Chapter 25: Mr. Hope

24.7K 703 1.2K
                                    

Tyler's head hurt like hell. And everything was dark. And it smelled like rotting garbage. He groaned and sat up from where he was sprawled on the floor, clutching the side of his head in one hand.
Looking around as his eyes started to adjust to the dark, he saw large heaps around him of which he could only assume was garbage, by the smell. Had he fallen down the trash chute?
Fallen...everything rushed back to Tyler's mind as he remembered everything that had happened. Ty and Suiko were dead...Tyler was executed...AlterSorcerer saved him...so many things didn't make sense, and all this thinking clearly didn't help his splitting headache...
Tyler remembered he had hit his head on something and blacked out. Curious, he looked up to try and see what it was. Almost instantly he spotted what appeared to be an upturned sofa on the top of a garbage heap. He must have hit his head on the hard undersurface of it and fallen onto the pile of garbage bags he was sitting on now.
Tyler stood up and carefully walked over the garbage bags, looking for a way out. He froze when he heard a muffled thud behind him, and turned around to see it was just another bag that had fallen down the chute.
Tyler turned around again when he heard a strange rustling. Looking behind him once more, he saw that the garbage bag was moving.
He watched in shock as a familiar figure got out of the bag, stood up and brushed himself off, looking around. He froze when he spotted Tyler staring at him.
"Tyler, you're alive!" Ryan exclaimed happily.
"Ryan?" Tyler asked incredulously. "What are you doing here?"
"Just taking my afternoon stroll," Ryan sighed sarcastically. "I'm here to rescue you!"
Tyler blinked. "Me? But...you all voted..."
Ryan sighed and looked away uncomfortably. "We...we were suspicious when AlterSorcerer stepped in to save you. And Herobrine had been acting fishy too. We didn't realize that until after the trial, however...we all feel really guilty."
"So...you guys believe I'm innocent now?" Tyler asked, a small flicker of happiness growing inside him. Ryan nodded. "We're all really sorry."
Tyler gave a big smile. "Haha! That's great! Now we can find the tru-" He cut off, looking up at Ryan's head. "Uh, Ryan, there's a soup bowl on your head."
"Huh?" Ryan said, then slapped the bowl off his head. "Gross. That's what I get for sneaking into the trash chute. Everyone thought I should go because this suit would be stealthy or whatever, maybe it would if it wasn't inside a properly lit house."
Tyler chuckled. "Anyways, do you, uh, know the way out? There is one, right?"
Ryan nodded. "Well, there's that door behind you there. That might be a thing."
"Oh...I didn't see that, I didn't really get a good look over there yet..." Tyler replied sheepishly. "Anyway, we should head up, right?"
"Yeah, let's go!" Ryan declared.
≪≫
Tyler and Ryan stepped into the Dining Hall, where all was quiet and everyone was eating breakfast in silence.
Breakfast, Tyler thought. I must have been unconscious down there all day. His stomach growled. I also haven't eaten all day.
Everyone looked up at surprise at Tyler.
"Tyler?!" Jason exclaimed in pure shock. "Hey, you're alive!" Jerome exclaimed with a big smile, then paused, his face falling. Everyone else at the table, including Jerome, had awkward, guilty looks on their faces. They must really feel bad, Tyler thought sympathetically.
Tyler gave a small smile. "It's okay, guys."
"What?!" Everyone exclaimed.
"It's alright," Tyler repeated. "Don't feel guilty about executing me."
"But...we all thought you had done it! We were too quick to look things through..." Brice said sadly.
"That's not your fault," Tyler objected. "It was despair. What Herobrine wanted. That must be why he executed me, to keep you all in despair longer."
"That sick bastard," Quentin said in disgust, frowning.
"What do we do now, then?" Jerome asked.
Tyler grinned. "We find the real culprit. We have a lot to talk about."
"Like AlterSorcerer?" Jason piped up.
"Yeah, AlterSorcerer was there!" Ryan added. "I thought he died or something!"
"AlterSorcerer was able to survive through consumption of the magical energy within his Enchantment Table," a voice said, and everyone whipped around.
Standing behind Tyler and Ryan in the doorway was the white figure, still unrecognizable but not as transparent. It was standing like a normal person with its ghastly arms calmly crossed over its torso.
Tyler and Ryan both took a step back, filled with utter shock, and the white figure walked right inside. "Thank you," It said.
Its voice was incredibly strange-It spoke inside Tyler's head, with no audible voice or any sign of being male or female. It was almost like the voice people sometimes heard in their when they read books, except this voice was being projected to everyone-Tyler could tell, by the looks on their faces.
The white figure took a sweeping look around at everybody. "Look, I'm not allowed to reveal my identity, and I'm not allowed to give away the culprit for this murder, because you're all supposed to find this new hope for yourselves. But I can still help you out, and make sure you can all escape this place safely."
Everyone stared at it in shock.
"Wait..." Quentin said, standing up. "How do you know all of this? About AlterSorcerer, and the true culprit?"
The white figure seemed to look sad or dreary. "Because, I was once good friends with the mastermind of this mansion."
Everyone gasped.
"Good friends..." Quentin murmured suspiciously, casting a side glance at Jerome, who glared uncomfortably straight back.
The white figure then chuckled, white mist fading off of its shoulders as they jerked from laugher. "Don't worry, the mastermind and I aren't Jerome and Mitch. Or Brice and Seto. You all actually think both of us are dead, really. Well, I'm actually dead, the mastermind's not, so only he faked his death, mine was real..."
"How can you say all this, and not just tell us directly?" Tyler demanded. "And are you confirming that you and the mastermind of this school are among the ten houseguests who died here?"
The white figure nodded. "Yes, I am. Oh, and I can't tell you this directly because you need to solve this case yourselves. To give you hope, you know? I would have came in to help with the other murders, but those ones weren't...interfered with."
"What does that mean?" Quentin growled, but the white figure ignored him and turned around. "Come on. There's a lot of clues you all missed before that I need to show you," It said, walking/drifting down the hallway.
"Um, am I hallucinating?" Jerome asked uncertainly.
"This white figure will be great for us," Quentin said thoughtfully with a grin. "It's helping us out with this trial!"
"Okay yeah, Quentin's smiling," Jerome said. "This is definitely a hallucination."
"Hey, wait up!" Brice called to the white figure. It turned around and looked at Brice with a confused, slightly surprised face that was too familiar. yet Tyler couldn't identify it. "Hm?"
"How did you become a ghost, anyway?" Brice asked. "Are the others ghosts, too?"
The white figure sighed sadly. "Sadly, I am the only ghost. It's hard to explain how I'm a ghost but nobody else is. Think of it this way though: The mastermind is on the side of Despair, right? I'm the opposite, on the side of Hope. So I've got the opposite of Herobrine on my side, too."
It turned around and continued down the hallway.
"The opposite of Herobrine, someone who can revive the dead..." Ryan muttered. "They couldn't mean...Notch?"
≪≫
"You all seemed to miss many clues this time, right?" The figure asked. "Your choices were clouded with despair, and you rushed to evict Tyler. Herobrine's influence, too."
"Um, I guess so...where are we going?" Brice asked.
"To where the clues are," The white figure said, and walked into the Enchanting Room.
"Hey, do you know anything else about AlterSorcerer?" Jason asked.
The white figure turned to look at Jason with ghostly white eyes. "What do you want to know?"
Jason looked surprised at the ghost's willingness to give answers. "Um, how did he get out of the Enchantment Table? And how did he save Tyler?"
"Hm, well AlterSorcerer sort of acted as a magical parasite to the Enchantment Table. He fed off the energy produced by the table until he was able to leave it. He hid so Herobrine wouldn't find him, but stepped in to save Tyler...probably because Seto had programmed him to save the innocent, probably so if that situation ever happened to him."
"You sure do know a lot about AlterSorcerer, huh?" Ryan drawled.
The figure sighed. "I'm not Seto, if that's what you're thinking. To be honest, you all didn't exactly know me very well in the first place."
"Liiiiiike, if you had an early death or something, hmm?" Jerome said with a grin and raised eyebrows.
"I'm not Jordan or Ian, either. I mean that...nevermind. And stop guessing who I am," the figure said in annoyance. "Someone push the book to the fourth floor."
Tyler pushed the light blue book and the bookshelf slid back.
"We didn't check the fourth floor at all, did we?" Brice said as they went up the stairs.
"No, you should have, though," the figure chided.
"By the way, what should we call you?" Quentin asked the figure.
"Umm...Well I obviously can't give myself away. Call me Mr. Hope."
"Mister Hope?" Tyler echoed in disbelief.
"If it was just Hope it would be a girl's name."
"I still can't believe I'm trusting a spooky scary white ghost that haunts a mansion where people die to save my friends from the mansion where people die and a man with flashlight eyes," Ryan groaned.
"Well it's not really spooky scary when you put it like that..." Jason said.
"Flashlight eyes. Ha, he does have flashlight eyes," Mr. Hope chuckled.
They arrived at the fourth floor, but to Tyler's surprise everything seemed to be normal. However, Mr. Hope walked right past the main room with the brewing stations, right to the small hallway in the back. They all followed him to the end of the hall.
The room with the sheep, Tyler recalled.
Tyler stepped forward and opened the door.
Everyone gasped (except Mr. Hope).
The floor was splattered with blood. The sheep was gone.

Dangan Ronpa MinecraftWhere stories live. Discover now