supergaybabyjail | THE MASTERMIND AU MEME

THE MASTERMIND AU MEME

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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?

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?

Edited 2015-08-16 16:10 (UTC)

[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?

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.

What? By trapping people, forcing them to kill each other off? That's not how you save people! That's not even how you help them grow stronger, how you protect yourselves... That makes no sense! What are you doing?

Huh. Maybe we shouldn't have broken all those DVDs after all. We could've at least left you one to clue you in, but so many of you already brought this theory up, we thought it might be obvious.

[Le sign.]

Listen. We already said we preserve the dead, by request through one of our emissaries. We don't really give much of a fuck about the living except as it suits our purposes.

[His eyes are so blank. So steady. No matter how much they mimic his body language, this will never be Dave. This dead emptiness.]

So how do you think we got hold of all of you?

...It's because we've all died, isn't it? Even if some of us came back, we're still dead to you. And that made us the perfect toys for -- for what? How could that help you live? It's not like you trapped your enemies in here!

The game itself wasn't our idea. It. Came with the territory, so to speak.

The prince has always been kind of annoyingly impossible to communicate with. We would have much preferred working with his sister again. But while we still held some sway over his soul, he remembered how we taught him to navigate the bizarre temporal vagaries of the Furthest Ring, and he managed to escape the dream bubbles we made to protect him. He first set off to find his friend. The prince of Prospit's moon; the one child he hadn't seen die.

He didn't find the boy. He found her instead.

That girl you made that creepy-looking puppet of and the shrine. She talked you into this?

She provided us the means. It's the same as using the prince's body; we're limited in function by the form allowed us. We needed the dead, and in numbers. She gave us entry to her ruined world and others, through her memories.

She was like your Dave in many ways. Lonely. Defined in all ways by her game. He...liked the shit out of her, we think. He was much easier to puppet after she had her way with him.

So you let someone break your host so you could use him to do anything you wanted. Then you went into a dream full of dead people from a world that ended and you forced us all to kill each other again. Now you have our dead friends trapped and whatever's out there is even worse than you are. And you did all this thinking it would help?

It kind of already has.

[He lifts his head. A section of the shattered, spherical wall flickers to display, instead of the Void, beautiful, star-filled space, studded with winking lights of every color. As the view zooms in, it's clear those lights are glowing bubbles of a sort, and within each are the memories of the dead; billions of people they've never seen before, still dreaming of their lives.

And then a terrifying creature with flashing eyes set in its skull vaporizes them.

There's no sound, thankfully. No way to hear them scream.]

The dead've bought us a hell of a lot of time. And yours...we keep yours close, for now, because they'll be the best diversions for when he closes in on us. Those with the strongest memories, the most vivid nightmares. They'll slow him down.

No!

[Something snaps in Haruka. She pushes past her podium, picks up speed towards the thing that maybe used to be Dave or at least his impression.]

You're using our despair to make us bait just to push away some inevitable death? There's got to be another way to do this! Something to just stop this guy! Every one of those people had something to live for, even if we are all dead! Dave-kun had something to live for, and you used and shattered him on purpose! You're worse than Enoshima ever was, and you're happy about it because you think that's the only choice you have that means anything!

[WOW UM OKAY time to fly now? Jesus. Hutch clings to Dave's foot as he moves up to hover a good few yards above everyone's heads.]

Well--yeah, we don't really care very much about you guys individually, especially since you've all already bit it. We just want to stop the complete destruction of reality by any means necessary.

[He points at the podiums again with his sword.]

But that's why we're forced to give you The Choice. This shitty human body will no longer allow it any other way.

[Haruka looks up at him, still strong but shaking on the ground.]

You mean this trial of yours. So what, either you win and we get to be your busted-up pawns before we get vapourized, or we win and... who knows what happens? We've done all this to go back to our lives. To live happily. To give everyone another chance, and you're saying that's basically impossible.

Not exactly. Dave Strider, Enoshima Junko, and the Lord of Time--they're the ones who play games. Who have something to win or lose that isn't the simple fact of their own existence. The simple fact of existence. Despair. Justice. ...Love.

[...He puts his free hand in his pocket.]

We're just asking you to choose whether to stand and fight, or. To abandon us, we guess. To ask us to stop maintaining the dream bubbles and allow you to go...wherever it is you believe mortal lives go, at the end of their brief time.

...Why would we help you? After everything you've done to us. Your despair game, making us think we had hope to fight for and then saying we were already dead, saying our friend was a puppet who doesn't exist anymore after what you put him through. I don't care about what happens when you die. I made a promise that we were all going to live and that we'd be happy after this and you know how hard that was because it was impossible even with what little we did know, and if I'm fighting for anyone, it's for people who care a whole lot more than you ever did!

We did point out that the Lord of Time is destroying everything, right? Not just us?

Yeah.

[It's a long time before she says anything.]

And maybe it'll be useless in the end. You sure think so. But there's no way I'm leaving them to their fate like you. People aren't toys to use, and they're not things to throw away no matter how good your intentions are. Even if I can't do anything, there's some kind of hope out there.

[She's starting to tear up, but to her credit, she's still there.]

And we're gonna find it. I'm not doing this for you. But I'm doing it for everyone you used and lied to and abandoned, and if you survive, that's fine. E-even if I can't go back to the life I wanted, even if life really is unfair in the end and you're right about us all being dead from the start, even if everything is going to be miserable from here on out, and even if it's pointless and we'll all die. But I don't want that, and I think somewhere there's a way out that you just don't see because you're too determined to do what you think is going to be a surer way to buy you time!

...So you want us to let go of the bubbles. Let you all free, even if it means even your ghosts will stop existing. That's what you're saying?

No, I... I don't know!

[Haruka wipes her eyes with her sleeve and seethes up at them.]

I just think there's got to be something other than "let you win after everything you've done to us and keep thinking your choice was the right one" and "let some green rainbow death guy who looks like he just got out of the shower keep killing everything."

Are you scared to not exist?

[The words are quieter.]

Terrified.

It's not what I want. I want to fight for everyone's sake, even if there really is nothing at the end like you said. But at least that'd mean I tried after all this, right?

[He floats there silently for a minute.]

Would you want us to turn the clock back. Make it so that none of this ever happened, and that you all had never met.

Dave would still be alone, if we did.

...wouldn't you have done that if you could? You're all about fate. You'd have stopped Green Shower Skeleton Man before he could start, but you don't think it's possible.

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