The End

[snowblindmods]

THE END

Day 447 is the last day, but you're ready for it. Scattering across Norfinbury, those of you who are the strongest, the bravest, or just the most willing to do the task approach the anomalies. Some are killed--with the nanomachines under your control and your abilities at your side, they are not as much a threat as they once were. Some--those who wish it--are left alone to remain in Norfinbury, whatever that may mean. Those more technologically inclined, led by Aigis, make for the cultist computer and put together the program that will put an end to the administrator. The process is a complex one, but many of you know your way around a computer, and some of you even have superhuman abilities to back up that skill. The program comes together piece by piece. Somehow, it doesn't feel as complicated as it should. The timer is connected, and the countdown begins. While all this is happening, and after, once those who left return to the town hall, Gregory House and Stephen Strange work nonstop at the NIMA machine, removing the nanomachines that flood your bodies and finally, completely, freeing you of them. You can no longer travel about the town at breakneck speeds, but you wouldn't want to, anyway, given that the radiation soaked into the town would now kill you. It becomes obvious there's no radiation beneath the town hall, if nothing else: you're safe here for what time remains. It's not much, of course. There's no time left for anything except goodbyes and stepping through the portal. Go in ones and twos, go in groups--you can go anywhere, but you can't stay here, not if you want to live. Bring whatever you want to keep, because there's no going back. The town empties out. The administrator, silently, adjusts its population count. Finally, the last of you steps through the portal. Norfinbury is silent. Then the program's timer reaches zero. Nobody sees what happens except the robotic spiders, which shut down milliseconds after the electricity crackles in overdrive through the quantum computer's circuits. A cooling pipe bursts, and ice cold water begins flooding the town hall's underground areas. Servers thousands of years old go dark. Robots made and remade stop moving. The administrator shuts off for good. The cycles end. Norfinbury is left to the snow. Over the years, with nothing to tend to it, the town is buried, just like every other town in this Alaska. The anomalies remaining can survive only as long as that--without the snow walls to shield them, the exposure kills them--eventually. That's years from now. Right now, in the present, you've escaped. You were always, always alone here--and yet you found one another. You made friends and enemies and relationships you don't know how to describe. You went home, or you made somewhere else your home, or you made somebody else your home. You have a story that will be impossible to tell. Maybe you'll try anyway. Maybe you'll keep it to yourself. Maybe you'll just go to the warmest place you can reach and stay there for a while. You triumphed over near-impossible odds, and you did it together. Thank you for playing.

Comments

QUESTIONS

[snowblindmods]

If you have questions about endgame or about the game in general, you can ask them here. Once more, from all of us to all of you, thank you for completing our game!

♥ Snowblind Mods

[jumpthegun]

What was Robert Miller's thing with the Admin in that last phone message they found? Did he go insane and, like... think she was a person he wanted to be with? Or was he trying to merge with Andromeda somehow?

[snowblindmods]

Robert Miller was driven insane by the nanomachines. He used to be a very normal, quiet person. He was the kind of guy who'd talk to a computer while he worked on it, but not like that. Then the nanomachine corruption got to him, and his more eccentric traits got... More eccentric.

[jumpthegun]

It makes you ALMOST feel sorry for the guy...

So who DID attack Norfinbury? Was it Canada asserting its dominance? NO MORE would they be AMERICA'S HAT.

[snowblindmods]

Nobody will ever know. That was a deliberate thing on my part--ambiguity worked well for making Winter seem potentially dangerous as a Russian spy robot and all. But there's actually no answer to this! I sort of drew inspiration from Fallout, where nobody knows who fired the first nuke and at the point the games take place it doesn't matter. Nukes bad etc

[jumpthegun]

I wasn't entirely clear on the timeline for the protests versus some of the other things. Were the houses in Norfinbury preserved according to the data ghosts that were still in the system? Like we know that Sparrow Langley eventually grew up, but we had a lot of information about her when she was a little girl. And Riley's things were left as they were, even though he presumably died well before the bombs went off.

[snowblindmods]

I was going to clear this up for you on Plurk and then forgot, but the protests actually took place QUITE a while ago, because they were about Admin! There was a large contingent of the town that understandably did not want anything to do with this heavily automated and heavily invasive administrative system. (I will let Mel answer about the rest)

[jumpthegun]

Ah! Thank you. That does make sense.

[snowblindmods]

The timeline stuff was deliberately confusing, definitely. Because the data ghosts were essentially nanomachine clouds, they were still to some degree being read by Norfinbury's computers, and that's why those houses were preserved as they were, yes.

Essentially, the timeline is the building of and protests over the administrator computer (Riley, Sparrow), years of administrator control (Shelley), the nuke, the Norfinbury survivors (Miller, Samantha, Jia), the Russians (Andrei/Андрей, Yuliya/Юлия), and then everyone from other universes (you guys, other dead guys).

[jumpthegun]

Thank you for answering all of these questions. I've absolutely adored trying to pick through and piece together the puzzle of Norfinbury's lore. You lot spin a good mystery.

Two more (unless I think of something else later): For the sun disappearing. Is all the static/that noise just the nanomachines going haywire and the sun not ACTUALLY disappearing?

WHO WAS THE MOLE? Did Robert Miller consider himself the mole when he asked that question during the Emergency Repairs event? Or was it just to screw with the characters and makes them run in circles wondering?

[snowblindmods]

The sun disappearing was just the nanomachines getting even worse. The sun did not actually go anywhere, it's still chilling out in space.

There was no mole, that was Miller messing with you guys.

[snowblindmods]

wait I have more relevant info sorry LOL but the data ghosts were preserved as they were the last time they were in Norfinbury! Sparrow grew up but she got adopted to a family outside of the town after her parents were killed in the protests. And, well, y'all saw Riley's last moments in Norfinbury.

[thewarningafter]

Is the entire world dead? Was Norfinbury the last place there were people on this version of Earth?

[snowblindmods]

Yes, Norfinbury was the last place there were people. The Russian NPCs were actually brought in from this version of Earth back when the portal could only reach things on the admin's own planet.

[thewarningafter]

I've got another one: what was the flesh mound? Was that some kind of glitch in the medical system or what?

[snowblindmods]

Honestly? I just thought it would be super creepy to have a flesh mound. But yeah, from an IC explanation perspective, it would have been a medical system failure. It is the most important character in Snowblind.

[warriorscribe]

Would there have been an alternative for getting through the sealed door in the event we hadn't handled Winter the way we did or hadn't thought to give her the galaxy key?

Were there any other possible endings besides "everyone gets out safe except one person who shuts everything down" and "you all fail and die"?

And I believe I asked this last game but I'll ask it again because it's a good one: was there anything you guys wanted us to discover that we didn't?

[snowblindmods]

1) There's a few things this would have depended on. If you did absolutely nothing different except that, that would have been it. If the data ghosts had still been around, it would have been possible to get to the cultist computer to do the job--but then there would have been no way to shut down the admin without someone staying behind.

2) Those were the main kinds of endings, just with variants based on what exactly happened. Like maybe you all fail and become cultists and die, or maybe you can't get through the door and die, or maybe you run out of time and die... So much dying!

3) Had you guys ended up making your own shelters that counted as houses, there would have been more with the Russians. It would have been revealed that Andrei ended up going crazy due to nanomachines and disemboweling himself in front of his Yuliya, who was his girlfriend. She survived on her own for a while, but eventually died of exposure.

[0thingsonmymind]

Thank you so much!

What did the cult/cloaked figures do with the quantum chips?

Was the thing below just the Admin?

[snowblindmods]

1) The quantum chips were returned to the lower levels for reuse in tablets and other machines. The administrator is very big on recycling.

2) Yes. The idea there was that a nonsapient intelligence like the administrator would be so incomprehensible that it would manifest something like a cosmic horror if you were looking at it like that.

[0thingsonmymind]

1) so did that change the timetable on anything or we all just being paranoid by thinking House fucked us?

2) That makes sense, thanks!

and 3) there were other towns with admins, did any of them also reach the state norfinbury was it?

[snowblindmods]

1) It didn't change any timetables! It was always very fun making you guys paranoid, though.

3) There were other towns with admins, though not many. Norfinbury was the only one that ended up like this, though, because of the weird errors that resulted from the attack.

this is still maddin

[standing_waters]

What year was it by the end of the game?

[snowblindmods]

I didn't specify beyond "it's been like 10000 years since the attack"... MATH...

[ex_this_ismydesign36]

Who was Will's stalker?

I know I keep peeping at you guys about this, but I loved that twist in the road and I am forever curious!

[snowblindmods]

It's sort of up to you: essentially, the stalker was a nanomachine cloud anomaly. This means it was someone from Will's world who failed to be brought over to the point they didn't even have a body, degraded enough to not really have their recognizable personality but aware that Will was familiar.

[phaseshifter]

so you once mentioned that there were Reasons™ rhys wouldn't be able to lose control of his body (and therefore give it up to jack) when he died, and there was some speculation that it meant the admin chose characters' death losses

was that a thing

[snowblindmods]

It was not a thing. The sole reason AI Jack couldn't take over Rhys's body in that instance is because AI Jack had misbehaved previously and been blacklisted by Admin, thus losing certain privileges. If he hadn't gotten caught and punished, Rhys's death loss could have been that AI Jack took over the body.

[snowblindmods]

Fun additional death loss fact: Those were always ICly randomly based on the admin's haphazard attempts to bring someone back. Like if someone was moving around and breathing and talking but maybe as a result of crazy medicine one of their arms was a leg now, well, that's good enough, right?

[phaseshifter]

I will never complain about healthcare in the uk ever again

[sharktrash]

what was in the coffin room

[snowblindmods]

That was the way to the back area of the morgue there. It was completely accessible by anyone who went into low power nanomachine mode. It provided access to all the bodies in there (their doors could be manually unlocked from that side), a NIMA machine, and also a way to get to the back of the other morgues, which are similar.

[headjacked]

CAN RHYS TAKE A ROBOSPIDER WITH HIM

and


was any part of Eve sapient ;;

[snowblindmods]

SURE WHY NOT he would have to grab one right before leaving though, otherwise the other spiders would chase him down

The spiders are heavier than they look. Not too heavy to carry or anything, but there's a lot of parts in there.

As for the question about the admin: GOOD QUESTION. There were periods where it expressed distress or frustration, certainly, but maybe that was just a reaction to the way basically everything was going wrong all the time, objectives-wise. Or maybe that was just how our squishy sapient human brains interpret such a reaction. Sounds like a good thing to debate.

[deus_ex_phs]

What was the deal with Samantha being the Prophet? I feel like this was partially explained somewhere along the way, but IC revelation tends to be jumbled and I think I missed some of it somewhere.

[snowblindmods]

Samantha was just a kid who went blind because she happened to be looking out the window at the exact moment of the nuclear explosion. She had no actual prophetic powers, but the cultists started attributing it to her anyway and kidnapped her as a result.