Girl

The girl is the protagonist in Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk and Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk. The goal of the girl is to buy milk with the help of her inner voice in the first game, and to get to sleep with the help of the voice in the second game.
== Appearance ==
She appears to be a slim girl of average height. She has a white skin tone, short, brown hair, and brownish/red eyes. For the longest time in the series, she is seen wearing a dark blue shirt with a red "∅" symbol on it, dark grey shorts, and a pair of dark blue slippers.
She was wearing different clothes when she was shopping: she was wearing a brown hat, a pink shirt, a red skirt, a beige coat, white socks, and dark brown shoes.
== Possible mental illnesses == 
Given the fact that the girl hates milk so much and experienced symptoms from it (possibly an allergy), along with other familial drama, she started taking medications. It is possible that she is allergic to milk and that the mother's "poison claw" was a medication used to treat allergies. Other medications could probably help her reduce her anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses as well.
At one point, it was likely that due to very harsh familial problems, the father committed suicide, and the girl was traumatized, experiencing a mental "gap" after the event, and is probably why she stayed in her apartment for a long time, before finally getting out of the apartment to buy milk.
* Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) (possibly)
* Social anxiety disorder (social phobia) (certainly)
* Schizophrenia (certainly)
== Story ==
=== Background ===
==== Early life ====
The girl's very early life is not fully clear, like where and when she is born. It is likely that parts of her life remain missing because she "burned" her memories on her photos after staring at them for too long, and the fact that she isn't able to remember a lot. However, there are some parts of her earlier life that she explained, and it is known that she grew up with her mother and father all while not having a very stable relationship with them.
==== School ====
At some point, the girl attended school and had been performing well there, given that she at least attended all of the classes unlike her peers. She even liked the school:
She most likely attended boarding school. In Russia, these schools are associated with orphanages. Perhaps her parents themselves left her there, or she was taken from her parents because they had no parental rights.
It is also possible that the "school" was actually a psychiatric hospital, given that no other kids attended "class" with the girl, and that the "school" had beds for the kids.
The girl tells several different stories of what happened of her last day of school:
* One day, her father decided that his daughter should stop going to school. He picked her up at school earlier than usual that day, telling her that she was too old for the school's curriculum. The girl had realized this too, because the tasks at school had become too easy for her. Her father drove her home, where they were greeted by her mother. They had dinner and went to their separate rooms.
* One day, her father picked the girl up from school earlier than usual, explaining that she needed to grow up. She did not fully understand what he meant, but did not resist, and got into the car with him. The father then drove home where they were greeted by the mother. They had dinner and went to their separate rooms.
* The father dragged the girl out of the school building while she was scratching and biting. The teachers did not interfere, as that scene was ordinary for them. The father then pushed the girl into the car and they drove home in complete silence. They were greeted by the mother at home, had dinner, and went to their separate rooms.
* The father bought milk on the way home, "again". The mother was not home, "again".
Given these, it is possible that the complete story is this: One day, her father picked the girl up from school earlier than usual, explaining that she needed to grow up. The girl couldn't completely grasp what he meant, so she resisted by scratching and biting while her father was dragging her out of the school building. The teachers did not interfere, as the scene was ordinary for them. Her father then pushed her into the car and they drove home in complete silence. On the way home, her father bought milk, "again". When they got home, her mother was not there, "again". The father and the girl had dinner and went to their separate rooms.
It is possible that, based on the girl's tone, her father attempted to make her drink milk, which she loathes. If she is allergic to milk, this could also mean her father attempted to kill her.
Because she left school early, the girl never graduated. Her backpack has been sitting on the floor of her room ever since.
==== The Web ====
At some point, one or both of the girl's parents gave a laptop to her and encouraged her to use it. The girl spent days using the laptop for things like playing games, drawing, using engineering calculators, and 3D-modeling. She had 317 friends (or, really, people who shared her interests) on the Web. 68 were into gaming, 130 of them liked drawing, and the remaining 119 were into calculators and 3D-modeling equally. The girl thought that all of her friends were some sort of "simulation" and that they would "die" when the laptop was turned off.
One day, someone appeared. From that point on, her laptop was always on. That was a friend, that made the girl think that he is real. He described his life to her in detail, and the girl believed that he was a real person because of it (however, in hindsight, the girl sees it as a bot describing someone else's life in detail as if it was its own). The girl thought that he expected her to do the same, and so she also told him everything about herself. He knew more about her than anybody else in the world. After that, the "friend" told others to harass the girl. He may have thought that, since she was strange, it would have been funny to start a massive cyberbullying attack. Because the girl had always thought of them like they were bots, she believed it to be an army of bots being sent to harass her, rather than real people. Likely due to the cyberbullying, her name began to surface on the Web more and more. The girl had always felt like she was being watched, but now she felt like the screens were watching her, too. Because of this, she stopped using her laptop, leaving it untouched for years.
=== Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk ===
The game opens with the girl walking down the road to the shop to buy milk. Because she has not been outside in so long, she rehearses asking to have some milk, with the voice giving some feedback. After the two figure out a solution to the problem of her walking with one foot on the pavement and one in the grass, the voice urges the girl to continue walking to the store, saying that she will be very guilty if she does not buy milk.
The girl enters the store and encounters a customer who repeatedly says "O". The girl is afraid of the letter O, and imagines an image to demonstrate her fear of O to the voice. The girl has several loops of the same dialogue with the customer until she asks him "O?", to which he responds "O!", shakes, and crawls away. Although it may seem like it was a imaginary preference as her facing her Fears and Thoughts.
The girl then walks up to a cashier and struggles to purchase the milk. The voice advises her to pay for the milk, which she does. After the cashier examines the money for two days (allegedly), he puts it into the cash register. The girl thanks him and leaves.
After successfully getting the milk, the girl expresses her desire to talk directly to the "reader", who is the person playing the game. She talks about her mental illness and how she takes different medications. She also explains that ever since "something" happened, she has only seen the colour red. She urges the reader not to ask what happened, but she realizes that she would have brought it up eventually since she is talking to herself. She then tells the reader about her father's suicide.
The girl explains that she decided to imagine herself as a visual novel character for the sake of going to the store that day. She is grateful to the reader, because imagining herself as a visual novel character clearly paid off, since she had been trying not to screw up in front of the reader to avoid embarrassing herself. Whilst the girl is expressing her gratitude to the reader, the voice interrupts and advises the girl to go home. When the girl gets home, she is greeted by her mother. Her mother asks her whether she got the milk and whether her new medicine helped, to which the girl says "Yes, Mom". The mother then sends the girl to bed.
=== Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk ===
The game opens with the girl going to her room, as her mother told her to. She walks past the kitchen door and feels the cool air from the other side; however, she then becomes distraught by the thought of there possibly being a living corpse blowing air through the keyhole. In a panic, she barges through the kitchen door and is relieved to find no corpse. Instead, she finds the bag of milk she had bought earlier, sitting on the table. The girl unknowingly drinks the milk (to which she is allergic), and then hurries out of the kitchen and to her room. She meets her mother at the door to her room. The mother does something which the girl describes as "sniffing her from head to toe", which could possibly be searching for signs of an allergic reaction. She pulls out a needle and holds the girl's arm still, telling her not to move. She uses the needle on the girl's arm, causing her vision to blur and her fingers to twitch. The girl begins to feel very hot and begins foaming from her mouth. The mother supposedly holds the girl's neck as the foam touches her neck, irritating her skin. The mother then forces the girl to say that she will never drink milk ever again, twice, before letting the girl go back to her room.
When the girl gets back to her room, she starts getting ready for bed. However, because she does not feel tired, she holds off on taking her pills, because she wants to stall for a little bit longer. She spends the next half hour going through each individual pill, finding a reason to not take each and throwing them in the trash. She "invents her own medicine" instead and takes it, causing the pains from the allergic reaction from earlier to go away. She wants to brag about her new medicine to someone (other than her mother, who would scold her), so, in order to summon the voice, she takes the medication which she took before going to the shop.
When the voice appears, it urges the girl to take her prescribed medications. The girl complies, because, despite the pain having subsided when she took her own custom-made medication, she now felt it in triple force.
After taking her pills, the girl decides to lie on the floor and look at the ceiling so she can get her thoughts in order. She takes half-formed thoughts from her head and imagines laying them out on her ceiling, like papers on a corkboard. She attempts rearranging them several times in hopes of "seeing the bigger picture", but ultimately fails. The voice suggests imagining the thoughts as cockroaches instead, but the girl hates cockroaches and chooses to imagine them as fireflies instead. She observes them and waits for the moment when the bigger picture will form. However, the moment does not come. The girl becomes impatient and screams, causing the fireflies to scatter.
After some banter, the voice manages to calm the girl down. The girl says she needs to find the fireflies because, whenever she is thinking about something, she needs to finish her thoughts. The girl realizes that it's midnight, and asks for the voice's help to find her fireflies so she can go to bed. Because imagining herself as a visual novel character helped her buy milk earlier that day, she decides to imagine herself as a point'n'click adventure game character to help her find her fireflies. The voice tells the girl to look down, where she finds a firefly crawl out from underneath her sweater. She tells it to "come home", so it returns to the inside of her head. The girl and the voice then spend time searching the room for the remaining fireflies.
After finding some or all of the fireflies, the girl declares that she is not going to take the pill which causes the voice ever again. She asks the voice for one more favor.
She explains that she's upset because she has not dreamt of anything for a long time. At first, she dealt with it by not sleeping and simply imagining that she was watching a dream. She always looked tired in the morning, and, after a week of insomnia, she started feeling weird and seeing things like floating letters, strange silhouettes, and bulging eyes. She says that, one day, she "almost died"; she collapsed in the middle of the room and couldn't move for a while. After that, she stopped imagining dreams, but the letters, silhouettes, and eyes stayed.
After telling the story, the girl uses her hands to talk to avoid letting the shapes hear what she says. Using her hands, she tells the voice to tell her a bedtime story. The voice tells her to close her eyes, and she falls asleep.
The girl dreams about something (that being any one of the game's five endings), marking it as the first time she has dreamt of anything in a long time. She begins to cry and covers her face, presumably out of joy for finally having dreamt of something after so long. She then goes out to her balcony and stares up at the abyss in the sky, which is one of her greatest fears.
== Relationships ==
=== Voice ===
The girl has the most positive relationship with the voice in her head, given that she is often guided by the voice to reach her goals, despite her mental illnesses and difficulties. 
The girl's relationship with the voice in the first game can vary, as choosing to be mean to the girl will lead to the bad ending and choosing to be helpful will lead to the good ending. The second game starts off immediately after the events of the good ending of the first game, suggesting that the voice is canonically helpful to the girl. This is supported by the voice's assistance in finding the girl's fireflies so she can go to bed.
=== Family ===
According to the girl, her family had always been very difficult, so it is likely that she did not have the best relationships with her mother and father.
==== Mother ====
The girl percieves her mother as evil and as a monster. Even though it may be possible that the mother is actually trying to help her take medications and/or prevent her from drinking milk (which causes health problems for the girl in the first place), the girl still perceives her as evil and the needle as a poison claw.
==== Father ====
Not much is known about the girl's relationship with her father. She may have disliked him when he was alive, because it is possible that the father may have forced her to drink milk (to which she is allergic) after he bought some on her last day of school. Though, it is also possible that there wasn't any bad blood between them, as no fight between them was explicitly mentioned.
It is possible that the father forcing the girl to drink milk was oral immunotherapy treatment. This aligns with why there are many milk cartons next to the girl's sink, as the girl might vomit during the treatment. It also aligns with the familial issues, because the mother's way of dealing with the girl's allergy was to keep her away from milk, rather than trying to make her immune to it.
Regardless of what his intention was for making her drink milk, the girl was traumatized after he committed suicide.
== Gallery ==
== Trivia ==
* The girl's age has never exactly been revealed, but many people assume she is a teenager or a young adult. Nikita once said "let's say she is 24". Most likely, Nikita just indicated his own age (on December 21, 2021, he was 24 years old).
* There is a clip of the girl being voiced for at least a couple of lines in Russian.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USTPZ-T4J84. During the beginning of the development of the second game, Nikita had an idea of giving the game full voice acting, but the idea was quickly scrapped, with one of the reasons being that Nikita at the time couldn't afford a voice actor.https://discord.com/channels/681742447864447009/901148438253699133/1005842554119536650
* Given that the girl's name was never revealed in the games, fans often refer to her as "Milk-chan", or somewhat less commonly as the "milk girl". In fact, Nikita Kryukov, the developer of the games, has officially started using "Milk-chan" as her name. Though, despite this, he has once mentioned in his Discord server that her name is "Ermolai", although really, it was a joke.https://discord.com/channels/681742447864447009/718574996707868693/880769519151374358
== References ==
Category:Characters