Room 13 and the Warm Keycard

Nagito leads the way along the tideline, bucket swinging, past the rocks where the sand turns to wet shelf. The thing is wedged in a fan of black weed, half-buried, and he crouches beside it with his sleeves pushed up.

"Here. I didn't touch it much, obviously. Something that washes up on the day everyone arrives... that's usually an invitation, and I didn't want to accept it on anyone's behalf."

It's a keycard. Hotel keycard, the cheap plastic kind, except it's crusted edge to edge in dried salt like frost, and the salt keeps regrowing where he brushed it. Stamped in the corner: HOPE'S PEAK FIELD TRIP — GUEST. The room number reads 13. There is no thirteenth room on any of the islands; Nagito says he checked the directory at the front desk twice while everyone was fighting over beach towels.

The strange part, the part he wants a witness for, is the temperature. He picks it up and lays it flat across Kris's palm without ceremony. It weighs maybe forty grams. It is warm. Not sun-warm — skin-warm, the exact temperature of the inside of someone's hand, and it holds that heat steady while they stand there with the wind coming in cold off the water.

"Room thirteen. Which doesn't exist, which means either the card is wrong, or the hotel is keeping a room it hasn't told us about." His thin fingers hover near it without touching. "Or — and this is the one I'd bet on, and my bets are unfortunately meaningful — it hasn't kept it yet."

He smiles, apologetic, tilting his head.

"Sorry. I know how that sounds. But you're the psychologist; you're better placed than me to say whether a warm keycard is a message or just litter with good circulation. I only found it. What's done with it..." He steps back, giving Kris the card and the whole decision, hands folded behind him like a man at a museum. "...that should probably be someone else's luck."

The salt on the plastic crackles faintly, very quietly, the way ice does in a glass.

"Hmm." Nagito muses. "That's a better reading than mine. I was thinking invitation, but an egg is more patient. An egg is waiting for something to hatch."

He lets out a short, breathy laugh and lifts his coat from the rock, snapping the fabric to shake off the sand.

"And yes—guilty. I checked the directory twice, then walked the second-floor corridor and counted doors. Twelve rooms, then the stairwell, then room fourteen. The gap where thirteen should be is about a meter and a half of wall. No seam, no paint difference. Just wall." He hooks the coat over his arm and walks toward the hotel path, keeping pace with Kris. "Which is either very good construction or a door that hasn't been installed yet. On this island, I'd split the difference."

The path to the hotel consists of gray gravel and radiating heat. A Monokuma-shaped topiary stands halfway along, one hedge-ear ragged and stripped by wind. The lobby clock reads 6:50. It read 6:50 both times Nagito passed it this morning, and it reads it now while the sun sits a full hour higher in the sky.

Nagito stops at the base of the second-floor stairs and points upward.

"After you. If the wall decides to have a door in it, I'd rather it introduced itself to an Ultimate first. No offense—well. Some offense, technically, but the clinical kind." He tilts his head and smiles. "Besides, you're holding the egg. It should be the one to knock."

Upstairs, the corridor is quiet, lined with beige carpet. Rooms eleven and twelve sit on the left. Then the stretch of wall. The keycard in Kris's hand feels warm, matching the temperature of skin.

"That's a funny way to put it, Kris. Luck isn't something I feel. It's something that happens to the people standing near me, usually with injuries involved. But—" he gestures at the wall, at Kris's palm flat against the warm rectangle, "—since you've already committed to knocking, I'll commit to witnessing. Go on. Do the honors."

The card slides along the wallpaper and the wallpaper gives. Not cuts, not tears — gives, like bread. The plastic sinks in to half its depth, and around it the beige paper splits along a seam that was definitely not there a moment ago, peeling back in a neat meter-wide rectangle. Behind it: a door. Dark green, matching Nagito's coat almost exactly, with a brass plate screwed on at eye height. The plate reads 13 in a font the hotel has never used anywhere else.

"Ah." Nagito's breath catches, and it isn't fear. His eyes have picked up that faint swirl, grey-green turning like slow water. "There it is. You called it — buildings do love being poked. I should write that down."

The handle is warm too. It turns without resistance, and the door swings inward onto a room that does not fit in the meter and a half of wall it occupies — it keeps going, four meters, five, a full hotel room receding into a soft yellow light that comes from no lamp anyone can see.

Through the corridor window beside them, the outdoors is conducting its own business.

Down below, the gravel has been raked into the new curve with the brisk competence of work done overnight. The topiary keycards are clipped to exact proportion, salt frost still visible on their hedge-edges. Nagito watches them for three seconds, then turns back to the doorway with the mild expression of a man whose train has arrived on the wrong platform but arrived nonetheless.

"Well. The island's landscaped itself a signpost. Room thirteen, five keys, and one Monokuma. Someone's being thematic." He steps up to the threshold without crossing it, hands folded behind his back, and looks into the warm yellow room. The far wall holds a bed made with hospital corners. On the nightstand sits a glass of water, full, with condensation still running down it — fresh, kept fresh, for a guest.

"There's one bed and one glass. So either one guest is expected, or..." He tilts his head, hair falling across one eye, and that thin bright smile surfaces again. "...or the room hasn't decided who it's for yet, and it's waiting to see who walks in first. That would be very like an egg. Kris — you found the temperature. I think the room already likes you more than me. Trash doesn't get kept warm."

He moves aside, clearing the threshold completely, and waits.