Of Apples And Spooks

Mavis had been planning this for a while. Ever since Mori, her beloved Mimikyu, had laid that egg. Maybe a little before that, if she was honest. The important thing was she had an idea, and once it was in her head, she was going to make it work. This plan in particular was very important. It could make or break the next stage of her life.

She decided to put her plan into action at the final stage of the gym challenge, after the final battle. That in and of itself had made her a bit nervous, she had to admit. If anything, she was hoping she'd be able to ride the adrenaline rush from a successful battle to give her the courage to just do it, but if she lost the opposite could happen. She could lose her motivation and her bravery, could chicken out and never get a good opportunity to do it again. When it came down to it, however, she really didn't need to doubt herself or her abilities. She was a strong trainer, highly skilled, and a brilliant strategist, if she did say so herself.

So here she was, nervous, fiddling with the hem of her shirt, still in the Champion uniform because she honestly wasn't sure if she would have time to change, so best not to chance it, about to talk to him.

Mavis had had the courtesy to do this away from the public eye. She had asked Bede to come with her to a side room to talk about something important. Hop said he would make sure no-one disturbed them, no fans or journalists, no other gym leaders, not even well wishing friends and family. She was thankful for that. Hop had been the first person Mavis had told when she realised she had feelings for Bede, and the first one she told when she decided she was going to confess her feelings to him. He had been nothing but encouraging and supportive the whole way, her best and most reliable friend right through to the end.

"So?" Ah yes, back to the present. Bede was watching her fiddling with her shirt, a look halfway between amusement and concern on his face. Had he ever seen her quite this flustered? She wasn't sure. "What do you need to talk to me about?"

"Oh! Right! Well...first, I need to give you something. Sort of a gift."

"'Sort of' a gift?"

"A gift."

"What for?" Now he just looked confused. It wasn't like he'd done anything to merit this, or like any kind of special occasion was today as far as he knew. She shrugged her bag off and began to dig through it.

"That's what I'll need to talk to you about." There it was. She pulled a pokeball from her bag and opened it. There was a flash of light, and then between them stood a single small Mimikyu in a shining silver disguise.

"A Mimikyu." Bede stated blankly as Mavis continued to pull things from her bag.

"That's right!" Laying a smaller bag on the floor beside the Mimikyu, she waved her hand at the Pokemon excitedly. "This is Spoop!"

"Spoop...you named your Pokemon Spoop..."

"Yep! She also answers to Spooplet. A Spooplet is the proper term for a baby ghost, after all."

"It's...really not."

"Yes it is."

"Fine, whatever, I'm not going to argue with you over something so stupid. Why are you giving me...Spoop?" He pulled a face when he said the name. It almost made her laugh.

"Okay." She stood and clapped her hands together. "So your gym is fairy type, and I know you don't have a Mimikyu, and I've prepared a bunch of different outfits for her so she can fit Miss Opal's pink theme as well. See, my Mori happened to have a baby and I thought I could give her a good home with you. You're a good trainer, and your Pokemon are all happy and healthy, and having Spoop on your team now and then would help make the Gym Challenge a bit more interesting for some people, and she's grown a little already, I think the two of you would get on really well. You're the best person to give Spoop to and I know she'd be really happy to have a trainer like you." She crouched down and gently lifted Spoop into the air, smiling all the way. That was when Bede seemed to notice the shadowy arms of the Pokemon. They shimmered and caught the light, and were tucked behind its back, carefully concealing something.

"Is she holding something?" He asked, craning his neck to one side to get a better look.

"Spoop has a gift for you too!" Excitedly, Mavis spoke to the creature cradled in her arms. "Show Bede what you have for him, sweetie."

Spoop made a noise that sounded happy and drew her hands out from behind her back, waiting until Bede held his own hands out before handing over the held item.

It was a red and brown ball with green extras attached, made to look like an Applin. "She's giving me one of her toys?" He asked, turning the ball over in his hands. He looked confused again, and honestly unimpressed.

"Well..." Mavis hesitated, not sure how to explain this. "Yes, but it's more what the toy is that's important."

He looked over it again. Then his eyes widened in understanding. "Are you trying to...? This isn't some kind of joke, is it?" He turned, looking around the room as if expecting to see someone spectating, laughing at his expense.

"No...Bede, no, I...I really do like you." She waited until he was looking at her before continuing. "I like you a lot. More than I've liked anyone before. Listen...you don't have to like me back, if you don't, that's fine, I just hope this doesn't make things awkward between us because the last thing I'd ever want is to lose you as a friend. It would be nice to be a little bit more than friends, but if friends is all we'll ever be then I'm okay with that too. And you don't have to take Spoop if you don't want to, I just thought this would be a better idea than giving you a real Applin. After all, you don't train dragon or grass types, and you'd bond a lot better with something you could use in battle. I thought it would be better if I went to the effort of, you know, personalising this confession to you, showing you I do care about you and that I know you fairly well and all. I wouldn't say perfectly, but I do know you. Anyway, you wouldn't have had to take Spoop if you didn't want to at all, it's just a cute way of presenting the toy Applin with a bonus new friend if you do want to take her." One of the problems with Mavis was that when she got nervous, she rambled. Figuring she wasn't going to stop talking any time soon, Bede quietly handed the toy back to Spoop.

This action actually caused Mavis to quiet down, however. Maybe she thought this was a rejection, or maybe she recognised she was about to get an answer of some kind, but whatever she was thinking, she trailed off and looked at Bede expectantly. The quiet as Bede tried to figure out what, exactly, he wanted to say wasn't that long, but seemed to drag on for an eternity. Finally, he seemed to decide. He nodded, reached out to take Spoop, but let his hands rest over Mavis'. "I do too. Like you a lot, I mean."

"Really? Really?!" With a squeal, she shifted Spoop to one arm and threw the other around him, pulling him into a hug. Squeezed between them, Spoop also wrapped an arm around him, deciding she might as well be a part of this hug. As for Bede, his arms were trapped between them whether he wanted to hug back or not.

In the end, Spoop went home with Bede, and the two trainers decided to give a relationship a try. Bede had tried to say Spoop should stay with Mavis, giving the fact they may have already bonded as a reason. She suspected that really he was just embarrassed at having to use the name 'Spoop' in a battle situation. Spoop herself had chosen to go with him in the end, and with them they took the little bag Mavis had given them, full of various handmade cloth disguises. A Sylveon, a Hattrene, a Snubbull, all sorts of different fairies to disguise as. And of course they brought the Applin ball along. It was, after all, Spoop's favourite toy, and part of a precious and heartfelt gift from one of Bede's favourite people.

((I find it hard to write for Bede. Like, really really hard. Spoop is best character. This can count as Dressedinpinkshipping because Mavis is my version of the female player character.))

The Hanged Man

This 'dark secrets' thing was...interesting, to say the least. Morihiko had no idea what was in the little despair envelope that held his secret, nor did he know who had it, but he could bet it was a hell of a lot more incriminating than the one he'd been slipped. It simply informed him that one of his surviving classmates tended to piss the bed. Not exactly the kind of reality-twisting secret that would cause someone to commit murder.

It wouldn't be hard to figure out who this secret belonged to. Part of Mori's job involved following people and learning their routines, learning their secrets. It almost came naturally to him. Almost as naturally as his killing did.

Being introduced by the goddamn bear as the 'super high school level assassin' meant everyone knew right away that this tiny asshole had taken lives before. Being forced into a game of kill or be killed meant they wanted to keep their distance from him. He didn't blame them, of course, and even if he did talk to them, he didn't really have any way to relate to them. He didn't know anything about what was popular or any of their talents or interests, he'd always been painfully awkward. It didn't bother him any more. Trying too hard to get closer to these other kids would just cause problems down the line anyway.

He checked a clock as he passed. Half an hour until Kai's yoga session in the entry hall they'd all met in. Did he want to go this time? Did he want the false sense of community and relaxation to distract himself? He'd been to the one that took place in the morning, before breakfast, for the early bird kids, because Kai always said rising with the sun and greeting it with a smile was good for you. Only three of the other kids had turned up and it had been awkward. You couldn't even see the sun down here, so he had no idea what she was blathering on about.

Yoga wasn't for him, he decided. He decided to go get some exercise in at the room that had clearly been decorated to resemble a school gym, likely to give a false sense of normalcy. There was some halfway decent equipment there, at least. He'd never be as good as the super high school level basketball player, but he could try his best to throw the ball vaguely in the direction of the hoops. If he had a greater height and reach, he figured he could be a fairly decent player.

With a sigh, Morihiko pushed open the double doors to the gym, and froze at the sight before him.

Now, by this point, Mori had seen many dead bodies, and had made many as well. Even if he hadn't been known as a killer before, this wasn't the first death to occur here, and nor would it be the last, The body was even in a better state than the previous one, but that wasn't hard to achieve.

Before him, swinging ever so slightly on its rope, Nolan Alzanar's corpse hung from the central scoreboard. His wrists were bound together, and his ankle, just the right one, was tied with the rope attached to the board. The other leg was spread to the side by gravity. The body itself was badly beaten. Bruised, bloody and swollen, Mori almost hadn't recognised the victim. Blood had collected beneath him in a messy puddle, and had been sprayed further out still by the force with which he was attacked. Postmortem, judging by the careful avoidance of the main puddle, the words 'THE HANGED MAN' had been painstakingly written over the floor and wall in the victim's blood. Large footprints led away from the body and to the door, but stopped there.

Not wanting to disturb the crime scene, Mori very carefully stepped around the footprints and came closer to the body. It was suspended quite high up, high enough that if the body was beaten after being hanged, it would have had to have been done by someone tall. Even then, a tall person would had to have used a ladder to reach the scoreboard. There was a baseball bat from the equipment store discarded carelessly to one side. It too was soaked in blood. For now, he would assume that was the murder weapon. Again careful not to step in the blood, Mori went over and tried to get a rough estimate on length. At the longest, it would be perhaps forty two inches in length, which would give a reach of three feet. There were no drag marks to suggest a specific place of death or attack prior to being hanged by the ankle.

Mori returned to the body. The victim's eyes were open and stained by burst blood vessels. The blood pooled beneath him was still wet. The murder had been done with malice and forethought, and an undue amount of brutality. Before he explored any further, he would have to let the others know what had happened. He turned to the door, and there stood a very frightened-looking Hiro Shironuma.

"Hiro!"

"Is he...?"

He didn't even look back at the body. "He is. We need to let the others know about this."

She gave a shaky nod and took off down the hall. He made sure to close the double doors before following.

When everyone in the entry hall had been gathered and brought over, with a few students still absent, the body discovery announcement went off, which quickly had the rest of them scurrying over. At that point, the investigation began proper. It was quickly noted that the large footprints could only be matched to the clown-sized feet of Jun Fujita, the basketball player, who conveniently had misplaced his shoes. With no ladder in sight, and the rather abrupt end to the footprints, however, Mori wondered if there was a chance someone was trying to frame the big guy. It wouldn't be too difficult, with his habit of isolating himself, but his constant presence in his room also meant it would be harder to plant hard evidence on him.

That was how Mori found himself in Jun's bedroom, looking for clues. Either some way to prove he hadn't done it, or some way to prove he had. A collapsible ladder was thrown into one corner, and unfolding it showed blood on some of the steps, but something seemed strange about it. Mori couldn't figure out exactly what it was that bothered him, so he folded it back up and put it back where he found it.

The wardrobe against the wall had several copies of his uniform and underwear thrown in haphazardly. No sign of blood or damage. A yoga mat had been rolled out on the floor. Jun had likely been using it when the announcement had gone out. He wouldn't have been wearing his shoes to do his yoga, and there was no sign of them in the room, not even the telltale smell of sweaty feet. There was another smell in here, one that Jun had attempted to mask with deodorant. The smell of urine. He approached the bed, where the smell was strongest. Hesitantly, he went to peel back the covers when he noticed something else. A sheet of paper peeking out from beneath the pillow. He decided to examine that first, and found the secret Jun had been given by Monokuma. The words on the paper simply read 'This student stole money from their mother's purse as a child'. It didn't seem worthy of murder. He tucked it back beneath the pillow, gripped the edge of the duvet between thumb and forefinger and peeled it back from the mattress.

Brown stain. The bedwetting secret Mori had been left with belonged to Jun. That coupled with the secret Jun received suggested he lacked motive to perform such a brutal killing. That would be important to mention at the trial. Embarrassing Jun by admitting to everyone that he'd pissed himself was definitely preferable to letting him get blamed for murder and having them all killed for it.

There didn't seem to be anything else of note to examine in Jun's room, but Mori doubted he was the culprit. Someone had certainly clumsily attempted to frame him, however. Frowning, Mori began to turn away, to leave the room, when something struck him hard on the back of the head.

It was like someone had hit him with all their strength. His knees buckled and he fell forward, sprawling on the bed. His face was lying in the piss stain, but that was the least of his concerns. Someone had attacked him while he was investigating. The same person who had killed Nolan?

He had to move, to get out of there, but his vision was already fuzzing over, his body refusing to cooperate. Through the haze, he saw someone. Small, smaller than him, a blur of black and white cloth and white hair, a bloodied baseball bat in her hands.

"Hi...ro...?" He tried to ask, to call out, to do anything, but he wasn't sure any noise escaped his mouth. Realising the single strike hadn't done the job, Hiro swung the bat again, hitting the same point on his head, cracking his skull.

Mori wasn't sure if he died at that point, or if he just lost consciousness. He didn't know if Hiro continued to bash his skull in, or if she was merciful enough to stop once his life had slipped away.

He'd been sure he'd been alone in that room, would never have expected someone to even have the balls to try and kill the Ultimate Hitman among them. He'd let his guard down like an idiot.

Someone else would have to figure out who killed The Hanged Man.

((This was originally meant to focus much more on Nolan's death and murder, but, uh, I got sidetracked...instead, I might write a second part that focuses on Nolan and the one who actually killed him. Nolan and Kai belong to a friend of mine.))