lovedanime | Week 4 Saturday Afternoon (SPOILERS)

... Hey.

[He's smiling... But he looks rather worn out right now. The trial did a number on him, like so many others.]

Guess your prediction on Tuesday came true, huh?

[A musician who can't hear... Sure matched 2D's predicament, huh?

... Is that a notebook under Rantaro's arm?]

Yeah...

[He smiles an equally broken smile.]

I wish it hadn't, but... Well, as soon as we discovered that Miss Fey was no longer with us, it's not like it would be better for the culprit to have had a different reason anyway...

[...he makes space on the table for Rantaro's notebook. Hypothetically.]

Yeah...

[He sets the notebook there, absently opening it up and flipping through random pages of pre-written quotes and recorded responses.]

... Ugh.

[He's faltering. As much as he wishes he could keep his walls of Jerico up, they're starting to crack under the strain.]

Are you alright, Amami-kun? I thought you'd recovered from losing your voice, but...

[Nah, he's probably just stressed. Mitarai is saying the wrong thing, again and again and again]

Nah, it's not that.

[He glances at the notebook like he's contemplating it before looking back up.]

... Mitarai-kun, you mentioned something about talent at the trial earlier. Mind telling me what that's about?

Oh, sure...

[He hesitates, wondering just how much to tell.]

To tell the truth, I jumped to conclusions about how desperate a deaf musician could become because... Anime is my only talent. I really had nothing to offer the world before I was able to be recognized for that talent. It's the main format of my field work for the future foundation as well. Over the course of my career I've come into contact with many other talented people who my mentors also scouted... And unfortunately some of those people were robbed of the opportunity to make the most of their talents and fell into despair. [He's gotten progressively somber.] I even know of an idol who became desperate enough to use a kitchen knife when separated from her performing band mates...

[That... Sounds frighteningly familiar to him. He can't be talking about the SHSL Initiative, right?

... Then he brings up the idol.]

An idol was driven to murder? Out of despair or something?

[This guy really likes talking about despair... It's a little worrying.]

You care to tell me the story behind that one?

[Listen, Mitarai "likes" talking about despair the way everyone in this terrible game "likes" talking about murder. He just sees it as a fact of the landscape.

He freezes into a nervous smile at the more direct solicitation of the scenario.]

...Amami-kun, surely you understand there's a reason I was so vague about what happened there. It was part of a... a complicated tragedy.

I, I don't mean I don't trust you, or won't tell you. But please understand it's... it's a sensitive matter.

...

[He really shouldn't press it. He really shouldn't... But...]

Is it worse than trapping 16 talented kids in a so-called high school with a munch of murder happy bears worse than that tragedy? Because I remembered being stuck in a situation like this before recently, and what you implied...

[Without thinking, leaping to his feet:]

You've got that wrong! You weren't one of them—!

[He claps his hands over his mouth and looks to see if anyone else heard his shouting. Also he's realizing it will probably offend Amami to be told this didn't happen to him, which isn't what Mitarai means, so he shakes his head with pleading eyes to indicate he's trying to take it back in some way.]

...

[Maybe he should just learn to shut up.

There's a moment of silence between them. Rantaro picks the notebook back up... And just holds onto it.]

... Okay. Stop me if you've heard this before. A student wakes up in a locker in the middle of an abandoned classroom. They start exploring their surroundings, and it turns out there are 15 other people trapped in the building with them. All of them are teenagers with talents so good they got recognized as Super High School Level whatever... Then everyone is herded to the gym, where this insane teddy bear calling himself Monokuma and his Monokubs basically tell us we have to start killing eachother if we want to get out of the school...

The locker... doesn't fit. The Kubs... don't belong. But...

[Okay fuck it Mitarai just grabs his own tablet and draws a Monokuma. As soon as Amami acknowledges seeing it, Mitarai makes eye contact and deletes it again.]

You understand how many people could get the wrong idea about us if we disclosed this information freely, right...?

[That's a nod of confirmation here. Feel free to delete.]

Yeah... You have a point. But at least I'm not totally crazy.

[After a moment of thought.]

Then again, we could learn from our past mistakes in those games, right?

[He clenches his left fist and looks down at his wrist before looking up and calming down again.]

Yeah... Though, oh, just to be clear, I wasn't in the game I describe. It was just... broadcast... and related to my work at the future foundation.

[Nothing on the wrist but the fitbit, pal.]

God... It was broadcast? I hope nobody enjoyed having to see that...

Well... No. But it spread despair. Obviously the people in that game had loved ones out there watching, or were already famous, and so on...

Oh...

[... He sighs.] Lemme guess, you think that whoever's really running this game is in it to cause despair or something?

Oh, no, of course not. It's obviously far worse than that.

[He spreads his hands, vaguely indicating a wide area.] This world is allegedly besieged by an epidemic of D-756, that induces homicides, suicides, or both, on anyone who sets foot into a certain area, with no cure. I really think they're mostly just trying to find a cure, and in their despair they stumbled upon this... terribly cruel method.

Ah... That...

[Sigh. He crosses his arms and focuses on the ground.]

Yeah, that's assuming the D-756 thing isn't just a cover up for some bigger conspiracy. There's gotta be a reason why they can just mess around with our brains, right?

Well, curing psychological conditions is very difficult, and it's much easier to induce bad conditions than reverse the damage and induce a good condition. For example, there are many people who lost their ability to read after suffering a blow to the head, but far fewer people who didn't know how to read - or, say, didn't know how to read a specific language - and suddenly learned after getting something injected into their head. Both technologies could theoretically exist, but it's not at all surprising they'd have the former and a much more limited form of the latter.

[he's not even anxious that Amami will disagree with him, though - it's a topic he's so confident about that he's comfortable with an intellectual debate]

["Suffering a blow to the head."

Rantaro can't blame Mitarai for not realizing it, but his example hit way too close to home. He instinctively rubs the back of his head, feeling for any scar tissue under his hair. If... If he really did die from getting bashed upside the head, he should have had something knocked out of his skull upon revival. Hell, he still didn't know if they could truly revive people like that...]

[Then he thinks back to that motive. That one where he couldn't say a word.

Maybe he could go without spoken words for a little longer...

He looks back up at Mitarai. There's something about his seemingly calm expression that feels a bit stiff, maybe a bit intimidated...]

Mitarai, have you heard that one quote about insanity?

...doing the same thing more than once and expecting a different result?

[He's fascinated... He feels really connected to Amami in this moment of discovering they have so much in common, even though there's still so little Mitarai actually knows about him. It's hard to explain.]

Yep. Now apply that to the metaphorical head-bashing and think about it for five seconds.

[On the other hand, Rantaro isn't really sure about this guy.]

Well... as terrible as it sounds, the administration is clearly targeting different psychological areas with each motive.

... Go on?

I think the human brain is like... a table.

[he's making loose diagrams on his tablet to help him organize these thoughts. no eye contact]

Any given table might have its own strong legs and weak legs. Each motive is designed to knock out a different leg of a table. Well, when I put it that way, it sounds like a percussion instrument.

[Wow... the talk of music is actually making him really sad. He's learned so much from the death of 2-D. It's a very bittersweet victory and the contradiction between epiphany and grief is evident on his face.]

You know what it's like? A piano!

Edited 2018-09-12 03:09 (UTC)

[Rantaro just stares in bewilderment.]

... What?

The core mechanism of a piano is a set of hammers corresponding to a set of strings. Any given piano might have one or two weak strings. Any given song you'd play on a piano would use some notes more than others. If you played that song on several different pianos, only one piano would have a weak string in the same area with the most used note of that song, and the string would break from the strain of so much hammering. But you wouldn't have learned how to prevent strain on every single area of a piano. You just would have observed the physics acting on that one string. To get a more complete picture, you would have to play many different songs that used a wide range of notes. To an extent, the range of notes that actually gets used in music is much smaller than the range of all possible sounds. Just like the range of wavelengths that are visible to the human eye is a much smaller range than the total range of all possible wavelengths.

...I'm sorry if I'm talking too much. You're just the first person I've really trusted with my knowledge about the effects of stimuli on the human brain... I'm sure it's relevant to the tragedies occurring here...!

... Ooookay. Now I get the metaphor. For a second I was wondering how you made the leap from brains to pianos.

[Kinda fishy, but he ain't gonna rat him out just yet.]

Where'd you manage to learn all that stuff?

Edited 2018-09-12 03:32 (UTC)

It's... the beating heart of my anime. I study the effect of sound, color, and motion on the human brain. We truly are suspectible creatures, I think—

[but now that he thinks about it, it's really in his best interest to gloss over this]

So I really... I have trouble wanting the "culprits" in this terrible program to die, as much as I don't want any murder to happen and will do what I can to prevent it. I feel very confident it's really just a result of the stimulus from the Administration.

... Yeah, must be.

[Is there a way to lose friendship points? Because Rantaro will remember that.]

So, I told you a little more about my talent, Amami-kun... May I ask about yours?

Oh! Right.

[Yeah, this might be a little awkward because...]

I'm called the Super High School Level Adventurer because I tend to travel all over the world to help my dad's business and all, but in that Monokuma game I told you about, I think I forgot my talent somehow.

[He got something else, but he doesn't trust Mitarai with the info.]

[Nodding, not really taking it badly]

The same thing happened to Kirigiri Kyoko-san... at first she was known as the Super High School Level Detective, [past tense... melancholic] but they used memory wiping technology - as they had on every participant to an extent - and she went by Super High School Level Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark for a while instead.

Huh... So Shuichi Saihara-kun isn't the only Super High School Level Detective... [If it makes Mitarai feel any better, Kirigiri-san might have a successor. Sort of.]

But if they used memory wiping on that class... And maybe my class too... Then what stops the folks here from using something similar on us?

...nothing at all. If anything, it's practically the same as "removing our functions".

The only evidence against it is the assertion at meetings that they didn't intend us to lose our memories and hired a doctor to look into the cause of the problem. Hiring an entire additional person just to mislead us seems like an... unusual allocation of resources...

Hm... That's assuming if the rest of the staff are totally in on what's going on, you get what I'm saying?

You have a good point... In particular, incomplete knowledge does make sense for the administrators who act like our "moral support".

Week 4 Saturday Afternoon (SPOILERS)

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blanket cw for lobotomy / brain surgery / brain trauma / drug use / altered mental states

1/2 + DRV3 spoilers

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assume that Rantaro used Honorifics like someone who isn't in love with Mitarai.

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