him ™

i was kaede in a DRV3 alternate game where the victims and blackened were different. Angie was missing but the body discovery announcement played so we had to find her.

The environment was basically the suburbs with architecture inspired by rome. There were 5 people left including Kokichi. For some reason I knew that he’d be the blackened beforehand- i think i like forced time to rewind because the first time he ended up hiding in a macy’s under a clothing rack before his execution- anyways

We followed some kind of trail that included finding the buried remains of 2-3 other classmates and a dog everyone loved. I was so confused and shock as to why he would do this. He popped in and out of the group, pretending to be surprised of course.

We finally made it to the crime scene: a town house butcher’s shop. The man who was in charge of the kitchen kept saying there was nothing inside, but I kept feeling like he was lying. I noticed Kokichi giving him a look, so I carefully signaled him to let me know what really happened. He gave me and onion and we continued on to find Angie. On the onion was a message carved in: K/SC. For whatever reason, I decided this meant Kokichi is a sociopath, and convinced everyone to go back and storm the shop.

It was very small, stairs leading upstairs and down stairs, a small bathroom, and the kitchen. The man didn’t stop us, and we eventually went to search downstairs.

It was a bedroom like basement, decorated with bookshelves and a bed and stuffed animals despite the visible pipes. After protest from Kokichi, we moved a large rug to reveal the flooring, completely drenched in blood.

After gathering clues including a man named Uno and figuring everyone’s alibis, we talk to the man and unveil Kokichi’s connection to the place.

Kokichi was an orphan who would come by often to do work for the kitchen/butcher shop owned by Uno, the landlord with some kind of royal status. The man would order him to chop up already butchered meat in his temporary room downstairs, which slowly became butchering the animals themselves. Kokichi appearently had some blackmail between him and the man that kept him from refusing his orders. Kokichi would chop up whatever they needed, even when it came to the man’s wife.

The wife was present during those days, forcing Kokichi to call her step-mother and would rarely show up to “manage” the two of them so she could still be paid, despite not doing her job. Despite having no motherly qualities, Kokichi saw her as a mother figure to him; a toxic, twisted mother. She ended up dying of a heart attack in the kitchen, and the man ordered Kokichi to chop and burn her. This was the first thing he had to chop that was traumatizing to him. Appearently, he was a sociopath and therefore wasn’t traumatized by butchering mystery meats or animals. (this is not at all an accurate representation of what sociopathy is btw!) Also, he later murdered Uno out of rage for his treatment of himself and the man.

After learning this, I realized Kokichi had made many out of character attempts to open up to the group, and was either stopped by the group or himself. I wondered if he had killed the people he did by that point, and if we could have maybe stopped him if we had paid attention to him. Kokichi had gone silent by this point, after going hysterical from failing to defend his faulty alibi.

For the rest of the dream, I kept trying to protect him the best I could. The classmates kept berating him with questions and sly insults. But I just hugged him- despite him trying to wriggle out of it before giving up and hugging back, grabbing the back of my shirt like his life depended on it- and was focused on coaxing his reasoning and feelings about this out of him. I told him I love him, in like an all encompassing kind of way, not romantic in that moment, and I never hated him and asked why he would do something so horrible. He never gave me an answer.

Soon punishment time came. I had been searching his room, and was called upstairs immediately by a classmate. When I got there, Kokichi had the cuff of the machine that drags culprits away around his neck. I tried to run to him to try to get him out of it, but wasn’t fast enough. He looked at me with a smile, no tears in his eyes as he said “Thank you! I love you!” and was swiftly pulled into the blue sky above.