Author's Note: So, as the description suggests, this story introduces the characters of a (not the but a) genderbent universe of Persona 4. Usually I'd just want to let you loose on the story but I wanted to put a little disclaimer up. Since as far as I know, there isn't a standard fanon set of genderbends for the characters, these characters will seem to be completely brand new. All the names and slight changes to them were my own ideas. This being said, one of the things that I really want to impart upon you is that none of these genderbends are OCs. The most you can call it is an AU (which is what it literally is, of course), but they are all very much the characters that you know and love. This story is really a character study, exploring the aspects of people's personality that can never change as well as the aspects that are generated by society's view on gender. So you should really think of the genderbends as elaborated offshoots of the canon characters, not as OCs.

But I think I've talked enough. I won't get much more into what this story is about, because I think you deserve to see for yourself! So, without further ado, please enjoy!

Persona 4 and the Shin Megami Tensei franchise belong to Atlus


Warp and Weft – a textile term describing the two directions of weaving; the threads of the fabric running lengthwise are referred as warp, while those crossing and overlapping them at right angles are called weft.


#01: This IS the real me


The past few days hadn't gone all that swimmingly for Kajiko Tatsumi. She knew full well that the world was full of shit, but she hadn't expected it all to hit the fan at the same time, and even then she wouldn't have figured it would all land on her. That's what it felt like, anyway; probably there were a few people somewhere having worse days than she, but it was hard to top… this.

Kajiko stumbled in the fog. With a violent tug of her leg she shook off whatever had wrapped itself around her ankle – she didn't even want to know what it was – and high-tailed it out of the corridor. So far all the doors in this place had opened to her touch – not that she really wanted to touch them all that badly, because they were pretty damn scummy-looking – but one of these times she might hit one without a broken lock and she didn't think she could hold down the panic in the face of such an event. Not that she wasn't trapped already, by the sheer size of this rat maze.

So strike that – if 'swimmingly' was what the past few days weren't, they'd gone just about 'drowningly', with extra emphasis on the sinking. First she'd been this week's spotlight delinquent after those TV idiots ran a story about her vendettas against the biker gangs. Didn't even have the decency to call her a vigilante or something, just assumed she was one of that sort. And then, not long after, she'd woken up to this eerie, foggy desolation. Since then, she'd been wandering for what could have been days through mazes of mist-filled rooms, her nerves getting sawed at like catgut fiddle strings in the hands of a tone-deaf amateur.

The only thing that could make it all worse would be ending the day strung up on the wires, like that announcer and the Konishi boy from the school she was technically supposed to be (but wasn't) attending. Had those two guys been thrown into this hellhole too, before they'd been killed? Kajiko was starting to hate herself for being so oblivious. First that cool-headed, mysterious boy had talked to her, and she'd been too preoccupied with hiding her stupid prissy blushes to notice that the whole thing made no sense. A guy her age talking serious business with her? Calling her 'intriguing'? Treating her like an equal? Like that was normal. And then those other two punks had followed her around, until she'd confronted them and eventually chased them off.

Had they been trying to warn her that she'd be the next victim? Kajiko leaned against cold steel bars, pulling the zipper of her grey school jacket even farther up and sullenly burying her chilled lips into the collar. She tried once again to knit her thoughts together, wishing she was as good at thinking as she was at knitting. If any of the kids had been trying to warn her, why couldn't have they just told her straight out? Probably one of them had been the kidnapper, come to think of it. Her money was on Mister Mysterious, because the other two kids following her had been total klutzes, and besides, she half-recognized them from around town. They weren't really the murdering sort. But that boy who approached her was a complete stranger and that was pretty suspicious. "Ain't it my damn luck," the girl muttered to herself, "First guy to think I'm worth taking seriously, he takes me seriously enough to think I'm worth killing."

The words cut through the faint and fuzzy drone that had been driving her crazy ever since she woke up here. It wasn't enough to be all alone; she had to start hearing things, too. The noises mostly sounded like TV static, but every so often a whisper of disembodied human speech would seem to come out of the gloom, and that was seriously freaking Kajiko out because no one was ever there. It was like how the shadows started to look like figures and faces when she stared at them for too long. This all unnerved her, but speaking aloud sometimes felt like it could dispel the creeping illusions.

… on the news, right?… the Tatsumi girl… heard she always skips school, what a weirdo… must be such a disgrace to her…

"Figure I oughta draw a map or something," she declared to the inside walls of the cell. Her tone turned the words into a warning, as if she could intimidate her prison by threatening to expose its true nature. "Cause every damn time I try to retrace my steps it's like the frikkin' place moves!"

The voices receded a little, their words becoming indistinguishable. The static still remained; faint, persistent, and absolutely infuriating. It was like an unscratchable itch. To fight it, Kajiko began to hum rather aggressively under her breath.

Nearly all the rooms looked alike. High ceilings obscured by dusty fog, iron-wrought cells in corners, smeared, unreadable graffiti on the walls. The windows were glazed and nearly opaque and had been sheeted with chicken wire. They were all too strong to break – the throbbing in Kajiko's knuckles was a shameful reminder of this fact. Everything was very shady-looking, and, to be honest, it seemed like the perfect place to murder someone. What puzzled Kajiko was that her kidnapper hadn't gotten around to that yet, and she assumed that this fact was probably what was causing her acute case of paranoia.

… if she were my daughter, I would have thrown her out… what does she think she… father must be so ashamed…

She started walking, and walking quickly. There had to be some way to get rid of these voices; they were driving her up the wall. "Don't know what they're talking about," Kajiko growled as she shoved another door open with her shoulder. "It isn't like that at all!"

But this time the voices didn't go away; in fact, they became stronger, clearer, more distinct. "I hear she refused to have that scar removed, even when they said they could do it," a girl's voice said in a stage whisper. "Isn't that, like, something only a crazy person would do? It's as if she wants to look like a criminal."

"It was because it woulda cost Dad a crapload of money!" Kajiko hissed, before she could stop herself. She touched the spot on her forehead. "That's all!" She knew that responding to the voices was a terrible idea. It only made them louder and clearer and she couldn't acknowledge them, otherwise she really would be crazy.

"I can't imagine what her father must think," a creaking male voice grumbled. "If I were him I'd knock some sense into her. Parents these days are too soft."

Kajiko ground her teeth. This had to be more than just an illusion – she was really hearing these voices, and wherever they were coming from, they were all talking about her. Was her kidnapper trying to crush her spirit before he closed in for the kill? Talk about adding insult to injury; would this, the sound of what the people of Inaba really thought of her, be the last thing in her life she would hear?

"Is she just doing it for attention?" scoffed a youth. "It's not like any guy would actually want a freak like that for a girlfriend. If she's even into guys at all."

She was going to snap if this kept up. She could feel herself snapping.

The eager gossip of a rumor-spreader. "So is it true that Kajiko's the leader of that biker gang now?"

The jeering of classmates. "Hey, Kaji-CHAN! Can you knit this guy a cute little cozy with your gang sign on it? He wants to join up!"

The careless cruelty of adults. "I saw her give something to this little girl the other day… Next time that happens, I'm calling the cops! She's bound to be up to something illegal."

Kajiko snapped, as she knew she would. "No, I was NOT!" she yelled, balling her fists, squaring off against the fog and static. "You don't know shit about me!" She remembered that little girl vividly, as well as the tiny plush keychain that Kajiko, the daughter of a textile shop owner, had sewn for her out of work scraps on a whim. But the next day, the little girl had been crying in the park, mourning the loss of her new toy. Someone had informed the mother of where her daughter's keychain had come from, and she'd promptly flushed it down the toilet. The memory of the incident still boiled Kajiko's blood. "Who the hell's there?" she shouted. "Come out and try saying this bullshit to my face, why don't you?"

She heard a low rushing noise behind her and wheeled around, her pulse stuttering into high gear. The room was still empty. Why couldn't there have been someone standing there? Even the kidnapper himself, whoever that might be, would have been a welcome sight. But unoccupied space could fill itself with far worse things than reality could conjure up.

"Is this really all I've got to work with?"

Her veins froze solid. Rising out of the static was a new voice. It reverberated with a demonically distorted chorus, and its tone swung back and forth between syrupy condescension and a feral snarl, but it was unmistakable.

"An EMPTY prison? How pathetic!"

The voice was her own.

"I was SO hoping for a few MANLY recruits for my street gang," complained Kajiko's distorted voice. "I guess even after I schooled those posers on live TV no one here in Inaba had the BALLS to take me seriously!"

Kajiko craned her neck up and squinted through the fog. "Wh-what the hell…?" she whispered, aghast. "How'd they do that? Get my voice in here…? I never said…"

"Ha!" her voice sharply barked."As if I care!" Its words became frantic, falling fast into the air before the ones preceding it had even begun to echo. "I'll just wait here for someone to try to find me and PROVE that they want to join my crew. Why should I waste my time with anyone who doesn't really want to be around me, anyway? People too scared to challenge society are nothing but mindless sheep, after all."

"Where's that voice coming from?" the girl growled. She shook a clenched fist at the ceiling. "You try'ina make fun of me? That… that isn't even what I sound like!"

"Everyone always thinks I'm putting on an act," the ghostly voice of not-Kajiko added venomously. "Or that I'm 'troubled', or that I'm compensating for the fact that I'm a GIRL! But they're all wrong! My only trouble is from people who don't see that THIS is the real me. I act this way... because I LIKE it!"

Kajiko was too enraged to notice that the shadows behind her had begun to move in a far more tangible, autonomous fashion than simple optic effects ever should. "Hey!" she shouted. "Whoever's out there had better be listening! Because I'm only gonna warn you one more time to knock it off before I knock you off, you got that?"

"I probably WOULD have wanted to join those biker gangs, if I didn't hafta beat them up every time they laughed at me! But once I put together a gang of my own, NOBODY won't take me seriously. And I'm through with making all these pathetic excuses for myself, or for anyone else!" The voice let out a short spasm of mirth followed by a gasping intake of air. "My name is Kajiko Tatsumi… and I just loooove! Being! BAD!"

"Yeah, keep talking, punk!" snarled Kajiko, fuming, even though she was secretly quite scandalized by what the voice was implying. "Your little impression of me might seem funny now but we'll see who's still laughing when I find you!" She marched down the corridor, trying to follow the voice and pinpoint its source. And somewhere deep down, Kajiko felt a kind of frightened desperation, because the voice was starting to get fainter. And when it disappeared, she'd be alone once again, with only the fog and the shadows for company.

"And I knooow I'm not the only one who's sick and tired of being told what to do, or what to be!" The voice kept on going, but it was fading fast. Kajiko pushed through door after nearly identical door, bumping into them and missing the handles on occasion because of the poor visibility that the fog created, trying frantically not to lose the trail. She could still make out the words, though, and they were making progressively less sense.

"So welcome, viewers of the Midnight Channel, to my tenebrously televised exposé of the Shadow World penitentiary, where I, your host, will be sifting through the dregs of your deepest rebellious desires to find some naughty criminal elements!" Another fit of hysterical laughter. Was that music that seemed to be accompanying not-Kajiko's words? How bizarre was that? Because now, coupled with the music, the words kind of sounded like an intro to a really shitty reality TV program, and that wasn't so much scary as just plain weird. Was this all a crazy lucid dream she was having?

"And we're not just talking about a few snot-nosed troublemakers or noisy, pesky bikers here, viewers," not-Kajiko went on gleefully. "You'd better call your local police station right away, because this shit's about to get illegal." It chuckled under its breath, but there was no humor in it. The tone of the words suddenly dropped its hammy cadence and became low, menacing, monotonous."I know you're watching this, boys and girls. I'll be waiting for you on the other side to test your resolveIf you honestly think I'm worth saving, you're going to have to prove it."

And then, quite suddenly, the voice and the music cut out and vanished, along with the background static and all other sound except that of her own footsteps. Never before had silence fallen so loudly in her ears. She slid to a halt, midway through crossing yet another long and drafty hall.

Kajiko waited and the moments stretched out. There was only her slightly labored breathing left keeping some sort of time, otherwise she thought she might lose track of how long a moment was. Her whole situation had suddenly become a lot harder to grasp. A guy kidnaps her and throws her into some giant abandoned prison before he kills her? Plausible. Backed up by shitty music, an insane disembodied voice masquerading as Kajiko herself pretends to host a TV show on the Midnight Channel about looking for gang recruits? Ridiculous. And the sheer madness of it was terrifying, because it sliced through all the tethers that held Kajiko to solid, comforting reality.

And then, out of the blue, some sixth sense struck a scent and a shiver ran up her spine. The swift feeling had come over her that she was being watched. As hairs prickled on her neck under the collar of her jacket, she slowly turned her head. Adrenaline shot through her veins. In the corners of her peripheral vision, she had seen movement.

She whirled around, faced the source of the movement, and then stumbled back in a panic. Come to think of it, maybe an empty room wasn't such a bad thing after all. After countless times being creeped out by nothing, she figured that any kind of something couldn't possibly be worse than what her subconscious could provide, what her imagination could use to fill the void. And she used that to comfort herself, feeling prepared for the worst.

But apparently she had a pretty crappy imagination, because what she saw was way, way beyond the worst she could have pictured, and after factoring the new ingredient of lunacy to this place, pretty much anything should have been on the table.

And this was quite true. In this case, what was on the table was a face. Or, technically it was on the tablecloth, but the point was that there was now a table where there hadn't been one before, and it had a face, a big blue mask with empty eyes, and the legs of the table had hands which were moving, and that the cup and the very long knife and the stick and the disk whirling in springy circles above the table were also very much moving, and overall the point was really, in the end, that the whole thing was moving towards her.

All these realizations had taken place in the span of a single second. In the next second, Kajiko let out a strangled yell and almost tripped over backwards in her haste to get away. The table scuttled forward, crablike, and the sheer wrongness of it, the fact that every part of it that should have been inanimate – it was a table, for god's sake! – was writhing and the one part that should have been moving – the face – didn't shift its expression one bit as it rushed towards her, threw Kajiko right over the edge into the depths of Panic Canyon.

It was time to bail. Kajiko turned and sprinted, hoping to get to the far end of the hallway in time to slam the door on the monster's face, before it caught up to her and… she wasn't even sure what it would do, actually, except crawl all over her with those nasty hands like a giant cave cricket, but she wasn't going to be so foolhardy as to try and find out. And she had nearly reached the other side when something whooshed past her ear. Kajiko slammed into the door and found herself going cross-eyed as she tried to focus on the blade of the table's knife, which was quivering inches from her nose, buried in the metal.

And, as if things couldn't get bad enough, the door handle refused to budge. Kajiko rattled it as hard as she could, kicked it, screamed a curse at it, and then planted her back to the wall, flattening herself against the door as the table rushed towards her.

Her arm moved on its own, out of an instinct for self-preservation, and the next second her fingers were wrapped around the handle of the long knife and it was being wrenched from the door and swung through the air as the table sprang towards her. There was a shout, probably from Kajiko herself. The blade of the knife struck one of the table's legs, passed through, and smacked into its underside. The monster table flew backwards, its cloth flapping.

"Not so tough now!" the girl crowed, wildly brandishing her new weapon in front of her, slicing clumsy arcs through space between her and the table, which picked itself up, unsteadily balancing on its remaining three legs. This just heightened Kajiko's thrill of power. "You want some more'a this? Wanna have another go at me, huh? Bring it on! I'll cut your creepy face to— oh shit…"

It really wasn't her lucky day. The blade had started to wobble violently in her hand, and she might have added the words "as if possessed" to describe its behavior, except that using such a phrase in the figurative sense would have been idiotic since it was clearly a literal truth. The knife wrenched forward of its own accord, or more likely, of the table's own accord, nearly managing to tear itself from the girl's grip, but she grimly hung onto it with both hands. "Argh! Let go of it, you stupid table! Let go of the damn thing so I can kick your ass in a fair fight!"

The blue face, rather unsurprisingly, didn't change its expression, and the knife didn't stop struggling to escape, yanking Kajiko from side to side as it did so. If this kept up, she might dislocate a shoulder. The knife jerked hard to the left. "Agh!" she yelled. To the right. "Ulp!" Upwards, nearly lifting her bodily off the floor. "Shit!" It twisted sharply, backflipping in her grasp, and aimed its point directly at her chest. "Gah!"

Once again, the tables had quite literally turned on her, but at least now she knew where she stood with this demonic piece of furniture. It wanted her dead; that was a simple enough goal to try and thwart. She braced herself against the door, pushing back as hard as she could to keep the shuddering knife from doing what it was managing to do anyway, which was to inexorably inch towards her heart. The table watched all of this with impassive calm.

"You're just… frikkin' enjoying this," Kajiko muttered through gritted teeth, straining against the possessed knife, "Aren't you?"

The table chose at this point to toss the cup at her as well, which flew in a lazy arc, bounced off Kajiko's forehead, and plopped to the ground. "Don't you dare laugh at me," she told the table angrily, trying to keep the knife handle from slipping from her palms, which were really starting to sweat. "I know you're laughing, you three-legged dipshit. I can just tell."

The knife began to twist in Kajiko's hands, trying to use torsion on break free, or maybe it was just preparing itself for what it would to her vital organs once it buried itself in her chest. Out of the corner of her eye Kajiko noticed the fat slice that the knife had carved into the door when the table had thrown it. The metal door… And the knife in her hands was trembling with tension, like an arrow about to be fired from a bow and just how fast could she dodge an possessed knife at point blank range, anyway?

What the hell. It was all she had. She inched over, buckled her knees slightly, so the locked door handle was pressing against the small of her back. She battled with the knife a bit, raised it up over her head so that the tip was aiming down, trying to make this all look like part of a natural, futile struggle with the weapon. And then she let go and the knife snapped forward, slicing through the air in a straight path towards her heart.

Or, that is, the place where her heart would have been, if she hadn't been diving off to the side the instant the handle left her grip. Even before she hit the ground, she saw sparks and heard a sharp, screeching clang, and she hoped like hell that her plan had worked. She landed, rolled, twisted, managed to plant her feet on the ground, and propelled herself at the door, which now had the knife embedded hilt-deep into what used to be the lock.

The laughing table didn't even have a chance to realize that its quarry was escaping. When Kajiko's shoulder hit the door it practically exploded open, and she flew through it with little grace and high velocity. Without even questioning the assumption, she was expecting another corridor, like the last one. At the very least, her brain's sense of balance expected a floor to land on, at the same height as the one in the other room, thank you very much. But instead Kajiko tumbled down without stopping, her stomach lurching, her skin crackling with static as it passed through the pulsating pattern of stripes – blood red and black – that had burned itself into her retina the moment the door had opened.


And just one final thing before you either leave or read the next chapter... give the story a shot. I decided to go with something a little risky; no strong focus on shipping to draw in that crowd (and I'm usually one of that crowd, too, so I feel ya), starting off from the POV of a semi-canon character, having a lot of introspection, starting by focusing on just one character out of the group, and so on. But do give it a chance; I think you'll find it interesting, at the very least. Persona is all about the complexities of character, and people's inner struggles and such, and that's really what inspired this story.