NieR Chronicles 22 — Fleeing Lovers and Three Photographs
Chapters in this story
- Fleeing Lovers, Three Photographs, and Preserving or Changing Memory
- 1. Two Androids Hiding in Pascal’s Village
- 2. The Injured Man Left After Trusting a Promise of Escape
- 3. One Person Missing from the Promise to Forget Together
- 4. Photographs Without Even Knowing What Was Forgotten
- 5. A Voice Growing Closer Through Communications Repairs
- 6. A Gift Sent in a Photograph Rather Than Placed in Her Hand
- 7. Relationships in a World Where Memory Can Be Touched
- Sources and Scope of Verification
Fleeing Lovers, Three Photographs, and Preserving or Changing Memory
Spoiler notice: this chapter covers The Wandering Couple, Photographs, and Find a Present from their beginnings through their outcomes. It gathers personal requests available during the relevant progression of Routes A and B, not a fixed timetable in which everything occurs the day after the preceding Ending B.
1. Two Androids Hiding in Pascal’s Village
Machines are not the only inhabitants of Pascal’s village. Two android lovers who fled the Resistance are hiding there. They dislike the continuing fighting and want somewhere quiet to live together. Rather than the obligation to fight for their side, they want a shared life away from violence. A village machines created to escape android attacks now becomes a temporary refuge for android deserters.
A problem with their bodies prevents them from immediately leaving for somewhere far away. They lack one Elaborate Gadget needed for repairs. Deciding to leave war behind does not repair a damaged body by itself. Accepting their request, 2B and 9S look for the part in the abandoned factory. Unlike a quest to pursue and eliminate people leaving their unit, this time they help those who want to leave keep moving.
When they deliver the part, the male android receives maintenance and the couple prepare to leave the village. Although Pascal’s community provided somewhere to hide temporarily, the couple do not want only to remain there forever. They intend to go together somewhere harder for war to reach. After helping, the two soldiers do not immediately accompany them to their destination. They encounter traces of them again later.
Meeting them again in the Flooded City, they learn that the couple plan to cross the sea. A broker called the Emancipator says he can help them escape, but a large sum is needed: 50,000G. The soldiers can lend that money too. The grateful couple promise repayment. First they needed a part to fix a body; now they need someone to arrange their departure and the money to pay for it.
2. The Injured Man Left After Trusting a Promise of Escape
Returning to the same place later does not bring news that they have begun a new life across the sea. The man lies injured after an attack. The broker who promised to help them escape betrayed them. Trying to leave violence behind, they were exposed to further violence exploiting their desperation. Gathering and handing over enough money did not create a safe exit by itself.
The woman drew the attackers’ attention to save the man, separated from him, and went toward the amusement park. He asks the soldiers to rescue her. Rather than checking a promised departure, 2B and 9S must now find the separated lover. Places visited many times become connected anew through another relationship’s crisis. To the soldiers, the park is not only Beauvoir’s stage, but a place where someone’s companion lies hurt.
The woman’s body is badly damaged when they find her. Making her move again requires one Memory Alloy. The two soldiers obtain the material in the City Ruins and, with Pascal’s repair assistance, help her return alive. The lovers’ actions to save one another really occur during this process. The manipulation revealed later does not turn all those dangers and rescues into fabricated events.
At last the couple reunite. Their original escape plan has failed, however, and continually living on the run is difficult. Repairing bodies does not repair the circumstances of people who left their command and war. They consider another way to return to their former lives: erase their memories of leaving and start anew.
3. One Person Missing from the Promise to Forget Together
At first, the plan sounds like a decision made for each other. Erasing their current memories may also cost them the time they shared, but they hope they can meet and fall in love again. They try to regard it as a new beginning rather than the end of their relationship. For 2B and 9S, a familiar question returns: bodily survival and the continuation of present memory are not the same matter.
The man’s memory reset proceeds. The woman, however, does not erase her memories in the same way. Offering a reason along the lines that at least one of them must be strong, she reveals an intention to change him into a personality she prefers. The proposal to pay the same price is not carried out on equal terms.
She reveals that this is already the sixth reset. This does not mean six earlier resets followed by a seventh now. What this encounter exposes is her repeated interference with his memory and personality to make him suit her better. He begins the relationship again without remembering his previous experiences or the process of those changes.
Even if staying together is what matters to her, his ability to recognize and choose her as someone with his own experiences is erased. The conditions the man understood when accepting the reset also differ from the conditions the woman actually observes. The romantic promise of falling in love again turns into power to reshape someone to one’s taste and prevent him from remembering the process.
Pascal is left with an uncomfortable lesson too. He helped androids wishing to escape war, but there is another kind of coercion within their intimate relationship. Learning humanlike feelings and forming families does not always lead to freeing one another. Even after fleeing enemies outside a community, someone can lose their memories to the person closest to them.
4. Photographs Without Even Knowing What Was Forgotten
Another woman in the Resistance camp has three photographs. Her memory was damaged in combat. She feels the pictures are important, but cannot recall why. She holds the records, while the context connecting them to her own life is gone. She asks the two soldiers to find the places shown in them.
2B and 9S locate the desert oasis, the amusement park theater, and the forest waterfall. They compare each landscape with its photograph, confirm the locations, and return the recovered information and coordinates. Unlike searching for the great secrets of war, the answers needed here are places in landscapes one individual once received. Investigating the same regions serves different purposes depending on what they mean to whom.
Receiving the information, the client gradually recovers her memories. The photographs were the last data sent by a lover killed in battle. Three old images become traces of what the forgotten person had told her they saw. More than the names of places is restored. It is the relationship: who sent those landscapes to her and why she cherished them.
Recovering memory in this quest does not bring the dead lover back to life. Instead, it makes that absence precisely known. Yet leaving a relationship as an empty space that seems to have been nothing differs from living while remembering the last messages that person left. Where the earlier couple changed one partner’s memories at the other’s will, information here returns so the survivor can recognize her own past again.
5. A Voice Growing Closer Through Communications Repairs
6O and 2B’s optional assignments do not begin with choosing a gift. First come investigating communications problems between the surface and the Bunker and repairing terminals. They initially check the disconnected City Ruins cave access point and deal with enhanced machines nearby. In the subsequent terminal-repair assignment, they eliminate enemies threatening the central city access point and check 6O’s reward mail. Even the operator’s usually familiar voice requires these connections and maintenance on site to continue.
After that help, 6O sends a message thanking 2B for what she did. Reading it leads into the gift-search assignment. A conversation grows beyond a short report of completed work. She is interested in a surface she has never seen and wonders about beautiful things found only there. 2B is normally the soldier receiving her guidance, but regarding Earth’s scenery, she is the one who can see and report it instead.
2B and 9S consider a present for 6O. They think about what would bring genuine happiness to someone far away. Eventually they follow information about a rose found in the desert. A soldier fighting for humanity steps briefly aside from processing targets on a mission list and goes looking for one thing a particular comrade wants to see.
6. A Gift Sent in a Photograph Rather Than Placed in Her Hand
The pair find the rose in the desert. After dealing with nearby enemies and securing what they need, 2B sends a photograph so 6O can see it. There is no need to invent a scene where a flower travels into orbit and is physically placed in a Bunker room. The important gift reaching the distant operator in this assignment is a record of something on the surface.
6O is delighted and sends thanks and a reward by mail. Checking her reply completes this round trip too. She remains in the Bunker and 2B on the surface, but a small connection forms in which they can know and discuss the same landscape. The terminal was equipment for transmitting orders. After its repair, that communication also carries news of something beautiful someone found for another person.
Placed beside Photographs, this small present becomes clearer. A record of a landscape can someday become the last material through which to remember its sender. Its meaning need not arise only after someone dies. First comes remembering what interested someone while they were alive and taking time to find and send it. Through that time, 2B and 6O’s relationship also extends beyond the titles of those who exchange assignments.
Later, when the Bunker is endangered, 6O’s final communication may express her wish to go see the flowers. That is a future on a different scale from the abstract order to reclaim a vast world. There was someone who wanted to see Earth for once and share that time with a comrade who had thought of her. The journey to find a gift lets us understand that wish beforehand.
7. Relationships in a World Where Memory Can Be Touched
In this world, memory can be read, repaired, and erased as data. That does not reduce the meaning of those acts to organizing a file. The wandering couple’s man repeatedly loses their shared experiences, the woman with photographs recovers a forgotten relationship, and 6O adds a newly received landscape to her experience. The same recording technology has different consequences depending on whose wishes guide it and to whom it returns.
Through such requests, 2B and 9S handle other people’s memories. They too live through reliance on backups, damage, and restoration, but learn again in the field how those processes affect another person’s choices and relationships. When their own memories are later destroyed or preserved, the player will not regard that information merely as a combat resource. It contains time spent going somewhere for someone and passing something on.
Sources and Scope of Verification
The three optional game quests are described through their beginnings, intermediate journeys, and final outcomes. The couple’s reset count follows the quest record that this is the sixth time. 6O’s present is not confused with a physical visit or delivery of the flower. Her communications investigation, terminal repairs, and gift search form a sequence of optional Route A assignments. Whether these requests are completed depends on player choice and progression. This is AI-assisted editorial material and does not reproduce original dialogue, lyrics, or novel text. Sources checked: 2026-10-18.
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