Roleplay / Trustfell Round Six

"Guilty or innocent, it really doesn't matter."

—Jericho

The sixth round of Trustfell.

Warning: all spoiler are unmarked.

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• Accent Relapse: Celia is found out in the third trial when her accent slips out while she's imitating Fern.
• Achilles in His Tent: Tarrlok locks himself away after his final memory is returned to him.
• Alternate Self: Everyone is this to their original rounds' selves, but Jericho treats them like they're the same exact people. They are and they aren't. Lisbeth had Rachel find those exact people, with the same souls and same energy signatures, but Cascada's Time Travel created an offshoot timeline, so she found those same versions of the characters but inadvertently made new ones out of them in making a timeline where this was the murdergame they all went to instead.
• Americans Are Cowboys: Discussed. Rin learns that American colleges will often have campus bars or at least have some bars nearby, and her mind automatically goes to whether this stereotype is just as true.
• And I'm the Queen of Sheba: When Elda insists she's a normal human, Caren replies, "and I'm actually a penguin."
• And I Must Scream: Terumi alludes to the souls inside Kimblee's stones being like this. He doesn't care too much about it, just wants to freak out Sayaka.
• Anti-Climax: Knowing that she wants a big, flashy execution like the others, Hilda decides to mock Aligula by giving her a straightforward and comparatively underwhelming death from a "broken heart" via Misa's Death Note.
• Arc Symbol: The same circle-over-crescent symbol Round 1 had, in a different colour.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Luca asks Rachel, "When will this all stop?" after arguing that the slippery slope Jericho/Lisbeth's gone down will mean she'll just keep killing.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Sayaka says she deserves to suffer but doesn't know what she wants, Rin's reply makes her realize that she's been looking this whole time for a purpose now that she's free from the constraints of being an Idol Singer.

• Back for the Finale: All the player characters in Round 6 are returning characters from the previous five rounds. Even one of the Coordinators appears to be R3's deadland NPC, Alena.

• Be Careful What You Wish For: Discussed when talking about how motives could go wrong. Tarrlok says stories like that are common.
• Bedsheet Ghost: Orihime has this as a Halloween costume and Aligula threatens to make others wear bedsheets if they don't already put on costumes too.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: The Coordinators are a duo, one working on the ground and the other behind the scenes.
• Bittersweet Ending: Everyone is alive and there will never be a Deadly Game again, but an entire world is staying destroyed to ensure that, and the sisters and their friends can't have their home back because of it.

• Blanket Fort: Fern and Sayaka build one to take their minds off their problems.
• A Bloody Mess: The eighth investigation involves red paint made to look at first like blood.
• Brick Joke: "Food in eat place" as an afterparty invitation returns for the last afterparty after being used earlier in the round.
• Butterfly of Doom: Lisbeth's goal is to find the source of the cataclysm and kill it in the past to undo the disaster. Every little change has a huge effect on the world here, as discussed in the last trial.
• Cabin Fever: Adelina and Susan try to help everyone stave this off by painting landscapes and putting them on the walls.
• Call-Back: There are a lot to previous rounds. For instance:
  • Orihime wonders if there's a Zombie Apocalypse outside the walls. In Round 1, there was.
  • Punishments and executions are all carried out with the weapons and powers of other Trustfell player characters.
  • Jericho keeps making cryptic comments that only make sense to those who read the previous rounds, like calling Blue a traitor (she was a mole in Round 1), referencing Sigrun's group-endangering decisions in Round 2, and calling Zagi a mess when he's not even here. Turns out she has a hit list including every villain in the game's history.
  • Remember when Walt nonlethally stabbed Fern in Round 3? That's the exact same place her body, taken over by the bacteria inside her, kills him from.
  • Susan calls Kimblee a wanker before she votes for him to die, just like her Round 1 counterpart did before she killed his.
  • Rin gives the same "You bastard!" and charge at the culprit of the sixth trial that Sakura did in her sixth trial, and for the same reason (albeit this one killed her father, not her sister).
  • Just like in her original round, Kyrie lures victims with a trap that includes another red liquid posing as blood.
  • The mastermind's in-person introduction starts out with a summation that attempting friendship and trying to appeal to basic decency won't work and that the mastermind wants everyone dead. Sounds a lot like Round 1's Conductor, for whom that was very true.
• Cerebus Retcon: To all the way back in Round 1. Lisbeth leaving to work for Dio wasn't just a silly ending gag. It gave her the power to run countless versions of every Trustfell character to date through murder sims that could only ever bad-end.
• Chaos Architecture: This version of Graceside grows and changes, just like the artificial settings of rounds two and five, and isn't an exact copy of round one's Graceside.
• Color Character: It's a convention of them. Blue and Weiss are both among the player characters, Silver is mentioned often in endgame and occasionally by Blue, Hilda, who once used the alias "Noir," appears later on, Walter's surname is White, and Fern Green's first and last name both reference the colour she is.
• Courteous Canadian: Tabby assumes that Estelle must be from Canada because she's very polite and Apologizes a Lot.
• Cradling Your Kill: Alena will often blankly kneel by the body of someone she's just executed and sit with them, petting their hair and holding them.
• Creepy Souvenir: Alena keeps Caren's Soul Jar and wears it around after executing her. Aligula does take some body parts from her victims, but rather than keep them, she sets up a scavenger hunt to distract people investigating the scene and makes them look for all of them.
• Curse Cut Short: Yosuke is about to say "ass," looks at Susan, and thinks better of it.
• Cut-and-Paste Note: The seventh case's culprit leaves a few at the crime scenes to mock investigators.
• Declaration of Protection: Elda and Alex declare that they won't let Sayaka die. This only gets Alex killed alongside Sayaka.

• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Adelina is a medieval princess, so this is normal to her, but it shocks Luca to learn that she got married at 16.
• Due to the Dead: Cabanela lights candles for each of the dead.
• Dysfunction Junction: Everyone in Graceside was a bit of a mess before this place, and the game just made it worse.
  Kimblee's Narration: "do you ever just pause and think, just
  man
  everyone in this room has problems
  because everyone in this room has problems"
• Exact Words:
  • Tarrlok's secret reveal says that he's responsible for his brother's death. He believes this to just be compounding Survivor Guilt for the disappearance, without all his memories. In truth, his brother's presumed death wasn't his actual one, where Tarrlok committed Murder-Suicide on purpose.
  • "Taken care of personally" sounded like Jericho had betrayed and killed Dio. Nope. When Lisbeth, Jericho's true identity, is pressed, she has to admit that she let him go due to a case of Mad Love.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Rideaux didn't expect "the Maxwell" to be a Stripperriffic, out-of-touch ditzy girl.
• Fill It with Flowers: Sayaka interprets Kimblee giving her his Philosopher's Stones and telling her to use them when she's figured out this alchemy thing as this and swears she'll make the world beautiful. Given who we're talking about, he probably did not want this.
• Foreign Queasine: Susan, who's English, considers chicken and waffles to be a disgusting combination only an American could stomach.
• For Your Own Good: Kimblee claims that this is why he drugged Archer with sleeping pills.
• French Jerk: Tabby's impression of France is that it's "where fancy people live and judge nonfancy people while they eat, like, cheese and snails."
• Funny Background Event: During the final trial, while Lisbeth is arguing with the Participants and pontificating about evil and the events that led up to this point, Rachel can be seen standing at her podium and vacantly using Blue's Ditto as a stress toy.
• Girlish Pigtails: Rin has them, Caren occasionally, Chie dares Tarrlok to do it once, and Lisbeth combines them with Motherly Side Plait.
• Given Name Reveal: A few for both first and last names. First, we learn that Alena's surname is "Larimore," indicating that she's related to Hilda. Then, when it turns out that "Hilda" and "Alena" were actually both Glory/Michaela in disguise and the remaining Participants never knew the real ones, we also find out that Glory/Michaela's real name is Rachel. Finally, Jericho's real name is revealed: Lisbeth Larimore. Yup, turns out "Lisbeth Benn" was another pseudonym and she's really the third sister.
• Hard-to-Light Fire: Fire behaves bizarrely in this version of Graceside. Even a fire that would normally burn the school to the ground is localized to one room and goes out mysteriously, and burned-in graffiti is strangely controlled.
• Heartbreak and Ice Cream: While she doesn't get dumped, Sayaka holes herself up in her room and eats ice cream for lunch after remembering the sealing of the school.
• Help Face Turn: While Rachel can't disobey the Larimore sisters and must treat anything they tell her as truth, she admits that she fears how obsessive Lisbeth's gotten with ignoring inconvenient facts and trying to solve everything with mass murder. Thus, she starts up a final investigation, hoping that the Participants can do something to help.
• Hypocritical Humour: Jean remarks that Aligula has Skewed Priorities when she's disappointed that Alena isn't a hot guy, only to reflect to himself that he's glad she's a hot girl.
• Iconic Item: Many, as always, appear in the regains — this time, including items from previous characters. Rin, for instance, immediately recognizes Sakura's ribbon. Also, Lisbeth and company collect and store the Iconic Items of former masterminds (though Archer's was technically not his) and people who gave them trouble.
• I'm Not Here to Make Friends: Blue tells Sayaka this, even if this is much more than a harmless game. Some of the others agree that you're on your own in the end.
  "You can't trust anyone in a place like this. People are mean and cruel, and later, you'll learn that they were just having a blast at your expense. You can like people all you want, but look out for number one."
• I'm Standing Right Here: Rideaux when Tabby derails a meeting to make fun of his name.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: After the stress of the preceding weeks, once the bar unlocks, Fern makes a beeline in there to chug one bottle and hoard more for herself.
• Intentionally Awkward Title: Averted; while the working title was Trustfell 6: Shit, We're Out of Die Hard Movies, the eventual title is just Trustfell Round 6.
• I Surrender, Suckers: Kimblee looks like he's going to calmly accept his own execution, only to pull Alena down and disarm her. Unfortunately for him, she still kills him.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Yuri accuses Jericho of this when he pleads with Rachel to let them try to reason with their captor, and the others agree.
• Karmic Death: Fern's own infected body is what kills Walt, growing from the same spot where his Round 3 counterpart stabbed hers. Also, what Jericho believes awaits the four masterminds, even if it wasn't technically them running the other rounds.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: Kyrie plots to do this so she can give herself another chance at life at another her's expense.
• Klingon Promotion: Hilda is introduced killing Alena and taking her job.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Mikoto says that most people who call themselves wise are idiots.
• Last-Minute Hookup: Elda and Aligula, as well as Yuri and Rideaux, in the ending log.
• Last-Second Word Swap: In the final log, Fern calls Lisbeth "kind of a diiiiiiiiiid you need anything," combining this with Curse Cut Short.
• Letter Motif: Pointed out with Jericho and Johanna. Turns out Johanna is not Jericho, but she is Jericho's Right-Hand Cat.
• Marry Them All: Hibiki leaves a love letter for Rin, who is taken. Rin decides sharing might be a good idea.
• Mirroring Factions: Jean is suspicious of possible non-humans because they might be the human-eating monsters from his world. When this leads to Caren accidentally killing him, she admits that among the many factors that keep her people from revealing themselves are the legends humans tell about them. This includes real-world legends where humans can become immortal by killing and eating mermaids.
• Mirror Match: When executing Terumi, instead of using a non-represented previous round's character's weapon or ability, Alena pulls out the culprit's own.
• Misery Builds Character: Jericho actually mocks this idea. When the notion comes up that the torture of Graceside could foster redemption for its captives, he decides to target any would-be heroes with the next incentive threatening their worlds.
• Mood Whiplash: When the secrets motive actually follows through with showing all the living's secrets, after a cavalcade of horrible revelations, Aligula's Dark Secret comes out... she's actually a virgin.
• Neck Lift: During his execution, Kirei does this to Hilda to try and kill her. She responds by using 2003 Kimbley's ability to make him explosive and kills him with one well-placed kick.
• The Needs of the Many: Jericho/Lisbeth's motivation and the final choice: save the world but let the murdergames continue and erase everything that happened in all six rounds of Trustfell, or stop the games but let the world stay ruined. Adelina goes straight for the former choice, but the other survivors pick the latter after Tarrlok and Rin argue that the calamity, having been caused by the practice of kidnapping people from other worlds to kill each other, will only happen again.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Discussed when Sigrun finds out about the real Alena, though it doesn't happen, despite all the alternate selves in the plot.
• The Night That Never Ends: The enclosed sunroom on the roof never lets in any sun. While a city is visible, no matter when the characters go up, it's dark. This is a result of the cataclysm.
• Nothing Personal: Rideaux says this of everyone whose lives he put his own above after his secrets come out.

• Not Me This Time: Tabby when Blue, not her, steals the kitchen toaster.
• Odd Name Out: This is not named for Die Hardest, presumably as that is still in development.
• Oh, Crap!: Weiss when she mistakes one of the Coordinators' copied abilities for her own, and Aligula, to a lesser extent, when she accurately recognizes another of them.
• One-Steve Limit: Very narrowly enforced with Kirei and Kyrie.
• Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: Explored with the moral dilemma in the final trial. After the first phase has the Participants arguing for their own lives and solving the mystery of who triggered the calamity and the second debates whether Lisbeth should be spared, the third and final question asks whether the survivor pool will reset to before the calamity, saving the Larimore sisters' world but allowing the murdergame industry to continue and undoing the events of all six rounds of Trustfell, or whether they'll continue from After the End to shut down the industry, saving themselves as they are. While the second option would help people other than the leads, it's still a lot fewer people, many of whom the multiverse is better off without, so the focus is on this.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Largely averted. While Lisbeth paints the previous versions of the cast as a bunch of disasters, most of the cast is impressed, and Susan even says she wishes she'd done what R1 Susan had.
• Out-of-Character Alert: "Fern" is revealed to be Celia when her accent slips.
• Outside-Context Problem: Discussed. Susan asks if people from mundane worlds even stand a chance against a mastermind duo who won the Superpower Lottery, and Cabanela insists that they have to try anyway.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: Hibiki exclaims this to Rin when the latter tries to shoo her off from a body she's just found.
• Poor Communication Kills: Fern says that this is the leading cause of death in horror movies. It turns out to apply here, too, especially with everyone keeping their secrets close to themselves.
• Power Copying: Jericho and Alena (and, later, Hilda) execute or punish people by using previous rounds' characters' weapon preference (like Asgore's trident) or Signature Move (like Kira's Stand).
• The Punishment Is the Crime: Rin tells Sayaka that she can't condemn her like Sayaka feels she deserves for her crime at home, since Sayaka already died for it, but also, Rin thinks to herself, because the worst part would be having to live with it.
• Robot Buddy: The school's resident troublesome robot cat.
• Rousing Speech: When Elda defies Kyrie in the last player trial, both talking her down and giving the others hope for survival.
• Scary Scorpions: Susan proposes that Jericho will have a bunch of scorpions brought in to retaliate if they hide the dangerous chemicals.
• Signs of the End Times: Susan bemoans that people seem to take every new disease as one of these.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Alex, who herself hasn't broken as badly as her Round 5 counterpart did, tells Elda that just because they may all die doesn't mean that the good things, the relationships built in Graceside, can't still give hope.
  "If I resign myself to likelihoods or what others could consider inevitabilities, then I'm already dead."

• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Fern and Elda despise one another from day one and constantly take potshots at each other.
• Stealth Pun: Johanna, the robot cat that has strange abilities relating to her owner's Stand, can move between the living and dead layers of the simulation. Some of the characters realize the stealth pun and start making "Schroedinger's Cat" jokes.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Tabby attempts to exploit this by making food for everyone so they won't want to kill her.
• Tempting Fate: Elda and Yuri say writing in-case-I-die letters is this. They both quickly admit to having done it anyway.
• Think Nothing of It: Elda says she just did what she had to do after Yuri tells her she's done well by making Kyrie surrender rather than kill them all.
• This Bear Was Framed: Discussed in the third trial when talking about a severed arm being ripped off like a bear would do. Hibiki immediately jumps to the defence of the hypothetical bear.
• Time Travel: Unlike in Round 4, where it was just a Red Herring, Round 6 does heavily involve time travel. Lisbeth's Stand has caused her to loop endless murder exercises to kill groups of Participants again and again, and the final choice is whether or not to allow her to reset the timeline to before any of this ever happened.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Even Sigrun and Kimblee, the more unflappable of the cast, are dumbstruck by the sheer weirdness of Celia controlling the Fernslob.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: The first murder. Caren panics at a threat and shoves Jean away when he goes for her pendant, and he dies from the fall.
• Undead Tax Exemption: Tarrlok comments that getting established in another world would be "an administrative nightmare." He and many others end up moving into Elda's town anyway.
• Unexplained Recovery: How the mastermind's notes treat Hilda being Not Quite Dead after Archer assumed he'd killed her in the backstory of Round 2, as well as her revival after she was killed in Round 4. Players and readers, of course, do have the explanations, at least if they read Round 4.
• Unholy Matrimony: When Kirei and Kimblee talk about their similarities in the fourth trial, the rest of the cast starts to think this. As well, Terumi and Mikoto, who were each the Token Evil Teammate of their original survivor pools, get together here.
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Aligula theorizes that the Coordinators got all those other people's powers and weapons by killing them and absorbing their abilities. We know all their owners have been in murdergames before, and we discover that Lisbeth grabbed everyone again for more and killed them all, but that's not really how Rachel got their powers and weapons; it was just a matter of programming them in.
• Villain Has a Point: Jericho might be all too happy to kill people over it, but the final choice is hard because what the mastermind wants and what the Participants want could both be considered "the greater good."
• Villainous Breakdown: Lisbeth after the Participants figure out that Rachel pulling from an unstable world caused the cataclysm, rather than the person who was pulled from that world doing it.
• Wall of Text: Elda's In-Universe reaction to Kimblee's notes when Sayaka shows them to her. Her eyes glaze over almost immediately.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: Luca sarcastically comments that Archer must want a cookie for reluctantly putting in the bare minimum of participation at the fourth trial.
• Wham Episode: The mastermind trial was a cascade of revelations bringing up dangling plot threads from every single previous round, especially how it brings all six Mystery Women into the same round for the first time.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: We never do find out which world was the unstable one that brought the cataclysm, because we don't need to; the solution is that opening the portal to the world caused it, so the "one at fault" was Rachel or whoever's orders she was forced to act on, not the person who lived in that world.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Elda and Caren struggle with mistreatment for being inhuman, although the former is accepted by many of the characters. Celia (in Fern's body) argues that her thousands of bacteria deserve to live as well, to no one's agreement.
• Where It All Began: The setting returns to the first round's Graceside Prep, though it's a little different because it's a digital recreation.
• "Which Restroom?" Dilemma: Hibiki accidentally wanders into the men's room, happily greets Tarrlok (who was washing his hands), and still only notices where she is when she sees the urinals.
• Why Don't You Marry It?: Aligula accuses Archer of making bedroom eyes at the piano when he lingers there too long.
• Wrong Assumption: With how little Jericho likes to give the whole story, Cabanela and Kyrie end up assuming that Chie and Rideaux are targets of his "mastermind hunt," and a few think Sayaka could be one of the four, too. None of these characters are among the actual targets.
• Wrong Time-Travel Savvy: The final trial involves Lisbeth explaining how her Stand turns back time and creates offshoots. Some of the Participants have set, conflicting ideas about how it should work.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Elda reluctantly sort-of-halfway thanks a few of the human Participants, particularly Sayaka, for consoling her in the fourth trial. She still hates humans, but approves of these ones this time.
• You Are Not Alone: Commonly heard in a number of situations. For instance, Alex starts telling this to people when she sees them in pain, probably wanting them to turn out better than her ghosts, and Adelina tells a drunk Fern the same thing and confesses that she's scared too.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Sayaka starts to believe this when she falls into despair after the sixth trial.

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