THE MASTERMIND AU MEME

[milliondollarpipes]

THE MASTERMIND AU
AMBIDEX EDITION

With Round 3 now over, it's about time we had the mastermind meme!

To those who aren't familiar, this is essentially an AU where your character is the one responsible for Round 3's Mutual Killing Game, and all of the carnage that came with it, from the kidnapping to the motives to the trials to the executions! And now, they have chosen to reveal themselves before the remaining members of their class at the final trial!

As such, you are free to play around with this as much as you would like; did your character make a contract with Kyuubey, or did your character put everyone in the Killing Game for a different reason? What is your character's motivation for bringing despair? What do they intend to get out of this seemingly senseless killing? And what does the rest of the class have to do to stop the madness and go home?

There's probably going to be quite a bit of AUing from your character's original canon happening here to make them into the best harbingers of despair they can be, so feel free to go as nuts with it as you want to! And, of course, feel free to tag others with your character's reaction to their classmate's big reveal; it doesn't matter whether or not your character made it to endgame, have fun and mix up the survivor pool as much as you'd like!

Oh, and feel free to describe your character's sweet new Monobear-themed duds, too!!

Original meme text borrowed and modified from loveisanopendoor!

Comments

[callbacks]

[The final investigation goes much the same as it does in any world. There are the hand-drawn pamphlets, each a short comic detailing the history of despair, style not immediately distinctive but not wholly unfamiliar, either. There's a child's bedroom, hardly slept in and sparsely decorated but for the photo wall of Enoshima Junko; instead of the stuffed Monobears, though, there's a puppet on the bed wearing a pigtailed wig, its glass eyes as blue as bright as hers.

Where Monaka had a library, though, there is instead a second media room, though this one has clearly only been furnished for one to enjoy. Shelves of homemade DVDs line the walls, but a set of twenty have been pulled out; pulled out and cracked, each lying in two neatly-snapped halves, each bearing the name of a student trapped here, living or dead.

Significant, then, maybe, that the clip left playing on loop on the high-def projector is of no one they can recognize. The situation is familiar, though: it's an execution, and the pajamas the dark-haired boy wears are the same vivid shade of blue that was so important in the hotel's very first trial.

And where there was an operating gallery, in another universe, there are simply four walls, a ceiling, and floor, all covered from seam to seam in multi-colored text, frantically scrawled, hardly any of it making coherent sense save BUT I DON'T WANT TO DIE i dont want you to die 1M 4FR41D TO NOT 3X1ST

arent you?

It shouldn't take too long, once reinstated in the courtroom, for the survivors to reach the obvious conclusion.

Dave sighs, and the breath seems to take physical shape in the suddenly quiet room. An invisible, but palpable energy that leaves him with the last of his fight.]

Kind of took you long enough.

[Suddenly, he isn't there at all, and the impenetrable blackness bounding the courtroom shatters like glass on impact. The cracks glow in a kaleidoscope of color, pulsing with terrific energy, but it's in the thick panes of darkness that remain that the real horror lies: writhing tentacles, gnashing beaks, mouths open in screams.

And the faces of their dead. The dreamers bear witness, too, and though they cannot make a sound, their eyes know terror. Horror. They press their hands against the barrier but they cannot get out. Can't be reached.

Dave reappears before the throne with both hands on the pommel of an ornate sword. As he speaks, color seems to lift from his skin. He is white, dead white, and then grey--and the cherry red evaporates from his clothes until Time's gear is split black and white on charcoal, slashed through only with a jagged, diagonal rip of crimson like Monobear's eye.

He isn't wearing his cape, but shadow drips from his shoulders like a cowl, writhing and wraithlike as if stirred by a fey wind.

Bun Hutchinson hops over to Dave's feet, and both his eyes are red, now. The horrorterrors continue to undulate in the shattered space around them, whispering unknowable things at the edges of every mind. Dave doesn't sit.]

All that shit you decided about time travel and alternate dimensions and coming back from the dead, and not a single one of you thought to look at the guy practiced in all of them.

[mopocalypse]

No... no! Dave-kun! What are you doing!? This can't...!

[callbacks]

'Dave-kun' died a long time ago, Harks.

[His cloak billows, and the horrible whispering of the monsters in the mirror gets louder, enough that one could almost hear words. Or song.]

None of you can be said to have ever met him at all.

[mopocalypse]

N-no... [She stares, shaking at the monsters and the ghosts and the screaming or whispering or she can't even tell, can she?] You're wrong! You can't just be -- what are you? Who are you?

[callbacks]

Using this body is a goddamn three-act ballet and a half, you know. There are so many things it won't do. It won't kill, except to protect you. It won't push anyone in one direction or another.

[He tucks his shades into the collar of his shirt. His eyes, revealed, glow white and empty.]

But the prince of the moon gave it to us, in an attempt to save the fractured remnants of his world. Even in death.

[mopocalypse]

What the... okay, you know I'm not gonna have any idea what that means, but you're some thing possessing Dave-kun because you want us all to die to save the world? What logic does that follow?

[callbacks]

The logic of the Furthest Ring, mostly. Y'all really should've let him tell you more about his universe. It kept happening, even though we didn't want to. It's almost like he wanted to warn you, doggs, if a departed spirit can really be said to want anything.

[He shifts a little, moving his weight to one side, looking infinitely more casual and Dave-like.]

Let's ask you, since you're the one who seems to know most about this. Did you know if you die in a dream, you die for real?

[mopocalypse]

[Haruka winces, steps back at what he's implying.]

That's -- that's made up, isn't it?

[But she remembers the ambulance siren, in that one offshoot where he couldn't tell the difference in time and how she... and then it started over, didn't it, before anything could happen?]

Does that mean he was in a dream? Or that you're from a dream?

[callbacks]

We're the keepers of the dreams, the makers. Those who preserve the memories of the dead. The outer gods.

[A few tentacles lap gently at the broken barrier nearest Haruka. It's almost a caress.]

But we're being murdered, all of us, by a power greater and more fuckin' destructive than our own. One who wishes for nothing less than the absolute silence of the universe and the domination that death grants him over all, just so he can be said to have won. So we took measures. We're still in the process of taking them.

[mutantkoalabff]

[It's good they still have the podiums, because Allie almost falls over, a stabbing pain in her chest since they started talking about the Mastermind. Her eyes keep glancing to the dead, to the horrors around them--

and she forces them on Dave, where it's hardest to look.]

What are you doing to them...? How could you-- Dave, why?!

[callbacks]

They're safer there than they would be if we'd just left them alone, you know. For a time, anyway. Guess it depends on how you guys vote.

[mutantkoalabff]

"We...?" What are you? You....let him go!

[callbacks]

You're misunderstanding the situation, Al. There's nothing of him to let go. How can you hope to free him when he was always already gone?

[mutantkoalabff]

No. You can't tell me all this time- he cared about me, he loved Meridiana, Dave is real</>!

[callbacks]

Dave was real. But he failed way before any of you had a chance to meet him, save perhaps the troll guy. We've been animating him since you guys woke up here, and since we were just running power through his body, everything he did was what he would've done, if he were alive. But he already told you he wasn't. You know that.

this is why i don't phonetag

[mutantkoalabff]

[...]

You never brought him back. You... [Her voice cracks.] You just used him. Why?

Phonetagging is hard and those of us who do it wish we didn't

[callbacks]

He asked us to. To save everything else.

[The tentacles move gently behind the barrier at her back.]

We never told you what he was fighting, did we? What we're still trying to fight. All those worlds, ended, but it always seemed like there was something worse waiting for him, wasn't there? That's the impression you must've got.

[occultigen]

[She's never felt so small as she does right then. It's the darkness that frightens her most, the way it smashes like glass on an impact; it reads in her perception as nothing so much as being a defenseless bird trapped behind glass, with clawed murder on the outside trying to fight its way in.

Except that the murder, she thinks as she watches Dave turn hues of grayscale — his once-red clothing going the color of a crow — is trapped in there with them.

And it hits her hard, hard enough to send her to her knees, because all this time safety has been something she's found in him, and now he's the one who holds all their deaths in his hands like the pommel of his sword.

She'd really gotten it wrong again, hadn't she.]

I-I don't...I don't understand...

[Shouldn't it have been obvious this whole time? It wasn't.]

W-Why...?!

[callbacks]

[Dave--the ghost of Dave, the gods possessing that corpse, whatever he is now--is quiet for a long time.]

...He would have loved you. We understand that much, even if that kind of human conceit should be beyond us.

If there is one thing you must understand before we continue, whatever choice he made that brought this about, he did it to protect. That much has always been true about him.

[occultigen]

You can't possibly be serious...all this, to protect something? All this madness, this suffering — to protect what?

[She gathers in on herself, unconsciously; her forearms come together and cross over her chest in an unthinkingly defensive posture.]

Dave wouldn't — he never would've wanted anything like this!

[callbacks]

...No. He wouldn't have. But he turned his quest over to us a long time before today, and this is what we built with the tools we were given. His heart included.

[He touches his chest, just over the split gear. Over the red wound through it.]

You said it yourself. He wanted to save everyone. Will you hear us out, knowing that?

[occultigen]

[We, us, the thing that looks like Dave keeps saying, as though it's something different, as though the face that even now makes warmth stir in her chest is really nothing but a mask, a hollowed-out husk hiding something worse inside.

It's terrifying, but she can't say no. Even if she knows that she ought to.]

You're saying...he let you...w-what is all this? Who can any of this possibly be saving?

[callbacks]

Everything. The universe. Reality itself.

[His line of sight shifts, and in the broken panels of darkness across from Meridiana, a monster--a man?--a grinning skull obliterates a horde of ghosts. No one she knows, of course; their screams are silent, and it's over quickly. The glass goes dark again, sparing her more.]

We've been fighting something that all life has to oppose by its very nature, and when your Knight failed to save even one person in his time, he gave what was left--his body, his powers--over to us, to save the rest. All we have done since then has been to put the dead between that green motherfucker and the living while the living find a way to fight.

[occultigen]

[She can't help but scream at the sudden sight anyway, her own shrill expression of horror sounding out where that of the ghosts hadn't; her hands are over her face, but her fingers are spread, like even in her horror she can't make herself look away from any of it.]

You're using them, to buy the rest time. Those people out there — that's their use to you, dying to give whoever's left a chance.

[Give me the terrible price I ask, and I'll save her — and he would've done it, wouldn't he, that other boy all in black. And instead she'd chosen to die so he would live, to make sure he never had the chance...]

Is that what you did to Dave, too? ...Is he out there, dying to buy us a few more seconds of chance...?

[callbacks]

...Dave died a long time ago, Meridiana.

[Trapped in this body, forced to communicate with this language, even the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors seem reluctant to explain this. At least to her.]

He...we nearly told you, once. Letting himself die to buy a few seconds for someone else--that's all the poor asshole's ever done. And we...we had a hand in it, once, but he still chose, every time. We didn't do anything to him. We just asked for his help.