[Alf]

Originally Posted by Cloudedmind

A couple of things I'm a bit confused about when it comes to the sequence of events. But, if I'm understanding things correctly, some kind of apocalypse happened and Haku and his brother, his brothers wife, and child and any other remaining humans were now living in underground cities. Haku's brother seems to be doing research on making the surface of the earth habitable or to at least make humans more resilient to be able to survive on the surface. There are other labs where other people are doing similar things. Decoys end up being the result of one of those experiments. Haku's brother has some kind of breakthrough with his own research, and Haku volunteers to be his guinea pig. This is where it starts to get a bit fuzzy for me. Did the brothers experiments involve putting Haku in some kind of cryogenic sleep? Well, it seems that sometime after this event humans started melting and turning into curses and humanity turned against itself before someone finally decided to just nuke (I'm using this term loosely) everyone from space or at least a good portion of people. Haku's brother made it out alive and decided to create more Decoy's himself since beside himself they seemed to be the only other living beings left. The Decoys in this particular area at least began to thrive under Haku's brother who's now the Emperor.

However, being the only human around made him kind of lonely so he found another lab, or his old lab (?) and started doing research again on how to turn the curses back to human, and created those masks in the process. And he now wants to use or get some information from a lab in Tusukuru to continue this research?

That's what I believe to understand so far, any corrections would be appreciated.

Mostly correct. Haku's brother's research aims for human to be able to live on the surface, and it involves putting the test subject to sleep. And there's no mention of how he became the emperor. The purpose of getting to Tuskuru is still not mentioned so it's now speculation.

There are some differences from the game:

Spoiler for difference with game:

In the game, there is no mention of Haku's brother's plan is also extending life span. But he used himself as test subject of various researches including increasing stamina, and that might have increased his life span.

After people start turning into slimes, since nothing can be done to destory them, some idiot used the Amaterasu system to fire against the slimes, and then it was also used for war and generated artificial suns.

Haku's brother fled around from the slimes and ended up at this almost finished lab located under the Yamato capital today. After a long time he managed to gain control of Amaterasu, and restored the environment for limited area by trial and error. By the time he set his feet on the surface, only he has survived. No one living could be contacted regardless of his effort.

The reason why he cannot regard decoys as human, is because he feels the difference between them and himself, and being treated like a god for giving them knowledge adds a lot to it. So he is unable to live among them.

There is a whole bunch of history got cut out, probably for time limit. But that give a lot more weight to the reason for his actions.

Spoiler for Game only history:

He shut himself inside the lab to research for hundred, two hundred years or more. When he reached a limit that he need to get outside to dig information from other labs, only to found that there are already several kingdoms in the lands.

After exchanging knowledge and other stuffs for assistance in exploring ruins for a while, people are getting greedy, asking for more and more, and those knowledge had cause the rise and fall of kingdoms. Finally someone attempted to capture him to monopolize knowledge source, and it disappoints him for the second time. So he gave up empathy for these people, used his knowledge and technology to raised his own force. That's the beginning of Yamato.

There are two purposes for him to explore the ruins: Find more information for his research, and to find Haku. So it's not like he didn't look for Haku in all those years.

After explaining everything, he was like an old man finally got to release the weight of history on this shoulder. And most important of all, he asked Haku to continue his task to revive human from tatari form. Haku wanted to refuse, but looking at his old brother he cannot.

When the emperor mentioning first teaching the decoys, it feels very similar to what Hakuoro did. So I think this is also a reflection of what could happen to Hakuoro if he stayed awake for a long time.

There are some added information in the anime: Details of the research of Haku's brother. I'm not sure is it canon, but if it is that would mean Haku might live significantly longer than normal human, perhaps more than hundreds of year like his brother.

This episode is very well handled, though with some changes that may affect overall theme.

The camera work of Haku looking at his sister in law is somewhat sexy, as a subtle hint of his feelings toward her. Not particularly important, but that's a nice touch.