BlazingBark
Snowdrops
BrokenPromise
rabidbacon
Tlaloc
Chronic
Lildear18
Lugubrious
Mae
Mixtape Ghost NThe infinites had conducted their investigation and united on the fifth floor. This floor looked like a tropical paradise, and was a nod to the killing game that took place on Jabberwock island. Hajime Hinata, or Izuru Kamukura as he had later been named, had planned on corrupting Alter Ego for the sole purpose of thwarting the NWP’s objective of rehabilitating the Remnants of Despair, and instead turning them into Junk clones. Hajime ended up thwarting his own plans when he came face to face with the corrupted Alter Ego.
The remaining infinites walked single profile into the resort. The room had a giant elevator at the back, which was being guarded by someone. Though her description was remarkably close to someone they had heard about.
The real Alice Parker.
”You showed up.” There was something off about the woman. She was far more human looking than any of the carnage sisters, but there were a few details that kept her apart from her human counterpart. Even if one could ignore her red eyes, her skin didn’t look the right color. It was a bit too glossy, and lacked the blemishes and imperfections a real human would have. ”Your final destination is right behind me. There’s an ultra strong magnet on the way up the elevator, so you might want to drop any metallic items you have before going up. “
Alice parker broke through the doorway behind the infinites and slung Izuru’s battered corpse over the android’s head. ”Where is he!?”
”Hmph.” The android looked over its shoulder. ”No matter how talented humans become, they are fated to be replaced by cold steel.” She looked ahead. ”Hurry onto the lift, there’s little you can do to change the outcome of our fight.” The android sprinted off, and the two robots fought.
The quick exchange between the two Parkers left the siblings silent, Masson more or less confused as to who's the real Parker than Henry focusing on the random(?) corpse thrown across the room. "Erm, does anyone know who the stiff is?"
“O-on a very real level, no idea,” commented Daimyon, clutching his handbook to his chest with shaky hands. Even standing at the back of the elevator, he felt intensely vulnerable—being taller than most his fellows did not help with that. It also meant that he had a clear view of the unfolding action, including the lifeless body lying slumped against the nearby wall. It was a most peculiar sight: wearing a full, blood-stained suit, with impossibly thick hair that reached down to their legs. “On a more semantic level, it does not...look human. And, and speaking of...er, beings that are not human, who is the robot woman? My memories, ah...” he leafed through his notes fruitlessly, “they fail me. Have we seen her before?”
Zachary shook his head. “We could make a guess, but is there any reason to bother?” his eyes rested on the sight of the two robots fighting as he said this. “Unless you want to step in between that shitshow, we should take this chance to leave while we have it,” Zach suggested.
"Agreed." Shona said with a nod. "I’m unsure what will happen if either of them is left standing."
“So like, we gotta ditch our metal stuff?” The clown sighed.
"It would appear so." Shona cast aside her sword. "I don’t fully trust the robot, but I see little reason for us to disbelieve it. If it wanted to kill us, it would have attacked when we entered the room."
Everyone shed as much metal as they could. Guns, improvised weaponry, handbooks and armor all had to go. Jezebel nearly cried as she parted from nearly a dozen trinkets. Everything from hand buzzers to those weird punch weapons she had been toting around.
Zachary removed his bow and the quiver full of arrows after dropping the sledgehammer he had before. Reaching up to his neck, he paused as his hand rested upon the necklace he’d worn for the longest time. The arrowhead at its base was supposed to be a reminder of his crime and it held quite a bit of value to him but what could he do? Tearing it from his neck, he placed it next to his discarded weapons and was fairly silent afterwards.
Witnessing the archer’s moment of parting, Daimyon found it quite poetic—but when he reached instinctively for his pen to jot down a short ditty about it, he realised he had already been forced to discard it. Without it, his notebook was no longer his living mind, but merely a highly detailed, erratic autobiography. Stepping on the elevator, he hoped that would suffice for what was ahead of them.
The robots were still fighting when they rode the elevator up.
The elevator ride up was long. Now would have been a good time to talk but there was nothing to discuss. Nothing to do but wait and see what the mastermind had in store for everyone. Perhaps they were steeling themselves for what they knew would be their final battle. Reflecting on all they had endured to get to this point.
The death of their friends.
The mockery of their memories.
The answers to their nagging questions.
The nightmares that would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
And before any of them knew it, they had done it. They were in the final room.
”You arrive.”
The infinites found themselves in a giant circular room, not unlike the courtrooms they had been in many times prior. But rather than separated in front of a bunch of podiums, they all stood together on the elevator. The room itself had hundreds of monitors, covering every wall stacked from floor to ceiling. Davis sat in a gilded throne decorated with an obnoxious amount of gemstones. His head rested on his knuckles, and he looked at the infinites with disinterested eyes. Though with time, a smile crept across his face, and he sat up.
”Welcome, candidates!” A boom attached itself to the back of the throne and hoisted it up into the air. Davis was on the outer edges of the room looking in at all the infinites. ”I don’t think you realize how long I’ve been waiting for this moment. The past few weeks must have felt like years to you, but I’ve been running this game for a much longer time than that.” Several Monokuma bots showed up to hand everyone their e-handbook before departing from the premises.
"Answers, Davis." Shona was curt with her request.
”I could lay it all out for you, but I wonder if you’d believe me?” He put his hands together. ”I can help guide you to the truth, but it’ll be up to you to actually discover it. To uncover your conquest.”
Jezebel fret her brow. “Sounds like someone’s stroking their grody little ego.”
”Perhaps.” His grin only grew as he continued to speak. ”I’d like everyone to take a look at Shona.” He pointed his hand towards her. ”How do you think she was resurrected? We can do a lot of things in this hospital, but bringing the dead back to life is not one of them.” He folded his hands under his chin.
Shona looked at herself. Without her armor, she was left with a tank and jeans. "If it wasn’t a true resurrection, then I never died in the first place. I must have survived the attack somehow."
Davis chuckled. ”Are you sure you’re the one who was attacked?”
The air of anger, confusion, and shock that lingered around the Infinites only got more tense as Davis questioned the knight. Daimyon found himself feeling all three emotions, though disbelief—as usually—dominated. He wanted to say that he had seen Shona die: the real Shona, the Shona that was standing in front of them at this very moment, or so he had written. Being all too aware of the fallibility of his notes, however, he did not say that, opting instead to voice a...perhaps foolish, bolder surely, line of reasoning. “If she did not remember any of us...and if reviving the dead is indeed impossible...then could the Shona of yore have been...an imposter?”
"Well- Maybe?? Neither me or Henry were here when it happened, so we can't say for certain." Alice spoke up, both just as confused as everyone else.
Zachary shrugged. “I was not there either, but could that have really been an imposter?” he asked. If she was seen killed - quite brutally, mind you -- then he couldn’t imagine how that would have been someone intentionally pretending to be her. Unless the person impersonating her really wanted to die? That was just complicated for him.
Forgetting that, he looked to Shona. “I imagine you don’t have a sister who looks just like you by chance?” he asked, though the question seemed rhetorical. “Because all I can think of right now is either that, the imposter was both very skilled and very suicidal, Davis has a promising future in the special effects industry, or we have some 6th Day shit going on right now.”
Shona shook her head. "I do not have a sister. Do I not act exactly as I did before anyway? Even if they were good actors, they could not possibly know I wanted to die a true knight."
"The 6th day. Hah!" Davis leaned back in his seat. "That was a fun B-grade movie, wasn’t it? I forget the premise. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a clone though, wasn’t he?"
“Like, what of it?”
"Oh Jezebel, I’m merely here to guide you along and make sure you don’t take any missteps. Discovering the truth is still your job." Davis winked. "Perhaps if we break it down a bit we can come to an answer." He cast out his hand. "A clone is essentially someone who looks and acts like a living person, correct? Unfortunately I do not have access to any special effects. Would it be possible to make someone look like Shona?"
“Totally.” Jezebel scrolled to the second floor hospital wing on her E-handbook. “Like, there’s a plastic surgery station here and junk.”
"Why, then I only need a way to overwrite someone’s consciousness with one of my choosing. How could I do something like that?"
"The amnesia machine, right?" Alice suggested, looking through her E-handbook. "Take away the surrogate's old memories, and you'd be able to remake them how you see fit."
Davis laughed. "Well yes, Alice, the amnesia machine is part of the puzzle."
"So all of my memories were erased?" Shona’s shoulder slumped. "That would explain why I never remembered getting dizzy. If all of my memories were removed, then there are no old memories to fade from."
The very notion made Daimyon shudder. “That cannot happen…” he muttered, so quietly he could not be convincing anyone but himself. He was failing at even that; the evidence was staring him in the face from his own notebook. A poem on an early page, giving a tragicomic account of his transformation: from a short-tempered, abrasive everyman to a sensitive artist with an overcharged sense of creativity. Night and day. And all it took was banging his head too hard. “That cannot happen,” he repeated louder, despite himself. He could not afford to show weakness, not in front of the mastermind. “A-and even if you could erase someone’s memories on a whim, how would you—how would you get them to adopt the personality you want? How would you even know what Shona was like, so well that you can replicate it exactly?”
Shona groaned. "At least I die a true knight. That is a very private thought that I’ve never shared with anyone." She looked at Davis. "This is not the work of an amnesia machine."
"As I said, the amnesia machine is part of the puzzle. It is not everything though. " Davis didn’t stop smiling. "Come on! Think about what you saw on your way here. How could I have planted someone else’s memories in Shona’s head?"
“Uh, weird thought here,” Zachary spoke up. “Does the amnesia machine just ‘erase’ memories?”
“Like...” Jezebel looked like she was going to say something to the effect of “Duh?” but instead turned to look at Davis. “Yas queen or nah queen?”
"It’s like selecting a file on your computer and hitting the delete key." Davis hovered near Zachary, but not too close. "The memory disappears, never to be seen again. Unless you have a backup."
If Zachary wasn’t convinced he’d get filled to the brim with bullet holes or something worse, he might have responded violently when Davis approached. Instead, they had to continue this dumb ‘game’ until they came up with the answer. He didn’t like Jezebel looking at him like he was stupid but Davis more or less gave him the information he wanted. “Then the obvious assumption to make her is that you can also restore memories,” he looked at Shona. “Or copy,” he didn’t feel comfortable in the slightest about the implications here. In fact, he dreaded them. “But maybe using ‘paste’ would be the better word here?”
As far as Zachary was aware, the amnesia machine caused one to feel dizzy and that they blacked out, which Shona apparently never experienced. But does this contradiction make his idea invalid?
Daimyon did not think so. As uncomfortable as he felt with the whole scenario—made many times worse by his imagination coming up with increasingly worse applications by the dozen—his weak protests amounted to nothing. Not only was the amnesia machine, apparently, fully functional, but Davis also had a way of inserting memories at will. The poet followed along Zachary’s line of thought and was the first to voice the conclusion he had reached, for better or worse. “There...there have to be two Shonas. The one we saw die, all those weeks ago...and the one standing here with us. One of them the real deal, the valourious Infinite Knight, the other...a terrifyingly accurate copycat. Who doesn’t—didn’t know even know they were such. And if this is all true, and I beg the heavens for it not to be, then my next question is…” Daimyon trailed off, losing certainty as he looked from Infinite to Infinite. “...who is who?”
Davis shrugged. "If that’s what I did, then how? The amnesia machine can only make one forget after all."
"Hm...assuming you had information on the real Shona in the database prior to the surrogate's memory wipe, you could perhaps use the data to convince them that they were Shona." Henry speculated.
”We are all Infinites, are we not?” Daimyon extended his arms. “Researched, scouted, catalogued. To what degree, that I do not recall, but this is perhaps the most believable part of this whole insanity. The only reach is that our mastermind here had to have access to our records—but that could not have been too large a challenge for the Infinite Conquest, could it?”
“Actually…” Zachary spoke up again. “With all of that information, it’s entirely possible for someone to be rewritten. It should have been more obvious to me before. We’re talking about something that is not unprecedented. No, if I’m correct, ‘that’ was used to make a genius into a normal person and it could be used again.”
Alice thought it over, before it hit her. "By 'that', you must mean the Neo World, right?" she asked. "So if the surrogate didn't have their memories erased by the amnesia machine, they must've instead been overwritten in the program!"
The mastermind clapped his hands together. ”You’re so clever. Moreover..."
The remaining infinites walked single profile into the resort. The room had a giant elevator at the back, which was being guarded by someone. Though her description was remarkably close to someone they had heard about.
The real Alice Parker.
”You showed up.” There was something off about the woman. She was far more human looking than any of the carnage sisters, but there were a few details that kept her apart from her human counterpart. Even if one could ignore her red eyes, her skin didn’t look the right color. It was a bit too glossy, and lacked the blemishes and imperfections a real human would have. ”Your final destination is right behind me. There’s an ultra strong magnet on the way up the elevator, so you might want to drop any metallic items you have before going up. “
Alice parker broke through the doorway behind the infinites and slung Izuru’s battered corpse over the android’s head. ”Where is he!?”
”Hmph.” The android looked over its shoulder. ”No matter how talented humans become, they are fated to be replaced by cold steel.” She looked ahead. ”Hurry onto the lift, there’s little you can do to change the outcome of our fight.” The android sprinted off, and the two robots fought.
The quick exchange between the two Parkers left the siblings silent, Masson more or less confused as to who's the real Parker than Henry focusing on the random(?) corpse thrown across the room. "Erm, does anyone know who the stiff is?"
“O-on a very real level, no idea,” commented Daimyon, clutching his handbook to his chest with shaky hands. Even standing at the back of the elevator, he felt intensely vulnerable—being taller than most his fellows did not help with that. It also meant that he had a clear view of the unfolding action, including the lifeless body lying slumped against the nearby wall. It was a most peculiar sight: wearing a full, blood-stained suit, with impossibly thick hair that reached down to their legs. “On a more semantic level, it does not...look human. And, and speaking of...er, beings that are not human, who is the robot woman? My memories, ah...” he leafed through his notes fruitlessly, “they fail me. Have we seen her before?”
Zachary shook his head. “We could make a guess, but is there any reason to bother?” his eyes rested on the sight of the two robots fighting as he said this. “Unless you want to step in between that shitshow, we should take this chance to leave while we have it,” Zach suggested.
"Agreed." Shona said with a nod. "I’m unsure what will happen if either of them is left standing."
“So like, we gotta ditch our metal stuff?” The clown sighed.
"It would appear so." Shona cast aside her sword. "I don’t fully trust the robot, but I see little reason for us to disbelieve it. If it wanted to kill us, it would have attacked when we entered the room."
Everyone shed as much metal as they could. Guns, improvised weaponry, handbooks and armor all had to go. Jezebel nearly cried as she parted from nearly a dozen trinkets. Everything from hand buzzers to those weird punch weapons she had been toting around.
Zachary removed his bow and the quiver full of arrows after dropping the sledgehammer he had before. Reaching up to his neck, he paused as his hand rested upon the necklace he’d worn for the longest time. The arrowhead at its base was supposed to be a reminder of his crime and it held quite a bit of value to him but what could he do? Tearing it from his neck, he placed it next to his discarded weapons and was fairly silent afterwards.
Witnessing the archer’s moment of parting, Daimyon found it quite poetic—but when he reached instinctively for his pen to jot down a short ditty about it, he realised he had already been forced to discard it. Without it, his notebook was no longer his living mind, but merely a highly detailed, erratic autobiography. Stepping on the elevator, he hoped that would suffice for what was ahead of them.
The robots were still fighting when they rode the elevator up.
The elevator ride up was long. Now would have been a good time to talk but there was nothing to discuss. Nothing to do but wait and see what the mastermind had in store for everyone. Perhaps they were steeling themselves for what they knew would be their final battle. Reflecting on all they had endured to get to this point.
The death of their friends.
The mockery of their memories.
The answers to their nagging questions.
The nightmares that would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
And before any of them knew it, they had done it. They were in the final room.
”You arrive.”
The infinites found themselves in a giant circular room, not unlike the courtrooms they had been in many times prior. But rather than separated in front of a bunch of podiums, they all stood together on the elevator. The room itself had hundreds of monitors, covering every wall stacked from floor to ceiling. Davis sat in a gilded throne decorated with an obnoxious amount of gemstones. His head rested on his knuckles, and he looked at the infinites with disinterested eyes. Though with time, a smile crept across his face, and he sat up.
”Welcome, candidates!” A boom attached itself to the back of the throne and hoisted it up into the air. Davis was on the outer edges of the room looking in at all the infinites. ”I don’t think you realize how long I’ve been waiting for this moment. The past few weeks must have felt like years to you, but I’ve been running this game for a much longer time than that.” Several Monokuma bots showed up to hand everyone their e-handbook before departing from the premises.
"Answers, Davis." Shona was curt with her request.
”I could lay it all out for you, but I wonder if you’d believe me?” He put his hands together. ”I can help guide you to the truth, but it’ll be up to you to actually discover it. To uncover your conquest.”
Jezebel fret her brow. “Sounds like someone’s stroking their grody little ego.”
”Perhaps.” His grin only grew as he continued to speak. ”I’d like everyone to take a look at Shona.” He pointed his hand towards her. ”How do you think she was resurrected? We can do a lot of things in this hospital, but bringing the dead back to life is not one of them.” He folded his hands under his chin.
Shona looked at herself. Without her armor, she was left with a tank and jeans. "If it wasn’t a true resurrection, then I never died in the first place. I must have survived the attack somehow."
Davis chuckled. ”Are you sure you’re the one who was attacked?”
The air of anger, confusion, and shock that lingered around the Infinites only got more tense as Davis questioned the knight. Daimyon found himself feeling all three emotions, though disbelief—as usually—dominated. He wanted to say that he had seen Shona die: the real Shona, the Shona that was standing in front of them at this very moment, or so he had written. Being all too aware of the fallibility of his notes, however, he did not say that, opting instead to voice a...perhaps foolish, bolder surely, line of reasoning. “If she did not remember any of us...and if reviving the dead is indeed impossible...then could the Shona of yore have been...an imposter?”
"Well- Maybe?? Neither me or Henry were here when it happened, so we can't say for certain." Alice spoke up, both just as confused as everyone else.
Zachary shrugged. “I was not there either, but could that have really been an imposter?” he asked. If she was seen killed - quite brutally, mind you -- then he couldn’t imagine how that would have been someone intentionally pretending to be her. Unless the person impersonating her really wanted to die? That was just complicated for him.
Forgetting that, he looked to Shona. “I imagine you don’t have a sister who looks just like you by chance?” he asked, though the question seemed rhetorical. “Because all I can think of right now is either that, the imposter was both very skilled and very suicidal, Davis has a promising future in the special effects industry, or we have some 6th Day shit going on right now.”
Shona shook her head. "I do not have a sister. Do I not act exactly as I did before anyway? Even if they were good actors, they could not possibly know I wanted to die a true knight."
"The 6th day. Hah!" Davis leaned back in his seat. "That was a fun B-grade movie, wasn’t it? I forget the premise. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a clone though, wasn’t he?"
“Like, what of it?”
"Oh Jezebel, I’m merely here to guide you along and make sure you don’t take any missteps. Discovering the truth is still your job." Davis winked. "Perhaps if we break it down a bit we can come to an answer." He cast out his hand. "A clone is essentially someone who looks and acts like a living person, correct? Unfortunately I do not have access to any special effects. Would it be possible to make someone look like Shona?"
“Totally.” Jezebel scrolled to the second floor hospital wing on her E-handbook. “Like, there’s a plastic surgery station here and junk.”
"Why, then I only need a way to overwrite someone’s consciousness with one of my choosing. How could I do something like that?"
"The amnesia machine, right?" Alice suggested, looking through her E-handbook. "Take away the surrogate's old memories, and you'd be able to remake them how you see fit."
Davis laughed. "Well yes, Alice, the amnesia machine is part of the puzzle."
"So all of my memories were erased?" Shona’s shoulder slumped. "That would explain why I never remembered getting dizzy. If all of my memories were removed, then there are no old memories to fade from."
The very notion made Daimyon shudder. “That cannot happen…” he muttered, so quietly he could not be convincing anyone but himself. He was failing at even that; the evidence was staring him in the face from his own notebook. A poem on an early page, giving a tragicomic account of his transformation: from a short-tempered, abrasive everyman to a sensitive artist with an overcharged sense of creativity. Night and day. And all it took was banging his head too hard. “That cannot happen,” he repeated louder, despite himself. He could not afford to show weakness, not in front of the mastermind. “A-and even if you could erase someone’s memories on a whim, how would you—how would you get them to adopt the personality you want? How would you even know what Shona was like, so well that you can replicate it exactly?”
Shona groaned. "At least I die a true knight. That is a very private thought that I’ve never shared with anyone." She looked at Davis. "This is not the work of an amnesia machine."
"As I said, the amnesia machine is part of the puzzle. It is not everything though. " Davis didn’t stop smiling. "Come on! Think about what you saw on your way here. How could I have planted someone else’s memories in Shona’s head?"
“Uh, weird thought here,” Zachary spoke up. “Does the amnesia machine just ‘erase’ memories?”
“Like...” Jezebel looked like she was going to say something to the effect of “Duh?” but instead turned to look at Davis. “Yas queen or nah queen?”
"It’s like selecting a file on your computer and hitting the delete key." Davis hovered near Zachary, but not too close. "The memory disappears, never to be seen again. Unless you have a backup."
If Zachary wasn’t convinced he’d get filled to the brim with bullet holes or something worse, he might have responded violently when Davis approached. Instead, they had to continue this dumb ‘game’ until they came up with the answer. He didn’t like Jezebel looking at him like he was stupid but Davis more or less gave him the information he wanted. “Then the obvious assumption to make her is that you can also restore memories,” he looked at Shona. “Or copy,” he didn’t feel comfortable in the slightest about the implications here. In fact, he dreaded them. “But maybe using ‘paste’ would be the better word here?”
As far as Zachary was aware, the amnesia machine caused one to feel dizzy and that they blacked out, which Shona apparently never experienced. But does this contradiction make his idea invalid?
Daimyon did not think so. As uncomfortable as he felt with the whole scenario—made many times worse by his imagination coming up with increasingly worse applications by the dozen—his weak protests amounted to nothing. Not only was the amnesia machine, apparently, fully functional, but Davis also had a way of inserting memories at will. The poet followed along Zachary’s line of thought and was the first to voice the conclusion he had reached, for better or worse. “There...there have to be two Shonas. The one we saw die, all those weeks ago...and the one standing here with us. One of them the real deal, the valourious Infinite Knight, the other...a terrifyingly accurate copycat. Who doesn’t—didn’t know even know they were such. And if this is all true, and I beg the heavens for it not to be, then my next question is…” Daimyon trailed off, losing certainty as he looked from Infinite to Infinite. “...who is who?”
Davis shrugged. "If that’s what I did, then how? The amnesia machine can only make one forget after all."
"Hm...assuming you had information on the real Shona in the database prior to the surrogate's memory wipe, you could perhaps use the data to convince them that they were Shona." Henry speculated.
”We are all Infinites, are we not?” Daimyon extended his arms. “Researched, scouted, catalogued. To what degree, that I do not recall, but this is perhaps the most believable part of this whole insanity. The only reach is that our mastermind here had to have access to our records—but that could not have been too large a challenge for the Infinite Conquest, could it?”
“Actually…” Zachary spoke up again. “With all of that information, it’s entirely possible for someone to be rewritten. It should have been more obvious to me before. We’re talking about something that is not unprecedented. No, if I’m correct, ‘that’ was used to make a genius into a normal person and it could be used again.”
Alice thought it over, before it hit her. "By 'that', you must mean the Neo World, right?" she asked. "So if the surrogate didn't have their memories erased by the amnesia machine, they must've instead been overwritten in the program!"
The mastermind clapped his hands together. ”You’re so clever. Moreover..."