Atlus owns all; join the Atlus Uni-Mind! I however, own nothing. For more information on this "Remixed" version of "After the End," check the Author's Notes. As I always, I write these for my wife. Let's all cross our fingers that I can finish it this time... and before the new games hit, and wreck all of my continuity!

- 1996 -

The tape at the edge of the police cordon was raised so that Kirijo the Elder could enter and approach Karukozaka High School. The press were trying to get past the wall of ambulances, where students were being looked over with completely useless tests and procedures. A stretcher was wheeled past him, and the child's contorted face lurched up towards him, mumbling the word "Makai" over and over again.

Kirijo the Elder smiled. Magnificent!

Closer to the building's entrance, an old friend was on his knees, sketching formulas on the asphalt with a bit of broken chalk. His face was the only other in the area that looked anything akin to pleased. He approached slowly, letting his cane tap to announce his arrival. After a moment, the scientist with the floppy mass of hair looked up.

"Nicholai." Kirijo held out his hands. "It has finally happened."

Dr. Nicholai stood. His hands were already dirty. They had been contemporaries in school, a lifetime ago, and their mutual passion for the sciences had kept them familiar even as their lifestyles – and their differences in class – had separated them. Nicholai was manic—his beard sparkled slightly in the sunlight, the remnants of drool. The scientist nodded again and again, clutching at his own arms.

"Official, ah, police and medical reports are writing this all off already. Reaction to an earthquake, perhaps."

Kirijo dismissed it with a curl of his lip. "You and I both know that this was no earthquake. The rumors are true. This school was gone for a moment, and returned the next."

Nicholai nodded. "It passed into an Avidya space – outside of our perception. We can discount the rest – the demon world they claimed that they saw – they likely perceived Maya, illusions... just shadows."

"Perhaps." Kirijo the Elder was considering the tale that some of the students were spinning – that they had been rescued by a single heroic student and her friends, a Tamaki Uchida, who had somehow slipped out of the cordon without being properly investigated.

"This is the scientific discovery of the millennium!" Dr. Nicholai was rubbing at his face. "What the ability to distort space could mean for physics alone! Who knows what might be possible from here... dimensional travel, time travel..." He got in close to Kirijo. "The things that we saw as children... the reports we've read... they may all be true!"

"That much I'll grant you." The old man looked over to the school, which looked no different than it might have any other day. This incident would be forgotten within a week, no matter what had occurred.

"Kirijo... how can you be so calm?" Nicholai was all but bouncing in place. "Just think of our respective research! With the financial backing of your company, we could both..."

Kirijo the Elder shook his head, with a slight smile. "Nicholai, do you recall my granddaughter? She is five years old now." Without waiting for the other man to respond, he continued. "When she was born, I did a very impulsive thing... I bought an island. An artificial one, just off of the coast of Iwatodai city. I had decided that if my life's work was a failure, then I could at least leave a positive legacy for the child. But something peculiar happened this week. My granddaughter somehow knew that something had happened here. Vague impressions, of course, easily discounted, except..." Except. Except that something new had happened. Something that validated a life's research.

Kirijo tapped his cane once, and turned his back on Nicholai. "As of today, the Kirijo Group has declared its independence from Nanjo Konzern. We need no longer be anyone's subsidiary or partner. Perhaps one in perfection can surpass two in harmony." He smiled. "Without our support, I expect that you'll find little backing from Nanjo, Nicholai. Perhaps the Saeki Electronics, Biological, and Energy Corporation can support your research on its own; perhaps it cannot. But you shall have to convince Takahisa Kandori without my help."

As Kirijo the Elder walked away from the sputtering, fragile scientist, he felt anything but sympathetic. He was planning for the future. Determining how to convince his son to let little Mitsuru undergo testing. He had all of Nicholai's notes to date, and what Nicholai could do on his own, Kirijo could construct without him. What was more interesting was that the stories about the girl Uchida meant that his own theories were as a validated as Nicholai's. That there was a power dwelling within humans that could be utilized, something far greater than Nicholai's prototype DVA devices.

A power that he would call Persona.

Persona: After The End

-An Apocrypha-

(This story was written before the release of P4:G and P4UM)

Prologue: Sin and Punishment

-1583 (Sengoku Era)-

"NO!"

But the call was too late. The length of the sword plunged through his lover's heart, right up to the hilt.

Tatsunoshin Suou did not falter, did not lower his own blade; but still the tears cut tracks down his cheeks as he watched his beloved Maihime Amano shudder down the hilt of his enemy's spear, a final clacking sound echoing from her throat. He did naught but incline his head. In the shadows, his manservant Junnosuke Kuroda receded; he knew what must be done. Sumaru Castle would burn to the ground.

They had failed – the Housoushi magician had abandoned them in their moment of need. The stalemate between the four clans had faltered in the worst way. And as the samurai Tatsunoshin Suou prepared to hold off his mad lord for as long as he was able, prepared to die in the same room as his lover in the hope of ending the evil of Kiyotada Sumaru... he uttered a curse upon the name Kuzunoha, for abandoning them to this fate.

As the first yellow curls of flame began to lick at the edges of the room, they looked for all the world to Tatsunoshin like a golden butterfly.

-1996-

"I feel like an asshole."

"You are an asshole." Miki smiled. "Go on, go on." She waved him forward. "It's adorable!"

Prosecutor Kaoru Saga rolled his eyes and placed one step in front of the other as he slowly traced a path around the foul Taiwanese hotel room. "Why aren't you doing this?"

Miki Asai, the beautiful woman who was laughing and watching Saga from her seat on the bed, just clapped her hands. "Hey! Hey! I'm not the one who needs the luck tomorrow! Start over! It's not going to work unless you mean it when you do it!

The brilliant and handsome prosecutor grumbled to himself and went back to the room's first corner and began his lap again. "Persona, Persona, please come here." And at the next corner: "Persona, Persona, please come to me."

It was a children's game. Like looking into a mirror and summoning Bloody Mary. Childhood was where all the best blessings and worst curses were made up. Kaoru winced each time he had to say the silly phrase, but one look at how delighted his partner and secretary was at his performance and he remembered why he was putting up with it.

The two of them were in Taiwan to follow a lead, a lead on the biggest corruption scandal in recent Japanese memory. His meeting the following day would, in theory, place the final nail in the coffin of the defense minister Tatsuzou Sudou. He wasn't sure if Miki was aware, truly aware, of the danger that the two of them were facing. If this kept her spirits up...

"Persona, Persona-"

The room seemed to explode inward as gunfire erupted through the windows.

-1999-

The woman sat upright in a hospital bed, attempting vainly to look dignified in her paper gown. Watching her was a security guard, who shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

After the last lab tech, something-something Komatsubara, had left the room – and after the woman had been given a few moments to compose herself fully, the security guard, whose name was Kurosawa, cleared his throat.

She looked over to him, and offered a weak smile. "Clean bill of health, apparently. Spending time within the tower appears to have no long-term adverse effects. The sickness is just a temporary reaction to the geometries of the place. The mind interprets it as..."

Kurosawa slowly shook his head. "That's not what I was going to ask."

The woman looked down. "Eiichiro... that is, Dr. Takeba... he saved my life. I cannot abandon him here."

He dared approach her. "You have to. This place... Dr. Kimijima and a few of the others, they are good people. Even the son, he may be a good man. But this place is evil. We both know this." She looked away from him. "What about your other dream? The one where you run a quiet antique store, yes?"

He did not add "We could run it together." And he could never hate her for choosing Takeba first, even if he did not return her love, was in fact happy with his own family. Takeba, too, was a good man. It was this place, the Kirijo Ergonomics Research Laboratory, that was ruining everything.

Kurosawa had a dream of a quiet life, himself. He had been a soldier; when his tour had ended, General Sugawara (a man himself descended from a great general) had recommended him for this detail. The Nanjo Group had developed military weapons in the past, and this R&D group that had split away from Nanjo had supposedly been working on new applications for the technology. But what Kirijo had was far and away beyond the initial Nanjo tech – the General's X-1 project was a shambling exoskeleton, but the androids developed by Kirijo Ergo looked downright human. He was done with this – done with the General, done with Kirijo. He wanted out; he could be a police officer in some quiet district somewhere... he just wanted her to come with him.

She looked like she was going to speak, but she was interrupted by the sound of a distant explosion.

"What was that?" He looked at her. He was always looking at her. She replaced her glasses.

"The beginning of the end."

-1996-

Kaoru Saga was dead.

The man who had replaced him, however, lay writhing on a stained mat in a burnt-out building. It was not much of a safehouse, but it would serve until he had the wherewithal to be on the move again. For the moment, in his pain, he could only focus on one word: "Baofu." Revenge.

The stinging wouldn't leave his eyes. The stinging wouldn't leave his heart.

He rolled over, into the mess of garbage left behind in the building's remains. Some part of him realized that this was bad, that he was vulnerable now to the Tien Tao Len, the Taiwanese mafia that had killed Miki and had nearly murdered him (had murdered him) as well. He needed to get back to Japan, to places that he knew were safe. But the pain was so great.

He knew it was standing over him; watching him. He refused to look at it.

His fingers found a discarded bottle cap. Kaoru Saga had been a practitioner of Qi Gong. When he had the ability to concentrate, he could feel the flow of his own Chi, and the Chi of others. He tried to focus on that sense now, as best as he was able. Shift his energy into the tiny shape of the cap in his fingers, make it an extension of himself. Route the pain into something tactile.

It was difficult, but his Chi was split – some part of him was hovering above his body. He knew it was within the thing that stood over him. The thing that had shielded him from the brunt of the attack. The thing that had let Miki die.

When he'd first woken, after the attack, the manager of the ratbag hotel had claimed there was an "accident." That a car had slammed into the side of the hotel. The story was so stupid, he'd almost believed it for a second.

Baofu. He would have his vengeance. He jerked his arm, and the cap shot like a bullet, cracking the ashen wall of the room in twain. When he kept his eyes closed, the pain wasn't so bad. He forced himself to open them.

He looked right at it, at the thing. He knew its name was Odysseus. He knew that he was it, and that it was he.

This was a Persona.

He hated it.

-1931 (Taisho 20)-

The fourteenth Raidou Kuzunoha stood and considered.

He was standing at the edge of Ushigome-gaeri Bridge. Or rather, standing at the edge of that bridge on the Other Side, the Dark side, the land of Demons and shadows. The demons did not frighten him – he was a Devil Summoner. But his next move, it did frighten him a little. He was to perform the ritual of Soul-Sending.

He held in his hands the Amatsu Kanagi, an artifact powered by strong emotions – the bonds formed with others, social links that give people the strength to go on in the face of annihilation. The bonds that he had formed with Narumi, with Tae and with Satake, even mad old Dr. Tsukumo. The slender artifact pulsed in his grip.

What would it mean, to change history? Whose place was it to divert the flow of fate? Was he right, or was Kaya – that is, was the thing inside Kaya?

He could hear Gouto's voice within his heart, but he missed the presence of the cat by his side. Gouto's sacrifice, so that he could bring an end to this story.

There was nothing to be done. Time was a river, like fate; he would let it carry him where it would. He began to chant the words.

And the Akarana Corridor opened to him.

-1997-

Takahisa "Guido" Kandori ran his fingers along the side of the machine. "Turn it on." Dr. Nicholai's finger hovered over the button. Hesitated. "Turn. It. On." The scientist pressed the brightly-colored button, and the inner drums of the Dimension Variable Accelerator System began to spin. A light, something like a static spark, filled the pressure-sealed tube, and it made Kandori's reflection in the glass seemed to glow.

Kandori turned away from the main core of the device and approached the transferral chamber. The large black machine that looked somewhat like a seed pod – or perhaps a butterfly's cocoon – was where an opening into the Avidya would be created, inside which matter could be altered to Kandori's whim. The board of directors were short-sighted; they expected to follow in the path of Hermes Trismegistus, spin gold from base metals. It was an easier story to sell them on – the scientists involved in the device's creation instead expected a time machine. Kandori, however, was not so short-sighted. If it could alter matter, then it could alter him; he could gain power beyond reckoning.

There was a voice that whispered to him, in the late hours. A voice that told him that this device could make him a God.

The mostly-opaque panels of the transferral chamber began to lighten, ever so slightly. The reaction was occurring inside. Kandori stepped closer without fear. He never feared anything, any longer – the voice would soothe him; it felt sometimes like the voice was sliding right across the surface of his very soul, something cold and damp like a tendril.

He placed his hands on the machine and felt its vibrations. Felt its resonance slowly fall into sync with his own.

And then, from deep within, he heard what sounded awfully like a young girl crying.

-20XX (Post 2040, Timeline A, After The End)-

"If all had gone as planned, history after Taisho 20 would have taken a different path..."

The thing inside of Kaya made the girl's motions somewhat jerky as she raised her sword – as if she were fighting to regain control – but the fourteenth Raidou Kuzunoha did not doubt that his opponent was still deadly.

"But, because of you, no one will ever see the new future I dreamt of... Are you satisfied, judging right and wrong with you own eyes, blinded from the truth!" The thing – no, call it what it is, the spirit of Raidou Kuzunoha the XLth – stared him down amidst the crawling chaos of the end of all time.

As the man once called Jouhei - the fourteenth heir to the title of Raidou - readied his own sword, he thought about what the time tourist had said in the Akarana Corridor. That the being he'd known as "Rasputin" was himself a traveler from the future, much as this latter-day Raidou was. That he had been charged with "righting" the timestream – that the Taisho period was only supposed to last fifteen years, not twenty or more.

Everyone involved in this case was concerned with preserving their own survival. Even the demon that had taken control of General Munakata was working to act against the darkness in man's heart in its own cruel way. Who could be the arbiter of all races – of all times?

Raidou did not believe it was he – but he knew that it could not be the man who had stolen the life of an innocent young girl. The sins of adults should never be answered by children. A holder of the title Raidou Kuzunoha could, at least, do that much.

Jouhei reached for the tubes beneath his cape, and prepared for battle.

-2009-

The boy in the headphones stared at the boy in stripes, and then looked down at the document on the counter.

"...Please sign your name there. It's a contract. Don't worry. All it says is that you'll accept full responsibility for your actions. You know... the usual stuff."

Without even understanding why, Minato Arisato lifted the pen. Everything was like a dream. The slight pinching of the headphones on his ears was the only sign that he still existed. As he signed his name to the contract, the introverted young man wondered vaguely how it was that his life was such a goddamned mess, and wondered what actions he could ever perform that would require such a formal declaration.

-1996-

Ideo Hazama knelt in the center of the pentagram, and closed his eyes. The ritual was almost complete. All he had to do was chant the words, and a demon would be at his command. It was all so... simple.

They'd beaten him, taunted him. Miss Kayama... she'd rejected him. They had no understanding of what he could be. He was special, dammit. Nobody understood, not even Reiko. Not even his sister! Well, if that's the way that they wanted it, fine. He knew what to do now.

He'd gone to Alaya Shrine to pray. At least that's what he'd told himself, but really he had been mustering up the courage to kill himself – it was all that someone like him deserved, he'd known deep down. But then that man had been there, the blond one in the nice suit, and they'd gotten to talking. And the blond man had told him about that rumor...

Everything was ready. He had to stop hesitating. He'd be remembered for this forever.

He began to chant the words.

-2012-

...I believe in you and I can do anything
We can change the world
It's best to leave your wake and spread wings
Too long this time for
Together we go...

Souji Seta looked at all of his friends, watching him, looking at him with those longing eyes. And he didn't know what to say.

It had always been like this for him. His parents had so rarely been home; he'd learned to cook his own meals. And to be honest, he'd always dreaded their return, because half the time it meant they'd be moving again, to some new place, with new people. But this was different. What they'd done... what they'd shared...

He forced himself to put it aside. These were bonds that could never be broken. Whatever happened from this point on, they'd conquered the shadows that approached each of them in the dark. The future held bright promise, and everything would be okay from that point on.

He mustered up the strength to offer his friends – his family – a single nod, and boarded the train.

-2021-

Kenta "Toro" Yokouchi walked out onto his balcony and sipped coffee.

It was a good day. The forty-one year old salesman idly rubbed his chunky frame and let the sun wash over him. That night, he was to receive his tenth consecutive national sales award.

But then, they were all good days now. His superiors kept threatening to promote him, but neither he nor (especially not) his wife would allow them to do it – his commissions were so high that an executive position would be a step down in salary. He was too beloved by his company for it to become an argument, or an indiscretion. He had it all.

Well, yes, everything but Ayase. It was a little sad, how youthful crushes sometimes never left you. But he loved his wife, and she'd long forgiven how he'd embarrassed himself at the twenty-year reunion, back in '19.

And yes, he and his wife had no children. That he could not seem to conceive... that surely had to be the most ironic thing of all time. But they were happy with each other, and his wife never tired of trying.

Yes, he thought idly, life was not perfect, but perfection was unattainable – he was happy, and that was far greater.

Toro heard a dripping sound, and paused. Then he heard it again. He looked down at his coffee. Something dark was swirling around the center of his gourmet blend. When it dripped again, he realized the cause, and brought his fingers to his lips. His nose was bleeding. Bleeding profusely, in fact. How odd. He put his mug down and went to fetch a towel.

The darkness continued to swirl in the drink like a gathering storm.