Fifth Trial

[airlockedmods]

[You get a little time after your investigation is over, but not too long. PAL gets bored easily and doesn't like to be kept waiting, after all.

When everyone has gathered at the elevators, the one going down turns on automatically. It...it looks like you're taking a leap of faith into an elevator shaft, not gonna lie. But the first person to step in finds that it's a carefully-balanced anti-gravity field made to just shoot you down and deposit you gently at the end of a long hallway. Like a walk-through aquarium, the walls and ceiling are all made of thick glass, giving you an even better view of the stars outside.

You're led to a wide-open area, empty except for a circle of podiums in its center. They've changed from last week, with the three previously empty podiums replaces with greyscale portraits of everyone you've lost this time around, including Ardyn and the Doctor. If anyone remembers where Jamie's portrait was in the simulation, however, that spot is now where Xander is meant to stand. The walls here are equally transparent, and they seem to have lines of large hatches going along them, as if this is where one might park one's small short-journey craft when getting ready to go on vacation to a galaxy far far away. Shame you don't know anything about those.

You already know what you're here to do. You'd best be getting along with it.]

Comments

[misanthropicprinciple]

[Yeah, you know what?

Junpei's gonna take a knife out of his pocket and stab it into his goddamn podium.]

Be my fucking guest.

[...Though, the knife is not from the kitchen.]

[daughterofthemark]

Sir Junpei?!

cw: suicidal ideation

[misanthropicprinciple]

I was gonna do it, you know. I was gonna run around and if we didn't have a body I was gonna go to the bathroom and take care of it because they didn't say we had to get away with it, they just said someone had to die--

cw: suicidal ideation

[daughterofthemark]

And--and you thought the rest of us would be fine?

[misanthropicprinciple]

The rest of you would be alive. Alive to keep finding the answers. To get us all back--it's not really like dying, and anyway I've already been killed so many times in these games, what's one more?

cw: suicidal ideation

[daughterofthemark]

Alive and without you! Perhaps without several of our number--what if all of us having such thoughts had followed through on them?

cw: suicidal ideation

[helladoptera]

[ Very quietly, from next to him. ]

Junpei...

[misanthropicprinciple]

[He can't meet her eyes, arms wrapped around himself. He's not that much older than her, really. Not far removed at all from the kind of love that'd bring down a storm.]

nah the cw can stay for a sec

[helladoptera]

[ shes gonna just. put a hand on his shoulder.

him too, huh? ]

cw: suicidal ideation

[tokencanadian]

...Junpei...

[That's something she's gonna think about for a while.]

[shikosuki]

[ uH ]

J-Junpei?!

cw: suicidal ideation

[misanthropicprinciple]

It was White Day and I couldn't--I couldn't make myself do it, she wouldn't have wanted me to but if I had, Ardyn wouldn't be--

[shikosuki]

No... N-No Junpei...

Don’t... don’t think like that. He...

He didn’t want it to happen to you.

[misanthropicprinciple]

...The hell does that mean.

[motherfucking_ghost]

What the actual fucking fuck.

[misanthropicprinciple]

If I'd made up my mind faster--if I hadn't been drinking, if I hadn't let myself go to that stupid spin the bottle game and had fun and thought, okay, maybe one more night, he wouldn't--someone wouldn't have--

[motherfucking_ghost]

Don't.

Don't.

The stupid game was on my stupid hands, cuz, that's what I do, okay? I do the stupid shit to make people have fun in the stupid hopes that someone won't be stupid enough to--

I--

[misanthropicprinciple]

That's why you're important, you idiot, that's why we need you! But I can't--I--if I let her die...

[Or, you know, all those other people, but we all know how Junpei feels about girls he was meant to save.]

[motherfucking_ghost]

Nothing about me is important here, but you're important, you dumb sack of shit!

[cyan_maid]

...Jesus Christ, Junpei...there - no, you...Jesus fucking Christ, Junpei!!!

[misanthropicprinciple]

Whatever! You already know how I feel about this bullshit! Four times, Jane! Four times I've been through this and seen my friends, and me, and the people I care about most dead for someone else's fucking profit, and dying is the only way I've ever saved anyone!

[ratherdoweddings]

[Yurika claps her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming.]

Where did you get a knife!?

[misanthropicprinciple]

Ruri.

[ratherdoweddings]

Ruri-chan? But that's -- wait, who do you mean?

[...she's never heard the roomba referred to by anything other than Stabby]

[misanthropicprinciple]

What? My roomba. She came with a knife. They all did.