Danganronpa: Locked Doors of Despair

Ch.6 Deadly Life Part 5: Of Relations, Reductions, and Rules

[A/N] Hey, all! Sorry for the slow-going. It's almost time for the last trial! It may not wind up being the absolute best, but I swear to put my whole heart into it. Also, I'm just gonna admit right now that I intended for a certain list to have lots of strikethrough, and that doesn't translate from Docs to WP. I couldn't figure out how to apply strikethrough to Wattpad, so imagine that underlines are lines running through the words.

Chimon, January 9th, 10:38 am

The garden's stumped me a little. We had a few leads pointing in that direction– Nari's in particular, about how the plants are always in season despite the crops being the same and the seasons changing, but also, now that we're assuming WDR stands for White Daisy Room, the garden is an obvious place of interest. We got nothing on EITHER front. Actually, that's sort of a lie. We discovered that there are no white daisies at ALL in there. There weren't any among the rest of the daisies, but when Gou and I literally walked the entirety of the massive garden looking for any trace of one, and nada. What we did wind up finding was... our loved ones letters, carefully arranged with the pottery pieces Bisque made. It was weird, because they had all of our letters, including students who weren't alive when we received them and even Gou's. It wouldn't normally be strange for his to be there. But he claims it was in his room yesterday (as was mine), and yet we were all in his room last night. For someone to sneak in and get it would probably alert at least ONE of us, even though we didn't have guard shifts.

I feel weird reading the letters of other survivors, since they aren't exactly here to give their consent. But we're working to read the rest of them. I scanned them each for hidden messages– we've already seen that happen twice over the course of the killing game– and finding nothing, we even went as far as to grab a book on ciphers from the library. I've pumped each letter through three ciphers already, and it doesn't seem like anything's encrypted in them.

"Chimon! Gou! We have made discoveries!" Azumi exclaims. She's running toward us, and she's got enough stamina that she isn't even breathing hard by the time she reaches us. The same can't be said of my big sis– it still feels weird but gratifying to say that– who is far behind, clutching her heels, and panting.

"Whatcha got?" Gou asks. A little spark of enthusiasm fills his eyes, after all our time drawing blanks. They explain the email transcripts they found, and I scan those for tips, too– one of the emails spells HINT with the first letter of every sentence, but ironically, I don't know what that would mean in this context. Gou and I both claim not to know a Sora Yamamoto. I briefly wonder whether they could be one of my former clients who I forgot, and I tell them this, but they don't seem to think that's important enough.

"One last thing. We found the cut-out pages of the Danganronpa book," Fujiko declares. She looks a little pale, and I don't blame her; she had once intended to cut those out herself, and yet someone else beat her to it and hid them away in a secret passage.

"This perplexes me," Azumi admits. "We are supposing that Wakumi and the Mastermind are the only individuals who knew about that tunnel, yes? Then, why would the Mastermind supply us with the full volume of the book only to hide the book and stash multiple chapters in an inaccessible location?"

Fujiko and I look to each other, silently asking if we should say something. Her voice is tiny. "I... hid the book. I wanted to take out those chapters cause it was making you and Tozen and Chimon cry every day, but when I went to ask Monokuma if that would get me killed, he said someone else already did it. It sounded like he wanted to kill them but couldn't cause it wasn't against the rules. So, I, uh... found the book and hid it somewhere else. I was, like, hoping I could freak out the perpi–prer– the person who tore out the pages– enough to get them to slip up, but it didn't work." She can't look Azumi in the eyes.