Part 21: Planning Ahead

After that hit, I had completely blacked out. Everything I had been preparing for had gone to waste. Waking up in a cold sweat and painful headache which felt worse than before, I looked around in confusion. I was in my bed.

Wait? Please don’t tell me…

I looked at my phone as quickly as possible and sure enough I had blacked out and missed up to half of a day at the academy. Of course, of all the things I did yesterday, no one was going to wake me up today. I had even slept through the alarm.

The window was still open. No wonder it felt colder in my room. The temperature must have changed as soon as I decided to sleep at 4 AM. As I closed the windows, I began to get a bit suspicious.

With how bizarre everything was from dreaming, I pinched the back of my hand to make sure I was actually awake. Of course, this did hurt a bit but proved I was really here.

Unfortunately, being here meant I would have to make up for so many things. Of course the events that happened while I was sleeping seemed too bizarre to even happen. I was afraid of embarrassing myself in front of other people. I looked at the plans to catch the murderer on my desk.

It revealed that there was a certain section of the building that lined up similarly when turned at a 45 degree angle with the library’s maze inside the game. It was the kitchen room where the school’s professional chefs prepared our meals.

If this was true, maybe the dream I had was trying to tell me something about the cafeteria and its connection to figuring out why the murderer would be associated with that area. Maybe it was dwelling somewhere secret in that part of the building. In order for it to have remained there for as long as it had to have stayed, it would need ways to travel back and forth. There were many vent systems located in that area as well that could have worked to this person’s advantage.

The mystery murderer knew how to access both the public sewers and bathrooms, meaning it would need an underground hiding spot where it could meticulously monitor everything that was happening.

Could the UVOCA agents in disguise have been setting up multiple ways to frame the deaths as natural accidents while keeping everyone from figuring out what they were doing? Why would they target Dream Academy High? Along with that came the biggest question of all.

Were the writings hidden near the casualties trying to manipulate their next victims into making the wrong choices? It certainly developed some form of paranoia amongst anyone that ever heard of it. Perhaps just like how the Tales Of The Time Keeper book was mixing truths with the lie to keep everyone guessing, the conspiracies behind these five stories would apply equally.

As for Tartropolatté being a real place, I was still skeptical of this. Cherry told me that place existed. The only way to determine this with more safety precautions in mind would be to find an alternative to eating the cherry whole. Maybe cutting one into eight bits would give us both two chances to enter that world and back.

I decided to meet Cherry at Paradise Park around the same time like yesterday to discuss the new idea I had in mind.

Wearing a magenta sweater with the Candiere heart symbol on it, I brought a specially made knapsack from my grandparents that was passed down to me. Inside, a special set of tools would help prepare me for the trip.

All I would have to bring was a plastic butter knife, a blue folder with all of my important papers inside, two red permanent markers, my phone, a working backup flashlight with four extra AA batteries to spare, and my little Princess Candiere necklace.