Thread:Addfire/@comment-35195751-20191007183448/@comment-26234016-20191008201109

So, it ends with Syed dying with no clue why, right? And there's still a forget-me-not bottle lying around.

So, Victor has just been fed up with Natsue's performance as an unofficial 'leader' and decides to take this opportunity to take the wheel from Natsue, as it were. Between him and Julia, it's honestly not that bad of an idea– Feagal's not a huge fan of the power shift but Natsue's honestly kind of relieved to be able to be by herself and process the deaths of Lazuli and Syed. There's like, a single day where things are fine. Also, the new area is released, and there's a maze. Then Potatokuma introduces the new motive.

The new motive is as follows: every day, the temperature drops 10ºC. And it'll keep going until everyone's dead or everyone beats a trial. Victor starts freaking out and goes into control freak mode. After a couple days, the cold and Victor's control forces everyone to stay in the Dorm commons together, where people are starting to go numb from cold.

Now, Jenny and Hedge have been plotting. They didn't actually think Potatokuma would fully follow through on its threat, and so they agree to duel to the death in the middle of the Maze. They agreed that the winner would fess up to everyone else and face death bravely. In the duel, Jenny fights so well that Hedge has no choice but to use his enhancements, which due to his FA kills him.

Now, here's the thing: when they sneak out of the common room, they don't go out unnoticed. Victor spots them. He takes a bit to find where they went, but when he sees Jenny leave the Maze alone, he kind of snaps. And when he hears the confession, he gets pissed. He tortures her (I forget all the details, it's been a calendar year since I worked on this) spits on Jenny, triggering her FA.

Victor wasn't the only person who noticed Jenny and Hedge's absence. Julia noticed it too. As Victor's going back to the Commons, sort of shaken, Julia confronts him about it and punches him. Then he hits back, but he hits hard enough to accidentally knock her hat off, triggering her FA. Killing Julia drives Victor over the edge and he just goes nuts. Completely insane. He sets a fire near Jenny's body and does some other stuff to obscure time of death for everyone in order to make people think Julia's death came first. After all, since Jenny killed Hedge, she's the actual blackened of this case.

In the trial, Victor kind of fucks with everyone, but Leo most of all. And when it turns out that Victor doesn't actually die for the shit he pulled, that really gets Leo's goat. But it turns out Victor pulled some shit beyond just that. He was the one with the first Forget-Me-Not bottle, and he broke it at the feet of him and of Syed. He was the one who convinced Syed to kill Lazuli (I can't remember his logic) knowing that, if he didn't remember convincing Syed to do that, he would take charge instead and run the place more effectively.

By the way, all the people who hadn't already revealed their Forbidden Actions reveal them during this trial. Theodore can't go underground. Feagal can't spend a certain amount of time alone in a non-dorm room. Natsue can't use writing implements. Luna, having previously beaten a killing game, doesn't actually have an FA. Josh... I can't actually remember Josh's FA, rip. But he had one.

So, everyone just can't stand Victor, with the exception of Josh. Josh is actually kind of sympathetic to Victor, and wants to try and rehabilitate him, sort of? Josh and Victor end up exchanging letters, and Josh receives a letter from Victor saying that Victor doesn't want to kill himself– he wants, desperately, for someone else to kill him so that he can cause more death.

There's a lot of tension, between Victor starting shit and Josh being sad and Feagal for some reason getting more and more anxious when around Luna. Then one day everyone finds Victor in the Greenhouse (new area), hanging from a rope. The entire trial is, did Victor kill himself (Luna pushes for this) or did someone kill Victor (Josh pushes for this)? Things get a little more complicated when people realize that a Forget-Me-Now bottle was broken near the armory, and of course no one can remember what was taken. People realize that someone had to have killed Victor based on the positioning of the body, and Leo's the only person without an alibi. The killer, though, had to have hid in the Dining Hall, which Leo couldn't do because of an FA. There isn't any other option than Leo, so Natsue presses on even though she's honestly not too psyched about it– Leo was a serious team player and one of the voices of reason within the class, so Natsue really didn't want him to go. Eventually, though, he does confess.

Leo isn't actually a member of the New York Branch. He's the janitor and groundskeeper for the school grounds, but he was working to get recognized as an Ultimate. Of course, the killing game started, so he got sort of cut off. Still, because he wasn't a member of the class, Potatokuma decided not to give him a FA. Theodore points out that this probably just worsened Leo's feelings of isolation.

Now we're at the sixth chapter, and boy howdy is it time to figure out who the mastermind is. Potatokuma acknowledges this and begins scattering clues throughout the school, and after collecting all the clues, the final trial begins. One clue that they find fairly early on is a newspaper clipping Hazuki finds, and it says basically that her sister has publically denounced her. There's no other context.

One of the first things that people start to realize is that literally every student was holding down some sort of trauma, and someone had files on all their issues. Of course, Luna had her thing, but Feagal had a prank misfire and his sister died as a result. That's actually why he left the Dublin Branch. Theodore spent his early years in a really tough orphanage and never considered anyone his family. A couple potential masterminds are thrown around– Josh for being in contact with Victor, Feagal and Luna accuse each other because the class Luna killed was Feagal's old class and Luna just doesn't like Feagal. But people begin to turn to Theodore. For one, if he never thought of himself as having a family, then why would he introduce himself with "my friends and family call me Theo?" But then there's one more major clue towards Theo– his FA, going underground, would trigger during trials. Theo mentions that Potatokuma made a point of turning off FAs during trials, but the counterpoint is that the rule was only instituted in the first trial– otherwise, Rose couldn't have had her final moment.

So Theodore puts up some protest, but... he actually doesn't struggle that much. He reveals the truth: that this is a simulation (X6 combo was actually based off of this story). And it's a simulation to rehabilitate the Ultimate Despair. But Theodore isn't actually a member of the Remnants of Despair He's a member of the Future Foundation. He fought against the Ultimate Despair, and was and is one of the Future Foundation's top officers. He was sent to spearhead the rehabilitation efforts. But... these guys literally ended the world. Theodore wanted, just once, to make them suffer like he had. Like the entire world had. And hey, isn't there some poetic justice in putting them through a killing game?

Josh pipes up around here and says, with that, he's kind of fine dying. He's not sure he wants to live in a world bearing that sort of guilt. And shit, everyone's kind of having a bummer moment after that. And Kazuki... well, her sister and Rose were sort of everything to her. And now that Rose is gone, and her sister hates her... Kazuki's kind of with Josh. She just wants it to end. Feagal, too, he's felt shitty for a long while. So it's just Luna and Natsue, and Luna isn't even sure she's fine continuing with the stuff she's done. Because if Luna's this fucked up over the stuff she knows she did, there's no way she'd be cool with all the stuff she forgot. Maybe Victor had it right.

We have a little hope power-up section where Natsue brings all the students back to full confidence and it's super cool just trust me.

And then with the power of HOPE, they therapy the shit out of Theodore and get him to calm the fuck down.

Everyone agrees together to end the simulation. The "survivors" step out fine, and then Theodore gets to work bringing everyone else back out– the more brutal their "death," the longer it's gonna take to bring them back. Oliver is the first out. They've got a lot of stuff they need to work through.