LETTERS

[antitrust]

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[antitrust]

All of you remind me of people I used to work with.

[blazeit]

[ He sees what you did there, Conductor, and he would be more pissed if that didn't strike him as a... really weird thing to say. ]

Are your former coworkers all dead?
Did you... I don't know.... like them as people??

[antitrust]

They aren't all dead, no, though most of them are.

As for whether I liked them as people, not really. Not enough to kill them personally, if that's what you're wondering, but not enough to be particularly sad or upset at their passing, either. I think I was more dispassionate toward them, as you put it.

[blazeit]

Not all about that ~~team spirit~~ are you. I guess I can't really talk about that, though.

So if you didn't play murder games together... What kinda stuff did you guys do together?

[antitrust]

We all had our individual pursuits, though a good amount of us were scientists. Some of us were investigators or soldiers. Some of us just knew the wrong people and got involved in things we shouldn't have.

We didn't all have a common goal to start with, and I'd say that toward the end we still didn't; we just ended up working on the same general project anyway.

[blazeit]

Does that project have something to do with what's happening to us now?

[antitrust]

No. It was completely independent from this.

[blazeit]

What about the people you worked with then. Any of them involved in this?

[antitrust]

You want to know if I'm working alone, is that it?

[blazeit]

Well, yeah.

But I guess I'm kinda morbidly curious in an "oh man, I can't tear my eyes away from this fucking trainwreck" sort of way about these guys you worked with too. Because you said we remind you of them and all.

[antitrust]

They were collectively about as much of a mess as all of you are, if that gives you any sort of idea.

I didn't really care for them much, as I said, but they were interesting people. I liked to watch them sometimes, when we weren't particularly busy - not in a voyeuristic sort of way, just when they were interacting with one another. We had a bit of a tenuous group dynamic, and it was always different from day to day.

[blazeit]

we're not a mess

okay yeah we're kind of a huge fucking mess as a whole

Someday I'm gonna not make the basic fuck-up of presenting multiple things to respond to in one letter, but dammit today was not that day.

You really didn't personally like any single one of them? Not even ONE?

[antitrust]

I was fond of some of them. I don't know if I liked them, exactly...but they were people who had impressed me in some way, and I wanted to see them do well for themselves, and even if that didn't come to pass I still held a great respect for them.

[blazeit]

Okay, so Venn diagram. One circle: coworkers you were fond of, second circle: coworkers still alive.

Any overlap?




[ ... At this point he just wants to know the sordid details of the Conductor's life, honestly. ]

[antitrust]

There isn't really, no, because things just worked out that way.

Again, I didn't kill them all personally.

[blazeit]

[ You know those sentences where if you emphasize a different word on each read, the meaning of the sentence changes entirely? Yeah, so Bakugou is looking at that last sentence and ????ing over where the emphasis is. ]

Okay, same Venn diagram. How many people are in the "people still alive" circle?

[antitrust]

I can't say for sure. We haven't really kept in touch.

[blazeit]

Okay well, I guess this entire line of inquiry has kind of been a waste of my damn time because mostly now I just know some random, kinda creepy shit about your backstory. Not that I don't have a lot of spare time on my hands (thanks a fucking BUNCH for that, by the way). And I guess we're getting even because you creepily know all OUR backstories, too.

... Which reminds me. You're probably watching all of us, right? Cameras and microphones and whatever? So you saw exactly whatever it was that went down when Kaneki was killed?

[antitrust]

I was aware of everything that happened, yes; it could hardly have been a fair trial if I didn't know, could it?

[blazeit]

We figured out during the trial that he had some kind of natural weapon.

... He really didn't use it that night, did he?

[antitrust]

He did not.

The sequence of events that you posited during the trial was actually entirely correct, as was Vivacious' assertion that Relentless disguised the more distinctive injury by covering it with a larger one that he could claim he obtained elsewhere.

[blazeit]

[ RIP KANEKI. BEAUTIFUL CINNAMON ROLL. TOO PURE FOR THIS GAME. Bakugou is still angry about this, so his response is incredibly mature and not at all reminiscent of a three year old lashing out at the wrong target: ]

that stupid fucking nerd