SHAME

> "*..Oh, where am I going? Well I'm off to go infect the whole hospital, silly! I can't be a deadly disease just lazing around, can I?*"
> ― SHAME[source]
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SHAME is one of the main characters of the UKSRT series, first appearing as a villain in UKSRT8. She's since become a more neutral addition to the cast.

## Appearance

When presenting herself via hallucinations, SHAME is a strange humanoid-looking creature, having a mixture of anorexic and shapely features along with a somewhat spherical head shape. She has pale grey skin, large sunken, deep-set eyes and a wide mouth lined with yellowing fangs. Her eyes change between two types - normally they're pink with red pupils and yellow scleroses, but when frenzied changes to all black with red pupils. She wears her green hair messily, tied up into four ponytails at the sides and splitting her bangs into three sections.

Her clothes resemble that of a seifuku, albeit missing the skirt and the top being cropped short. The overall quality of her outfit is low; marked with stains and discoloured, it seems like she's never really washed them. Not that she needs to.

## Personality

SHAME has the personality of a sadistic and brutal child, of the variety to pull the wings off insects just to watch them struggle and die. Unlike most viruses and bacteria, SHAME actually derives pleasure from watching her victims suffer, and almost cares more about that than actually spreading, the usual driving force of viruses.

After the events of UKSRT8, SHAME took on more of a tsundere role, generally being passive aggressive towards the player but caring for their safety (if only for her own benefit).

## Major Roles

### Virus Arc (SRT8-11)

#### UKSRT8

A small contained SHAME sample is being transported from the storage room into one of the more secure labs for analysis, when Ayaze accidentally knocks the vial out of Chan's hand, and SHAME is freed. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Styles, Laer and Ayaze, in addition to being revived by Luculent, SHAME was eventually distracted for long enough for a vaccine to be developed, rendering her mostly harmless and non-contagious.

#### UKSRT9

As SHAME is no longer contagious and the only living host left for SHAME is the player character, SHAME is now an ally of the player- it is in her best interests to keep the player alive in order to keep herself alive. SHAME is one of the few people to show intense distrust for Cursor in the virtual world of [REDACTED]'s PC. The party chose not to heed this warning however, causing SHAME to become upset with the players.

## Powers and abilities

> "*Starts off as mild negligent illnesses like a cold or migraine, slowly getting worse over time, then after a couple of hours the body starts shutting down. Erratic haemorrhaging, mental deterioration, cells attacking other cells. Everything and anything goes haywire.*"
> ― Dr. Styles (Virus arc)
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SHAME started out as an incredibly dangerous sentient virus-like entity capable of inflicting a wide variety of symptoms on her hosts, eventually leading to a usually guaranteed death. While SHAME's bodily attack is generally everything-at-once, the attack quickly becomes predictable to the host's immune system, so should the host not instantly die, a full recovery is generally achievable.

Her most prominent ability however, is the ability to communicate directly with her hosts by appearing as a hallucination.

## Trivia

* SHAME does not actually have arms, her seifuku sleeves are used for emoting only and their motion is part of the hallucination.
* The background colors of the In The Groove 2 fallback in SHAME's main battle, Get Fucked, correspond to the stages of the disease's progression - green: illness -> red: coughing blood -> purple: internal bleeding -> blue: death.