trueultimatedespair | super duper nasty aftermath

"Upupupupu."

She laughed right in the face of nobody at all. Then she coughed in the face of nobody at all, and rolled over on her stomach in front of nobody at all and she threw up all over nobody at all.

Her crown had fallen from her head. Her Monokuma was in arms' reach. More than a handful of bones had probably taken some extreme baseball damage. Odds on a concussion were good - no, excellent. Especially after the firetruck. Handful of minor burns, she'd guess.

Thanks to the pain and the sick sensation in the pit of her bleeding organs, she felt very conspicuously alive. So that was a thing. Had the crusher failed after all? She thought it had stopped for a second, but it was only a second. It had definitely started moving again.

So...

Either Junko was amazing enough to survive her own Ultimate Punishment, or she had seriously lost her touch at killing people. She was definitely amazing, but so amazing not even she could kill herself?

That was like, a koan, right?

"Did I just get blueballed?" she gasped out at nobody at all, sitting up for a moment before falling back on her ass. The wirepuller glanced around at the room around her in a daze...some kind of warehouse, dimly lit by a few flickering bulbs. Didn't look like anyone really used it for anything anymore; the only crates lying around were covered with dusty tarps.

It felt like it took everything Junko had in her to stand and two or three times as much to make her way to a door, and ten or twenty times as much as that to drag the heavy warehouse shutter open.

What kind of shitshow is this? There's no button to just friggin' open it? What is this, 1950?

It took all of one look out into the Nexus's industrial district to confirm what Junko already suspected, deep in her twisted heart: fucking shenanigans.

This wasn't Hell. This wasn't Hope's Peak. It probably wasn't even Japan.

There would be no Ultimate Despair here, most likely. She was on her own, for the first time in...well, her entire life, really.

...Her last mutual killing game ended in her despair, and for that, she earned the despair of death. It was her first taste of failure, of defeat, in her entire life.

"...Upupu."

The despair of death that she had worked so hard to try not to earn amounted to nothing in the end, a paper tiger that came with a few bruises and ruptures and nothing more.

And now, she knew the despair of loss - the loss of her ambitions, her resources, the lifetime she'd spent on the Ultimate Despair. None of them mattered here; she was nothing but a broken and battered girl that woke up in a shitty 1950's warehouse, entirely alone in the world aside from a stupid bear doll.

"Upupupupu."

It was bliss. To lose everything, even her treasured despair of death, was an orgasmic bliss that sent Junko Enoshima tumbling to the ground again in a fit of manic giggling.

"Upupupupupupupupu!"

But almost more than that, the fact that she was still here meant that hope had failed to crush her. She could start again - start anew on an entire new world of despair.

That was the kind of girl Junko Enoshima was, after all.

---

A few days later, she had managed to pull herself together and patch herself up. Nobody had come looking in the warehouse, and nobody had complained when she spraypainted a giant black and white bear head on the door. If she weren't sleeping on a tarp (something that was more boring and irritating than despair-inducing), it might almost be homey.

Well, one thing at a time.