Rantaro and Professor Arukawa led the way- of course Rantaro would know where he lived within the facility- the remaining sixteen taking measured pace behind, with Jiro in the rear, walking with a cane.
"This is what I get for trying to push myself," he muttered.
"You're not the only one with trouble standing and walking," K1-b0 reassured him.
"That's true, isn't it, thank you, K1-b0," Jiro replied.
"I've never been this way in here, not that I can't stray on my own, but my balance is lacking. So, I tended to just stay in the lab," K1-b0 added.
"I don't think Keisuke and I have been on this side of the facility, either, Keebs," Toshiro added. "Us robot nerds wanted to stay the hell away from this part of the building. Psyche is a soooooft science," he added, joking. "Also I never thought I'd end up on this side of the experiment, anyway."
"And here we are," Arukawa gestured to a pair of double doors. "Your belongings are in storage, except for things like video games, books, et centera. There's a chest of drawers at everyone's bunks with clothes."
Sixteen faces peeked in with trepidation as Rantaro himself just stepped inside. "Sorry to be a buzzkill but I'm exhausted. See you all in the morning,"
He waved gently and headed inwards and right, to a door marked with eight names in blue.
"Get yourselves settled, and buzz if you need. I think I'll follow Rantaro-kun's lead and head in early myself. Someone on staff is up 24/7, don't hesitate to call for one of us."
"Thank you," came a chorus of voices.
"Hey, hey," Hikaru asked, after looking at the girl's side and realizing the names on the door were their characters' names, not their own. "I don't know your real name, Tenko-chan, can you show me your sheet or should I call you Tenko?"
'Tenko' gripped her folder tightly to her chest and shook her head.
"You're doing this wrong," Natsuko chided, turning to Tenko. "Until we can talk with you, it's easier to use yes or no questions. Is that okay?"
'Tenko' nodded yes.
"Can we call you Tenko since we don't know your name?"
She nodded yes again.
"Tenko-chan?"
Another nod.
"I don't think you're deaf, but do you speak JSL?" Natsuko asked, as she moved her hands.
Tenko signed back, to stunned silence.
"She says she can hear, but can't talk," Natsuko translated to the group before turning her attention back to Tenko. "What if we got you a dry erase board? Can you write to us?" Natsuko asked aloud as she signed.
Tenko fidgeted, signing.
"It's Nao, her name is Nao, but she says since she's going to disappear because of the memory thing to just start calling her Tenko. And yes, she's willing to write to us, right?"
Tenko nodded, and Natsuko pressed the call button. "A small dry erase board, eraser and markers please?"
A moment of static. "There's a pictionary game on the games shelf- next to the TV. Should be in there."
"Thank you." Natsuko didn't even have time to finish before Hikaru was running up to the shelf and tearing through the game boxes.
"Here you go, Tenko, sorry I don't know how to sign, too."
Tenko grabbed the red marker and drew a little heart.
(Thank you,) she wrote.
Hikaru squealed and hugged her.
"Your handwriting is so goood aaaah, look at your calligraphy," come on, lets go check out the bunks." Himiko held out a hand, and Tenko capped her marker, shifting everything into one hand and taking it with the other.
She wasn't shaking anymore.
"Why don't we all have a look?" K1-b0 suggested. "So long as nobody is opposed to it. We are allowed to go in and out of the dorms, yes?"
"But it's the giii-" Hikaru started. "Wait, but if I say no I can't see the boys side. So fine. But if your names not on a door, you have to knock first before you can come in, capiche? Except Ai-chan."
"Including Ai-chan," Rei corrected. "Otherwise poor Shuichi-kun is going to get ideas once he... starts showing up."
"Point. Um, sorry Ai-chan..."
"No offense taken," Ai said with a shrug. "But you guys are going to have to deal with my snoring. Let's do the boys side first so we can give Rantaro-kun some rest?"
Ai knocked on the boys side of the dorms. "Rantaro-kun?" She pressed her ear to the door. "He says we can all come in. He's just reading."
Ai opened the boys door and blinked a little, and the rest of the group piled in. Four bunk beds, plus a recliner with a weird set of claws around where someone's neck would go (K1-b0's charger?), a couple of sofas, a big bookshelf, and doors marked "showers" "toilets" "changing space" sat on the back wall. Two bunk beds were on each side of the long wall, head to head, with two chests of drawers at each end of the set. No names were written, but it was pretty clear whose was whose.
"I guess this one is mine and Daisuke's," Ai commented. The upper half of the bunk had plaid sheets, and a small bookshelf bolted into the wall with a reading light. "Mystery novels gives it away, ha. And I guess these photos represent Shuichi's family?"
The lower bunk had tons of junk tacked to the wall the bunk jutted against. A clown mask, and a photo of ten people in matching white uniforms and masks, though most of them had them partially off their faces and smiling. A bunch of cyphers, hastily scrawled and tacked up with pins in the shape of dice, a whiteboard with some diagrams for a remote-controlled camera, and a printout of some code.
"That's the source code for the virus that took down the Iranian nuclear reactors..." K1-b0 mused. "Please, I beg do not mess with my programming, though I suppose I should be asking that of Kokichi-kun and not you."
"Those are supposed to be my ringleaders?" Daisuke said, carefully removing the tack holding it in place and pulling it to him. "Everyone's young," he added, "I didn't expect them to all be kids."
"Well, you're an ultimate, so your character probably gathered them up," Rantaro supplied, resting on his bed. He was on the adjoining top bunk, his area decorated with maps and a ton of small girls. "Don't get any ideas," he said pointing to the photos, "they're supposed to be my sisters."
"Twelve though?"
"And I'm lucky 13," Rantaro replied, turning sideways. "Jun's bunk is below mine if that's not obvious."
Indeed, there was a tennis racquet hung up, and a slew of trophies topping one of the drawers sets on the far side. Daisuke noted that one of the far bunks was decorated identically top and bottom across from his with insect specimens- probably both the Gontas. No family photos though. Which meant that the final bunk with a bookcase and gilded sword on the bottom and NASA posters up top were Jiro's and Ichiro's respectively.
Daisuke went to the set of drawers that were his and Ai's. It was hard to tell from the decorations on top whose set was whose, crime novels, a small enigma machine, a luminoil kit- fine line between detective and criminal and all that. He took a gamble at the one on the right side, only to find a binder of YuGiOh cards and some case files. Nope, that one was Ai's. He opened the top shelf of the other, and found a whoopee cushion, water pistols, playing cards, handcuffs, lock picks, bobbly pins, needles, and some sleight of hand magic tricks, along with his e-reader and a Sudoku book.
Yeah, that one was his, he noted, shutting it quickly.
"Hey, Daisuke, let's give Rantaro some peace of mind, you can rifle through your stuff when we're done." Jiro smiled and pointed back to the door to the common room.
"Yeah, sure," Daisuke said, slamming the drawer shut and hurrying to follow them.
The girl's side was set up like a mirror image to the boy's, minus the recliner, and just as easy to tell whose space would be whose.
China plates and a cross stitch half in progress? Ririn, on the bottom bunk with some… very avant-garde art above it for Jenny's artist top of their drawers were just as split between a brush rack and watercolors on one side, and cookbooks stop a doily on the other.
The next bunk was Rei and Natsuko's- the bottom was Rei's, and she looked taken aback.
"These aren't staged photos. I brought these," she said, pointing to a corkboard pinned up with photos of an orphanage full of children. "And the paper ropes and cranes were gifts from the kids." She frowned a little, touching a daisy chain hanging from the underside of Natsuko's bunk above hers, adorned with fairy lights, hanging over her sleeping space. "I guess I won't be changed that much… I wonder, really."
"You may not, but I don't know half these anime," Natsuko said, looking at the upper part of the bunk, plastered with anime and game references. They'd even snuck in some design documents from the first Danganronpa video game, marked up with red lines denoting where to place seams or gathers.
Facing the pair of bunks were Maiya's and Ace's. Maiya's on bottom, with sheet music and concert playbills, and Ace's even messier than Daisuke's, her part of the wall literally invisible under half-finished invention diagrams, plus…
"Oh, those are some of my design documents," K1-b0 noted. "Though they're quite out of date. That is unmistakably the Professor's handwriting- erm, Iidabashi, not Arukawa."
And then the last bunk. Himiko's was up top, neatly organized with posters of Houdini and other famous magicians, and a rack of small props and sleight of hand tricks, like what Daisuke found in his drawer.
Tenko's had a Buddhist prayer book, a shelf with implements for preparing traditional green tea, and a hand-painted fan with a sutra written on it, as well as a second shelf for a small inductive incense burner like the one Daisuke had been using for memory recollection. "Tenko, are you a Buddhist nun?" Himiko asked her. Tenko shook her head no, and finally showed everyone her sheet.
"Ohhhh, aikido," she replied knowingly. "And mostly raised in a temple."
"I took karate as a child," Ririn supplied. "Though I'm not sure I remember all that much."
"Uh, don't look at me," Rei said, embarrassed. "I only do naginata. I don't think polearms are in aikido, just bare hands and occasionally boken, right? Don't worry, we're all in this together."
Tenko nodded, signing furiously to Natsuko.
"She's really tired and wants to sleep. She came here all the way from Okinawa this morning."
"Um, hey, Tenko-chan? This might be a weird request, but can I use your incense and burner? I pray for my parents every night," Daisuke asked a bit sheepishly. It wasn't untrue, he just had ulterior motives.
"Our stuff's ours for a reason, I'd buzz the staff and ask if you can get your own," Toshiro replied. "And honestly, after today, I just want a hot shower and sleep, too."
"Oh yeah, point," Hikaru mentioned, before climbing up her bunk and pressing her own button.
"Hikaru-chan?" the other end asked.
"How did you kno- wait it's my bunk, uh, can I get a sign language book please?"
"You'll have it in the morning, is that okay?"
"Uh, wow, yeah." She turned to face everyone. "I guess Rantaro wasn't joking around. I'm going to shower and rest too, can we kick out the boys for now?"
"Slumber party?" Ririn asked.
"Sounds good by me," Maiya agreed. "Gentlemen, shoo, we're having girl time."
Ai bowed, unhooking her brother's hat from her belt to put it on her head and tip it. "I take my leave, fair ladies."
Ichiro groaned looking in the direction of Daisuke and Ai's bunk. "See, now, we can't do anything fun," he muttered.
"Look, I'm going to take a shower, you can take care of yourself and talk about sports or whatever machismo thing you expect to do," Ai hissed back. "If you're going to complain, do it quieter. Rantaro-kun is asleep already and Toshiro and Jun just told you they're hitting the hay once they're done. She opened and closed the left hand drawers, then the right.
"Right's yours, my tablet's in the left set," Daisuke said, laying on his bed and looking at one of the ciphers tacked to his part of the wall, before pressing his own button to ask for incense.
"S-sorry, but your character doesn't have anyone close to them that passed away, so it would contradict your character once you… converted over. If someone who has a character that lost a family member wanted to pray together, that would work, if you wanted."
"Jiro-kun, you said your character's sis is dead, right?" Daisuke hissed so as not to wake Rantaro. Tactlessly hissed, but still.
"You can pray with me, I should probably learn how," he hissed back.
"Jiro-kun'll help," he supplied back to the intercom.
"Fair, we'll leave it in the common room."
"Thanks, Jiro-kun," Daisuke said, once he'd ended the call. Ai had already headed to shower, and Daisuke rifled through his own chest of drawers for pajamas to do the same.
None of the clothes were his. On a hunch, he peeked at the drawers on the right side. The top drawer, as he'd seen earlier, was hobby type stuff.
Yeah, they'd given Ai jeans, slacks, button downs- guy's clothes. No wonder she'd been flipping through them both trying to figure out what was hers. He shut her drawers closed, and went back into his for something to sleep in. Clearly Kokichi was a sharper dresser than he was, or at the very least, could afford better clothes.
The showers were private, completely sealed off mini rooms, with a shower and a drying area, plus a giant open onsen style tub in the back, which, to his surprise, K1-b0 was in the process of filling.
"Who wanted a bath?" Daisuke asked.
"I did. Heat expands metal and I can't move my knee properly to oil it. I'm rated IP 6X apart from ingression via mouth- erm, I'm waterproof if I keep my mouth shut."
"….huh."
"Care to join me? Hot water is relaxing for people, no?"
"I need to get cleaned off first, if I did. I'm not going to dirty up fresh bathwater."
"Oh… I did not realize you are supposed to wash prior to bathing, I'll need to find some isopropyl and a rag…"
"Well, you don't sweat, do you? Just I dunno, put your legs in to heat up, it's not like you get dirty the same way we do…"
"No, if you're supposed to wash before entering, the same rules ought to apply to me. I guess I'll have to do this tomorrow. I could still have bacteria or dirt on my chassis too, you know…" K1-b0 almost sounded like he wanted to get dirty the same way humans did. Daisuke actually felt bad for suggesting he just use the tub.
"Why don't you ring the staff for some? If that's how you wash yourself there's probably already some in here."
"Oh! I didn't even think to look!" K1-b0 sounded excited, as he ran with a start, wobbled, and tripped. Dausuke flung his head to the sound of the crash.
"…help…"
Keisuke had to haul K1-b0 off the floor and onto his charging dock, and once K1-b0's head was clamped in place, Keisuke pressed down hard on the back of his neck. K1-b0 went limp immediately, the light in his eyes going out completely.
"Sleep mode? Does K1-b0 sleep?" Daisuke asked, concerned.
"No, I shut him off. He was starting to panic again. Let him charge. I'd rather have the Professor look at his knee. Personally, I don't think he's ready yet. His fine motor skills are good, his ambulation needs work. Go shower, and go to bed. His AI is back on in the lab no doubt, but he can't panic enough to fry the supercomputer in there. It'll give him some time to chill out," Keisuke's words were measured. "Look, he even has a hunk of bathroom tile lodged in his thigh. He's like my little brother. I know he can't feel physical pain, but he can worry, and when he worries, I do too."
As if on cue, the call button in the corner- Daisuke assumed it was meant for K1-b0 to reach even while in his dock, lit up.
"K1-b0 is back in the computer, what happened?" asked a feminine voice.
"Hey Mori-chan, he fell and busted up his leg. I turned him off so he wouldn't short circuit," replied Keisuke. "let him cool off in there for a while?"
"It's that bad?" K1-b0's voice, a bit canned and far off.
"It's easily fixed but everyone is tired, K1-b0, and I don't want to mess it up."
"I… do tend to overreact a little," K1-b0's voice said. "If I promised to stay in my dock, could you turn me back on?"
"No moving around, no panicking, and then yes. I can get you a reading tablet or a handheld game console to play while we sleep."
"I… I'd appreciate that."
"Hang on, I'm powering you up and…" Keisuke pressed hard on K1-b0's off switch. His eyes flickered to white, before the pupils and irises loaded in. "…there. You throw a tantrum like a toddler. I know you're only about four, but you need to reign it in a little."
K1-b0's face glowed red.
"But, hey, that means you're expressing your emotions like a human does. But the difference between a little kid and an adult is knowing how to correctly manage those feelings. You're not going to mature as an AI if you can't."
K1-b0's face grew redder. "So that was… like a human?"
"Exactly like one. But a preschooler. You can get upset, or angry, or both at once, but you need to manage it, too."
"I… I will!" K1-b0 replied brightly, before a pillow was thrown in their direction.
Ichiro groaned. "Didn't someone earlier tell me to tone it down? Now I'm trying to sleep and you keep yapping."
"Oh, sorry, Ichiro-kun, I'll cease talking. May… may I have something to do while I wait?"
"Let me get you my reading tablet," Daisuke said, dropping his still unused pajamas on a sofa and grabbing it for him.
Yawning, he passed K1-b0 the device, picked up his clothes, and finally made his way to the shower.
One hell of a day, he thought as Ai and Toshiro came out of the shower room, completely unaware.
"Who half-filled the tub?" Ai hissed at Daisuke.
"Just… don't ask, I'll drain it."
