The naked apron dance-off ending! (Part I)

As everyone had been arguing amongst themselves about who ought to be punished for what and in what way, a loud, previously unheard young man's voice suddenly blasted at them through the hall. For a moment, no one knew who it was, since it sounded so different from the way his voice normally did. "Y'ALL HOLD ON A MINUTE!!"

When the two detectives, their captive, and the previous culprit turned, they were surprised to see a red-faced Teruteru breathing heavily, his ordinarily beady eyes wide with rage. For a moment, Kyoko didn't realize the anger was directed at her. When she began to suspect it was, she brushed her hair aside, impatiently, trying to fix him with a glare. "I'm sure you're having fun, Teruteru. Please keep your perverted thoughts to yourself-"

"Havin' fun-?!" the chef started to bellow, before realizing people were staring. Having gotten everyone's attention, he calmed himself and worked to correct his voice. "H-Having fun?! How should an honest, long-suffering, hard-working, and prideful chef enjoy himself while the main course he slavishly worked over lies destroyed without so much as an apology?! Here ya'll-.... you all are, arguing over theft and that kind of hogwash when there's an actual **** committed! You can't begin to imagine the preparation that went into this dish, prepared for the Academy's prestigious formal dinner tonight! And, as far as I'm concerned, all four of you are guilty of ****!"

Before Kyoko could begin to protest, amazed that she'd somehow ended up owing both Shuichi and Teruteru for destroyed property in a single miserable day, a familiar and obnoxious laugh interrupted yet again. "Upupu! I agree! Now, the Ultimate Chef here doesn't have authority to dish out any discipline for you naughty students, but know who does? The Academy's headmaster, Monokuma!" The bear stepped around the corner of the hall at a leisurely pace, looking fully-healed from his earlier demise. "You know, in supposedly victimless crimes like public indecency, there are always the unseen victims, like poor Mr. Hanamaru's work here. And despite none of you having heard anything about the surprise formal dinner he and the Academy staff have been working on, make no mistake: ruining it is a serious, serious offense! If it were up to me, all of you would be facing a premature graduation! Tsumugi... Nagito... Shuichi... and Kyoko!"

Each of the students' eyes widened as they heard their name called, but none quite so wide as the two detectives'. Kyoko recovered her cool more quickly, although it was hard to be cool in this situation. "You've got to be joking. Expelling anyone for this is severe, but how could you possibly expel Shuichi and I? We're victims of that 'victimless crime' you mentioned, if anything."

"For detectives, your judgment in this case was unbearably poor!" Monokuma retorted with a smirk in his voice. "But you're in luck! I think that with Teruteru's help, we'll come to an alternative punishment everyone will be happy with. So, unless you want to face expulsion, I expect to see all of you in the dining hall in... hm, let's say... one hour! There may not be enough time to whip up another main course, but I'm sure the two of us can put together a feast, anyway! Upupupu-"

Interrupting Monokuma's laughter, Komaru re-entered the scene in soggy clothes, panting. "I-I got dried and dressed as fast as I could! Did we find out who the real culprit is-"

"And you too!" Monokuma declared, pointing at her with a stubby paw. "You better be at the dining hall, or face expulsion! Now, Teruteru and I have some details to work out and some invites to send..."

While a maid who happened to be in the crowd got to work cleaning up Teruteru's forgotten dish, one that apparently weighed importance against the fate of five Ultimate Students, all five of them looked at each other. For the moment, their grudges were put aside: all they could do was speculate about what lay in wait for them.

... They weren't speculating for long. Teruteru had apparently figured out what he wanted in compensation pretty quickly, and Monokuma wasted no time getting everyone ready for it. Even though the school's dining hall had been set up earlier that day for a fancy banquet, the layout of tables along with other miscellaneous details all had to be adjusted. Then, there was the matter of what the last-minute staff/entertainers were **** to wear as they went about their work... It had been questionable if everything would even be ready in an hour.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Monokuma was able to corral his workers into labor by threatening them with further punishments. So it was that an odd arrangement of tables was set up at this supposed last-minute formal gathering, announced so suddenly that no one had even managed to put together a formal outfit, unless they were one of the more well-to-do students who happened to have one ready to go. That said, the arrangement of tables was a wide circle around the outside that left almost everyone a faceless guest in a crowd compared to the four gathered in the middle of the hall and the four who were serving them.

At the first table sat the young man who'd truly earned his title of Ultimate Lucky Student that day, Makoto Naegi. He was being waited on by a silver-haired young woman who was already very familiar to him, although he'd never seen her in the uniform she wore tonight. Or rather, didn't wear: the Ultimate Detective was clad in nothing more than a half-black half-white apron, the trademark Monokuma colors. She'd tried to play it off like it wasn't bothering her when she'd been **** to turn and grab Makoto's food at Teruteru's insistence, revealing her pale, round ass for the shortest moment she could manage as she moved quickly across the hall in bare feet. Wherever she went, she tucked one hand into her apron and kept one hidden beneath her serving tray, determined to keep at least her burns from everyone.

A part of her wondered if she wasn't getting desensitized to this: all of her classmates were gathered at the fringes of the hall, murmuring to themselves and enjoying as much as they liked of her exposure, but they hardly registered to her. By comparison, the young man at the table... Even though he'd been invited to enjoy himself, Kyoko kept a constant, icy glare on him, daring him to try and start a conversation, to do anything but stare straight forward and enjoy the lesser banquet Teruteru had been able to salvage from ruin.

She wanted him to feel her cold eyes so he would shrink away from making eye contact, at which point he would surely notice her hotly burning face. Kyoko was a detective who took pride in a cool disposition, but she was also a young woman with some particular feelings towards the classmate she was being **** to stand directly next to and wait on, her naked body separated from him by little more than a foot and some cheap cloth.

It helped that there was a distraction at the other end of the table: for whatever reason, Komaru was staged in a similar way there, nearly-naked and waiting on her friend, the Ultimate Writing Prodigy, Toko Fukawa. The gloomy-looking, glasses wearing student and her humiliated server were having a spirited exchange of barbs, making for a stark contrast to their silent, stifling and shuffling counterparts.

"W-why am I even here?!" Toko complained, jabbing at Teruteru's food with a knife.

"You're hungry, aren't you? I hear your stomach growling!" Komaru complained in turn, putting her fists on her hips. "Just shut up and eat! It's really good... I mean, I assume it is. You'd know better than me."

"N-not why am I at this dinner! I mean why am I here, with you?! I thought Teruteru was picking the worst pair for you. Th-th-that's why those two are together, isn't it? Shouldn't you be with your brother then, you brocon? B-but you and I aren't... W-wait, do you-?!" Toko momentarily looked shock, her eyes widening as a flush crossed her face.

"No! No way!" Komaru denied, shaking her head wildly. "I'm your friend, but just that! They probably just picked you cause you're like the only person I know here. And can you shut up about Makoto?!" she hissed. "For some reason, I feel like he hasn't stopped looking at me since this started..."

"Th-the idea of hitching up with me makes your skin crawl, huh? G-good! I'm the same..." Toko agreed, nodding as a creepy smile crept across her face. "N-n-now, if Lord Byakuya was the one waiting on me, dressed like that..." She put her hands to her face, beginning to drool onto her plate before swinging hard into an angry mood. "Ughh, you're useless! You couldn't drag him into your h-human multi-car pileup?!"

"It's not like I had any idea this would happen! If I did, I definitely wouldn't be on this side of it! Grr, just shuddup and eat your fancy food!" Komaru demanded, grabbing the spoon off the plate and trying to ****-feed her friend.

"B-bueh! Cut it out, cut it out! If I can't breathe, I'll sneeze!"

"That's not a thing!"

"Like you would know! I can't trust you for anything... if only it was Lord Byakuya showing off his good side and not that pasty pervert detective! Gaahmrfgh!"

The detective Toko referred to wasn't the one waiting on the other end of the table. Instead, around an unwilling mouthful of potatoes, she was referencing Shuichi at the other table. The young man was standing ramrod straight alongside Maki Harukawa, the Ultimate Child Caregiver. Certainly, those two had a dynamic more like Kyoko and Makoto, although reversed. While Shuichi tried to make small talk, anything to make this nightmare situation of constantly shifting his apron just right to hide his equipment more bearable, Maki's dark double ponytails seemed to bristle with a powerful, unspoken killing aura.

The dark-haired young man cleared his throat. "Funny how Nagito ended up getting out of this. I mean, not really funny. It looked like he broke both an arm and a leg in a freak table-moving accident... but at least he didn't have to do it in front of the whole school. I don't know if you call that lucky or not."

"Mm," Maki replied, dead-ending the conversation as she kept her red eyes focused on her food and ate, slowly.

"... Sorry you got pulled into this. I'm not sure why. It was supposed to be the person it'd be worst for me to have to serve..." Shuichi gulped, finishing his sentence without the cheeky "and golly, aren't you a joy to serve!" he'd almost tacked on as a joke.

Maki turned her eyes to him for just a moment before darting them away again, a gesture too fast and furtive for untrained eyes when she combined it with a blink. "We're close, aren't we, Shuichi? Training buddies, if you want to use that moron's words."

"... Yeah... I wonder if Kaito's watching this."

"If he is, I'll kill him," Maki replied. It didn't sound like a joke. Of course, it never did. "I'm more surprised it wasn't Kokichi. That kid would love a front row seat at your expense. You're lucky they didn't let us bring phones in here. The real reason it's me, though... it's because she's already at the other end, huh?"

The two of them glanced to the other end of the table, where the blonde-headed Kaede Akamatsu was seated, wearing a **** smile as the back-to-normal Tsumugi poured her a drink, dressed like the other waiting staff in nothing but a two-toned apron, excluding her glasses. Compared to the other groups, this was somehow the table end with the most friction: although both women wore smiles and seemed friendly, there was a palpable feeling of negative chemistry between the two. Each looked like she thought she was doing the other a favor by being well-mannered in spite of the situation, and each struggled to make conversation she really didn't want to make.

"Sorry it's just plain old me," Tsumugi apologized, putting a hand to her face when she finished decanting into Kaede's cup. She was trying to feel out if Kaede yet had any reason to suspect she wasn't a "plain old" person, perhaps using her as a barometer for how fast word traveled at the school.

"Aha, why should you be sorry? You're anything but plain," Kaede remarked, a bit more tightly than she intended to. She couldn't quite hide what she was really thinking: who on earth would call the long-legged, busty, blue-haired beauty a "plain old" anything while she was wearing a naked apron? There was no way that was how Tsumugi thought of herself. The false humility was grating. "I'm just wondering why I, of all people, ended up seated here! You and I don't have any kind of special relationship that makes this awkward, right? I'm no detective, but I'm at least picking up that theme with the others."

"Right... How could anyone dislike serving a perfectly plain and normal girl like you?" Tsumugi questioned aloud, in a way that didn't quite sound rhetorical. "I mean, it might be true that you're a little normie for a way-out cosplay taste like the naked apron... And that we don't really have funny, awkward romantic chemistry, so the needle isn't going to budge on the ratings with you being here," Tsumugi spoke this last part quietly, with a far-away look.

"What was that?" Kaede raised an eyebrow.

"More tea?" Tsumugi offered in a transparent dodge, giving Kaede a sunny smile along with it.

She almost spilled it on Kaede when a loud clap away from the tables startled them. Monokuma sat over at a table alongside Teruteru, enjoying a plate full of salmon and, along with the chubby chef, looking almost like a pair of ringside announcers. Monokuma separated his surprisingly loud fluffy paws and raised his voice to be heard. "It seems like you four rule-breakers have just about gotten used to showing your troublemaking tushies off to your classmates. That can only mean it's time to shake things up again! You see, the four of you are intended to be entertainment, not just glorified serving carts!"

The four addressed were quiet. There'd been no warning about this ahead of time: they'd assumed being **** to serve food nearly naked in front of their friends was all the entertainment (and punishment) they were due.

Monokuma set his salmon aside and whipped the tablecloth off of the table he was seated at, leaving Teruteru crying as his own dish flew and crashed into a wall. The revealed table now made those two look less like announcers and more like DJs. It wasn't a dining table at all, but a digital turntable. Monokuma wasted no time putting on a pair of black earmuffs, cranking up the volume on a microphone. "Now, it's time for the Naked Apron Dancing Execution! A fitting end for troublemaking exhibitionists, to be sure! The four of you are going to dance your hardest for all of our entertainment... and for your very lives!"

Kyoko and Shuichi went pale. Komaru, on the other hand, raised her voice, sounding both panicked and indignant. "Wait, are you saying you'll kill us if we don't dance the best?! That's not fair at all!! A-and it's not entertaining, either!!"

"Well, leaving aside whether it'd be entertaining or not, I obviously don't mean that!" Monokuma shouted back. "Not your literal lives, comic-books-for-brains! I mean your public lives, the **** of when you were known as 'that weirdo who had to serve food almost naked in front of their classmates' and the birth of when you're known as 'that weirdo who had to serve food totally bear in front of their classmates!' For some of you who might be a little slow, I'm saying I'm gonna turn on some music, and you're gonna try to give us a tabletop dance, and whoever Teruteru and I judge to be the least impressive will be stripped of his or her uniform for some real entertainment. So strap on your metaphorical dancing shoes, the party starts in just ten seconds! Hop on up if you don't want to be left in the dust, then in the buff!"

In those ten seconds, the four students each managed to work up the nerve to get up onto the table in front of their assigned guest. As it turned out, while the apron each of them had been provided wasn't much, it also wasn't nothing. None of them relished the idea of what they'd have to do to avoid expulsion once the apron was gone... None of them had any reason to believe Monokuma would consider their punishment over with just that. Each of them prepared to dance with his or her pride on the line...

((Concept by reader skillbox, thanks for your input!))