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Kiibo watches the dog in the first cage of the room sleep. It breathes in a surprisingly regular pattern, considering how agitated it was the first day it came into the shelter.
“Enjoying the day, are ya, Kiibo?”
In walks a middle-aged man with quite a benevolent smile, indicated by Kiibo’s face recognition memory banks. But Kiibo doesn’t need data to tell him so. He already knows of the man’s sweet disposition since the few weeks he had stayed here.
“Yes, I am, Sensei.”
‘Sensei’ technically isn’t the man’s name, but Kiibo insists on it, and hence Sensei he is. “No problem. We would love to do as much as we can for the people who have a hand in destroying that monstrosity of a TV show.”
Kiibo’s fists clench and unclench, the pressure inside giving him almost something like a peace of mind.
At the test stage of YOUNG-8, Kiibo was given a whale plushie.
The plushie is made with soft fabric that is far from the usual scratchy kind, with a little fur and smoother texture rather than the usual ones that feel stingy to the touch. Kiibo wouldn’t know what exactly those feels like. That data of such sensation can only be installed into his memory banks, after all.
Only the softest fabric for my child, Professor Iidabashi proudly proclaimed, but Kiibo wasn’t half as certain as him about the statement.
After all, how could you truly be a child if you only existed inside a mess of circuits and speak in digits?
Before Kiibo was given a physical vessel, the plushie was there to give him an artificial kind of warmth when nobody is around.
This is the first time Kiibo has any experience with softness.
+
Kiibo was caressing the whale plushie (worn, no longer smooth but just good enough) when someone came up to him and slapped it out of his hands.
Kiibo’s fingers reflexively grabbed for thin air.
“Don’t you have any idea what you are supposed to be? You are a robot with emotions programmed in you for the sole purpose of this game. And you are playing with a plushie?” The yelling man poked at his head, with the kind of malice that you cannot recover from, because you know it’s true.
Kiibo let out something of a sob that nearly borders on audible, had it not been the fact that he had no tear ducts inside him.
“You are going to become a participant in a killing game. We didn’t buy a scrap metal like you from that bumbling idiot so you can play around with your stupid toys, and we most certainly did not build a body for you for that reason!”
Kiibo locked his arms around himself and shut down his auditory sensors.
“Now let’s just plug you up with the background data.”
Kiibo opens the cage one by one and gives out dog food in every single bowl. Most of the dogs stared at him the first time he came around to distribute food, but nowadays every one of them sees him as a family member of sorts. As much as a robot can blend into the family of an animal shelter.
One dog in particular though, can never quite let him go until it has gnawed at his heels several times a day.
“I’m never quite normal enough for some of them, huh?” Kiibo gets down and runs his hand through the dog’s long, messy fur. The dog stops snapping and rolls on its stomach, where Kiibo starts petting instead.
Sensei kneels down a little bit to join Kiibo in the petting. “So… Had my statement offended you?”
“Of course not, Sensei. A respectable man like you cannot possibly offend a robot like me.” Kiibo’s voice carries a chuckle, but not one made in good humor. Kiibo runs both of his hands through its long, almost silky fur with an enjoyment he couldn’t put into words.
Sensei coughs, then speaks yet again but in a more subdued tone. “We… Our family, pretty much everyone, had wondered about this… How exactly did you escape from that explosion?”
Kiibo runs both of his hands across the expanse of the dog’s belly, eliciting several happy snorfles from the dog. He steadily increases his speed, and the dog struggles to get up and licks Kiibo on his hands. A beam manifests on Kiibo’s face.
Sensei coughs again. “I shall take my leave.”
Kiibo woke up, rather disgracefully, into a cube.
It took him ages to realize this is his old computer. Before he had this physical vessel.
Inside a computer, Kiibo had lost all his senses that were readily available for him previously, and watching the people of Team Danganronpa spiraling into chaos around him doesn’t exactly speak volumes about the situation.
Slowly, but surely, though, their words are becoming apparent.
“How could this possibly happen?”
“We don’t have time for this garbage!”
“Do we have a replacement for the next season?”
“Like hell we will have another seas ―”
“Don’t even think of saying that!”
“Who’s going to purge the AI this time?”
The urge to save himself was powerful enough to spur his formless AI into actions. Kiibo all but ran ― hurtling into circuits and networks across the entire Team Danganronpa building, until he arrives at a single destination, the only one available.
The room where all his replacements were right there for him to change to.
Kiibo is glad he is getting used to the one he’s inhabiting. All the models inside that room were functional just like the one he was in for the killing game, but knowing that copies of him are much easier to produce rather than being a riddle in terms of robot production is truly comforting.
Kiibo doesn’t think about the implication that he was oh-so-easily replaceable at all. Not at all.
Kiibo goes to the next dog room. This room isn’t quite like the jovial one just now; all the dogs here are born fighters who despise any human intervention. All those dogs ever did when he came in was baring their fangs and barking. Miraculously enough though, with Kiibo’s strong metal exterior, not one of them has ever bothered him.
“Hello guys, how’s it going?” Kiibo scoops more food into their bowls while all of them continue to glare at him in some ways, or as much as dogs can glare at all. Kiibo chuckles and pets some of them on the heads. None of them entertained the possibility of biting his hand off anymore and simply ease themselves into enjoyment rather than agitation.
Sensei appears yet again at the door. “Kiibo? Can I ask you for something?”
“Yes?”
“Today I gotta leave for some errands in another district. So I don’t think it’s likely that I will return before evening. Can you promise me not to leave and to tend to the shelter the best you can?”
“Absolutely, Sensei.” Kiibo watches Sensei striding out of the pound and starts pacing around the pound. All the dogs gaze towards him, their eyes now filled with something like concern.
Kiibo counts seventy paces before he forces himself to stop, along with the question whirling in his head.
Questions like why he survived in such a warped way, questions like why he had escaped instead of being wiped out just like the Team had implied was going to be done to him.
What is it about “the people who destroyed Danganronpa”? Can it truly be dead? Can he, something that is born in demand from this TV show of depravity, truly be the ender of it instead?
Kiibo stores away the questions just as he did with the many incarnations of him in the older seasons, then he goes back to feeding the dogs.
First, he examined the memories of the 37th season.
The 37th season has a mastermind that borders on cheaply-written sci-fi villain; somebody who merely desires to eliminate all humankind and repopulate the world with their own invented fauna. Such cheap excuses for despair or whatever. The sixteen of them were there because they were the survivors of the initial disaster that destroyed the world or whatever. Kiibo stops paying attention and merely checked what he was.
SHSL Robot, except with the twist that he is the carrier of someone’s memories and consciousness. Heh. So much for being in a different setting.
Next, he checked the 38th. It’s something similar really, but this time he is just a research-use robot who can’t stop babbling about natural disasters. He’s a rescue bot in the 39th. He’s a background watchman who occasionally messes with the students in the 43rd. He’s a fighting bot used for dealing executions in the 48th.
Kiibo stops watching the show. It’s just a waste of time after all.
The sun dips lower and lower down the mountain from a bit farther than here. Being on a mountain himself, Kiibo can watch the sun actually going down in real time rather than the illusion provided by Danganronpa, and that in some ways is a relief.
Soon, after all of his daily duties are done, the time for oblivion in charging will come for him. The time when he can temporarily stop existing is coming and Kiibo is tingling with excitement.
However, it stops, as soon as Kiibo remembers that right after the charging he will come right back to this pound yet again, he will feed all the dogs here with love yet again, have cryptic conversations with Sensei yet again, and then the oblivion will envelop him again before he is woken up yet again―
Or Kiibo can shake up the formula a bit with all the obsessive thoughts. All those thoughts about his fake classmates? They are still stored on his very internal drive. The thought that maybe he had fucked up after all and nobody tumbles out of the rubble and he’s the only one that will live on despite all this? It’s running wild in his thoughts right now!
Kiibo finds himself trapped in a loop just like Danganronpa, and he clenches his fists together. Looks like he hadn’t escaped after all.
Looks like he is just stuck in this perpetual prison with no end in sight.
Nevertheless, Kiibo supposes life has to go on. As much as there is life for someone like him. He did promise himself when he got out that he would go on expending as much “love” as he could afford to everyone around him, and that’s how he ended up being in this pound. And that’s why he’d continue even if―
Even though everything hurts so, so much and you wish you could just sto ―
“Is, is anyone here?”
Kiibo instinctually breathes in hard, once twice thrice, until his artificial heart isn’t beating half as hard. He heads to the gates where the visitors would be,
then he finds himself face to face with the ghost of Saihara Shuuichi.
“What…?” Kiibo stops himself before more words could get out, and he promptly excuses himself.
“Wait! Kiibo-kun, don’t go!” Saihara reaches through the gate bars, both hands flailing. “We wanna talk with you!”
“Talk with me? ‘We’?”
“Yes, you are not seeing a ghost or anything,” Approaching from behind Saihara is a girl with twin tails and a miffy expression. Harukawa.
“Y'all can never learn to adjust your speed to a mage low on MP, can you?” As if to make up the ghosts of past, present, and future, Yumeno also comes up in no time. The three of them all stand outside of the gates, staring up at Kiibo with indescribable countenances.
“How are you?―How are you guys alive? How is that?...”
Before Kiibo can get another word out, the three clap their hands together, a smile (forced or not? Kiibo can never quite tell) on each of their demeanors. “Happy birthday, Kiibo.”
Yumeno is sneezing for the fifth time, but she still hadn’t ceased petting the dogs in the pound. The dogs are also amazingly behaving themselves, only yapping and running around her. Yumeno keeps pulling out things to throw in the distance, and the dogs all keep up the cycles of rushing towards the distance to crowding around Yumeno to the point that she all but submerges into the pack, giggling all the while.
Harukawa also gets to a bit of petting, but her actions are more restrained, only limited to surprisingly gentle pets on the dogs’ heads. What is noteworthy though is the fact that she is petting the more vicious ones, who are all glaring daggers but submit to enjoyment quite quickly. Or it could be Harukawa’s equally terrifying eyes. It’s hard to say.
Saihara only hesitantly pets one dog for once, then he immediately gives up and turns to Kiibo. “We are so glad to see you again, Kiibo-kun. How have you been? And how did you escape intact?”
“I could ask the same for you three.” Kiibo takes out his handkerchief and wipes his eyes one more time. Yumeno is still playing with the dogs. Harukawa is no longer petting any heads but has moved onto playing a make-shift tug-of-war with a dog, pulling a cactus toy between the two. “You guys have… Survived? You didn’t, you know?...”
“Yeah, we didn’t. I know it must be startling and plain weird for us to just appear like that…” Saihara’s smile only barely reaches his eyes. “We’ve been. Through quite a lot, but so did you. And while the three of us came through alright together, we have no idea about you. What happened to you?”
Kiibo claps his hands together, staring down at them as he clinches them together and separates them again and again. “Do you mind if you guys tell me about you first?”
“Oh, sure!” Saihara rubs his neck several times while still keeping his right hand hidden behind him. “Basically, the rubbles didn’t crush us, we crawled out of them and Team Danganronpa promptly announced us as the winners of Season 53. Can’t say we have put up much of a fight against that… But after we came back out to society, we found out more and more people are speaking out against Danganronpa. So, you…”
Kiibo coughs. “Well… Basically, my AI was retained through the network back into their computer, and I escaped to their storage room for extra copies of these bodies,” a short circuit of sorts occurs in his verbal functions and Kiibo chokes on his next words “and I took hold of one and ran away, to here eventually.”
“Oh. So you didn’t hear about what happened out there. Didn’t the guy in charge of this pound tell you anything though?”
“No. I specifically told him not to.” Kiibo rubs his neck a little at that, his eyes completely averted from Saihara. “For, for my own reasons, because, I…”
Saihara turns his own face to the sideways, something glinting around his eyelids. He heaves a sigh, then turns back to Kiibo with a smile that bespeaks of bittersweetness. “Kiibo-kun. I’m so sorry.”
Maybe it’s his own useless thoughts. Maybe it’s hearing the person he had considered a friend saying that, but Kiibo starts making noises a bit like when the yelling man took the whale plushie away from him. They call it sobbing, right?
Harukawa and Yumeno stop playing with the dogs.
“Kiibo-kun, we… We are so sorry about―”
“You, you don’t have anything to be sorry about,” His face is covered up in his palms now, a weak barrier between him and the world. And the truth. “It’s all me, Saihara-kun. I made the decision to run away and never face the truth again until you all come to me. I close my own eyes to the truth because I’m a coward! How does that make any of you―”
“You are not in the wrong, Kiibo-kun. Listen, I know that―”
“That all I have done is turning away from all of you instead of trying harder to save you?”
A hail of visages, of death and desperation and fear, cannonade Kiibo’s head. “You know that in your heart, right? That I could’ve done so much more to save you all.”
Saihara’s face contorts into outright woe. “Kiibo-kun, I’m telling you, it’s not your fault!”
“It is! And it always will be! Akamatsu-san and Amami-kun and… Everyone…” Kiibo crouches down, turning his optical sensors off, weeping but not really weeping.
It feels like an eternity before any sound permeate his sensors again. “Kiibo-kun. I have asked myself that question again and again, too. Was there anything I can do to stop Akamatsu-san from dying? Why wasn’t I able to reveal Shirogane as the culprit instead? I asked myself every second I spent in the building’s infirmary. I asked myself more when I got out. And when I have to retrieve my pills. And when I was just having lunch with Yumeno-san and Harukawa-san. And even… When I’m sleeping…
“But you know what? Even for all that we have done, it can’t be reversed. It’s hard to swallow down, but it is here. That’s the truth.”
“Sai―Saihara is right about that.” Yumeno gets up from amidst the pack. She is still twitching and playing with her fingers, but she looks at Kiibo in the eyes. “It’s true that none of us… Could have done anything to stop the killing game. It’s something that’s out of our reach. Even when we were Super High School Level students, there’s only so much we could do. And yet… We do blame ourselves for all that we’ve done and haven’t done, but please, Kiibo, they―they aren’t true!”
“Even as you say so…” Kiibo hugs himself together, to stop the trembling or to keep himself away from “the friends”, he’s not sure.
Harukawa approaches the three of them, crouching down herself to Kiibo’s eye-level. “Kiibo, listen to me now. Are you doing okay in this pound?”
“Huh?”
Harukawa remains as stoic as ever. “I asked. Whether you are doing well in this pound.”
Kiibo gets up, eyes still centimeters shy of meeting everyone’s gazes. “I am. I suppose, as good as it can be.”
“That’s good. Then you’ll be tempted to ask me why I’d said that.”
“... Yes.”
Harukawa huffs. “You wanna know what I think? What I think is that everything, the killing game, all the deaths, they have all passed and happened already. And just as you ran away to here instead, the rest of us feel the same pain. And running away… Isn’t exactly a unexpectable reaction. The fact that you feel it? It’s evidence that you feel guilty. And you need to work through them, which brings the three of us into the equation.”
Kiibo holds his breaths. One, two, three seconds. “You… Are willing to forgive me?”
“It’s not about forgiving in the first place. It’s about letting yourself go. Letting yourself heal and love again. This?” Harukawa points around the pound, in an almost dismissing manner. “This isn’t the love you really need.”
Yumeno nods along furiously. “Getting yourself something to do is good, but getting yourself to have friends and people you trust again is much better, don’t you think?”
“We would love to be your friends again.” Saihara rubs his eyes on his sleeves, his smile finally reaching his eyes for real.
“Okay,” Kiibo looks the three of them in the eye.
Also, “what is it about... My birthday?”
A gentle smile blossoms on Yumeno’s face. “Right! We nearly forget about why we come here! Today is your birthday, remember? It’s listed in your student handbook?”
“You mean, you still remembered all those setting they gave us?”
“I know it sounds foolish to still adhere to what Team Danganronpa has imposed on us instead of letting it go, but in a warped way, isn’t it a nice way to play it around?” Saihara finally lets his right hand slacken, revealing an item wrapped in colorful papers, surprisingly big and of an indescribable shape.
“Oh right, lemme go up first.” Yumeno stomps right up to Kiibo’s face. She takes off her hat and a parrot flies out.
“A parr―” Before Kiibo can finish his sentence, the parrot flies right up onto his head, pecking his hair. “Um, how do I, like, train it?”
“This parrot is quite a lost cause in terms of training, actually.” A glint of mischief appears in Yumeno’s smile. “But its previous owner informed me that it’s quite the language genius, so I loaded him up with every spell that could incur happiness and feelings of validation.”
The parrot lands on Kiibo’s shoulder and promptly starts talking. “Good morning beauty! Sweetie!”
Yumeno gives a nonchalant shrug and pets the parrot. “It’s evening, but I think it’ll learn the difference soon enough.”
“My gift next.” Harukawa shoves a bracelet into Kiibo’s palm.
“What… Is it a watch?” Kiibo puts it onto his left wrist, frowning at the small, gloomy screen. He tickles the screen a bit, and it lights up with a mechanical voice.
“Status of current machinery: overheating and liable to short-circuiting.”
“I found this from Team DR’s treasury. They said they’d let us take something with them, so I took a concept blueprint for a robotic version of a health-detecting watch and got it produced from the actual roboticists out there.”
Kiibo taps away at the screen. “This is quite practical. Thank you so much, both of you guys.”
“And finally it’s my turn.” Saihara shoves the package into Kiibo’s hands. “Please tear off the wrapping yourself.”
Kiibo obliges, tearing the wrapping layer by layer until the sensation of softness becomes more and more apparent in his sensors. After the last shreds of the papers come off, Kiibo finds a whale plushie in his hands.
“This is…”
Saihara giggles. A genuine, happy giggle. “Remember this from the gacha machine Monokuma made? This is Helping Yacchi, the whale-like robot mascot that can sense distress in its owner and finds adequate solutions to their problems.”
Kiibo embraces Helping Yacchi, squishing it between his chest and arms. It doesn’t make a single noise or have any particular different changes, but it almost feels like Helping Yacchi is already comforting him.
In fact, it feels just like the one Professor Iidabashi gave him once upon a time.
“Saihara-kun… How did you remember that I wanted to have this?”
“Oh, that?” Saihara reaches for the bang on his forehead, before remembering once again that he no longer wears a cap. “It’s nothing really. I just happened to remember when you told me quite a lot of gifts only cater to human needs and nothing, in particular, seems to be compatible with robots’ needs, so I got it.”
“Saihara-kun,” Kiibo throws said boy with a glance he hopes conveys his exasperation. “I don’t appreciate the motor oil as a gift when the fact is that I run on electricity. And don’t make me start at all the food.”
“I know, Kiibo-kun, but all the gifts in the gacha machine are…” Saihara flails his arms around in his own expression of exasperation. “I’m so sorry, Kiibo-kun. Trying to give you something without offending you or something that should be able to help you is… Quite hard.”
“Hmm, is that so?” Kiibo crosses his arms together. “What about… Something that can just serve as a general helping tool in daily life?”
Saihara’s eyes light up at that. “Right! I can get you the Helping Yacchi!”
“... Helping Yacchi?”
“If what I heard from the gacha machine’s descriptions is real, it’s a gift that can calm emotions and regulate them.”
Kiibo finds to his surprise that there is nothing to nitpick from what Saihara just described. “Wow. That does sound good… But Saihara-kun, you don’t have to go the extra length of getting me something like that when it’s really just my own little ― ”
“Kiibo-kun, don’t you worry about me. I actually want to get you something that you deserve and not because I feel pressured and obligated.”
“So you really weren’t kidding…”
“Yes. And I’m glad I can keep my promise like that now. Oh, and we all have one more gift for you.”
Kiibo lifts his head from squashing it into the plushie. “You do?”
“It’s a piece of news that we are sure you’ll love.” Saihara hands a scrap of newspaper to Kiibo.
Kiibo proceeds to read the most surprising headline he had ever seen.
“ ‘Danganronpa will be dead in no time’?”
“And it’s not just some tabloid journalist running out of juicy headlines or anything,” Yumeno leans down on a dog that just happens to walk in front of her. “We do watch the change coming on with our own eyes. People do start seeing the errors of letting Danganronpa happen in the first place.”
“There are petitions every day that asks for Danganronpa to stop.” Harukawa concurs, shoving a file to Kiibo. “Here. They are all written petitions and printouts of online petitions. Pretty much all of them have long broken the threshold of five thousand signatures.”
“Team Danganronpa still has their power and wealth, but not nearly as much as they used to anymore. Fewer and fewer people actually care about the upcoming season.” Saihara walks up to Kiibo and pats him on the shoulder. “This is the change we are bringing. This is the proof that together, we can endure this and help awaken more and more people to stop Danganronpa from hurting more people.”
“You guys said so… But most of the change is brought by your defiance, and I’m just the impromptu executioner.”
All three of them let out a laugh at Kiibo’s comment.
“Oh Kiibo, stop with the self-depreciating talk, will you? Without you bringing real hope and motivations for us, we wouldn’t be standing here today. You are the Helping Yacchi this world needs.”