"Your eyes seemed so innocent. Everything made sense to you but they-"
"Koto-tan, come here!"
Kotone Arisato sighed and lifted herself out of her chair warily, letting her calloused fingers grip the edge of the pseudo-wood desk and stretching out her legs as she mentally prepared herself for whatever situation her friend would drag her into.
Junpei, who clearly had no patience for Kotone's uncharacteristic sluggishness, took it upon himself to enter the class room and stand by Kotone's desk as the Wild Card gathered her stuff. Junpei's expression didn't seem particularly excited or urgent so Kotone took her time gracefully stuffing class work papers and her pencil into her bag. Kotone could still see Junpei out of the corner of her eye and he still hadn't said anything. He had leaned against some other desk and scratched at his scalp with his left hand, his baseball cap in his right.
Kotone sighed through her nose, forcing herself to hold back any irritation she felt. She had been having an 'off' day but that was no reason to get mad at her friend for just for standing over to her like a tower.
"What do you need?" She asked lightly, fingers blindly trailing along the high waistline of her skirt to find where she had clipped her mp3 to turn it off.
Junpei replaced his hat on his head with little error and smoothed out a wrinkle in his dress shirt almost reflexively before saying, "Me and Kenji need help cleaning the art room and you don't look like you have anything to do for once so I figured you'd be cool."
His eyes trailed along the ceiling to the windows, catching the miniscule natural lighting the stormy sky provided and making his irises appear grey. Kotone pulled a face at the mention of Kenji knowing full well that Junpei could see her face (and not caring that her disdain was clear) and ran her fingers through her ponytail to rip out a stubborn knot that had been bothering her all day.
"Who says I didn't have anything to do? I kinda have plans," Plans to go find out about the weird premonition that's been weighing on her head and maybe stop by the Velvet Room before the typhoon hit but Junpei didn't need to know about any of that, "and I'd like to get them over with minimal pain if possible. You could probably get Miyamoto-kun to help," she offered, pointing to the malcontent-looking track star who had been instructed to clean all the windows in 2-F alone as atonement for something or rather he did to Ms. Toriumi. Quite frankly, Kotone didn't know him well enough to give a damn. She and Kazushi had been the only ones in 2-F who hadn't left to clean something else in the school building and she had just sat by and watched on and off as her classmate grumbled and wiped the windows.
Junpei shook his head even as Kaz perked up in the background.
"No way, man! Kaz is shit at talking to girls. I need someone with real experience."
Kotone snorted loudly at Kazushi's expense and ambled her way out of the classroom, blithely disregarding the lingering aches in her arms and legs from their forage through Tartarus last night. Junpei tailed her after a quick nod to Kazushi and made no comment even as the Wild Card began walking in the opposite direction of the art room.
"You need to talk to a girl or you need to talk to someone who knows how to talk to girls?" Kotone asked, her voice carrying over the bustling crowd of student with ease. She waved to a group of seniors Junpei had never spoken to before and, without missing a beat, turned abruptly and walked down the stairs.
Junpei followed with a groan but was relieved to see that the first floor was relatively less crowded than the second floor and that he wouldn't lose his short friend in the sea of students. He caught up to her and tapped her shoulder as if to tell her to slow down, but she ignored the gesture and made a beeline to the lockers. Junpei considered telling her that she was acting like her brother but then thought better of it.
"Well, y'know how it is between me and Chidorita. I just needed some, uh, I mean, I would like some, uh, advice to talk… to her," The teenager finished weakly, hiding his face under the brim of his cap.
Kotone smirked to herself, mildly surprised about how easily Junpei would get flustered about this 'Chidorita' that he had only mentioned once or twice before, but offered no response. She let her friend stew in the awkward silence as she slipped off her slippers with two expert kicks and pulled her sneakers out of her cluttered locker.
"Uh- Wait, are you leaving school? We still gotta take down all the decorations for the culture festival!"
Kotone laughed and almost said 'to hell with that' but was interrupted by Fuuka and Aigis calling out "Kotone-chan!" and "Leader!" respectively.
"Kotone-chan, we were looking all over for you," Yukari said at the head of the approaching group. The brunette seemed extremely relieved at locating her friend but the situation didn't seem to be too pressing. Behind her, Fuuka was holding onto a broken music stand and a folding chair, her smile oozing some level of contentment that Kotone couldn't particularly understand. Aigis was scanning the crowd of students and returned any confused glances the first years sent her with a flat stare. Minato seemed occupied with twisting his headphone wires around his fingers.
"Any reason?" Kotone asked a touch distracted. She was itching to get outside at this point, even more so now that she had five pairs of eyes on her back. The foreboding feeling that had been weighing on her all day was getting unbearable. Maybe she was catching a cold? Maybe her personas were trying to tell her something? This wouldn't be the first time either of those happened.
If Yukari noticed Kotone's odd tone, she didn't mention it. "Ah, no. Just kind of wanted to know where you-"
"Where are you going?" Aigis asked, tilted her head to the side like a cat would on TV. She probably got that from Koromaru.
"Out," Kotone replied crisply and swung open the glass doors, thinking of leaving right then and there with no other explanation.
But then, she froze, ears ringing and not from the harsh wind.
"..."
She heard a bell. Not like the electronic chime that the school used but more of a sound that she would imagine would come from one of those gigantic brass bells in old brick towers. The echoes rung all around her and she could feel the vibrations flutter at the ends of her fingertips. She released her grip on the door handle out of fear that the shaking of the glass and the shaking of her body would generate its own ring.
Gekkoukan didn't have a clock tower, did it?
"…tone? You alright?" Junpei was shaking her shoulder, apparently. She hadn't noticed. Whatever spell she had been under broke.
Kotone turned to face her friends and ignored their concerned faces as she filtered through her suddenly scattered thoughts. Behind her, the door was still open and the strong winds blew her hair wildly against her neck.
"Tonight…," She blurted out before she could even think to stop herself," let's go to Tartarus. Alright?"
Everyone gave the Wild Card odd looks, but Fuuka nodded and everyone nodded along albeit with a little hesitance.
"Fine, but you should take a nap or something. You look like shit," Minato said helpfully.
Kotone snorted (and her brother rolled his eyes back at her) and held out a hand to Aigis, who grabbed it immediately and stated," I will escort Leader safely to the dorm."
"Thank you Aigis," Kotone said to the blonde before sharing a brief look with her brother and turning back towards the door," Seeya guys later! Don't let the storm catch you!"
Tartarus felt the same as it always did and that was more than frustrating to the Wild Card. She refused to believe that all the foreboding and the phantom bell had nothing to do with the Dark Hour.
"Leader, why did you want to come here tonight?" Fuuka asked, situating herself by the stairs to the entrance and readying her evoker.
Kotone frowned slightly and trailed her eyes to the Velvet Room door.
"I've had a feeling that something was wrong. Sorry if that sounds vague and cliché or whatever, but that's all I have to go by."
"That's okay. Your instincts are normally right," Fuuka said, dutifully bringing her evoker to her head and encasing herself in Lucia's protective shell.
Mitsuru seemed to nod approvingly at the girls' discussion and looked around the large entrance hall as if she could see something ominous hanging from the ceiling. For once the senior looked fairly relaxed. Kotone began to wonder if she was the only one on the team in a bad mood.
Ken and Junpei were bantering about some video game that was coming out later in the week. Yukari scoffed at them without any real ire and strung her bow. Shinjiro, Aigis, and Koromaru were in the middle of a heated discussion that had been going on since they left the dorm, though the specifics of that conversation sounded rather limited. Akihiko was lecturing Minato on how to stretch properly and the junior actually looked interested. Fuuka was knitting her brows in concentration, muttering out any information she gathered to Mitsuru who offered her own words of advice. It seemed that neither could tell if anything was weird. No one seemed to be paying attention but everyone was definitely in a good mood.
Maybe Kotone was wrong and there really was a problem with her personas.
(She couldn't help but notice how close everyone else seemed now, too. Their natural groups and conversations was a far cry from how they were just two months ago. When did they all become friends like this?)
Resigned to being the odd one out for the day, Kotone began her approach to the Velvet Room door and only stopped when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned and looked up into Junpei's expectant expression.
"Where are you going?" He asked, his hand casually going to his side where he rested it around the handle of his sword.
Kotone sighed. She hated trying to explain the Velvet Room. "The Velvet Room. I gotta check something."
"Can you take me?"
Kotone raised an eyebrow but couldn't stop herself from smiling when she saw Ken standing a few feet away and looking equally excited as Junpei at the prospect of going to the mysterious 'persona-making' room.
"Probably not. I mean, I haven't tried taking other people in but I'd imagine you'd need to sign a contract or whatever."
"Contract?" Junpei and Ken echoed in perfect unison. Kotone giggled so loudly that she caught the attention of a few of her teammates across the room.
"A contract?" Ken repeated, face screwed up in a mocking yet contemplative light, almost like he thought Kotone was joking," Who'd sign a contract to see an invisible room? Who would even make a contract like that?"
Kotone shrugged and pulled the Velvet Key out from her Tartarus Exploration Bag (or her Inventory as her brother would cheekily call it) and held it out in front of the door. Whoever designed the door apparently didn't have an idea what keyholes were for so Kotone had to hold the key out to unlock it. She had spent an awkwardly long amount of time figuring this out the first time she had encountered the door in the Paulownia Mall and that was an experience in itself.
She almost opened the door, but paused (once again!) when she heard Fuuka squawk. Everyone glanced to the navigator whose eyes were glued to the floor, skitterishly jumping back a few steps and dimissing her persona in the process.
"Yamagishi!? What's wrong?" Mitsuru asked. The senior's voice echoed throughout the unnatural hall. The cheery atmosphere instantly became serious.
Fuuka looked up after a pause and waved her hands around in an assuring manner. "Ah, nothing's wrong! I just thought I saw a spider at my feet and it really scared me!"
"A spider?" Kotone heard her brother mutter," I thought there wasn't anything living in Tartarus…"
When the atmosphere returned to normal, Kotone turned back to the Velvet Room door, figuring there weren't any problems left to deal with. Perhaps if she had stayed a second longer, she would have heard the ringing of a phantom bell.
There was a brief out-of-body experience before Kotone found herself standing on the other side of the Velvet Room door. The great change in lighting between the magically lit ceiling(? Mitsuru and Ikutsuki couldn't come up with other explanations) of Tartarus and the deep, dark blues of the Velvet Room forced Kotone to squint, but the slight setback did not deter her from catching one of the oddest sights she'd ever seen.
Igor wasn't in his chair.
Kotone blinked a few times as though her eyes were playing tricks on her before reminding herself of something that Igor had when she had first joined S.E.E.S.
"Nothing happens in the Velvet Room without a reason," the lights from the elevator flashed behind him and made his image appear as an elf shaped silhouette. The loose smile on his face revealed how easily the words came from him, as if the statement was something he had repeated many times in his long, long life. Kotone wouldn't dare forget.
Following through with that reasoning – and seeing that this situation could certainly be counted as a Something of Importance – perhaps it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that the strange man's absence was the reason for her weird day. The room was connected to her conscious/subconscious after all. Maybe Igor was taking a quick break or something. He always seemed to be drinking coffee. Maybe he ran out? Kotone considered sitting around and waiting for Igor or Theodore as she walked over to her seat, but then everything around her stopped.
The elevator halted. Kotone's foot froze mid-step. Even the headphones swinging over her shoulders hung, suspended in the suddenly stale air of the mysterious room. The room was abruptly void of its opera singer, cut off mid-crescendo.
There was a foreign presence in the room. That was something the Wild Card knew instinctually.
She wanted to turn her head, feeling the large presence as a mass of heat gathered behind her like she was some sort of heat sensing animal. She found moving in the stale and heavy air a lot easier than expected, almost like how Shadows looked when they appeared to be docile blobs. When she fully turned and comprehended the sight before her, she let out a breath in relief.
"Wha-! Where are we!?" Yukari shouted, stealing the heavy atmosphere from the room in an instant that Kotone felt every millisecond of.
Somehow, impossibly, her friends were in the Velvet Room.
"Leader!" Aigis called from the back of the group, her hands up and prepared to shoot at any enemies.
Everyone's eyes turned to the Wild Card and the teen truly felt at a loss of what to say. How did everyone get in?
"Koto-tan! Oh thank god you're here! You frickin' missed it!" Junpei made his way to the front of the group, visibly distressed. Kotone was starting to feel a little stressed herself.
Kotone wrung her fingers, mildly wishing her naginata could conjure itself into her hands, and faked a smile in a attempt to placate the bewildered looks on everyone's faces, "W-what happe–?"
"There was this bell and the lights went out." Akihiko interrupted gravely.
Behind him, Shinjiro shoved his hands in his pocket and took a look at their surroundings, "Where the hell is this, Arisato?"
Said Arisato propped a hand on her side, a little put off at getting sidetracked but understanding that this distraction would be inevitable. "Well," she began as cheerily as she could manage at the moment, "Welcome to the Velvet Room!" She sat backwards in her chair, facing the group and wrapping her legs around the chair legs, raising her hands up to the ceiling in a grandiose manner.
Her teammates hardly seemed amused. She supposed that was fair. So much for raising morale.
Minato was the first to separate from the pack after the awkward silence, mutely inspecting the covered doors at the side of the room. Despite how unusual the entire situation was, he seemed to not be alarmed in the slightest and Kotone could not appreciate his glaring indifference even if she tried, especially since she felt reasonably confused.
"Any thoughts?" She asked, irritation stirring at the edges of her words. It was hard to keep her tone in check with so much going on.
Minato didn't reply immediately, taking a full moment to look at the light shining through the gated wall. His posture suggested that he was purposefully ignoring his sister's ire.
"I thought you said the Persona room was an elevator."
"That's right, good job! Anything else helpful today, or do I have to subscribe to get the full benefits?"
Minato sent her a glare.
"It's not moving."
Kotone had to forcefully hold back her smug look, leaning forward in the chair but with her head turned back," I've noticed, brother. Anything else, or–?"
A loud click stole the rest of the words from her throat and suddenly the whole room was falling.
Shouts sprung up in the room as the students were thrown to the floor. Aigis was the only member able to stand against the harsh gravitational pull.
"At this rate, we are going to crash!" She shouted over the noise of rushing air.
"Into what!" Fuuka cried back.
Kotone felt her heartbeat leaping out of her throat. This was it. This was her last moment in some unreal elevator room and she couldn't do anything to stop it. Out of reflex, she glanced back at her brother and met his terrified eyes.
She couldn't get a word out before there was a jarring crash and then white.
Hello! I love Persona Q and I think it needs some Femc so here you go. I will continue this ( ´ ▽ ` )b