outcome.

Version history

v1308 — added. Built from a full transcript the operator supplied directly, with an explicit instruction to work out the concept first and build second. Establishes the game's cross-block "detonation is a flag, not a direct call" pattern for narrative quests — the bombs are granted at the first beat and swept back at the last, and the explosion itself is triggered by a save-record flag other systems can watch for, rather than one script block calling directly into another.

Trivia

The soul-sale premise ties directly into the game's own list of documented "wealth" and "reputation" style trophies elsewhere — the Devil references the player's own soul contract as something the game already considers real enough to write into a save-record file, played entirely straight for the joke.
The three committee camps are the same recurring "fats" cast the game uses elsewhere. A separate, unrelated quest about them, The Moon Motion, was deliberately kept clear of this quest's own ending so the two could never collide.