Kirumi Tojo's Palace | The Ultimate Maid's Failures

[kandata]

By now everyone may be used to find themselves in bizarre locations, between going into palaces and visiting Nekyia. It might not come as a surprise that it has happened again.

What might come as a surprise, though...is how empty this place is.

All around you there's nothing more than a large, gray, featureless expanse. In the distance there seem to be bars, curving upwards to gather so, so high above you, possibly hundreds of miles above, so high it’s hard to distinguish.

It’s a cage. So unfathomably large. You could escape, were you to get to the edges of the cage, but...it would take forever. No matter how you look at it, you're trapped. The atmosphere is so...hopeless. Devoid of anything even remotely positive.

Not that you want to hang around for long, do you? After all, this is someone's palace. Not a place to stick around at. What to do, though?

It’s all so...empty. Silent. Featureless. A flat expanse of hard gray tiles.

Gather together, everyone. Gather and choose a direction. North, East, West, South. All directions look completely identical, but could it affect your time in this place, somehow? Probably not. But all treks start with the first step. Perhaps, if you get moving, you'll progress?

Comments

[vogelfrei]

[ Ah... ]

I can confirm that your assumption is correct. The rules for that game were in her dreamscape last week.

[ And Sayaka... Well, suddenly arriving bloody with a knife makes a lot of sense. Funny how the pieces finally fit together. ]

[destage]

[There's pain in that realization. That their perfect and elegant maid could have been hiding so much pain from them all, despite being such a kind cornerstone. Her strength was incredible and something Sayaka wanted to emulate, and her kindness was something Sayaka appreciated...]

"Anyone who kills a fellow student and becomes "blackened" will graduate, unless they are discovered." I take it that was one of them, or at least of similar wording?

[Because yeah. Yeah, Sayaka's posture is tight but deeply resolved. And...

Honestly, she's shaking with both fright and anger that she's keeping very restrained.]

...So Tojo-san was the anon I talked to, who recognized that bear's name. That explains a lot.

[vogelfrei]

[ There is a surprised pause of recognition here. McGillis had been reading along with the other responses on that post - how could he not have, when he'd been so deeply involved and invested in the discussion? And if Kirumi is that individual, then...

Oh dear. A lot of things are clicking into place today. ]

Yes, it certainly does.

[ Ahem. ]

And yes, precisely. Once someone committed a murder, it'd be either execution or graduation.

[ And he sees now which path the both of you took. ]

[destage]

[Sayaka winds up nodding her head; no seeking of pity, no seeking of remorse. She already made it clear on the network post that she wanted none of these things, but rather to understand the strange world that she'd been born into.

And if it means taking responsibility for her actions, so be it. She'll own them. Even if finding out what happens after is...painful for sure.]

...I can't say I'm surprised that that's what would come after. Considering everything littered around that school that looked like it would kill us if we stepped out of line, that seems exactly like something Monokuma would do.

[There's a brief pang of guilt, for forcing everyone's hand like that--Kuwata was a jerk, but he sure as hell didn't deserve that.]

[vogelfrei]

[ Sayaka doesn't know about execution, and she died knife in hand... She did something unforgivable, too. The picture of what must have happened begins growing in McGillis' mind.

And because he is the way he is, his respect rises for the fact that she was willing to take initiative, at least. ]

I believe that is what happened to Kirumi, at the end of it.

[ They had too much talk about Kandata for that to not be the case. ]

pretend this was much earlier, i got hella distracted whoops

[destage]

...So she acted on something that was threatened too, huh?

[No sense in hiding it. Everyone likely knows her from the anon post now, and there's no sense in playing coy about the fact that it was her actions that set everything in motion.]

I understand. She always had the weight of the world on her shoulders, it seemed like. I can only imagine what was used against her.

...But let's make sure she's okay. She deserves to understand that there's better in this world beyond that game, too.

we can live in the past here it's fiine

[vogelfrei]

'The weight of the world' sounds about right, yes.

[ He does know about what was leveraged against Kirumi, though he's not going to spill the beans on it if it can be helped. They're invading Kirumi's privacy enough as is. ]

So let's go find her, and let her choose again. For herself.