Chapter Text
For once in your life, you knew what you were getting yourself into. Outside was... Anarchy. Or rather was so corrupted in the city that breaking into an old DR building seemed safer. The inside was...damaged, the white walls had cracks, tiles had scratches and the amount of broken glass was certainly not helping with the feeling of danger.
You looked at the stolen harddrive in your hand, knowing full well if She found you with it...You shook off the thought and plugged it in your laptop. The screen flickered as the files showed on screen. There wasn't a whole lot of them, but you're going to take what you can get. In the first file labelled "Mashup lol", you saw a video file labelled "Video".
"How original." you thought as you clicked on it, ignoring the other two note files also present in this particular file.
As you did, the video opened with a black screen before quickly cutting into a clip from the documentary, the one that started it all.
...
The Tragedy. An event in human kind so vile, cruel and unbelievable, that it makes the other ones look tame in comparison. You would expect this kind of event to have been lead by some cruel dictator, an adult man or woman with sociopathic ideas of ending humanity...not a high schooler.
The high schooler in question was Junko Edoshima, a psychopath with an obsession with despair, and spreading it through the world. Though she wasn't only a simple scholar mind you, she was an Ultimate, an elite student of the formal Hope's Peak Academy.
This psychopath not only caused The Tragedy, with the use of none other then brainwashing and other unbelievable manipulation tactics...but also made the very first never seen before killing game, with her own classmates no less!
The whole event was said to have been broadcasted live on television. Where many people, still traumatised with the stuff going on outside, somehow got even more traumatised. Counting they didn't watch the brainwashing anime, which is a whole other can of worms.
You would think such an event would be widely known, get a day in the calendar and be taught in history class. After all that's what happened with many genocides so it should be the same for this one...right?
...Sadly this is not the case. As the government was trying their best to pretend...like The Tragedy never happened. As soon as they took charge they shut down the rebuilt Hope's Peak, and denied the existence of it. They also made sure that all evidence was either very hard to find or downright impossible.
Many families are still to this day searching for their lost family members, despite the government telling them that, they were never missing from a make believe tragedy.
....
The video then cut to a clip of an DR interview, which one? You weren't sure.
....
My brother Dan was always fascinated with true crime and fictional killing games. When we were younger he always had murder mysterys books, reading them in his spare time. So when he told me about some real life killing game, I honestly didn't believe it....
Until he showed me the footage...
It was... vile.
The whole thing was treated-like a game!
Ironic, isn't it?
Just few days ago, I didn't know about The Tragedy, I thought it was a myth.
...
It cut again.
...
My name is Ron. Ron Ami. I am a 1st year high school student. I've always loved mysterys and mysterious characters, I used to even try to be mysterious...but I've ended up being just weird haha...
My brother Dan came to me and told me that we could change the world, I laughed cause what could we do?
Then he reminded me of the killing game.
"What about it?" I asked, getting goosebumps from the mear memories.
"We have to show this to the world!" Dan said in an inspirational tone.
"I'd rather not, it gave me nightmares. Plus I doubt that the government will let us." I said meekly.
"Who cares about the government! There are more important things at stake!" Dan exclaimed.
"Like what the money?" I asked bluntly.
"I mean that is part of it-but!" Dan said, thinking for a moment then saying:"What about the-you know families?"
Dan had a point, the families must have felt terrible, especially the ones still looking for their lost members.
"Fine but we can't just send the raw footage." I said, then added:"Wouldn't we just get arrested like your friend?"
"Yeah, but who said anything about the raw footage?" Dan asked smugly and added:"You would have thought your 18 year old big brother didn't have a plan?"
I rolled my eyes at his statement, and decided to listen to his plan...which was to make a documentary on The Tragedy. Then interview the families of the killing game participants and add the footage of the killing game.
I must admit his plan was solid, but I've still had my doubts, after all just because we hide the footage doesn't mean it still isn't in there. There was a whole group rating movies based on it's content after all.
But Dan managed to convince me, and so our quest to get the families permission begun.
It was....hard. Many of them took convincing to even take us seriously, but those ones at least agreed to us. There was one family that straight up tried to call the police on us, but Dan somehow managed to not only get them to not call them, but also get the written permission for the documentary! I genuinely don't know how he managed that, but kudos to him!
When it comes to the documentary itself, it was...actually pretty solid! Considering it was only just the two of us in the production. And surprisingly, it only took us...a month!
We realised it in September 12, and I'll be honest..I expected for it to maybe get watched by a small audience. But-Boy was I wrong.
People loved it! The documentary was a box-office hit!
The government tried to stop it from being viewed, but it was wayy to late! Even when they removed it from social media, people still discussed it. They tried to even kick us out of the country, but we had the public on our side! And besides, we were a 14 year old and 18 year living with our grandparents because our parents died...heh...
But the thing that made the government break truly, was Dan's friend Toki, the one who tried to expose the footage, yet got arrested for and I quote "disturbing the public peace".
Let's just say that the election went horrendously for them, and a new man was put in charge.
...
You silently finished watching the video mashup the you found on the hard drive. The video ended there, but you knew there was more to this story then what was on the top of the iceberg. After all if there wasn't, you would've risked your life this much.
You clicked out of the video and dragged your mouse over to one of the notes in this file.
All it said was this: "Under the red there it lies." The other was empty with it's title being "bro if you're reading this...just try to guess what to do, hehehehrh"
The harddrive was full of other empty files, most of which seem to be from downloading very legally games then deleting them. One of those files stood out, as among all the other things it had a file labelled "undertale", which actually still had the game on it. You knew you had no time for games as you plugged the harddrive out of the laptop.
You decided to look around the room more, if anything was truly as it seems then there was no harm in taking a peek.
You started to search for anything red, if the note wasn't trolling you then that was the closest thing you had to a clue.
As you were searching the floor a memory of yours resurfaced, one of your coworker Feiko getting themselves into trouble as they went and almost did an illegal search...again. All because a certain dumbass jokingly said to them that this was a serious criminal they were dealing with. The crime of the criminal in question was accidentally going over the speed limit in a rural area. If she saw what you were doing now... It brought a slight chuckle to your face.
You searched for a while until you spotted an odd red tile behind a broken closet on the ground. Bingo! You thought as you barely managed to move the heavy closet off the spot. The tile was even harder to move, someone truly wanted to hide something, didn't they!
Moving the tile revealed the truth, it was empty except a single piece of paper.
It said:"HAH, got'cha bro. Now you'll never find my secrets. >:)"
You were, quite frankly, furious at the fact that you have been outwitted and bamboozled. Despite the feeling you still checked further into the hole. After a while of shoving your hand in and looking in the hole you finally found..something. It was an old dvd case of a kids show, specifically my little pony. Now you were just...confused? Why would one go through so much trouble to hide the fact they liked a kids show?
"I sincerely hope this is just another layer of deceit on this guys part." You thought as you put the cd in your laptop.
Surprisingly instead of the colourfull pony show the box promised, the cd contained...more files, two to be more specific. To give the lad credit at least he seemed to organise everything.
You clicked on the first nameless file, which held a bunch of videos, each named 01, 02...you get the gist. And with a click on the mouse, you watched the 01 video.