全ての終わりに愛があるなら

I can’t tell you guys how I felt, honestly. Oller introduced me to the whole set up about, what, two years ago now? I spent a full year just researching, and going into hero worship mode. Their own tv tropes page? A long and storied history? Exemplary characters and story arcs? Memes?? I was so into it.

Applying was one of the most heart-racing experiences of my life. I spent time while at DISNEYLAND of all places sneaking peeks at my phone on the hopefuls chat. Joking about choking the MM out on a poisoned meatball or figurine...the memories are ridiculously clear of that time. It feels like spring, or something...

I remember exactly where I was when the roster came out--at my friend’s house, on their couch, as we were packing up to go home. It was, a total rush--I saw Piney’s name on my screen and squealed, my poor friends just putting up with it. I was BEYOND excited--I was in! To THE Doubt Academy! I was gonna get to make a story with everybody! It just did not get better than this.

Sike, yes it did. A minute after seeing the roster, one of the mods came up to me in private Skype. “Hi! Egmun, right? How would you feel about being the MM for Doubt Academy 6; Parelthon?”

Guys I screamed. Real legit screaming, scared the shit out of my friends bless them. Threw myself onto the couch bodily. I was not BELIEVING this. Accepted right away, got into the MM chat and 

Mod: Hello Mod: Hi Oller: Hey

I just. What was Ollie doing there? UnLESS

Me: Oller?! Oller: ?! NO WAY

Somehow I was not only MM, I was MM with the very person who introed me to this. I knew in that moment, I might never get an opportunity this amazing again. I had to put my full power into making this the best game I could possibly give.

Things haven’t always been smooth. Some scrambling had to be done once it got solidified that Yuji was 6-7 years older than the main cast, some story elements had to be rolled with further than we had road maps for. Ellie, Rhys, Oller and Azura carved the paths out as far as we each could, and I can remember really well lots of the conversations we had (I clearly remember the memeing, the deadline panic, Azura’s amazing reaction when they found out about Yuji being MM--sorry Azura!!) and honestly I. Was just so THRILLED to get to finally, after a year, come out with it and say ‘SURPRISE’. I was shaking the full weekend of the MM reveal, aching all beforehand as I got to see my first dedicated group game forge and ruin relationships, the memes and aus and am I saying memes too much? Sorry I really like memes. They’re freaking great.

Guys...seeing you guys work through hints, drag determination out of lulls, create content and relationships and bonds and drama and art has been utterly jaw dropping. Getting Piney a spot on TV tropes felt like getting a star on the Hollywood walk, and seeing everyone else up there too was an amazing experience. One that I wanted to give everything I had to.

It’s been long, guys. So long, apparently the longest in Doubt history. But it’s been once in a lifetime, it’s been something really amazing. I hope that in my work with the story and the MM I’ve given you guys some expression of how much I admire and appreciate you guys as players and people. 

Thank you so much for making this story and these memories with me, you guys. I’m never gonna forget it. I really hope I did everything I could to make this one go out with a bang, as much as could be allowed. You guys deserve it!

Thank you guys, from the bottom of my heart, for having me as your Mastermind. I hope I did you proud and gave you a good time.

Throughout the full ordeal, Veronica’s calm head kept Yuji similarly calm. He honestly had no idea what the hell he was doing in the sim–he knew what he was there to DO, but not why he was in the game and not in control. Having Veronica there gave him a sense of stability, her unending sensibility standing in for a reliable authority figure.

And then monobear showed up and things REALLY went to shit. He might have known about the mutual killing, but with elements left and right coming out of nowhere he didn’t have to act much of his terror in the slightest. Again, calm Veronica was a good steadying force.

Despite his opinion maybe becoming a little less shiny overtime she in no way ever let him down–always on point, clear headed and undaunted. He doesn’t know what she thinks of him–but she’s so glad that she seems strong enough to keep her head and heart clear enough to make one of the fullest recoveries among them. She’s strong, potentially one of the strongest in the group as far as emotional powering, and her ability to channel her heart through her head and resolve herself has earned her so much respect. 

Yuji didn’t know Jamie before this whole mess went down–he in fact had no idea about most anyone from Tora, as they were all Chou’s domain and unlike his group had never been people he’d known personally sans maybe Genta via association. So no…starting impression.

He only really met Jamie during the first trial after merge, and they were quiet enough and Piney busy enough that he didn’t think much of him. Not in a bad way but…not notably either. Just ‘someone who does not stir unmanageable levels of shit.’

From there, it was just. Lots of focus in other places. From basically Tomoka’s murder on it’s been panic hell for him, and Jamie was never obtrusively part of that. It wasn’t as much his job to tear Jamie apart in the name of any kind of science, and since he didn’t really want to anyway he never had to try to. Something he could be thankful for. 

One thing he did feel, if asked, would be admiration. He could see a lot of people checking out and not caring, but he could actively SEE Jamie putting some of it on and really fearing for his life. When accusations started flying at him, or the pressure of trial started coming for him, he showed it at times even as he tried to keep calm and light. It’s something Yuji admires, the ability to still stay that cogent of your fear and will to live despite how trying on the nerves.

Epilogue

Yuji sticks to his word, driving people around in the mech and getting what information he needs to get the kids home or wherever else they intend to go. Cover stories, information on whereabouts, even minor bouts of counseling if it’s both needed and accepted; whatever is needed of him, he provides immediately. He goes at expediting his classmates return to the world with single minded drive, facing whatever consequences he has accrued without complaint.

Model behavior, in short. Between his times planning return strategies with his classmates and asking mandatory questions he’s silent, keeping to himself unless intervention is required or otherwise engaged. While a surprising amount of air is cleared along the way, Yuji remains grimly sober and distant as he dares throughout the entire ordeal.

When the last classmate is returned to their home, Yuji parks the Jager and spends two solid day waiting to die. He estimates no longer than 48 hours left to live after he’s completed his tasks, and to this end he has completed everything he had left to do and surely still has at least one classmate ready to take eye for eye from him. 

Coming out the other end of the 48 hours still alive is upsetting, to say the least.

Now utterly at a loss, Yuji spends another week stationed on the Jager in a deep depressive slump while debating the inevitable question of what to do with himself next. Ultimately he decides his job, if any remains, is to ensure that the lives the class has returned to is protected, and to this end begins to seek out different ways he can keep whatever peace they have hopefully managed to find out of Collective or DA hands.

This winds up leading him, deliciously enough, to the yakuza. Begging for protection and/or assistance for any of the families who have chosen to remain in Japan, Yuji offers anything he could possibly give to pay for the protection without putting the cost on the families. 

Thankfully, the Yakuza branch he was appealing to wound up being Yuka’s. Finding it in her to pity this utterly pathetic man, she winds up housing him and taking basic work from him as payment for both the protections and the board. Thus, as fate would have it, Yuji’s life becomes tied to working directly for the very Yakuza that drove him through fear to begin his life as Piney in the first place.

Things aren’t perfect. Yuji wakes up many a night screaming or convinced he’s back in the murder game, or in the bunkers, begging forgiveness to the air. To call him socially anxious would be the understatement of the century, and bone-deep depression is a fact of life at this point. His PTSD has if anything worsened, and he will spend hours trying to pull apart what is true and what is Morishige’s brainwashing. The guilt complex runs deep as a canyon, and he doesn’t seem like he’ll even consider something as far fetched as romantic inclinations until he’s once again 27, if ever at all. 

But he never expected things to be as good as they are too. A surprising number of his classmates have not only kept contact but, if not forgiven him, are at least actively friendly with him. Yuka Kagome, the woman he feared more than any, has become one of his strongest surprise allies; offering him not only job and house but family and support, being a better therapist in only a few words than Morishige was her entire career and treating Yuji as a younger brother of her blood and bond, getting her irezumi redone as Yuji gets his own. 

Yuji’s friendfiction remains a method of coping, and due to the friendly cat cafe antics of Kazuko, support squad connection with Tadashi and the Shoji girls, the robust second chance friendship of Ailani, gentle antics of Ayato and the delicately warm reception from Genta and Ryouji, some of those friendfictions are even becoming friend realities. If group chat is to be believed, a group therapy trip around the world might even be in order some day.

Yuji wakes up in a bed, with friends on the other end of the phone and a warm meal waiting for him downstairs, Chou and Sarara remaining at large with no word of them being good omen as they no doubt travel the roads of America Yuji and Chou once planned to travel together,  and he wonders when someone will flick the switch and inevitably destroy it all. But as time goes by, bit by bit, he begins to give himself the chance to trust it will all be there the next day.

He’s not sure if he’s earned the right to be at ease--if he ever will--but slowly he’s beginning to learn how to live with and for himself without looking back as much. Because if there would be anything Monobear and Morishige would have wanted more than anything, it would have been for him to destroy himself.

 “Friendly” was about as much as he really got out of her while they were both alive in the school. Piney was friendly, Ailani was friendly–Piney was also accessible, as far as signing and writing things down, just as a general mascot thing, which eased interactions. Amicable.

Probably the most memorable thing was that her dead face was the one he was mainly stuck staring at for the hour before the Collective found him. It…took a little for him to calm down from that. Longer still to be able to look at a picture of her face without losing it.

Wig off was easier. A lot easier. Seeing her alive again, smiling at their note passes, sledding down the hill on the log (in that big lipped alligator moment of a time), that was good for his psyche but it was. MUCH easier to talk to her after they found themselves breaking ice. As Yuji and Youji. They shared a lot more similarities in thought than Yuji thought– he held immediate kinship with someone who too, saw the practicality and the bitter sensibility of being a coward who trusted no one. And things like seeing her push the truth for her life once she realized her accident had wound up hurting the rest of the class? That hit home REAL hard.

But by that point too, he’d already realized the extent of what he’d done. As soon as he realized what his part in all this had become, he realized he’d betrayed everyone before he even got the chance to promise them otherwise. So when Ailani gave her ultimatum during the norm days before trial…he knew what he was accepting when he agreed. He knows in near full the kind of trust he’s betraying, and he knows how it feels. 

He expects nothing short of a knife in the throat for what he’s done, if not outright dismissal. He knows if he had Morishige at arm’s reach with a gun what HE would do.

From the very start of the game, from well before that, Yuji had never understood Ryan. He was fond in a kind of panicking way–a classmate who’d play pranks on him, and who’s motivations were never clear but had a large enough reputation preceding them that they were likely too weighted down to try anything. It played hell on his paranoia, but in a way acted as a kind of exposure therapy no matter how loudly he had Piney shriek and flail. Their absence after the disaster was felt surprisingly strongly, for someone Yuji didn’t realize he’d been as close to as he had been.

 The reintroduction of that kind of play in his life was like breathing again. The kabedons, prank battles…he was frankly a little surprised that he got so little of it as Piney and so much of it as Yuji, but in a Mastermind-analyze kind of way he wasn’t sure why he was shocked. Ryan and their reactions to the new had always pointed to this kind of thing, after all. And Yuji was fresh meat, as far as Ryan knew.

At the point while he was still thinking this Mastermind business was a good and altruistic idea, he found the chance to finally see what Ryan was made of kind of fascinating. Less so from a ‘scientist’ point of view–he’d never really been one–but as someone who’d always been so nervous about the unspoken angles of Ryan Roe, finding out why they did what they did would if nothing else give him peace of mind whenever they shot off to do something unexpected.

And then…everything fell down around his ears. He realized that no therapy or support system that had been promised was waiting for them, and that he’d dragged his dearest friends into an endless mind-breaking murder game. 

Ryan was the first person he initially suspected to kill him after this was all over. He fully expects SOMEONE to do it, but figuring out who and if he’d have a line would be the question. As time went on he honed in on other people for more viable candidates for people who’d slit his throat post game, but by that point he was already realizing something far worse; that, through seeing them interact with people they better got along with, Yuji was beginning to see the kind of toll this was going to immediately take on them.  

Being part responsible for shutting Ryan down after they’d finally started finding roots to plant is going to be something that haunts Yuji for the rest of his life. For all the good they’d done, regardless of motivation or pragmatism, Yuji has everything to owe them. Ryan kept him light if not laughing during some of the deepest slumps Yuji’d had, and indirectly kept him fighting for a way out. 

The Sosuke Incident:

“….Jesus Kagami.”

Yuji really can’t. Stomach violence. He’s a soldier, he’s the head of a murder game, he’s personally made sure to watch and ingrain every sim and real death he’s responsible for into his mind, and he still can’t stomach the violence. 

So Sosuke’s murder was…well, it was bad. Extended torture situation as opposed to a flat out murder, though unintentionally so. 

Kazuko’s own obvious lack of remorse is actually less disturbing than the murder itself; he doesn’t really know her life or what she’s gone through (who was he to talk about judging when he had his thing with Yakuza?) and aside from that, by this point he’d fully come to grips with how out of control the situation was from his hands and was really witnessing just how far the extended game had driven everyone. Not to mention, on a more selfish level, he didn’t know very many of the Tora class by anything but association to his own class back in the day, so it became between a man he knew nothing about but had basic human dignity, and a girl he already knew better than he let on.

So while he can’t approve or condone it even slightly, he can’t say it’s done more than confirm what he already expected of Kazuko from observing her as a Mastermind–that she deals in absolute justices, and feels no scruples on the in-betweens. And that ultimately, it’s not something he has even half a right to say anything about.

Kasuko in General:

“…I’m… sorry I wasn’t worthy of your trust. I meant…what I said though.”

While he’d known her before, and the details of how close they were in any respect can be explored in IM’s, Yuji was still Piney to everyone even at the time of the explosion. So he’d never known her as himself before, though he’d known her and she shared the whole Parelthon class’s rose-tinted nostalgia glasses at the start.

While of course that opinion was shocked out of him as it was with all the class, it wasn’t as far a fall as some others had been. Pretty much as he remembered her–just with some fatal flaws. He could respect that. If nothing else, it proved she had conviction. 

Her reaching out to both Piney and Yuji were welcome spots of warmth, and their talks tended to be light and pleasant with her reacting surprisingly well to an obnoxious talking tree in the middle of a high tension murder game. While he’d expected that friendliness to die after Piney went packing and Yuji was left there, he was surprised to find her lingering kindness.

….Course this was about the point he’d fully engaged in the counterattack against Morishige, and thus the first time he’d completely confessed that he’d put these kids on the track to hell, so. As the first case with that realization, the weight of responsibility was heavy with her–and his pride and remorse at seeing her accept her death with grace, reasons regardless, spurred him to action in that trial. 

In a way, he’s kind of glad she was out before his reveal. With all the support she gave in the Projection Room to him, seeing him at some of his most beaten down and languid, he didn’t want to see her face when she saw the reveal. She’d been one of the people putting the most effort into him, and seeing all that effort go to waste on a guy like him was…not something he wanted to see her realize she’d done.

All in all, he can see a kind of complete picture of her–a girl fatally flawed and especially kind and having no business thinking of herself as trash. HE’S king of trash mountain, thank you very much!