Squid territiory

“Heys, BOFA’S! There’s no poisons in the snacks rooms, but I did finds a cool trinkets, sees?” He takes the bracelet out and waves it, as if they could see from here. “Also…alls of thes importants cleanings chemicals were gones, suspicious if you weres to asks me.”

He paused to take a deep breath.

And then the speakers crackled to life. Leroy was heard losing his absolute shit with Ellen less than pleased. Of course, any sort of humor in the situation died instantly as Ellen announced the death of another person. Toubei, huh. They’d never met him-just talked that one time during Capture the Flag. Whatever. They walked over to where Squids was apparently waiting and brandished the container at him, shaking wet bangs from their eyes.

Upon arriving to the snack room, he looked at the tables and chairs before placing his order like so.

“Heys, BOFA’S! There’s no poisons in the snacks rooms, but I did finds a cool trinkets, sees?” He takes the bracelet out and waves it, as if they could see from here. “Also...alls of thes importants cleanings chemicals were gones, suspicious if you weres to asks me.”

He paused to take a deep breath.

Upon arriving to the snack room, he looked at the tables and chairs before placing his order like so.

Loic…

He was suffice to say, alright. Squids had never exactly spoken to him much but he was nice when he first got here, helping him up and all, but kind of abrasive during the last trial (again, who could blame him). Needless to say Squids was still sad at the news, but he figured that someone as tough as him could last a bit longer. 

As for getting up, he didn’t exactly want to- it was…early. It felt too early to be functioning, but it would be bad if he lost out on any opportunities to help, so he forced himself out of bed, covering his nose and coughing once he was out of the room. Whatever Ikura was doing hadn’t exactly gone away, so that was another chore to deal with.

Rubbing his eyes, he made his way down the hallways, almost tripping over his own feet several times, yelping quietly each time he did. Eventually through perseverance (and starting to fully wake up) he got the hang of this “increased movement” and moved at a normal pace. Part of him hoped to run into someone he was somewhat friendly with and luckily he sort of did. 

It was Mayumi, holding Loic. Squids had almost forgotten what the sight of a body was like, and seeing one again just made his stomach turn. He backed away and shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut so he didn’t have to look at it.

Soaked. Drenched. Many things could have happened to him. Squid’s vision blurred slightly, his heart rate increasing. 

They’d gotten themselves soaked only for someone to not want to touch the body they’d so generously fished out of the water. See if they ever tried to help out in investigation ever again. Which, of course, implied that they’d been doing any sort of helping prior but that’s old news.

What wasn’t old news was Loic. Or his corpse anyway. Ignoring Squids having some little fit, they crouched down to examine the blood around his head and mouth. The screen had said poison, so the blood on the mouth made sense but the blood on the head didn’t. And besides, the dude had snakes for hair. Hitting him in the head didn’t seem easy. Without looking up, they addressed whoever was still around-be it Squids or literally anyone else.

Well, here we go again. Someone was bound to do it. The pattern repeats itself, over and over again. It was getting kind of boring, though. Like, were they just destined to kill and kill until there was nobody left? Or maybe there could only be One. Whatever the case was, they were getting tired of it all and wanted it to end. 

Leroy’s announcement certainly didn’t help matters, having woken them at the asscrack of dawn and out of a half-sleep stupor. Motherfucker, what did he want-oh.

Loic was dead. That…really sucked. He’d seemed pretty nice-they’d watched Space Jam with him and had been pretty helpful in trials, too. But there his autopsy report was, up on the big screen for everyone and Jesus to see. This meant the usual charade of playing detective, right? Form teams and all that. Fun. With how their last team had gone, this was bound to end in more dramatics. Whatever.

They strolled on over to the crime scene-and ended up falling right into the water with a loud and ungraceful splash. They emerged thoroughly unamused, especially upon looking near them.

“[For fuck’s sake.]”

That sure was a dead body floating near them. Gross. Well, might as well get him out of the water so they could actually, you know, do the investigating. They swam over to there and tried to pull the corpse over to where the door was. Easier said than done, but the body was, at least, near the door. It was just the task of pushing the body up out of the water that was the less successful task. Christ, they didn’t ask for this shit.

At one point or another, they actually looked up properly and saw a couple people looking at them from the hallway, as if they were about to walk in and had stopped and enjoyed the view. Perfect. They grabbed onto Loic’s arm, focused…

…and appeared in front of them, holding a dead body and completely drenched. They looked completely apathetic to this scene and merely shrugged by way of greeting them.

Loic...

He was suffice to say, alright. Squids had never exactly spoken to him much but he was nice when he first got here, helping him up and all, but kind of abrasive during the last trial (again, who could blame him). Needless to say Squids was still sad at the news, but he figured that someone as tough as him could last a bit longer. 

As for getting up, he didn’t exactly want to- it was...early. It felt too early to be functioning, but it would be bad if he lost out on any opportunities to help, so he forced himself out of bed, covering his nose and coughing once he was out of the room. Whatever Ikura was doing hadn’t exactly gone away, so that was another chore to deal with.

Rubbing his eyes, he made his way down the hallways, almost tripping over his own feet several times, yelping quietly each time he did. Eventually through perseverance (and starting to fully wake up) he got the hang of this “increased movement” and moved at a normal pace. Part of him hoped to run into someone he was somewhat friendly with and luckily he sort of did. 

It was Mayumi, holding Loic. Squids had almost forgotten what the sight of a body was like, and seeing one again just made his stomach turn. He backed away and shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut so he didn’t have to look at it.

Soaked. Drenched. Many things could have happened to him. Squid’s vision blurred slightly, his heart rate increasing. 

Time passed. Painfully, but it passed.

They had found that they’d never get used to the pain, even if they eventually learnt to talk through it. 

The body announcement going off didn’t faze them at first. They were having a wild time enough as it was, so they numbly followed the others to the theater.

Of course, like any good person, the sight of a dead body startled them right to their senses.

“Holy shit.”

Well, kind of. Anyway, just like last time, they had to take a step back and recompose themselves. Another pointless death, and soon, another death, under the name of justice would soon follow. Oh god, oh god why is this happening.

At least their recomposing jam session revealed one thing; the blood had stopped, and the pain was gone. Their poor mask was soaked, but at least that was all. Feeling under their mask, there was nothing that had signified that they’d just gone through how many days of pain. Another magic spell cast by Leroy and Ellen…? Who knows, who cares.

Looking up from the ground, they saw that people were starting to investigate and had gone off into groups of three. Well then, time to get to it. They grabbed the arm of the person right next to them and dragged them over to one of the people standing alone. Who were they dragging? What a good question; they didn’t actually know yet.

They stopped right in front of Matthias and made a peace sign with their free hand.

“Sup, Matti-kun. Guess we’re gonna be the Investigation Trio, yeah? You, me an’…”

They looked over their shoulder to see Otto. Good ol’ Otto. What a good fellow.

“…and Squidkid. Yeah, good team I think. So I don’t know where everyone’s going off to but where do ny’all think we should mosey off to look first?”

Matthias didn’t really know how he felt about it all. The girl had been someone he’d quite liked, after all. Sure, they hadn’t really been friends per se, but he’d definitely been interested in getting to know her more. They were both athletes, after all and she’d been blunt but not unkind. It was a damn shame it’d all ended like this, a damn shame. In his own words, ‘don’t that just beat all’ though given the situation that seemed insincere.

“Mayuri… no, that ain’t right.”

Matthias shakes his head, a bit disappointed in himself for having the crappy memory he does. At the very least if it’s Mayumi, they probably won’t mind. He rubs the back of his neck in thought before heaving a sigh.

“It’s a damn shame this ended up happenin’ again. Was hopin’ we wouldn’t be bumpin’ into anymore of the dead but guess that was just some wishful thinkin’ there…”

When he’s done with his regretful speech, he shakes his head and offers a shrug. It’s no good just hanging around here. It’s as Mayumi said, they have to go find something… well, technically Mayumi didn’t say that but it was more or less implied. Good enough.

Nevertheless he attempted to at least be strong in front of those two. Chickening out wouldn’t help the situation at all.  On top of it all, talking to someone without looking at them was rude, right? Internally, hr groaned and turned around to at least face one of them, and Mayumi ended up being that person, mainly because they were still holding onto him--not that he really minded. 

The test will begin in 3, 2, 1…

☆ これから一所懸命頑張ります ! !

You know how in RPGs, when one boss is replaced with a newer one, that one is usually worse and makes the other one seem like an ant comparatively? 

Well, unfortunately that seemed to have jumped from the screen to real life. They’d just been laying on top of their bed, having a jolly old time, when the speakers crackled to life. As this new rival-what was that lady’s name again? McLog? McLoser? Mc-aw fuck it, they’re calling her Ellen-began to speak, Mayumi could only raise an eyebrow at how different she was from Leroy. Asshole though he was for putting them through a ton of shit, he was probably a hell of a lot nicer than this one.

They were about to turn right over and go to sleep or something when those dreadful words were uttered.

“…met with an untimely demise.”

“…cause of death was…”

Instantly, they shot right up and stared at the direction of Ellen’s voice, their brow furrowed. Did they hear her right? Demise…that meant someone was dead…but that was impossible. This was just an experiment-people weren’t actually supposed to die. That made for really bad peer reviews, right?

Listening further, they were relieved to hear that they wouldn’t be suffering from “not-puberty” as Squids had put it any longer. Even if it was only temporary, feeling like their stomach was gonna explode all the time had been an experience they never wanted to feel again.

But back to the dead girl. Lacey…who was that? They’d met a few people in here, but not everyone so there were still a few blanks. Huh. Well, guess they’d better go jog their memory, right?

And thus, this is how Mayumi found herself staring down a dead body. She could feel her breath slipping away and her eyes widening in shock as reality took hold of her like a slap in the face.

She was dead. Like completely, no lives remaining, no respawns dead. There was no doubt this time. Something had gone horribly astray in this experiment.

Oh god. Ohhhh god. Oh, this is bad. Very very veeeery bad. 

She wanted more than anything to run back to her room, lock the door and never emerge until the cops came. But that wouldn’t do; not only was she unsure about the arrival of said cops, she also had to maintain her “casual but cool” air and running away would ruin it completely.

So instead, she let other curious people take her place and retreated to the back of the kitchen for a spell, taking deep breaths as she went. She made sure that nobody noticed her trying to regain her cool.

After she was sure she could function properly, she went back to the group of people surrounding Lacey’s body. She mumbled out her thoughts to whatever poor soul managed to hear her.

“Huh. I wonder what’s under the box? I kinda wanna take a closer look at that body. For science…and for curiosity’s sake and all that.”

His first order of business was to go with everyone else to the body and after seeing the truth for himself, his face twisted into a mixture of repulsiveness and shock. Sure Squids never got to know her all that well but the pain of loss was still great.  Luckily there weren’t too many details yet  to fully feel Lacey’s experience so he was able to stay calm just long enough to high-tail out of there and to the movie theater to see the information, shake his head simultaneously while clicking his tongue and making the slow drag back to the kitchen.

Second order of business was to now notice the other alive people in the room--get his mind off the body if you would. Squids noticed BOFA, muttering something that he couldn’t really hear, but disregarded it and talked to them anyways.

[1:41:56 PM] Airi: before the body, just flexin leroy [1:43:28 PM] Airi: i want leroy to walk into the trial room [1:43:32 PM] Airi: everyone spits out their drinks [1:43:38 PM] Airi: and then takara’s like “what”