The Place

She/they AO3/Prev Tumblr: @HeyHeyDidjaKnow From the top, with gusto.

[gupgoodles]

I have been inspired by Sarah Z’s new video to put on a Submit Your Own Tribute but through the medium of a Fangan. If you, dear reader, have an OC that you would like to see put through a killing game, please submit them to my ask-box (or comment under the AO3 post of the first chapter if you’d rather lurk on Tumblr) so that I may put them through torture! No set requirements for entry apart from a name to credit for your OC, but please keep in mind that I will fill any blanks you choose to leave empty, so don’t leave anything unsaid! Your entrance letter can be found at the end of this post. To anyone that chooses to submit: thank you, and I promise that, if I kill your little guy, they will go out gloriously! To anyone who wants to follow along, here’s to watching young adults kill each other!

Great Falls School of Innovation

The Pre-Prologue

Mukuro Ikusaba did not know that her sister’s mascara was not waterproof until it was streaming down her cheeks. She didn’t know exactly when the tears started. She’d been calm enough when she’d sat in the makeup chair for her mandatory training (her sister had claimed that her own skills were insufficient). As was the case with every other execution she had been assigned in her decade-long career, the buildup, as calculated as it necessarily was, inspired in her only icy determination; she’d never been one for pre-show jitters. Her target, she knew, was especially forgiving. If she failed, she knew she would be granted clemency, at least for a little while. In that sense, this was more similar to the drills she performed before she became a soldier. If anything, she had figured, this was even lower stakes than that. This was play fighting, like they’d done when they were kids, before they’d gone past the point of no return. She didn’t even bother with a weapon.

Mukuro gritted her teeth, blood mixing with saliva and dribbling through her lips. Her sister’s open neck pooled excess liquid into her lap, half lidded and filled with perverse ecstasy. Even in the end, she hadn’t given into that comforting blackness willingly, eager to draw out her suffering every second she could. She was, after all, a true believer.

It was Junko’s worst quality.

Mukuro turned her head, spitting flesh onto the carpet. Gently, she placed her hand on the small of her sister’s back, slipping out of her own chair and bringing the pair of them down to rest on the floor. She stood up, wiping stubborn tears off onto her sleeve. Stepping over the corpse, she made her way to her sister’s desk— not to be confused with her vanity— and dug shakily through the leftmost drawer for a flip phone. She let herself take in her work for a moment before dialing the only person she could think of.

A voice met her after two rings. “Hello?”

Mukuro shut her eyes, struggling to remember her schooling. “It’s me,” she said.

“Oh, Mukuro.” The girl on the other side of the line perked up. “What up?”

“I…” Mukuro cleared her throat, spitting again. “Call it off. The plan— it’s off.”

There was a gasp on the other end of the line. “Off? What for?”

“She’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

“My sister?”

“What, for real?” The phone was pulled away from the girl’s mouth— Mukuro suppressed her groan. “Hey, babe! Guess what? Junko ate it! I know! She didn't mention how she—!” The phone was brought to her mouth again. “How’d she die?”

Her socks caught the rivulets of blood trickling down her thighs. “She fell."

“No shot!” She could hear the girl’s grin on the other end of the line. “She killed her! I know! Don’t take this the wrong way, “ she continued, phone shuffling on the other end, “but I don’t think anyone really thought you had it in you. We owe—”

“Tell me about it later.” Her mouth moved without her brain’s input, her eyes finding the camera above the bed. She got up, quickly wiping her bleeding hands off on her pants. She began rummaging through drawers for a change of clothes. “That’s not important right now. What matters right now is that the game’s off; you need to call it off.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This whole thing,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt with one hand, “was all Junko. Now that she’s gone, there’s no reason to keep going. We need to pivot, and to do that—”

“Hey, hey, slow your roll.” The girl inhaled and exhaled into the mic. “What does any of this have to do with our game?”

Mukuro paused. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” she sighed, “it’s not like we aren’t self-sufficient. No offense, obviously— your sister was a visionary— but we’re kinda already locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Her heart dropped to her stomach.

“We’re ahead of schedule. Hell, we’re supposed to start our game tomorrow afternoon— we’re beating out L-Dog for first in the time-slot! You want us to give that up for, what? Your sister’s funeral? If it’s that big a deal to you, we can splice in an in-memoriam.”

Bile rose in Mukuro’s throat. “But— I— you can’t be serious!”

A sigh. “Listen, Mumu,” she said, “I want you to go look out a window when you have a chance. You may notice, if you do, that the world’s currently on fire, and that the apocalypse is very much now around the world.” A knock. “You can’t honestly expect to stop a train just because you threw someone on the tracks, especially not when the Ultimate Despair doesn’t have a foothold here.” Instinctively, Mukuro lunged for the door. “Simply put,” the girl on the line said, “our show is going to go on with Japan’s support or not. We don’t need you if your group is set on pulling out.”

She snapped the lock shut, stumbling towards the dresser as the low, droning hum of fear slowly began to seep into her ears. “This can’t go on forever.” Her words fell like heavy raindrops into the microphone. “A campaign of despair can only last as long as we can keep down hope. I thought you knew that.”

“I do. I stand by that; we all do.” There was a flippancy to her tone that inspired in Mukuro reverent incredulity. “You guys just never seemed to understand that all we want to do is ride the wave, not pick through the shit it brought to shore.”

The phone quivered in her grip.

“Is that all? I have a fire to put out on my end from one of our sponsors and—”

“You’re worse than her.”

A beat.

“I’ll see you after the finale, Mukuro.”

Click.

The Ultimate Soldier became aware, for the first time, of the crescent-shaped punctures lining her palm; she shook her hand out, disregarding the sensation.

She took in her situation. Her sister’s corpse still laid undignified by her makeup chair. She was much too bloody to walk out the door. Even if her room’s camera wasn’t active yet, the possibility of being found out, the chance that one of the others saw, was too great a risk to take. She closed the phone and chucked it into the glass of the lens; it cracked, but failed to shatter. Frustrated, she climbed onto the desk, ripping wires from the wall and tossing the machine’s guts to the side. She hopped down again, grabbing any clean articles she could find from the drawer that could pass as hers and violently pulling them on. The girl bounced off the dresser to barrel once more towards the desk, tearing it apart for anything that could be usable as a weapon, finding only the sewing kit Junko had planted for the Killing Game. She tore the packaging open, slipping a pair of scissors and a pack of needles into her waistband. There was no time to hide the body; in any case, nobody important would get more from searching here than they would from the camera footage they may or may not have gathered.

There was nothing she could grab in this building that would make clearing the building easier.

She took one last look back at the room, at the haphazard piles of dirty clothes, at the drawers left unclosed, at the trash. In a way, this was the closest her living space had felt to being what it was essentially: a teenage girl’s bedroom. The only thing setting it apart, really, was her sister.

A whisper of a smile crossed her lips. How fitting.

~

Dear prospective student:

Congratulations! If you are receiving this letter, you have been scouted and have been offered a place in the first class of Great Falls School of Innovation, the first international campus and sister school for Hope’s Peak Academy! One or more of our scouts have taken note of your many accomplishments, and you have been found to possess the following qualities:

You are currently between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two years old; and,You have been identified by our scouts as being a leader in your field, art form, or sport internationally.

Your exceptional performance in your area of choice has rightfully earned you the illustrious title of “Ultimate,” (formerly referred to as “Super High School Level”) a globally recognized moniker denoting you as the very best in the world at what you do, as well as a place at our school.

At Great Falls School of Innovation, we recognize that one of the greatest limiters to the blossoming of your talent is not ability, but resources. It is for this reason that we— like our sister school— pride ourselves for our novel approach to education. Using Hope Peak Academy’s tried and true methods, we aim to offer students such as yourselves the room you need to grow. Unlike a traditional preparatory school or undergraduate program, we offer a truly personalized curriculum, tuition free, one on one educational opportunities, and the guidance you need to take the next step from prodigy to historic figure. You will be granted access to exclusive government and independent contracts and grants to facilitate the research and development of your given field of study as well as state of the art training facilities and work spaces designed and optimized by Hope’s Peak Academy staff. On top of this, we are proud to provide complementary living and dining for the duration of your enrollment, allowing for students to spend their time doing what they do best.

We know that, for a not insignificant number of potential students, their financial contributions to their household are what keep them afloat. For this reason, we are proud to offer contract based, flexible stipends to all scouted students as part of our mission to remove every boundary between you and excellence. For information regarding this and all other aspects of your future education, you can visit our website (the address for which may be found at the bottom of this letter) or send us a letter at our listed return address with any questions or concerns you may have with the stamps included in this envelope.

To secure your spot at GFSI, you can either register yourself on our website or fill out the attached form.

We look forward to hearing back from you and to welcoming you to the first class of Great Falls School of Innovation.

Sincerely,

Dean Kyosuke Munakata

[catastropheelin]

fates week day two : song