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The school is interlinked through many, many different passageways.
Mukuro adjusts her wig as she crawls out of one of the various vents, having traveled through the one in the girls’ bathroom by the dorms. It’s a little storage closet in the back, and the vent is hidden behind a janitor’s cart and an unreasonable amount of toilet paper rolls, where most won’t think to look. (Even if they did, the vent is so dusty and gross that it’d sway them from actually exploring it. None of the girls in this school would ever willingly get themselves so dirty.)
(Well, besides Mukuro. And that’s the point. She’s dirty already, so it’s never mattered too much to her.)
As she stands to her feet, her heels clacking on the metal flooring, she dusts herself off. Her fake nails get caught on her skirt, and she frustratedly huffs as she checks to make sure they’re still in good condition. She’s never been a girl to care for her nails—they were a nuisance more than anything—but she wears them because they’re such a staple of her sister. Her real nails are horribly bitten to shreds, which would make her stand out even more.
They look good, anyhow. As good as a girl like Ikusaba Mukuro can actually pull off. (Which isn’t much, but it’s decent.)
In the distance, she hears a familiar hum as it runs through the voice changer. She ventures closer to one of Junko’s various Monokumas working away at a few blueprints, making edits and barking orders at another Monokuma making preparations on a large motorcycle. Both of them are wearing hard hats.
“Junko?” says Mukuro, walking up to the blueprints. The bear ignores her, like she’s not even there, even though she knows she’s made her presence clear. Mukuro knows how to hide and when to make herself known.
After a moment, she realizes her error. Stupid Mukuro.
“Monokuma?”
At which rate, both bears perk up, and the one by the blueprints adjusts its hat. “Hey, hey! What are you doing here so late!? Don’t’cha know that a bear needs his rest too?”
Mukuro doesn’t really know what to do with her hands, so she just stands there. “You’re not resting either,” she points out.
Suddenly, the sound of snoring fills the air, and both Mukuro and the first Monokuma look over to whete the motorcycle is. The second Monokuma has fallen asleep on the seat of the bike, and she can hear Junko’s fake “honk shoo” through the voice changer.
“You there! Wake up, lazy bum!” the first Monokuma yells, which effectively scares the second one into jumping out of his spot.
“Don’t tell me what to do!” he shouts back.
Mukuro is painfully aware that her sister is just yelling at herself from the control room upstairs. She shifts her weight to one leg, waiting for her to get bored.
Which she does, as always. “Ugh, whatever,” the first Monokuma grumbles, waving his paw and turning back to Mukuro. “You’ve got no purpose, little ‘kuma. Get lost!”
And then the second Monokuma disappears, sinking into the ground when Mukuro blinks. That’s still something she hasn’t quite figured out the mechanics of yet.
“You!” Monokuma points at her—except he doesn’t have any fingers really, so he’s just jabbing at her through the air with a closed paw. “You take over! Help me out here, okay!?”
So she obliges, walking over to the motorcycle. It’s brand new and certainly built from scratch. Curiously, she places a hand on one of the handles, trying to take in the material—and yes, of course it’s real.
“What is this for?” she asks, watching Monokuma grab a pencil off the table and messily scribble onto the blueprint.
“What do ya think? It’s for an execution, obviously!” He laughs, and then claps his paws. The soft thumping alerts a few other Monokumas to spring into action, who push two wheels over to Mukuro. They’re also wearing hard hats. It’s like Junko has prepared a whole construction unit of Monokumas. “Guess who, guess who!”
Mukuro takes one of the wheels out of the Monokumas’ paws, carefully running her nails between the crevices and rubber markings that make this wheel identifiable. It’s not too difficult to hazard a guess.
“For… Owada?”
“Ding ding ding!” Monokuma cheers, throwing his little bear arms in the air. The pencil goes flying into some dark corner of the room. “But also boo. You suck at dramatics! How’re ya gonna be somebody if you’re so boring all the time?”
One of the Monokumas at her side drops a few tools on the ground. “Don’t just stand there!” it yells at her, lightly swatting her with a paw. “C’mon, c’mon, make yourself useful, knucklehead!”
Following orders, Mukuro falls to her knees and begins trying to attach the wheel to the motorcycle. The Monokuma next to her, gratefully, provides some kind of direction—in a rather crude way, because she is stupid for not knowing how to change a tire, but she accepts the degradation as she responds to the first Monokuma.
“You’ve always been more interesting than me, Junko,” she says, raising her voice to be heard—only to be swapped again by another Monokuma who seemingly glares at her. Oh, right. “Monokuma,” she corrects.
“And like, that’s another thing!” he yells. “How are you calling your gracious Headmaster by your own name!? Geez, you kids have no respect for authority! First I get pummeled to the ground, then I get kicked in the air, and I get blown to smithereens!”
She hears Monokuma begin to pace back and forth by the blueprint table, listing things off on his fingerless paws.
“What’s next!? Are you gonna bring harm to your ever loving Headmaster, Enoshima Junko?”
Oh, Mukuro understands now. Just because they’re alone doesn’t mean the show has been put on pause.
“Never planning on it,” she replies, putting that practiced oomph into her voice as she looks over her shoulder. There’s a quiet part of her that’s searching for some kind of… validation, maybe. A sign that Junko is proud of her.
The Monokuma swats her again. She mutters an “ow” instinctively, though it doesn’t actually hurt. Mukuro focuses on the wheel installation again.
From the blueprint table, Monokuma sighs, “Geez, Mukuro, you’re a lost cause,” he grumbles—and she can hear Junko’s unwavering disappointment. That’s all Mukuro seems to ever be, even though she’s trying so hard to pretend to be someone else. “Oh, well. It’s not like anyone remembers what Junko was like, anyway. That lives on in you!”
Monokuma laughs like it’s the funniest thing in the world. Mukuro recognizes that responsibility she carries, though. It isn’t like anyone ever knew Junko, not in the way that Mukuro does. Nobody understands her like Mukuro does.
It’s up to Mukuro to truly put on a good execution of Junko’s character. To show her that she isn’t alone in her head; Mukuro understands. She always has.
Suddenly, Monokuma springs up on the other side of Mukuro, and he’s holding the blueprint that was sprawled out on the table before. He presses it against the motorcycle, and the sheet crinkles as he messily pins it to the uneven surface. “So,” he asks, changing the topic at the drop of a hat—Junko must have grown bored of the previous conversation. “How long you think the Ultimate Biker Gang Leader is gonna last out there?”
Mukuro only glances at the blueprint before focusing on the tool in her hands. It’s really difficult to manuever anything around with her long nails, but she does her best. “You think he’s going to kill someone?”
“Well, kill, be killed, same thing,” Monokuma replies with a shrug, “but if I had to guess, that hot-headed bastard’s gonna get riled some and knock a guy out! You saw what he did to poor little Naegi—what a sweet soul he is, trying to get everyone to get along…”
His voice is dripping with sarcasm. Naegi has always been an interesting person to both Junko and Mukuro.
“Ah! Oh well. He looks like he makes a good punching bag.” Monokuma laughs again, throwing his head back—except he doesn’t have much of a neck, so the rest of his torso also leans backwards. “Anyway, answer the question. Not like you have anything to bet, but this bear loves a good gamble!”
It’s an unevenly matched game, really. Mukuro doesn’t know her classmates particularly well. Before all this, she’s always kept her distance, only speaking to the others when Junko was also talking to them. Very rarely did anyone ever approach her, and she never approached anyone herself. Junko is also gifted with the art of analyzing people—one look is all she needs to understand someone inside and out, and a second look is more than enough to decide if they’re boring or interesting. Most people are boring. The boring people are easier to figure out.
Owada is an instance of someone teetering towards boring, but he has some “interesting” qualities. Junko has always wanted to see how he’d snap one day, especially when it came to his deceased older brother. Owada Daiya himself is “boring” by Junko’s standards; too nice for someone who headed the biggest biker gang in all of Japan, but she’d taken a deep interest in their bond.
(Mukuro herself has no particular feelings. She sympathizes with Owada; she doesn’t know what she’d personally do if anything ever happened to Junko. It’s her duty to fight for her sister. Owada Daiya probably saw it the same way, to a lesser extent.
Then again, Owada and him constantly fought. Mukuro has never once said something cruel to Junko—and if she had, it was so many years ago, and she knows better now. If they put the Owadas in the same room right now, she figures they’d find something to argue about within an hour or two. Owada never knows when to listen to his brother.)
“Possibly not long,” Mukuro settles on. There’s a difference between herself and Owada, and it lies in his hot-headed nature. She can be aggressive sometimes, but it’s a calculated sort of aggression. She kills when she is told to, like the living weapon she is. “Someone is likely to piss him off, and then he’ll break their neck.”
Monokuma shakes his head. “Oh, you’re so cutthroat with things…” His voice sounds like he’s sulking. “Wouldn’t it be totally cool if he got into a scuffle with someone else? Ooh, how do you think he’d fair against our daring pawn in action!?”
It takes her a moment to figure out who he’s talking about, but she puts the pieces together. Ogami, who is currently metaphorically strung up like a puppet in Junko’s hands. “He’d lose.”
Ogami Sakura is dubbed the strongest human in the world. Of course, her strength is no match for the reaches of despair, but something had to be done to keep her from rebelling so easily. Even Mukuro isn’t sure if she could win a battle against Ogami—not in hand-to-hand combat. Maybe with a weapon.
“Ugh, you are so boring,” Monokuma complains, and she can hear the flicker of Junko dropping her character to express her frustrations. He drops the blueprint for Owada’s planned execution, rubbing his face with his paws. “You’re so boring it makes me want to tear my parts out! In fact, I’ll tear your organs out first, eat them, and then rip myself to shreds! That’s how boring you are!”
Mukuro removes the jack that was holding the motorcycle up, soaking in all of her sister’s complaints. She feels terrible, really, but she’s also used to being such a disappointment. (She wants to be better. She wants to make Junko proud, but sometimes, it’s not in her capabilities. On a fundamental level, she understands Junko better than no other—but she can never find the right words to say, because even Enoshima Junko makes sure her emotions are unpredictable. That’s probably what keeps her from ripping her own body to shreds on the daily.)
“I’m sorry, Junko.” She hangs her head low, but stands up. She dusts off her skirt and fixes the top that she wears. She’ll make sure to change clothes once she’s back in her room. “If it means anything, I think Owada will kill somebody soon. Then you’ll get to see his execution in action.”
Mukuro doesn’t know all the details of Owada’s execution, but if she had to hazard a guess, maybe it’s some kind of obstacle course for him to complete. He’ll be so hopeful, fighting to survive—and then maybe his bike will suddenly break down, and he’ll fall off the road. Perhaps his body will be mangled by an oncoming vehicle, so he’ll know what it’s like to die like his brother.
Maybe. Or maybe Junko has something far more unpredictable planned. If Mukuro could think of it, it’s probably not that, because Mukuro is too boring and predictable and stupid.
Oh, and disappointing.
Monokuma, clearly frustrated, kicks the wheel that she’s just installed. It doesn’t budge, so she assumes she’s done a good job. “Whatever. I hope it fails! That’ll be so despairing, to watch my own work fail…”
That simple hypothetical seems to cheer him up for a brief moment, but it disperses all the same.
“Buuut now it’s not gonna happen, because I’m expecting it. You kids ruin everything!”
Mukuro stands there, uncertain of what to say.
And so, Monokuma turns around. “Get out of my face. Shoo, shoo!”
That’s when Mukuro knows their conversation is over. She quietly sighs, spinning on her heels and walking back towards the vent at the other end of the room—the very end, because there’s multiple vents and multiple passageways (including one in the men’s restroom on the second floor, but that one’s more obvious; something about Junko wanting to give her players a “fighting chance,” and something about it maybe stirring some drama).
As she crawls through the vent to return to the ladies’ restroom, she wonders what’s occurring on the first floor tonight. With the first motive announced earlier that day, something is bound to occur during nighttime, even though there’s an unofficial “agreed” rule to not venture out during this period. She should make sure she can be physically accounted for, when morning comes.