Welcome to the updated chapters of Minato and Carrie! I'll admit, it took me way too long to get around to this, and I apologise for that. But I changed my mind about the whole third person thing, and I'm going back to the first person format. The writing is improved over the last attempt, but the overall story remains the same, and I hope you all enjoy it.

Prelude to Disaster

My name is Minato Arisato and, technically speaking, I'm a zombie. When I say that I don't mean that I'm wondering the Earth in a shambling mess eating people. No. It's more… complicated than that. Let me explain.

Over the year 2009 I found myself fighting against supernatural entities known as 'Shadows.' They were the physical incarnation of humanity's negative emotions, the things they hid from others and couldn't accept about themselves. In order to fight them, me and my friends in SEES (Specialised Extracurricular Execution Squad), used a power that was only available to a special group of people. The power of Persona. Personas are our Shadows; or at least they would have been our Shadows. The main difference being that our Personas are what happens when we accept those little, disgusting details as part of us, instead of rejecting them and denying they exist.

I am what is known as a Wild Card: A person with the capability to wield multiple Personas. Using this special ability, I protected my friends and allies as best I could. But, I'm afraid to say, I wasn't always successful. We lost people along the way: Shinjiro, Mitsuru's father, Chidori. Allies and friends that died in our war to save the Earth.

We went through betrayal as well as loss, which, in many ways, was worse to cope with. Shuji Ikutski was the advisor to SEES. He was also a backstabbing, two-faced son of a bitch. He was part of a group who wanted to release a Shadow known as Death in order to bring about The Fall: The end of the world. He killed Mitsuru's father when he tried to help us and then he reprogrammed Aigis, an android on our team, to kill us. Luckily for us, he was sent right off the top of Tartarus and was left a mangled, bloody mess in front of the school. Good riddance to the bastard is what I say.

The group of people Ikutski were working with, the ones who wanted to bring about The Fall, were called Strega. Takaya, Jin and Chidori. They started out as hitmen who accepted revenge requests and killed people during the Dark Hour, the time of day when the Shadows came out to play. We were lucky enough to capture Chidori when she had one of our own, Junpei, held captive at our base of operations. We spent quite a lot of time trying to get information out of her, but she was broken free by the other members of Strega. Though there was one thing Strega hadn't expected. Mind you, we hadn't expected it, either. But Chidori had fallen in love with Junpei, and vice-versa, during his many visits to her at the hospital we were holding her at. So when Takaya shot and killed Junpei, Chidori used her healing powers to bring him back from the dead. But, you see, there was a downside to Chidori's healing abilities. The damage healed on Junpei bounced back onto Chidori during the healing process, leading to her death as she resurrected my best friend.

The single biggest kick in the teeth at the hands of Strega came with the shooting of Shinjiro by Takaya. Ken, the youngest of our group, followed Shinjiro on the night of the full moon, while the rest of us were taking on a powerful Shadow. Ken was out to get revenge for his mother, who was killed in an incident years ago when Shinjiro's Persona went berserk. Shinjiro wasn't a natural Persona wielder, you see. He was part of an experiment to create artificial Persona users, which was unsuccessful due to the Personas being unstable and violent; the only way to keep the artificial Personas under control was to take a special kind of pill, but there was a catch. These pills were slowly killing him. When Ken found this out, he became distraught. His revenge had been taken from him because, whether he killed Shinjiro or not, Shinjiro was going to die anyway. Seeing that Ken wasn't going to do it, Takaya, who was watching the scene unfold, attempted to shoot Ken, only for Shinjiro to get in the way of the bullet. Shinjiro saved the life of one of our comrades, but died in the process.

I could sit here and list off all of the things that happened in 2009, but that would take absolutely ages. So, lets just get to where I come into all this. In 1999, ten years before these events, my parents died in an 'accident' on Moonlight Bridge. In 2009 I found out that this accident was in fact Aigis combating Death. The car was totalled in the crossfire, but I was still alive… if you could even call it alive. I spent the next ten years of my life not expressing a single emotion. I was just a blank slate. Over the course of the year 2009 SEES and I killed 12 Shadows that were different to the others, more powerful and only appearing during the full moon. The weird thing was… for every one of these Shadows we defeated, my emotions began to take shape. By the time we'd beaten the final one, I was just like any other teenager. And that's when I discovered the true reason behind my sudden return to Port Island.

I was Death. Or, more accurately, Death was sealed inside of me by Aigis after she determined that it was impossible for her to defeat. This made me realise why she felt such an attachment to me without really understanding why. The twelve Shadows we killed were each a different portion of Death's overall being, and when they were all defeated, Death became free of my body. In order to bring about The Fall, Death summoned an entity called Nyx with whom I engaged in battle. I fought off Nyx completely on my own, with only the cries of my comrades, my friends, to push me on. And when it became apparent that Nxy's immortality was indeed real, I did the only thing that I could. I gave up my soul in order to create and become the Great Seal, holding Nyx at bay, away from our world and saving it from destruction. I held onto my life for an entire month with no soul, so that I could keep my promise to my friends: to meet them on the day of graduation so that we could celebrate it together. On that day, I died peacefully on the roof of the school surrounded by the best friends I'd ever had.

…Then I woke up.

It was in the hospital a few days later, and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. I'd created that seal knowing that it was going to kill me, that I'd have to give up my life in order for the world to live on. I was later informed by Igor, a strange entity that resided in the Velvet Room, that this was a reward of sorts for my selfless actions. The seal remained in place, and I was still alive.

And that's when the next hectic chapter of my life began.

~Minato and Carrie~

"Shadow Operatives?" I asked as I looked at the file Mitsuru had given me.

Across from me sat Mitsuru Kirijo, new head of the Kirijo Group after her father's untimely death. She had long, flowing crimson hair, matching eyes, pale skin and a figure that most women would positively kill for. She wore what I assumed was her business attire, consisting of a white dress shirt and tie, accompanied by a knee-length black shirt. "Yes," she told me from her seat. "The ex-members of SEES all still have the ability to wield a Persona, even though the Dark Hour is no more. Port Island may have been the main source of Shadow activity, but we've found that there are small pockets of it all around the world. If we act before these small infestations get any bigger, then we may be able to end this for good."

"Well, I'm in," I accepted without really having to think about it. "Those things have pretty much been my life since I was six years old. It would be nice to finally put all of this to bed."

"Then you should have no problem doing a little recon in America," she said with a smirk directed at me. I raised my eyebrow in response.

"America?"

"Specifically Maine," she told me. "Check in the file, page five, the details are all on there." I opened the file to the correct page and saw the name of the small town she'd be sending me to.

Chamberlain

"What's so important about this place?" I asked out of curiosity. It looked like your run-of-the-mill, small town to me.

"Most of the Shadow activity we've discovered outside of Port Island has been in small towns just like this one," she informed me with a serious tone of voice. "There was also an unexplained incident there years ago, in which the town's weather took on a rather unusual characteristic. It began to rain stones."

"Stones?" I asked. That didn't sound like the Shadows' MO.

"Indeed," she confirmed with a nod of her head. "No explanation. Nothing. There was a large amount of psychic energy in the area at the time, and the strangest thing was that the stones only fell around one house."

"That is strange," I said with a click of my tongue. "So, when do I leave?"

"Next week," she told me. "You'll be enrolled in the high school there, and you're to look for anything suspicious. The girl who lives in that house also attends the school. If you can, then get the information about the stones from her." I looked into the files again and saw the names of the house's owner and her teenage daughter.

Margaret White

Carrie White

They looked like a perfectly ordinary, single mother and daughter. There was a little in there about Margaret being a bit of a zealot, but that was hardly new; every town has one. This'll be over and done with in no time, I thought to myself with a smile. "Okay, I'll look over this and be at the airport next week," I said with a smile before saying my goodbyes to Mitsuru and leaving the office. Small town, quiet environment, school. How bad could it be?

…

…

…

Fuck!

Well, there you have it! The first updated chapter of Minato and Carrie! I hope you enjoyed it, since it's a vast improvement on the original, and I look forward to having you read the rest of it.

Next Chapter: The Arrival and the Video