Day 6: (Ab)normal Days

White turned around.

"Y-yeah, this isn't the w-way out. W-well, I guess it is. There's another d-door in here that leads to the outs-side. We can s-show you!"

With that, they both turned around, hand in hand, and Black's eyes glowed bright - like red flashlights. It laughed. "S-since my eyes are useless, they're f-flashlights. So White can s-see better!"

They walked in. It wasn't a big room - maybe a bit smaller than the main office itself, and coated with a fine layer of dust. There was an astonishingly large cobweb in one of the corners.

"W-we're designed to w-work off each other. But t-they decided that friendship isn't a v-virtue they wanted to t-teach."

Black shined his eyes on the door - it was as normal of a door as they'd ever seen. "H-here it is. T-that's the way out. I w-wouldn't run for it, t-though. If there's m-more than four left, there'll be m-monobears everywhere out there. L-like, at l-least thirty. All w-with bombs."

Black snickered. "W-we know the way past, t-though."

Herbert trailed behind, ready to make a break for it if something fishy started. He could care less about the damn bears, even if they looked adorable, but at the same time he felt like this was some trap.

Adda entered the room with Marci.

"Davey-David, I mean, told us we didn't have much time.  If you show us the way and we leave, can he and another friend still come with us?"

Eloise walked slowly into the room, the tensions rising. David wasn't back yet. Neither was Laura. Few questions were being answered and they just kept piling up.

"I-If you know, g-go ahead." She found their speech addicting, "After...you?" She waved her arms towards the door, as if presenting it.

"Upupupupu! By the long run, I mean the rest of your life! You can help us with all of our plans...you'd fit perfectly, I'm sure! A true icon of despair!" The message projected on the screen, and the bear said it out loud.

The bear laughed, then stopped. It spoke out loud, but no words projected.  "Oh. What's that? Something's turning on. Two things." It's face went blue. "Not THOSE two bastards. It can't be those two."

The mechanical bear growled.

"It's those two."

It was precisely at that point that David appeared in the door to the auditorium.

Laura saw Monobear talking to itself, but the words didn't reach her ears. Or rather, they were lost somewhere in her head. She didn't even notice David at the doorway. She was starting to panic. "What are you talking about?! What does despair have to do with anything? I mean yeah, it sucks that you killed some of us, but what are you getting at!"

"For Christ's sake, can you just give a straight answer?!"

The two stood there for a second, accessing their data memory banks. They almost seemed to shut off - Black's flashlight eyes turned off, sending the room into darkness. Then they flickered back on. 

"We j-just checked." Black said, explaining their sudden silence to the non-robots in the room. "N-no, it's a one way t-trip. Once the four of you g-go, we can't do it again. They'll p-patch up the mistake as fast as possible. Faster than we could d-do it again."

White looked to the door, and Black looked a few inches above Adda's head. "D-do you wanna go, s-still? If n-not, we can w-wait. It'll be more d-dangerous with more people esc-caping, but...p-possible."

Adda showed more determination then she had through most of the ordeal.

"We need to wait for them.  To leave them behind here would be worse then actually killing them- to be stuck here, with no way out, with Monobear and whatever goons are running this thing."

She turned to look at the other three in the room. 

"Do we agree?"

Having David in the same room as him now was a surefire way to probably stain the walls with blood. Probably.

"David said 'e'd 'andle it. 'E must got a secret passage or somethin'." He doubted it. He was gonna die because of the stupid fake driver and his weird cute bears. The sinking feeling was slowly mounting on him, yet he still clung to the hope he'd get out alive. He felt like a cornered animal. "Ah say we go."

"Hey Monobro!" he shouted across the room, slowly walking up without a care in the world. He didn't seem the least afraid - he was smirking, for god's sake. The bear's eyes were on him like hawks.

"You trying to despair her up too? It ain't gonna work." he took off his hat and threw it - it landed on one of the chairs in the front row. If he remembered correctly, that was the one he sat at the first day.

He shook his head. He didn't like thinking about the first day.

"She's a bit more stubborn then I am." He casually tapped Laura's shoulder, hoping to not freak her out.

Eloise's headache came back. She didn't want to have to make the choice. She didn't want to be the tiebreaker. She turned just slightly to Marci.

"David seemed to have a plan. Then again, it didn't seem like the best plan." She paused, "Do I trust Laura in his hands? No, not really." She sighed, "We could wait, maybe, five more minutes?"

She looked at Duobear, "Would it be possible to...break in from outside? Save them after we're out?"

Laura noticed the hat -David's hat- reach the front of the room, but didn't quite piece it all together until she got the tap on her shoulder. Totally ignoring Monobear's presence, she addressed her classmate. "Hey Rivs. Don't bother answering, but what the heck is going on right now?" She shook her head.

"Forget it, forget it. Where is everyone?"

She looked over at Adda and nodded. "We should wait, I think." 

She looked down at the two bears - they scared her a bit, but seemed trustable enough. As in, more trustable than Monobear.

"Who knows how capable David actually is? Maybe he has no idea what he's doing, or maybe he does. We should wait either way, just to be safe."

Adda turned to Herbert, a slightly apologetic look in her eyes.

"You were closer to David than anyone, so it makes sense that you'd have a strong opinion.  As much as it's good to think he's planned ahead, we have no idea how much of David Richmond we know.  Sorry, we're giving him at least a little time."

David looked down at her, trying to figure out a sane method of communication. He couldn't figure one out that would work in time, so he looked at Monobear.

"Okay, here's a deal," he had his arms on the handles to Laura's wheelchair, "You let her go, I'll tell you my idea for the finale. It'll work wonders. You'll never be prouder of yourselves or whatever." He took a deep breath. "Just let them go. Then I'll spill."

He didn't want to do this; that was a certainty. But it would keep the five of them safe. So he had to.

Laura looked up at David. He seemed to be talking to Monobear, but she predictably couldn't tell what he was saying. Laura was no lip reader, that was for sure.

"I don't know what you're even loving saying but you tell 'im, Rivs! By the way, you know Herbert went psycho right? He's trying to say you're a fraud or something. I'd be careful around him. Never trusted the ass."

Black nodded. "We'll wait, then. I d-dunno what Davey told you, but we can w-wait a little while. T-that's probably f-for the better, actually." The bear gave a mechanical laugh. "I'll tell him we're waiting, then! He won't be happy about this, b-but he told us to listen to you all first."

The bears did nothing for a second, and then a "Message Sent!" could be heard from Black's voice processor. Except it seemed to be the generic voice that's on every phone.

"We s-sent it straight to his ID. H-he'll know in a s-second, t-then he'll come here and w-we'll all escape!" Black laughed, and White smiled.

Adda sat down against one of the walls.

"Well um, I guess while we wait... we can chat?"  She looked towards Duobear.

"So, did you guys know what was going on here?  Or were you in the dark the whole time?"

The bear looked at him, a frown on it's face. "First, you wake up those dumb prototypes, now, you come here with a deal." It's red eye glowed for a second. "A promising deal, if we're thinking the same thing. Which we tend to do, don't we? I had a plan for it...it'll be great. Truly worth every loss!"

The bear looked at Laura and laughed. "Oh, oh my! Upupupupu...!"

A message was projected into the screen. "Herbert wasn't lying, Laura! David works for me! He always had! He's...he's a mastermind, I guess! Upupu!"

Laura stared at the screen, dumbfounded. Slowly but surely, her expression hardened. She turned to look at David. "You..." She was visibly shaking, and her hands clenched into fists. "That means you're responsible for..."

Before she even thought about what she was doing, her elbow shot out behind her, aiming for David's gut. "You killed Asher! And my brother! You motherfucker!" She was screaming, and her headache along with the effort nearly made her faint.

"To be honest, I have no clue what's going on!" Eloise began, not feeling inclined to relax just yet, "All I know is that there's an open door and I want the hell out."

She squinted at duobear a bit, "So, tell us about...Davey," the fact any sort of bear seemed to know him well struck her as off. She didn't exactly catch much else over the sound of imminent escape.

The bears looked at Adda, and then at each other.

"It would be b-better to say we knew what was going on here. We got shut down right before the fun s-started!" Black seemed to pout in a fairly realistic way. "We know mostly everyt-thing that happened bef-forehand, though. We were the center of a lot-t of it, after all!" Black laughed and patted White on the head. 

"So if you have any ques-stions about how this game s-started, go ahead and ask! We don't feel like hid-ding secrets." The bears looked around. "Any takers-s?

The bears looked at Eloise and lit up. "D-Davey, huh? He's the best!" The black bear cheered, sitting down with it's white twin. "I g-guess he indirectly built us, with help from them of c-course! H-he had the idea of the double bears, s-since he didn't want to completely rip off the first one...I t-think that's how the story goes, anyways. We're r-rusty on history before our time, upupu!"

Black looked at Eloise with a big grin. "D-don't worry about Davey, though. H-he'll help you. He's got a g-good heart, s-somewhere." It laughed a bit. "Mayb-be he's finally finding it."

Adda paused for a moment.

"Well... what's it like outside?  David said it's different... bad different.  But... how bad?  Are our families really dead...or in danger?"

She paused again.

"And what is David's connection?  You make it sound like he wasn't a student or anything... that he works for someone?"

Herbert realized Adda's question echoed some of the ones he waneted. Might as well get to specifics now.

"How much did... David participate in? Was he really the mastermind? The one who worked everything out? Or was he kept in the dark for most of it?" And with a sinking feeling he thought he was being rhetorical. If he built the goddamned v1 of Monobear, he was was hip-deep in it. He shivered.

Duobear looked to Adda and shivered. "Y-you all don't know?"

The two looked at each other and sighed in the best way a mechanical bear can. "Everyone - or m-most - g-got this t-thing called the Despair bug. And it k-kinda d-doesn't let go."

The black bear went quiet for a second, then added. "T-they really like you all. It's f-funny for them for p-people to hope and be happy. They like watching you guys get c-crushed." They weren't laughing anymore. 

"It's s-scary. We're glad we can't leave."

They turned to Herbert.

"How involved was R-Richy? W-well, it was h-his idea!" they shook their heads. "T-that's a longer story. The D-Despaired people m-might have been bad, b-but those that provided for them were a p-pinch worse. D-Davey was one of t-those people. S-so I guess you could call him sane. B-barely."

"He d-did a lot. He d-designed us. D-designed his weird River p-persona. D-designed the main office, too. He h-hid this place!" they referenced the room they were in. "B-but there were a group in charge. They did t-the final monobear design, the executions - all of y-yours were pretty terrifying, actually, g-good job avoiding them - and t-the motives. They hid them from poor Davey." they stopped for a second, then explained.

"W-we call them...them, yeah? No one knows t-there names - they h-hide them." Black's eyes twinkled. "W-we know initials, though. W-we hacked the system one day. They n-never found out."