Yumie Yamauchi

She can’t help being jazzed that aliens are for real guys, sorry.

An announcement?  Maybe they’d be getting an explanation for why they’d stopped here!  Yumie followed the others eagerly, hoping that maybe they’d see Sensei, and some kind benefactor who knew trains, and maybe she’d be able to figure out who was missing!  Strange how their phones were malfunctioning.  She could understand the lack of service, but usually it just meant that apps couldn’t be used.  She’d never seen this sort of distortion…but maybe it was just a game she had on her phone acting up.  Yumie hadn’t really deleted apps from her phone in a long time.

Any lighthearted thoughts she had before going into the room, about phones or trains or anything of the sort -- faded when she looked around the strange room.  What was a room like this doing here in a train station?  What purpose would it serve?  Why would a room like this need to be so...different, especially since it seemed to be a conference room, what with all the seats -- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yumie gasped involuntarily when she laid eyes upon the twenty-first seat.  So that was who was missing -- Kara Killdare, or Kayu Tsugimori -- but her skin was pale, her eyes were red, her hands and limbs were surrounded by machinery she had a large set of stitches on her chest and her hair was gone and oh -- oh god -- was, was the top of her head missing?  Was that, really, no it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be that that was the top of her brain, that they had cut off the top of her head to expose her brain, that would’ve killed her, that surely wouldn’t leave her alive to talk -- alive enough to scream...  All the purple-haired girl could do was watch in silent horror, longing to turn away, and yet utterly transfixed.

As Kara spoke about the poorly-named Benefactors, she saw the shift out of the corner of her eye.  A part of her wanted to keep staring at Kayu, keep being horrified by the gore she’d never seen so up close, but another part of her tugged her gaze away to look at...what were those things?  Giant, spindly horrorterrors, out to make them despair.  Yumie might’ve screamed, if she hadn’t just witnessed the petrifying non-corpse of one of her classmates.  If they wanted despair, they’d brought Yumie pretty close, because all she could manage were soft whimpers.

The glass polarized, sparing her of the scary sight, but Yumie still stared there ahead of her, not wanting to glance back at Kayu.  Fear seemed to have washed over her like a wave and soaked her completely, leaving her silent and shivering.  If those...things...behind the glass had taken them here, and done this to Kara...what was stopping them from doing the same to all of them?  What were they capable of?  Her eyes were wide, and her breaths were quick and shallow.  She couldn’t recall feeling like this in her life, this shaky, this repulsed, this...helpless.

It isn’t long, no not long at all until something happens. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. Your watches don’t work. Your phones spit static and read 00:00:00 Not the droning static and mechanical screaming that seems to gently pour forth from the speakers like a sussurus from hell. 

But hell isn’t where you are. You’re in the Station.

The lower concourse, there’s something calling you all there. Through the abandoned station, as if all the world’s gone to the rapture. To a certain hallway on that lower concourse, a long hallway that… that doesn’t FIT. Not with the architecture, not with the world, smooth and strange…. organic almost.

Come now children, down the hallway. The door is unlocked for you.

A circular room with twenty seats. Sorry… twenty empty seats.

The Twenty First Is Taken

What happened to her… what happened… oh god….

The static starts again

[celestial noise detected]

[speaker online]

[transmit our will]

“I I… I’m Kara-…. Kayu Tsugimori and… and… I speak for ou our benefac benefactors…”

Her voice wavers, like a weak transmission, noise caught in the wind.

“They’ve brought us her here… for an experiment. In… in stress. In um… despair. They… oh god please… please don’t do this… please!”

Her begging is interrupted by sparking, electricity into her exposed brain. She screams. A pure and perfect scream. The pain of someone having their nervous system directly stimulated by Direct Current. Beautiful. No. Wait. The other thing.

“I’M SORRY I’M SORRY MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP”

It does, thankfully. Blessedly. She… tries. She’s a host. She has to put on her hostess face through stained makeup and dripping cerbral fluids.

“Our… Our benefactors want to study Despair. They… they want to see unkindness and sufferings… um… that’s.. that’s the best way I can put it… the… the thoughts they send in my head…. its like… something’s crawling in there… oh god…”

She would vomit, you think, if she still had a stomach. You somehow doubt that the autopsy stitches lend themselves to having much of anything inside dear Kayu. 

  Behind her seat, above it, set high in the wall, is glass. Behind that glass. Something moves.

You can see it, vaguely, for perhaps a moment,

A group of tall things, limbs out of proportion with slender bodies. Pallid gray skin that clings to… bones that wouldn’t be out of place on a victim of starvation. A neck so thin and fragile, you are surprised it does not snap under the distended and swollen head. The faces are… awful. Not right. There are no ears, no mouth, no nose. Only eyes the shape of almonds, pitch black. There is no emotion you can recognize in those eyes. Only an apathetic judgement.

And then the glass is polarized. You can still feel the eyes upon you.

“They… they want you to kill each other. They want… they want to make a game out of it… the… the winner is whoever gets away with three murders… that person… gets to leave. We’ll have… have a trial after every murder… to to find the kil killer. God… just… please… let me wake up…”

She breaks down. Sobbing. Until the electricity shocks her again.

And she falls silent as a corpse.

[so begins the game]

[chapter 1]

[start]

Time to go home!  Time to share what an awesome trip she’d had!  She’d gotten to know new people, learned new information, and – perhaps most importantly – outlined a new article to write.  It would be a great read, almost as if you had been there yourself!  Once she wrote it down, of course.  That’s what she tasked herself with on the train ride home, taking her jotted notes and weaving them into words and sentences that others could read.  No need to sit next to anyone, they’d just distract her from her purpose.

She was absorbed in her work, but even she seemed to realize that this trip home seemed longer than the trip to the planetarium.  She could notice how the train seemed to have cleared very completely, leaving just them, from just a few quick glances up.  Still, she wrote it off as people not being HPA-bound at this time of day… No need to panic… Just go back to writing your article, everything will be fine…

Yumie couldn’t ignore it forever, and she finally turned her attention to it when the train drew to a stop.  What station was this?  Was the train recharging, or refueling, or going in for maintenance or something?  Wouldn’t it have been better if they’d all gotten off the train at their stop, and then it returned to OH GOD THAT NOISE!!  Instinctively, Yumie’s hands flew to her ears, and her eyes squeezed shut.  When the static had been going on long enough for her to open her eyes again, she followed suit with the others and got out of the train – what else was there to do?

Her first instinct was to ask Sensei what was going on.  But, as she looked around, she saw students, she saw people she’d spoken with…but she didn’t see her teacher.  She dashed up to the Upper Concourse, in the hopes he’d gone there, but nope.  Wherever he’d gone, it was a mystery to Yumie.  "Hello?“ she called out, her voice much less chipper than it had been earlier in the day.  "Morita-sensei, where are you?  Has anyone seen Morita-sensei?”  Her head turned to and fro, and she ran back from Upper to Lower, hoping to find a door that Sensei could have ducked into.  As she investigated, though, something else struck her as off…it took her a minute or two to figure out just what was off.  "Hey, is everyone here?  Is anyone missing at all?“

With no apparent answer, Yumie slowly opened her notebook again and began to write down her surroundings.  It wasn’t like it would help her find Morita-sensei or anyone else.  But maybe if she got her thoughts in order enough, she could find clues?  Her mind also flew to the thought that this would make an interesting addition to the article,

[children! time to leave!]

Isn’t that what sensei says? It is! Its time to go from Alchemilla Observatory and Planetarium. Your field trip is over. Did you have fun? Can you see the setting sun as you exit onto the hill? Isn’t it beautiful? Its really a lovely evening.

Sensei is all smiles, just like always as you board the train to go back to HPA, back to your dorms and apartments and rest. Sensei promises on the train that there’s not gonna be a quiz or anything.

[mind the gap! and please, remember your bags!]

How many miles of the train is underground? How many miles are abandoned? How much of the underground is uncharted, unknown, untouched by the hands of men?

[do you know where you’re going?]

[the train chimes don’t sound right]

[they sound like static]

[celestial noise detected]

Where did Sensei go? What the hell is the 

What station are you in? This place looks… abandoned.  Dusty and empty with bits of trash fluttering in the wind from the tunnels where the trains come, like bellowing dragons in the far distance.

The train doors open

[please exit the train, mind the gap]

[please exit the train, mind the gap]

[pleeeeeaassssee exxxxiiiiit theee trAAAAINNNN aND MIIIIIIIIND THE GAP]

You exit the train, there’s nothing else to do, the speakers are just… screaming like a dying machine. You are the only ones here. As if only your car had people on it. Your phone is getting the same kind of screaming instead of a dial tone…

 Where

Where are you?

[welcome to nowhere station]

This had been a blessed relief, a chance to get off of the Hope’s Peak campus and see something different from the interior of a dusty old library or the coarse grain of a dodgeball to the face. Joseph had never been a solitary creature and so he had to admit this trip to Japan, while necessary, was… Profoundly lonely in practice. He loathed the lack of people to talk to, he loathed not being around his kin and countrymen, loathed how the food tasted, loathed how his head consistently bonked against the door frame of his dorm room. Here, at least, they had built their entryways with the tall folk in mind.

The mayor had been exploring Alchemilla alone for a little while, splitting off from those eccentric oafs Michio and Atenemhet to simply… Breathe. Absorb the atmosphere, the knowledge, the learning. He was always eager to learn something new, to glean some little tidbit of information that might prove useful to him, but… He found this exhibit on Life in the Stars to be so disappointing. Why were people so enamored with leaving Earth, spending ungodly amounts of money, when there was so much disparity and poverty still left on Earth? What was more useful, a rocketship or a relief team? 

His bitter musings on the fickle foibles of the West were interrupted by someone bumping into him, knocking him a couple steps back but not really sending him off balance - he was of a rather large stature, after all. The girl began apologizing in rapid-fire Japanese, barely giving him time to turn on the translation software in his tablet and understand what in the world she was saying. He recognized this girl, the reserve course student along for the trip, someone who hadn’t quite made the cut but wasn’t so bad they weren’t worth kicking out onto the street. Joseph listened carefully and parsed the broken English that the tablet squawked, carefully replying in English for the tablet to reply in Japanese. “ Uh … I am very sorry, but I did not understand … That means.“ The tablet pauses hesitantly, reflecting his own discomfort  "Do you speak English or French? Because I can hardly understand what he says, my Japanese is not very good.”

Yumie's eyebrow rose in curiosity as Joseph worked with his tablet. What did he have that for? Her blunder briefly forgotten, she wondered just what he was doing with that thing. Was he...making a report of his own? Taking a log of their conversation to refer to it later? Whoa! Her eyes briefly lit up...until she heard the (attempted) English translation of what she had just said. Her expression went back to confusion. So, he couldn't understand Japanese? Then, he probably hadn't caught much of her apology...oops. That suddenly made things a lot more awkward. But it was also a chance to start fresh! Leave a better impression!

"[Actually, I do speak English! Sorry if it sounds a little strange, but at least I can speak and understand.]" She smiled at him. "[Anyway, what I was saying was that I was sorry for not seeing you there, I was kind of...hmm...]" She looked up at the exhibit, furrowing her brows together as she mentally searched for the right word. "[...taken, with the exhibit? Um, anyway, yeah, sorry for that. I also realized that you were in my class, so I wanted to ask if you were Mbafia Jo -- er, Joseph Mbafia? Does it go first name or last name first, where you're from? Came...ruhn?

After taking a look around the first floor and grabbing lunch with Kisuke, Yumie decided that the best place to go next would be on the same floor as the cafe, the basement.  After all, there were still things that she hadn’t seen down there, and she wanted to have completely explored both floors before going up to the second floor.  That would make it feel more like she was actually ascending to the stars, wouldn’t it? exploring on the ground then rising up above?  However she wanted to see it, there were only a few things in the basement.  All she had to do was take a left turn out of the cafe to reach the Night Sky Theater, and she would have seen all there was on this floor.

It was almost lunch time, and Kisuke was in the cafe, mere minutes before noon, the most appropriate time to have lunch, as his father said. He stood in line, but not without noticing the longer line of patrons forming behind him. He scanned the cafe, seeing that Yumie had entered the cafe as well! She was a classmate of his, rambunctious and passionate about what she does, even though she has no semblance of talent… At least by Hope’s Peak Academy’s standards. He waves a stiff arm Yumie’s direction, calling out to her, his voice even and monotonous.

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“Yamauchi-sama, you are allowed to have your lunch meal with me, if you’d wish. I will buy you food… I clearly have advantage of time and necessity, and a good person would not allow their acquaintance to experience the burden of capitalism.”

Kisuke looks at the line, then at the counter before him, then back at her, his expression still very tame.

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“I would appreciate a very swift answer, please…”

The first floor was amazing! All those exhibits, and she even got to look through a telescope into the stars! She could only imagine how stellar (heheh!) the second floor would be! But, she wanted her ascent to the top floor to be meaningful -- or at least, cool. And the best way to make it cool would be to climb up from the earth too the highest point...so her next destination was the basement! Besides, when she'd looked at the map once earlier, it said that there was a cafe down there, and she was getting kinda hungry.

So, down she went, making the turn into the cafe and getting in line.  She was too focused on looking at what food was available to actually notice Kisuke enter behind her, but she certainly saw him when he waved an arm in her direction!  Dramatic movements at the corner of her eye had a tendency to catch the attention of a reporter, after all.  She merely blinked as she listened to him speak, not wanting to miss anything...but when he mentioned that he wanted a quick answer, her face quickly turned to glance at the counter again, then snapped back to Kisuke.

What a time this was going to be!  What a day this had already proven to be!  First a train ride underground, then a bus ride, and now here they were!  The Alchemilla Planetarium…how exciting, to learn about the stars!  And how exciting would this be to read about in a report later!  Yumie made sure to take notes about the exhibits, based on the maps, and then elaborate on them as she experienced them later.  It was just a shame that she wouldn’t be able to take any pictures.  Oh well.  Akira wasn’t here, he hadn’t even applied to attend, so Yumie was on her own.

Currently, she was on her own in the Life in the Stars exhibit.  Before she had even begun to look at the panels, she had taken out her notebook and started taking note of the room around her.  The people in the exhibit, the various features of the exhibit above her…  For a moment, Yumie was overtaken with awe, drinking in the atmosphere.  That was only momentary, however, for soon enough she had turned her eyes back to her notebook, and was scribbling down frantic notes.  So much to see, and she hadn’t even started looking through the exhibit yet!

As she wrote, she would occasionally look back up at the exhibit.  She took steps backward as she did so, without any regard for where she was walking.  Therefore, it was all but inevitable when she bumped into something from behind her.  If she were lucky, it would’ve been just been a wall, a fixture, or a railing, something that couldn’t feel her or get angry.  But alas, Yumie wasn’t lucky, for what she had bumped into was a lot more solid than a fixture or a railing, and was much warmer and felt fleshier than what she would expect a wall to feel like.  Eyes widening in panic, she turned around to face the person she’d just bumped into.  "Ah!  I’m really sorry!  I wasn’t looking where I was going, I was just taking everything in, and…“

[mind the gap!]

There are 121.2 Miles of track on the Tokyo Metro, and 67.7 miles of track in the Toei Subway. Combined they create 285 stations, thirteen lines and approximately 189 miles of total system length. Approximately eight million passengers ride the rails daily.

Among these 8 million are 22 that we shall focus upon. 21 Students and 1 Teacher from the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy. 21 of the best, brightest, most gifted and most privileged young people in the world.

Today is perhaps the last day they will ride the train.

The stations bustle with crowds of salarymen and students and civilians, an ebb and flow like the ocean tide as the press of humanity moves through the bloodlines of a city. 

[Wakoshi, Saitama Prefecture! Please mind the gap!]

The westernmost station on the Tokyo subway, not even underground at this point. How many miles of the nearly 200 miles are underground? Who can say? The class steps off the platform, they board a bus, they ride it to a small hilltop. 

Sensei is smiling at his bright young students. A former SHSL himself, he always has an understand ear for his students. He understands the position many find themselves in.

“Right! Students! Please behave! You represent Hope’s Peak on this field trip!”

His grin only goes wider as he chuckles slightly to himself and the bus doors open, letting in sunlight and a better view of the two story Alchemilla. An impressive structure, recently built, its telescope is apparently capable of seeing farther than any other in the world, at least, so the researchers claim.

“Now that that’s out of the way, lets have loads of fun learning today kids! There’s gonna be so much cool stuff, I got hyped up reading the brochures on the way over!”

[so begins a second tale of terror and woe]

[celestial noise detected......]

“Hey, are you alri–”

Renée was understandably pretty concerned when a strange girl skidded to a stop directly in front of her without warning. Before she could finish inquiring about this stranger’s health, however, she exploded into a flurry of words. She was slower than Kara, however, so at least there was that. She could almost barely follow.

“Um, no, I’m not a cat behaviorist…Yes I came out of the biology lab? And um…yes it has all of those things in it…What’s happening?”

She was writing stuff down. What??

shslgcat:

“Hey, are you alri–”

Renée was understandably pretty concerned when a strange girl skidded to a stop directly in front of her without warning. Before she could finish inquiring about this stranger’s health, however, she exploded into a flurry of words. She was slower than Kara, however, so at least there was that. She could almost barely follow.

“Um, no, I’m not a cat behaviorist…Yes I came out of the biology lab? And um…yes it has all of those things in it…What’s happening?”

She was writing stuff down. What??

Yumie might’ve been embarrassed if Renée had finished her question.  A reporter was supposed to be calm, collected...not what she had just done, by any stretch of the imagination.  Fortunately, Yumie’s own talkativeness curbed the humiliation from the situation, by swiftly distracting them both from what had happened.  Unfortunately, she was in transmit mode, so Renée couldn’t have voiced any questions or objections.  It was a good thing that she had caught everything Yumie had said, because in a few moments, Yumie probably wouldn’t be able to completely recall all that she had blurted out.

“Heheh, of course you’re not the cat behaviorist.  I just talked with the cat behaviorist before I met you! She seemed like a cool person! A little quiet, but quiet people are cool too. I'm Yumie Yamauchi, by the way, I'm the Reserve Course student in the class! What's your name?" The movement of her pen actually paused as she waited for Renée to answer, and Yumie's eyes remained on her.

Uta stared at her phone, acutely aware of a purple shape in the foreground of her vision, even if she didn’t look up or acknowledge this purple person in any way. This person wasn’t talking to them, couldn’t be. Uta didn’t have friends, didn’t talk to people, and that was the way they liked it. Friends were hard, talking to people was difficult. None of it was worth the effort. She enjoyed being left alone, and she was pretty sure the other members of her class enjoyed leaving her alone.

Yet still, here this person was, approaching them so casually. It was almost enough to make Uta angry. She continued to stare at her phone, flicking at the spinner ring on her right index finger with increasing intensity. After a few torturous moments, she snuck a glance to the side, staring at the purple girl sitting beside her.

What a mistake. By some unfortunate accident, she had made eye-contact with purple girl, and that meant that she had to say something. Those were the rules. She bit at her lip, before forcing out the shaking syllables, agonizingly slow.

“U…Uta Yasutake. I’m the Super H…High School Level Cat Behaviorist.”

She grimaced, and her eyes slid back to her cellphone.

“I’m a student under Morita-sensei, o…of course I am. It’s not like I’d meet a R…Reserve Course student anywhere else.”

She grit her teeth, and asked the girl a question in return, without looking up from her phone.

“Why are you talking to me…? Surely you have better t…things to do with your time…”

Though Yumie was briefly distracted by the movement of her spinner ring, she was back to business when the other made eye contact with her.  She listened intently to every syllable, then started to take down what she said.  “Well, it’s nice to really meet you, Yas-take-san!  Cat behaviorist...ing, sounds really awesome!  Is that what you were doing just earlier?” she asked, seeming to completely ignore Uta’s signs of discomfort.

She couldn’t really say anything in response to the remark about Morita-sensei and the Reserve Course, so she just sat and watched Uta look at her phone.  Once she asked her a question, though, Yumie leaned forward so she was sure that Uta would hear her and know that she had answered.  “I’m talking with you because I wanted to meet you!  I want to know lots of people in the school, and what better place to start than meeting one of my classmates?  And, you were right here.  I figured why not talk with you?”

She smiled at Uta, then looked back at her notepad, jotting down her own answers to the question the other had posed.  “Besides,  talking to people is what I do with my time!  I’m the reporter of the Reserve Hope Shimbun, the school newspaper!  Well, the Reserve Course school newspaper.  I’m not sure of its circulation in the Talent Course -- but, that’s beside the point.  Someone else handles that.  I go to the Talent Course to find the news, and I report on it!  It’s always really interesting what goes on here, and it’s interesting to report it back!”  At that, she smiled again and nodded.