Prologue

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BFB 16, the EXIT, a few hours before Spongy's elimination

"...well, it's getting late. I'll tell you tomorrow, diary," Loser read out loud to himself. He turned the page, bumping his elbow on the side of the jawbreaker he was trapped inside, but that was it. "But Donut..." He closed the book and looked at the cover. "That was the last entry in your diary! Aw man, looks like I gotta find some new reading material."

He uncrossed his legs, put both hands on separate sides of the jawbreaker, and prepared to break his way out, when he remembered all the post-it notes he had stuck in Donut's diary to mark various pages. Thinking back to BFB 11, he remembered coming across some sort of cryptic message and decided that it wasn't a bad idea to double-check some of the more... suspicious pages in the book.

He flicked through the pages until he found the message he discovered in BFB 11. It read:

"Please be SILENT and LISTEN.
I am the SCHOOLMASTER
and you are in THE CLASSROOM.
Just like ELEVEN PLUS TWO equals
TWELVE PLUS ONE,
And even a FUNERAL can be REAL FUN,
You will find my DICTIONARY
is quite INDICATORY.
If you want to read my story, just look...
THEN UNREAD."

Underneath it was a note in Donut's handwriting: I found this cool code in one of my favorite book series. I think it's pretty fitting for what this diary really is.

Five episodes later, Loser still didn't understand what it meant. It was a code, but to what? Unfortunately, Loser was never really one for solving puzzles. But something about the first line bothered him. Like he had heard it somewhere before.

Extremely faint murmurs drifted in from the teeny, tiny hole at the top of his prison, but Loser ignored it. He could never make anything out, due to the weird sound properties of the inside-out jawbreaker.

Inside-out...

It hit Loser like a train, and he slapped his forehead. Of COURSE! The words in all capital letters were ANAGRAMS of each other! Anagrams are when letters of one word get rearranged to form another, like it was being turned inside-out. That's why the first line had bothered him - SILENT and LISTEN was one of the most common anagrams, so it makes sense he would have heard it somewhere. He looked at the code again. All of the phrases in caps had an anagram counterpart... except for THEN UNREAD.

Loser's heart (if he had one) sped up with excitement. All he had to do was figure out an anagram for that. He jotted down some notes and quickly came up with the answer - UNDERNEATH.

His 'heart' began to slow down again. UNDERNEATH? Did that mean Donut had buried something somewhere? No. Donut's note under the code said that it had something to do with the diary.

Loser began to examine the actual diary more closely. The covers seemed to be normal, but something was off with the pages. They were thicker than the pages of most books. He had noticed that before, but shrugged it off. Now...

He chose a page and began to gingerly peel it apart at the corner. He hoped he wouldn't damage anything, but the paper came apart much more easily than he had expected. The one page he had just separated was actually two, glued together. But the glue must have been old, because it didn't tear the paper.

Loser stared at the text hidden underneath the page he thought was one. He tried again on the next page, and it worked. If this applied to the entire diary, than that means it originally had twice the number of pages it should have had. Loser began to excitedly, but carefully, pull apart each page, one by one. It was a large diary.

After several minutes, having finally finished and somehow not spoiling himself, he went back to the beginning and started to read out loud. "This text is a full third-person account..."

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