Disclaimer: The Persona series of video games and all associated fictional characters or locations are the intellectual property of our lords and masters, the game designers of Atlus, and whoever else has legal ownership of whatever and whichever. The only things that I claim ownership of are this work of fan fiction itself, and the original characters created for it: Kyo Morinaga, her mother Eri, and any others who I create during the process of writing future chapters. I do not intend to derive any monetary profit through the writing and publication of this fan work, and strongly recommend that anyone reading this support the official product by buying and playing Persona 5 themselves.
- PART ONE -
"Obsession"
~ V ~
"The reason I talk to myself is because I'm the only one whose answers I accept."
— George Carlin
- Chapter One -
"One Weird Girl's Very Weird Day"
Fist met alarm clock. Gently. Kyo wasn't the type to wreck her alarm clocks when they woke her up, after all. She was quite the enthusiastic morning person, and prided herself on that trait.
But she had learned through experimentation, well... the motion of swinging her arm in a wide arc and smacking the snooze button to shut off the Bridge of Khazad-dûm music that blared at her to get her going in the morning? It was a fantastic little aerobic jolt to her system, so she'd worked it it into her routine over the last year or so of early mornings.
Alarm properly silenced, Kyo arched her back, lifting her pelvis off the mattress and letting the soft fleece blanket slide off her shorts-and-tank-top-clad form, stretching her back and groaning at the sensation. The rumble of her own vocal chords vibrating from throat to chest was another good jolt. Like a whip, then, she lashed her whole body footward, throwing off what blanket hadn't already fallen away and launching herself into a Spider-Man crouch in the middle of the bed.
"Good mooooornin', Yongen-Jaya!" she laughed.
Her feet sprang inward and she dropped into an Indian-style sitting position, thrilling in the way the mattress bounced like a trampoline in response to her two rapid-fire landings. Reaching up with her left-hand, she slowly rolled her neck in a circle, closing her eyes... then opened them, looking to her right, where a black-framed full-body mirror stood in the corner. It was Kyo's sole substitute for a vanity, since she really couldn't be half-assed to bother with morning make-up things. Or with make-up at all. She wasn't exactly all gung-ho anti-feminine-stuff anymore, the way she'd been as a stupid-in-the-head high school freshman. But even now she just could not picture herself wearing either a skirt or make-up. The mental image just clanged in her brain as Wrong! Wrong! Wrooooooooong!
She turned on the bed, swinging her legs over the side of it. As another part of her morning routine, she admired herself in the mirror for just a moment. Kyo's fitness philosophy could have been accurately summed up as something like Vanity, thy name is abdominal muscles. In the short-shorts and loose, spaghetti-strap top that comprised her sleepwear, she could see those well-defined abs peeking out, and had a full view of her own adequately feminine but pretty well-hardened thighs. Her arms were even developing some pretty impressive-looking muscles, though that development was still in its toddlerhood, so to say. Kyo's first objective today would be to find herself an affordable gym. There had to be a good one at a good price point somewhere in Shibuya.
She interlaced her fingers and stretched her arms out in front of her, then over her head, eyes still on the mirror as the motion caused her back to arch alluringly again. Yep, she thought. I am a sexy beast. To hell with dudes who're grossed-out by chicks with muscle.
So, hopping to her feet, she looked around her new bedroom, which looked like it might have belonged to a boy if that boy happened to really like dark purple paint on his walls. There was a shelf full of comics, Blu-Rays, and video games against the wall on one side of her bed, within easy casual reach if she wanted to read a comic before sleeping, and on the opposite side of the bed, a good bedroom-sized flatscreen TV with a PlayStation 4 Pro set up beneath it, Kyo's old GameCube console plugged into its GameBoy Player on the faux-hardwood floor beside the TV stand. A desk and chair stood against the wall near the foot of the bed, occupied by a small lamp, laptop computer, and plugged-in mobile phone. Posters of various superheroes, movie characters, and other faces from pop culture littered the wall, mostly displaying Western pop culture items with a dash of domestic influence in the form of characters from the better examples of games and anime. Without rhyme or reason, the likes of Batgirl and Avatar Korra mingled with John McClane, Samus Aran, Kamen Rider Double, and the Elric Brothers.
Possibly the only not-quite-boyish thing about the room was its lack of obvious cheesecake posters or cute-girl pop idols. It wasn't as if Kyo was a prude (picture that, eh?). She just kept that kind of stuff in a discreet folder among the files on her laptop.
This room was already a familiar enough sight to her, but it felt new all the same and something about the way things had gone when her mom had taken her to deal with Shujin's placement test... it was hard to put into a coherent thought, but yesterday felt like it had injected yet more of that sense of newness into their recent living situation. She and her mom had been living in this apartment for a number of weeks, though, courtesy of some rich uncle who'd pulled a string or two to get Eri a well-enough-paying job that she could afford a place on her income alone. Come to think of it, would that have been Mr. Corporate Overlord Kunikazu Okumura-sama who'd done that? Hm. Now that it had occurred to her, Kyo made a mental note to ask her mother about it at some point.
But she had set her alarm for ten-thirty today. No need for a super-early wake-up when the start of the school year was still a few days off! Her mom would be at work now; apparently she was pretty good at engineering design, so she was working a respectable job for Kirijo Construction Solutions, a subsidiary of a larger company that was headquartered elsewhere but retained an important branch in Tokyo. Apparently this little tentacle of the Kirijo Group had been acquired via merger over the last year and was still trying consolidate solid talent. Eri's job involved designing tools and components or some such... it hadn't been a job that Kyo would have pictured her in, but then, she'd spent most of their life in Osaka as a full-time housewife. Lately, it was dawning on Kyo that she knew shockingly little about her own damn mom, which chafed like nothing else.
Once she'd gotten dressed — in brown cargo pants and a black, purple-dotted tube top with a vibrant purple butterfly emblazoned across the chest — she pulled on green-laced black boots and a pair of fingerless biker gloves. If Kobayakawa ever got wind of what she wore when school was out, Kyo mused in front of the mirror, his obviously lax attitude toward his own health would probably catch up with him on the spot in the form of a stroke or heart attack. Which of those two was more likely for an obese dude? Ah, whatever. It would be funny, either way.
She spent an hour playing Ultra Street Fighter IV online to kick her brain into gear, racking up a respectable eight-wins-and-six-losses alternating between Cammy and Makoto. Once she'd had her fill of that, Kyo decided to head out for some curry at that place down the way before she got her day started for realsies. She pulled her black biking jacket (sadly not real leather) off the hook by the front door, eyes sweeping the apartment as she slid arms into sleeves. The apartment was pretty small: just a room for her, a room for her mom, and a main sitting-area-slash-kitchen-thing, plus obligatory bathroom and shower. But for the two of them living alone, it was perfect. Kyo had expressed surprise that her mom hadn't gone for something more roomy or extravagant, to which Eri had simply said that she wanted to save up for a while and aim for a small house after Kyo graduated. The lower rent this apartment charged would make that possible.
A sound plan, Kyo had to admit. She'd been worried that Eri wouldn't know how to live independently at all, because she'd been married while still college-age and had leaned on a breadwinner husband ever since. But the old lady was smarter about these things than Kyo had given her credit for. It was encouraging to know that.
Kyo had to descend three flights of stairs before she emerged into the narrow maze of alleys that comprised Yongen-Jaya, the district they'd moved into two months before. It was at once a cluttered mess and a warm place to live; Kyo had taken a real shine to it, not least because there were batting cages right nearby and, of course, because spicy food was totally Kyo's jam and she was now all of a minute's walk away from some of the best curry she'd had in a good-long time.
"Heeeeeeey, Sakura-san!"
That was her greeting as she pushed open the door to Cafe Leblanc, strolling over to the bar and hopping onto one of the round seats in front of it. She paid no heed to the annoyed look that one of the conversing old-timers in the far booth shot her, instead propping her elbows shamelessly on the counter and resting her chin in her hands. The man who ran this joint, a middle-aged guy with glasses and a pretty sick pointed beard, was hard at work stirring curry in the kitchen that was snugly jammed into the rear of the bar area, in an alcove to the right side of all the coffee-bean jars.
It was a warm, homey kind of restaurant. Sojiro Sakura's expression did not reflect that warmth when he saw who it was that had just barreled in crowing a greeting at him. If anything, he looked like he'd been hoping not to see Kyo today, the old grump. She bit back a laugh at the look that crossed his face before he assumed his professional demeanor.
"Kyo-san," he said. "Your mother's not here with you? Ah, she'd be at work. So will it be the usual?"
Sojiro had subtly hit on Eri for a little while after they'd moved in, or at the very least, been playfully charming toward her. Kyo would say "subtly" as a kindness to his attempts at grace. It was obvious what he was doing, and Eri's polite replies had a certain undercurrent of apology to them, as if she would have quite liked to flirt right back if only she wasn't so fresh out of a failed marriage as it was. Sojiro, it transpired, was good at picking up signals, and had eased off as soon as he realized it was turning Eri's thoughts down a melancholy road. After that rocky start, however, Eri and Sojiro had become sort of friends, and Eri regularly stopped by Leblanc to chat with him over coffee.
Kyo had been present for only a few of those conversations, not being all that crazy for coffee. It was good that he was taking the hint and keeping a few two-liters of Coke under the damn counter now, though. This was the only tell Sojiro had given that he had kind of taken a shine to Eri's daughter, too.
In answer to his routine question she said, "Yep," and turned her attention to the television in the corner. That didn't hold her attention for very long at all — it was some kind of silly game show. So she turned her eyes back to the man to watch him cook. He seemed to know exactly what to do at exactly what moment, muscle memory carrying him through the process as much as his actual brain-memory did. It was almost like watching a digital artist speed-draw a portrait of a character on livestream, something that Kyo had always found to be an oddly relaxing, mesmerizing way to spend an evening after school.
"Say, Sakura-san," Kyo decided to ask. "I don't suppose you've got an openin' for any part-timers? It's just I'd really like t' learn how t' make curry the way you do, and figured I could trade help for some lessons."
Sojiro hesitated with his hand above the pot, at the point of adding some kind of seasoning to it that Kyo was too far away to identify.
"Ah, sorry," he said abruptly, now genuinely uncomfortable. That was interesting. "I just took on a part-timer, so there's no room for any more. Besides, this recipe's a trade secret."
He regained some of his professional air of humor as he added this second excuse.
Kyo sighed, exaggerating her disappointment. "I'm not gonna be openin' any restaurants, y'know!" she said, then froze. "Oh. Right. My cousins are the Okumuras. Fuck damn, but I keep forgettin' that."
Sojiro added his ingredients, stirred, and stepped back. Evidently it was time for a hands-off minute of simmering.
"Okumura as in Okumura Foods?" he asked, actual interest bleeding through his facade of detached friendliness now. He must have been more interested than he let on, because he completely forgot to tell her off for using obscene language in front of his customers.
"Yeah, mom's parents are like, the CEO's sister and her husband, or somethin'," Kyo said with a shrug, glad for an excuse to engage him in some real conversation for once. She liked Sojiro Sakura, so it was frustrating that he seemed to keep her at arm's length in a way he didn't with her mom. "It never mattered much t' me until I went over t' Shujin for the entrance exam yesterday. Seems like the staff sees that as so important that they're willing to ignore me dressin' like a boy and havin' natural swamp-goblin green for the curtains and drapes. Frickin' kiss-ups."
Sojiro chuckled quietly, but aborted the sound before it could carry and put fist over his mouth as if covering a cough. "I have customers who don't want to hear that kind of vulgarity while they eat, Kyo-kun," he said. He didn't appear to notice that he'd slipped and referred to her a bit more casually than normal. "You'll be attending Shujin for the year, you say? If that's the case, I might have a job for you after all."
Kyo cocked an eyebrow. Sojiro didn't elaborate. She figured this was something he wanted to discuss in private, so she just said, "Alright, whenever you're ready, shoot. Is that in exchange for curry-cookin' lessons? More valuable t' me than money at this point, since I'm gonna be livin' on my own for a while before I even think o' marryin'."
"Wouldn't you still need to know how to cook if you wanted to move in with a guy?" Sojiro asked with a bit of long-suffering amusement. He moved to the fridge and extracted a bottle of soda, then smoothly stepped to one side and opened the cabinet where the regular, non-coffee cups were. "You're not going to find many young men who want to play house-husband, you know."
"I'm always on the hunt for mythical creatures," Kyo said seriously. "I won't rest until I find a young stud just like you, Sakura-san: an incubus chef with a sexy beard."
Sojiro really had to work to cover his "cough" this time. Ah, but she'd chip through that wall of ice yet. He poured her soda and kept his face determinedly neutral as he slid the glass along the bar toward her. She caught it in her hand like a round of beer at the pub.
But the jingling of the cafe door alerted them to other customers entering, the start of the lunch-hour rush. So that was it for heckling the barista, at least for now.
~ V ~
Sojiro's special recipe was as good as ever. She paid in cash. As he handed the change over, he told her to come back at a later date: he'd have a job for her to do then. What this had to do with her attending Shujin Academy, Kyo had no clue. But if she didn't like it, she could always bow out. Sojiro seemed like good people, so she doubted it'd be anything weird.
With a belly full of delicious curry, it was now time for a day out on the town. She hadn't really been in the mood for exploring over the last month or so; she'd only been around Yongen-Jaya and its immediate surroundings up until now. But Shibuya was so well-known that she'd have had to be crazy not to hop a train over eventually, and now she had her student train pass, which so happened to cover trips to Shibuya by virtue of it just being a necessary stop in the middle! So it was time to strike out into the wild and see what there was to see. Maybe she'd even find one of those mythical "househusband" creatures and claim one for her own while she was at it.
Eh. A girl could dream.
Tokyo wasn't much more intimidating to her than Osaka had been, and there had been a time when Kyo had felt more at home out on the streets indulging her random fits of wanderlust than she had when... actually staying at home. Tokyo was different, but in many ways similar. In truth, Kyo found the big city too chaotic for its own good, one of the reasons that she hoped one day to move to America, where there was a more evenly-spaced balance between Big City Living, Small Town Quiet, and The Suburbs That Lay Between. Japan was too centralized around its cities, and that meant too many people felt obligated to live in or near them. It also had a problem with young people not having enough kids and the resulting skewed toward old, crusty, approaching-their-expiration-dates population was a pain in the neck to live with. That was another reason she wanted to quit the place. The last thing she needed in her life was a bunch of snooty old-timers shaming her for not wanting to jump right into the process of baking buns in her oven.
Kyo didn't have a problem with kids, she just didn't see the appeal of personally raising them. Paradoxically, and like most of the human race, she loved the baby-making process when it utterly failed to create one. Thank the zillion-and-a-half Shinto deity-things for the miracle of birth control. Speaking of, she'd need to pay a visit to that clinic back in Yongen and see if she could work something out. The doctor there was a woman with interesting fashion sense, Tae Takemi: Kyo had made casual conversation with her a bit at Leblanc, just the one time she'd seemed receptive to it. Kyo figured it was a good bet that she wouldn't catch any self-righteous lectures from Dr. Takemi about either staying pure or making babies for the good of the Japanese nation if she went to her for that stuff, so...
...And here was her stop. She'd gotten so lost in the random jumble of her thoughts that she almost couldn't tell whether it had taken far too much time or no time at all.
Yeah, trains were about as boring in Tokyo as they were in any city, with the added issue of not being able to find a frickin' seat to sit on ninety-nine times out of twenty. Kyo slid out the door of the train between a salaryman and a willowy foreign-looking lady, and stepped out onto the platform at the Shibuya station with an exaggerated deep breath, as if she were bursting out from a deep dive under water. Her hearing, quite keen for individual points of interest in city crowds, caught a chuckle from the willowy woman who'd exited just behind her.
It was good to know that indulging in spontaneous displays of minor visual comedy could brighten the day for a random stranger or two, you know, just here and there, now and again...
...But yeah, trains were boring and her brain ran off on random tangents when she was bored and had no one to talk to. Not that it was any different when she wasn't bored and did have people to talk to. When she did, it was just her mouth running off on tangents, dragging her brain along for the ride. What had she been thinking about? Sex and birth control? Sex: a fun way to spend an hour and an activity that she probably wouldn't motivate herself to engage in for a while. Birth control: medical assistance that she wouldn't actually need to bother with until that former emotional hurdle was conquered. What a constructive train of thought she'd taken, all the way to frickin' Shibuya.
"Kyo," she said to herself under her breath, "just buy a dildo and call it a one-woman marriage. That way only the battery'll die on you, and that, y'can replace."
This obnoxious self-recrimination was masked by the yammering of the surrounding crowd. The best place to speak private things out loud was in the middle of a bunch of loud people, she had learned back home. None of them would hear you. Hell, not many of them would even really see you. The oxymoronic thing about crowds was that they were a haven both for people who wanted to talk about sensitive things and people who wanted to overhear those things. No one ever noticed either of them.
She didn't let herself dwell on her reasons for not wanting to jump back into the boys thing. That would have soured her mood. Her boyfriend had been shot in the head, and the culprit had been justly punished for it: that was that. It had been the sad ending of a long, twisted chain of events that she had no desire to relive either inside her own head or out loud to somebody else. Kyo wasn't the kind of person who moped and internalized, anyway. She drowned her sorrows in adrenaline and excitement instead. And when she got mad, she got even. So, in the interest of that drowning-of-sorrows portion of her personal policy, she had three goals for today:
First? Find a good gym, as she'd reminded herself to that morning. Nothing cleansed the soul like a hard, hearty workout!
Second! Locate the arcade. Life was too short to go even a single day more without challenging some cocky wannabe pop-star to a dance-off.
Third, and the activity that would likely consume most of the afternoon: scope out the immediate Shibuya area. There would be stores, fast food places, restaurants galore, tourist attractions... but what lurked on the fringes? The most interesting events in Kyo's life, both good and bad, had always come from poking her nose into the shadows at the edge of public awareness. Specialist shops, side-alley fortune tellers, those beneath-the-bridge hidey-holes where banchou types hung out smoking and pretending they were hot shit. Stuff like that.
At one point she'd have taken it further, including as a footnote "hunt down a place that will sell alcohol to a minor." Not cigarettes, of course: Kyo had never seen the appeal of those and she didn't relish the idea of what it might do to her teeth or her breath. But getting drunk? She found she could absolutely see the fun in that.
As it happened, though, Kyo had resolved to clean up her act on that front even before she'd left Osaka. So it only occurred to her now in a moment of retrospective irony. She would not be hunting for booze this day. But it would be handy to know where it could be acquired by a minor, even so. Information was power. If she was ever in a situation where she was sneaking around, she could misdirect anyone who'd noticed her into thinking she was nothing but another trash delinquent indulging her trash impulses.
Pfffffwahahaha... what?! What the heck, brain?! You crazy.
Sometimes even Kyo had to stop and marvel at the compacted, semisolid micro-monsoon that she called a frontal lobe. Another mental tangent, wonder of wonders. It didn't surprise her that she'd already tuned out again, though. The station was a blur of faceless strangers which she would need to dodge and weave through in order to reach the fun part of this trip. So here she was, thinking of beer as if it were a costume prop she could outsmart criminals with, because she had nothing better to think about at the moment. What had even directed her brain toward such crackhead shenanigans? It wasn't as if she were Batgirl, running around rooftops and beating up evildoers in butt-hugging leathers and a fabulous yellow cape.
Kyo stepped out into the station square, slipping a hand out of her pocket to shade her eyes from sudden, invigorating brightness. Ah, sunlight! That lovely warmth caressing the skin of her face and collarbone. Such a nice feeling. Never got old. It wasn't quite nice enough out to go without her jacket yet, but she'd take what she could get from Mother Nature when she could snag it.
She skimmed the area with her eyes. People, young and old, milled about their business. Off to the side, a politician went halfway-ignored by passersby in his impassioned rant about the youth of the country being the future or whatever. He was probably a regular piece of background scenery to most of them, like a small waterfall that had be splish-splooshing down a stream in someone's backyard for as long as they'd lived there. Kyo likewise ignored him — that he was preaching out here like this, without ceremony, meant he probably had a candle's chance in a snowstorm of making a real difference, and it wasn't like she could have voted for him even if she did kind of like what he was saying just now.
So which way from here would take her to all of the cool things that Shibuya had to offer?
It was only at this point that Kyo whipped out her phone, tapping the button to turn on the lock screen and sliding the tip of her index finger down overtop the middle button at the bottom — the unlabeled black, horizontal bar that was both Home button and fingerprint scanner. It was a nice enough model, a bit out of date but more than enough to serve all the functions of a pocket-computer-phone thing. She did like the fingerprint-unlock function, especially. Quicker than a password, but she still need a password on reboot, so her phone and its questionable Internet history were safe and secure. At least, they were safe from any casual rando who might swipe her phone at school while she wasn't looking.
...Not so much from malware, she remembered in the next moment.
Kyo grunted in irritation at the sight of new icon blinking in an empty space she kept in her home screen right beneath the transparent clock widget, a space that was reserved (thank you kindly) for the magnificent right breast of Morrigan Aensland from Darkstalkers, the character proudly displayed as her wallpaper: the color of the anime succubus's flowing hair had made her into Kyo's instant in-game avatar the moment she'd discovered the franchise. Covering up such a magnificent feminine asset would have been a travesty, so why was this brazen little icon doing exactly that? She didn't remember putting it there. Kyo custom-arranged all of the icons on every page of her phone's home screen for maximum exposure, which meant they were mostly lined up along the bottom and right side when they were there at all.
She frowned at it. It was the left-most, top-most empty space on her Android phone, which meant it was one of those shortcuts that was auto-generated upon the installation of a new app. And she hadn't installed anything new for at least three or four months. She doubted it was malware, either, come to think of it. She didn't use the Internet much on her phone, preferring her laptop for that sort of thing, and when she listened to music or streamed video, it was usually through a dedicated app. Had one of her phone's built-in apps received a major update, maybe? Her eyes flicked to the notification bar at the top. Battery, signal bar, 4G indicator, Wi-Fi... whoops, she'd forgotten to turn that off — and... nope, no icon for a new installation or even any app updates. Weird. She returned her attention to the interloper icon which dared censor the succubus mascot of Kyo's womanly power fantasies.
The funniest thing about it was the design of the icon itself: a black-on-red design featuring some kind of edgelord eyeball-thing.
"Rude," Kyo said aloud, pressing her finger to the app icon and holding it so that she could move it to another page. "Eyes up here, ya perv."
And she slid it over, over, over, past several pages of other shortcuts, until she had popped a whole new empty page into being. Here she stopped and released the icon on a space directly over top of Morrigan's devious, smirking face.
"There. That's how polite little boys interact with pretty women," she instructed her phone in a righteous Tokyo dialect, an accurate (if haughty) imitation of her mother's. "Even if she was clearly drawn to be ogled there. Fiction is not permission." She paused, tapping her chin as she pondered her own thought-out-loud joke. "Nah, I kid. Ogle away." She slid the app one space down to its previous position over the same breast it had been so in love with before. She couldn't blame it. As the human mammary went, it was some top-tier motorboating equipment, no mistake.
Snorting to herself and shaking her head, took a moment to mentally construct a squeaky-voiced anime girl in her mind, who administered the sharp mental slap that Kyo surely needed. She figuring this would satisfy her daily quota of moments in which she must re-evaluate her own maturity. Thanks, imaginary anime waifu-friend!
But then, with her urge to indulge in crass humor properly sated, Kyo shifted her attention to satisfying the secondary itch that was curiosity. She tapped the app icon to open it. The phone's screen at once surrendered itself to a strange program that looked like some sort of search-and-navigate app. And as suddenly as that, the whole world went silent around her: the words filtering into her brain from the people around her slowed down and ground to a halt, as did all of the sounds of shoes on pavement, purses rustling against clothes. Even the wind blowing by her ears ceased to tickle her eardrums.
Kyo blinked, and looked up. Where had all the chattering, yammering faceless people gone? And she had her answer. They were still there. The only things that were gone was the noise and the motion. She nearly dropped her phone in shock at what she was seeing, and rent the silence in half, letting loose with a resounding banshee-shriek of "THE HELL?!" as she staggered backward, nearly falling on her ass in the middle of the square.
She would have done, had something not propped her up. Her right shoulder blade bumped something immovable and chest-high. Kyo spun around to see that it was a young girl, smiling and holding hands with her mother. She was maybe eleven or twelve years old, and she had frozen mid-walk. So her her mother beside her. Kyo whipped around again, gawking at the soap-box politician, who was likewise in mid-rant suspended animation. Her head yanked itself left, then right. Everyone was frozen in place. The police officer berating a public drunk, frozen. That pair of hot boys and their gremlin-like bottom-feeder friend who was clearly hoping to bask in their reflected attractiveness. The three semi-receptive-looking-or-maybe-just-polite young women they were hitting on. Frozen, all of them.
Kyo gulped, then stared at the application still displaying on her phone for several seconds. The display of her phone might have been the only thing besides her that wasn't frozen. She had the thought that this was like the cliche opening of some otaku-as-fuck RPG, like Final Fantasy X, maybe.
"Hi," said a voice next to her, clearly amused. That was when an arm draped over her shoulder and Kyo screamed like a little girl.
Kyo had the fleeting impression of a leanly-muscled arm resting across the back of her jacket as if she and the person who had apparently beamed down from the Starship Enterprise right next to her were the best of bros. Her brain registered inhuman, echoey distortion in the voice that had mockingly greeted her within casual spitting distance of her right ear. And then reflex made her flail and swing her arms, she yanked herself away, whirling to snarl like an animal at the offending man.
She froze, then, almost as completely as the people around her, forgetting to swing her fist at this idiot's jaw as she had intended, forgetting to breathe. It wasn't a man. The arm's subtle muscular had just given it a rough feeling that reminded her of one.
The person who stood there, hand on a hip and hip thrust coquettishly to the side, grinning... was herself, or someone that looked exactly like her. This mirror-image (no, that was the wrong way to describe it... if it had been that, the hair would have been flipped around, right?) wore the boy's uniform of Shujin Academy as Kyo had done the previous day. Her grin was thin, flirty, and her eyes were eerily yellow, the opposite of the green they should have been. Kyo stared, gawked even. The resemblance was too exact to be anything short of an identical twin, and Kyo knew herself to be an only child.
This apparition lifted the hand not occupied with her hip and tapped the side of her nose, grin growing wider.
"There's already a castle there," this yellow-eyed Kyo said, disapproving but amused. "Someone actually called dibs on it. That sick bastard thinks he owns the place, too. Ha! I'll show him. Before he even sees the foot that kicked him in the those deviant family jewels of his, I'll make that place into the Palace it was meant to be. A beautiful palace, where those I love can live in peace, in the heaven that is my embrace. Don't disappoint me out there, Me-chan. Strut your stuff... show him who really rules the roost. Kyeheh...!"
And then? Then it was as if it hadn't happened at all. People were moving, the noise of their chatter invaded her eardrums as if a damn had burst and that waterfall was suddenly not just the constant source of white noise it had been before its inexplicable absence. A slap broke through to her awareness through the tangle of audiovisual sensation, and Kyo looked toward the source. That maybe-receptive-but-probably-just-polite trio of girls had apparently just been polite, until the gremlin, obviously a bit drunk, slid a hand over one of the girls' thighs and received the only appropriate answer someone could give when you did that in the middle of a crowded street. Even gremlin-boy's cohorts looked mortified by him, and were backing away, faces scrunched-up with the words What the hell, man?! all but tattooed across their foreheads.
The slap also diverted the policeman who'd been berating the other drunk. Said policeman looked like the most long-suffering fool on the planet, as he gave the man he had been threatening with arrest a short, angry dismissal, and then stomped over toward the unruly group of teen boys... there was no sign that the policeman, or the pedestrians, or anyone had noticed any disturbance at all apart from the grabby drunk who had probably just earned himself an overnight vacation in a holding cell...
Kyo almost believed it had been some kind of daydream or delusion, as her eyes and ears and good sense were now telling her it must have been. Almost believe it had been. And would have believed it had been, if her entire body hadn't suddenly been oriented in the wrong fucking direction and positioned three yards from where she'd started, too damn fast for anything but the movements she remembered making to account for it. No one, not even the little girl and the mother who strolled without a care through the open space that Kyo had just occupied, seemed to have noticed her miraculous use of the Instant Transmission Technique.
She stared down at the app, still full-screen on her phone, and sucked in a shuddering breath.
"And just what the hell was that fresh bowl o' batshit?" she breathed, heart still hammering blood through a vein in her neck. She reached up with her empty hand and felt her racing pulse, then hastily clicked her phone's lock button and turned to scan the area with her eyes. There had to be a place around here to sit down, calm down, re-adjust... think. Sit down. Calm down. Think. Sit down. Calm down...
She walked as quickly as she could, eyes frantically searching for such a place until finally she found a bench by a bus stop at the outerskirts of the station square. Ignoring the bored salaryman who occupied one half of it, she plopped down leaned forward, stuffing her phone into her inner jacket pocket so she could rest her head in her hands and hold it as close to her knees as she could without it becoming some kind of impromptu yoga routine.
She remained there for what felt like a very long time, eyes closed, breathing deeply. The faint scent of the laundry detergent still clinging to the knees of her cargo pants was almost like incense. Dimly, she was aware of the salaryman vacating the bench in-between the rumbling of a bus engine arriving and departing. She didn't want to get up. But the world did not go silent again.
~ V ~
It was some time later, almost half an hour, when the random tangents of her thought process yanked her hook-through-nose out of this stupor. It occurred to her that society was a marvel in how easily people ignored other people in obvious distress. Not once as she sat there had anyone tried to ask if she was okay, although she supposed someone probably would have done exactly that if she hadn't looked like a punk-ass boy when she held her arms in front of her open jacket, like she'd been doing this whole time.
Kyo snorted, shook her head, and stood up.
Get it together, "Me-chan," she thought to herself with sardonic amusement. The mental image she had formed of herself sitting with her head down at a random bus stop was just too uncharacteristically pitiful for her to do anything but laugh at.
Alright, so she sure as heck wasn't tired enough to be nodding off on her feet. She was also fairly certain that recovering alcoholics didn't experience hallucinations unless one happened to find themselves stuck inside a haunted mountain hotel over the winter. Kyo was confident in her sanity, even if she was learning to doubt her maturity, so whatever had happened was certainly a thing that had happened. What did that mean for her?
She clicked the unlock button, slid her finger over the bottom of the phone, and stared at the red-eye icon on her phone. It was a creepy, but cool-looking design. She would have mistaken it for some kind of edgy mobile role-playing game if she hadn't checked it and found a navigation app. If she really had a mobile application that could make the user have weird hallucinatory episodes... maybe is used some kind of horrible subliminal messaging thing or MKUltra fuckery. Whatever the case, she wanted to know just what the shit had happened to her, but thought that maybe it wasn't such a hot idea to mess with it in the middle of a public street.
So Kyo slid her finger to the right across the phone's screen, scrolling back to her own quite mundane and ordinary navigation application.
She tapped it. Mundane and ordinary was a redundant and repetitious way of describing it. But Kyo figured that a mundane, ordinary navigation application would be just supercalifragilisticexpialidocious for her state of mind right now. And so it was. She found the nearest cluster of places to eat, including a diner, beef bowl place, and Big Bang Burger, figuring this was likely to be the best place to start her exploration of Shibuya. The strange, mind-twisting red-eye icon wouldn't be going anywhere unless she uninstalled it, so that would keep until she had the privacy of her bedroom to work with.
As soon as she was sure of her game plan, the weirdness of what had happened didn't seem so overpowering anymore. She gradually regained her confidence and casual energy as she walked.
And so she found herself swimming along with and against a frothing stream of comers-and-goers, admiring the big-city charm that exuded from the place. Occasionally she glanced at her phone, and it was only when she saw the little rounded arrow icon that represented herself come level with that diner that she stopped and really took in the businesses around her.
A bookstore. Hm. Ooh, a video store! Definitely more her speed. Not that she hated books, she just had trouble focusing on them. She'd come to appreciate reading a bit more since she'd started picking up English-language novels to help hammer the foreign words into her noggin, though... she'd even gotten pretty invested in her English-language copy of The Last Wish, although it was a bit weird when she thought of it, being a Japanese girl reading an English translation of a Polish short story collection. It was easier to get invested if it was a language she wanted to learn and a video game series that she was already pretty into, though.
"Heyyyyy, you look like you're new in town," a voice sounded from her right. Thankfully with no unearthly distortions this time, just regular old earthly slime and sleeze. Kyo's eyes went deadpan and she sighed, without looking. She wasn't worried, in spite of the suspicion that had spiked in her gut. Kyo could see the man in his casually-open suit jacket in her peripheral vision as it was, and there was no real need to be on guard for aggression when both of them were practically buried in a mobile dog-pile of witnesses.
So she just continued to look over the buildings lining the street ahead of her and said casually, "Who's askin'?"
The man, perturbed a little by her inattention, stepped to the side so that he was a bit more directly in her line of sight. This naturally drew her eyes to him whether she liked it or not, but she kept her patented, deadpan the fuck's this shit look on at full blast just to spite him. It was subtle, yet obvious: a tightening of the muscles around her eyes, which turned expressionlessness into obvious flatness. He frowned at the look she was giving him, and made a "Tch" sound.
"I was just lookin' to welcome you to town, dude," he offered. Then his eyes flicked downward, and his eyebrows went up. "Oh. My mistake. You look, uh, a lot less feminine from the side."
"I get that a lot," Kyo said blandly. "I look even less feminine when I take the jacket off. Experience has taught me that a girl who lifts might as well spray herself with dudebro repellant in the mornin'."
The guy in the suit jacket laughed. So he wasn't uptight about his masculinity, huh? Point for him, then. Kyo let the deadpan slide out of her eyes, and even graced the man with a personable smirk.
"Ahhhh, you I like," he said, as the laughter died down. "I was gonna ask if you were up for an odd job, y'know, make a bit o' yen. But on second thought, maybe you ain't the type. Welcome to Shibuya, anyways."
Kyo cocked an eyebrow, the smirk disappearing. "A job?" she prompted. "Or a swindle? Y'gotta know that's kinda like bein' a hitchhiker... only gullible doofs would take ya up on it."
She kept her voice carefully lowered and casual, making it sound like she didn't disapprove of this tactic, and was simply criticizing its effectiveness. The man looked momentarily wary, but then shrugged, and leaned in conspiratorially. "You'd be surprised how many gullible doofs you can find in a day, just by hanging around the popular spots," he said slyly. "You sound like you've been around the block before, though. You, uh... you affiliated with any group as yet? You do look new to town. Only newbies need Google Maps to find their way around this city block."
Affiliated with any groups. As in criminal groups, Kyo realized with a teaspoon measure of black humor. She shook her head.
"I'm a free agent," she said, with a crooked smile. "Haven't put down roots yet."
"Wellllll," said the man. "You just might find a place to dig into the ground if stick with me."
Aha! Ha! Ha! That was a laugh. Barely exchanged two words with the first stranger to address her and she was already being recruited by the fucking mafia. At least, she assumed it was. This guy definitely wasn't yakuza. They weren't as graceless as this blundering ox, and wouldn't likely be running a scam that targeted teenagers. They probably also wouldn't have extended such an invitation to a young girl, even if she did dress like a wannabe hardass. But this gullible doof had bought into her low-key bluff. Kyo knew that if she just talked like she knew what was going on, it was pretty easy to trick someone into thinking you knew more than you'd really confirmed. The trick was not look like she was trying to learn what she didn't know.
And the secret to good acting was to make yourself feel what you wanted to look like you felt. So Kyo channeled her amusement at this turn of events into a good-natured twinkle of her eyes. "That sounds like a private talk t' me," she answered, her voice carrying the suggestion of a snicker.
"So it does, so it does," said the man, who reached into his jacket and extracted a notepad.
A few quick scribbles and then he tore out a page, handing her a slip of paper. It was a phone number. There wasn't a name written alongside it; it was nothing but a number.
"This your personal phone?" Kyo asked, glancing up over the sheet. "Lucky me. Barely a week in town and already scored a date. Stud magnets, these abs."
The man laughed, and shook his head. Her tone had made it obvious that she was joking, so he rolled with it. "You just call that number if you want to start making connections," he said, still chuckling. "I can make introductions for you. The start of a lucrative career, if you've got the stomach for it."
"Career, huh?" Kyo echoed thoughtfully, folding the paper deftly between her fingers and slipping it into her pocket. "I'll think about it. But I'd better be on my way before someone notices us and thinks it's a bit of a weird exchange goin' on here, if you follow me."
The man nodded, eyes glinting. They darted down to her abs. Oh. So that was why he was so quick to offer her a potential entry-level employment inroad. He was an abs man. How interesting. The question was, did the invitation hold water, or was he just looking to bait Kyo into the bedroom? Probably both. She wondered if he could even tell she wasn't an adult yet, and now that this occurred to her, she realized it was likely he thought she was eighteen or nineteen. Girls with her general look weren't so common that guys could be expected to pin down her real age with just a glance.
She gave him a two-fingered salute and went on her way. As soon as she knew he was behind him, the deadpan flatness retook control of her eye muscles. That silly son of a goat. Well, she would keep the number and think about pursuing it later. Fucking with some mafia goons and causing a little trouble for scumbags who deserved it? To Kyo, it sounded like nothing less than good sport. But she was trying to focus her attention on senior year and maybe volleyball, a legitimate sport. So maybe she'd just ignore it this time.
Funny how shit like this had a way of falling into her lap, though. Stud magnets? Maybe her abs were trouble magnets. Maybe she could save herself a world of annoyance if she took the Big Bang Burger challenge and grew herself a healthy, feminine layer of smooth fat to cushion that muscle against all the trouble that was magnetized to it. Yeah. Maybe she would do that.
When Kyo really went insane and decided that she wanted to live a boring life, she would.
~ V ~
Her visit to Shibuya was a pretty normal one after that, even if spontaneity overrode her vague plan for what she wanted to do and she wound up going to see a movie at the theater before she went hunting around they alleyways, and had only taken the time to scope out the arcade instead of challenging anyone to that dance-off.
It was in one of said alleyways that she found just the perfect little gym for her needs, Protein Lovers, which didn't charge for a membership or anything and was therefore just right for her kind of irregular exercise habits. A plan was forming in her head — she would join the Volleyball Team at Shujin, using the training as her fitness centerpiece, and would hit Protein Lovers on the days when she didn't have practice. Unless, of course, her body was telling her to lay off and let her muscles rebuild themselves for a little while. She was good at gauging her recovery like that.
She'd also found a promising little back-alley shop that sold airsoft guns and guns models, plus other related miscellany. She'd wanted to go in (a model Beretta M9 to hang on the wall in her room would have been just super) but she figured that after publicly conversing with a shady guy and accepting a slip of paper from him, it was best to avoid entering any buildings that might raise suspicions about her activities. Just in case, you know, someone who could observe things properly had noticed and made a point to be sure she was above board. The trip into the movie theater had been her impulsive means to disappear from the street for a while, too. Also just in case.
It wasn't as if she'd been nervous or anything. Like the rambling tangents her brain spiraled off on at all odd hours of the day, it was just the way she was: if it seemed like a smart idea, she tended to treat it like one. If Mafia Man was operating openly and she had an inkling of what was going on, chances were good that someone in local law enforcement was at least smart enough to notice that something was up, too.
~ V ~
"I have returned from my odyssey of urban exploration, with gifts from the elves," Kyo declared theatrically as she opened the apartment's front door.
A swinging plastic bag preceded her through it, and she shut the door with a careless thud behind her. Eri Morinaga, who was reading a thin paperback romance novel on the armchair in the sitting-room corner, looked up and gracefully slipped a finger into the book as she closed it to save her page.
"Kyo-chan! Welcome home," she said. "How was Shibuya?"
"Not bad," she said, shrugging out of her jacket and hanging it by the door. "Tokyo's got its own kinda feel, but I think I can get used to it. D'ya know, I already found a video store that sells the movies I like, and even the book store by the diner has a pretty nicely-stuffed little English-language imports section."
She held up the bag, digging through it as she plopped down on the sofa. She extracted two items: a box set Blu-Ray collection containing The Godfather and both of its sequels, and then quite a thick paperback book: the English cover bore the words The Godfather and the author's name, Mario Puzu. Eri slowly dog-eared the page in her own book and set it down on the small, round table with the reading lamp that next to her chair.
"That's... quite a lot of reading," she observed, nodding in the direction of the book to indicate its imposing girth. "I thought you said you had trouble focusing on books."
"Eh, I figured I'd take a chance on it," Kyo answered, digging into the bag again, which had three more items left inside. "If I can get better with books, maybe I can study without losin' concentration so damn hard. Who knows. And I picked up these for you."
She pulled out two additional books, much thinner than The Godfather and sporting Japanese-language covers. Setting those down, she extracted the final item, a DVD. Eri's eyes widened a bit and she leaned forward, taking a closer look to be sure she was seeing things right. The books were both recently-released novels by authors that she loved: there were quite a lot of books by both of them on the shelf in her room. The DVD was an older film, but it was one she'd missed out on when it had been newly-released and had never gotten around to purchasing for herself. It was a historical satire by one of Japan's most respected directors.
"Kyo-chan..." she whispered.
Eri had only mentioned it to her daughter once, three months before. She'd been half-drunk on champagne, whining about how stifling Akio had been as a husband. He hadn't approved of her taste in movies, and she'd passed on a lot of films because she hadn't wanted to rock the boat. She'd mentioned this one by name. Missing it when it had been showing in theaters had been... a huge wrench, really, the first time she had felt that she was sacrificing too much to appease her husband's narrow worldview.
Kyo had remembered... Eri almost wanted to cry, it touched her so. Kyo set the items down on the table almost carelessly, then made a show of looking disinterested. Eri stared at her daughter. Kyo looked like she wanted Eri to believe it wasn't a hugely important gesture.
But Eri knew better. Kyo had never gotten her a gift before, unless there was some kind of formal occasion that demanded it, and she'd never put such obvious thought into one when she had. This was different. This was her daughter showing that she truly cared.
Eri stood up, and slowly walked to the sofa. Sitting down next to her daughter, she watched Kyo jump slightly at the disturbance this caused in the cushions; then, smiling, she leaned in and wrapped her daughter in a hug.
"Oi! Mom..." Kyo muttered, fidgeting. The position she'd been sitting in meant that she couldn't have returned the hug even if she wanted to, since Eri's arms had pinned hers to her sides.
"Thanks for remembering my drunken bitching," Eri laughed. Kyo didn't answer right away. Hearing vulgar language like that come out of her mom's mouth almost registered in her brain as some mutated hybrid of French, Greek, and Korean, Eri realized. It was a little out of character, even if she'd been quite the vulgar little hellion when she had been Kyo's age.
And then Kyo said awkwardly, as if to explain that it was truly no big deal, "I remember just about everything anyone tells me whether I wanna remember or not."
"Well, thank you for remembering this," Eri said with grateful firmness that brooked no further handwaving. She pulled back and looked at the movie on the table specifically. "I'll be sure to enjoy watching it."
"You do that," Kyo mumbled bashfully as her mother let her go.
~ V ~
A little while later, when Eri had gone back to the novel and darkness fell outside to a point where she'd switched on the reading lamp, Kyo shut herself in her bedroom. After a moment's consideration, she also locked the door. She didn't make a point of being quiet about doing that. Even if her mom noticed, she'd probably just assume that Kyo wanted some alone time with her laptop computer and some vaguely phallic item hidden away at the bottom of one of her dresser drawers. Eri was at least tactful enough not to pry into that. Thinking about it, she'd always stayed out of that stuff. She had only ever intruded into the subject of Kyo's sex life when she had been worried about who Kyo had been dating, and that had been in the interest of her future, hadn't it?
...Why did I never notice that the one thing she never lectured me about, Kyo thought to herself as she dragged her feet to sit on the chair in front of her desk, was how "active" I was? Oh, the shit I did to hurt people, yeah, but she never said anything about me sleeping around. I guess I just assumed that it was an implied thing.
This was a question to ponder about her mother some other time. For now, Kyo had a haunted Android phone to examine. She opened the top drawer of her desk, and then slid her fingers into her jacket pocket. Out came the folded piece of paper with Mr. Mafia Man's personal number scribbled on it, which she turned over in front of her eyes under the dimming light from the street-lamps outside of her window. Blindly reaching across the desk with her other hand, she flipped the switch at the base of the lamp, giving herself a source of brighter liked to work with. After considering her decision to keep the man's number around for a bit, she set the paper down on top of the stack of notebooks inside the drawer. She slid it shut, then pulled out her phone and set it face-up on the desk, staring at it without unlocking it. The bright white circle of the desk lamp's reflection glared up at her from its smooth surface.
What had actually happened in that square today, anyway?
Kyo had half-expected the memory of the vision or hallucination or whatever it was to become hazy with time, like a dream one could only barely recall three or four hours after waking. But it was still there, as clear and as crisp as anything else that had happened that day. Even clearer, in fact, than her memories of most of the day. The only things that stood out as much in her mind were her encounter with Mafia Man, a few memorable snippets of her shopping expedition, and the movie she'd caught at the theater — which had actually been pretty damn good.
She reached over, slowly turning the phone around — though she left it flat on the desk — so that the screen was oriented toward her and she could run her finger down the central button to unlock it. She clicked the button on the top-right edge, activating the screen. The time and the date, March 29th, displayed brightly on screen. She ran her finger across the button, and the Home screen zoomed into prominence with barely any lag. It was a damn good phone, she thought. The lack of lag also stood as a good argument that the strange app which had appeared on her phone out of nowhere wasn't doing anything to hinder her phone's performance.
More to prolong the moment when she would actually have to tap that ominous icon than anything, Kyo reached to the back of her desk and plucked the charger cable up between index finger and thumb. She tugged it out from behind the desk so she could stick it into her phone. The battery icon blinked from half-full to "lightning bolt, bee-atch," and Kyo leaned back. Folding her arms across her chest, she stared at her phone for a bit longer. Kyo knew it wouldn't lock itself, as she'd set it so that it would stay active for a full ten minutes unless she locked it manually.
Kyo was a hands-on kind of person like that. Even cars that turned their headlights on or locked their doors by themselves kind of pissed her off. Idiot-proofing like that was just, you know, a little frickin' condescending. She thought so, anyway.
So she stared at her phone for a full minute and a half, and then leaned forward, flicked her finger across the screen, and hovered with her middle finger a few hairs' breadths above the eyeball icon. It was still positioned overtop Morrigan's tit on her wallpaper, but now that she was at the point of experimenting with it again she couldn't find it in her to be amused by that. At last, gritting her teeth, she tapped the screen.
The sounds of the city murmuring through her cracked-open window did not abate. She released the breath she'd been holding, and leaned in to examine the bizarre navigation app. There was no textbox to type in. The app looked to be voice-activated, so she drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the desk and then said the first word that came to mind.
"Dicks."
A waveform animation played, and unsurprisingly, the app answered her in a mechanical feminine voice with, "No candidates found."
"So you're tellin' me this is a city of eunuchs..." Kyo responded to her phone, leaning back and snorting.
"No candidates found."
"Pff. C'mon, that wasn't a search term, stupid app. Okay, how about... muffins."
"No candidates found."
"Tokyo truly is hell on Earth," Kyo lamented.
"No candidates found."
"...A navigation app that can't find Tokyo, Hell, or Earth. Sounds useful," Kyo said dryly.
"No candidates found."
"What a borin' conversation... okay, then. How 'bout Osaka?"
"No candidates found."
Kyo's eyebrows disappeared beneath her bangs. The app didn't recognize two of Japan's biggest cities? What?
"...Nagoya," she said, after a few moments of pondering this.
"No candidates found."
"...New York?"
"No candidates found."
Alright, so it wasn't some American thing. Maybe she should try a different tack.
"Shujin Academy," Kyo guessed, the first thing to come to mind.
"Two candidates found."
"...Alright, how 'bout... wait. What?"
And so it had found a hit at last. Kyo leaned in over her phone, scratching a random itch near the back of her neck. There was now a visual search history above the voice-search waveform prompt, consisting of two horizontal lines. They were displayed in such small type that she was glad for her phone's high-resolution screen:
? - ? - Shujin Academy - ?
? - ? - Shujin Academy - ?
"...Huh," was all that Kyo could say to that. She leaned back, utterly flummoxed now. So it wasn't just a general search-term thing. The app seemed to use some kind of weird keyword system. A bizarrely specific one that only recognized specific keyword combinations and seemed to need four specific ones to produce a result. Kyo shook her head. It didn't make any sense. Just what was this program's function supposed to be? What did a keyword-combination search system have to do with that weird hallucinatory episode she'd had earlier?
She tilted her head back, staring at the ceiling and groaning. The only thing that Kyo knew for sure now was that it recognized her school, or at least the name of her school... which could have been shared by another location or two other locations or fifteen other locations for all she knew. She could sit here guessing at the other keywords all night, but she didn't know where to begin, and it would be both a long process and a mind-numbingly boring one unless she got lucky. And she'd probably forget what words she'd already used unless she wrote them down as she said them or read them from a list, and even then she'd have to re-check a progressively longer and longer list whenever her memory failed her. She might as well just read words out in order from a frickin' dictionary, or...
Kyo's eyes popped open. It had taken all of thirty seconds for the answer to occur to her. She grinned, and burst out laughing at the simplicity of it.
"Ha! Haha, kyeheheheheheh... " she laughed at the ceiling, kicking her chair back and propping her foot against the leg of her desk to balance on its rear legs. "Ah, someone just give me a bag o' toothpicks and a ball o' string, and I'll be Prime Minister by the end o' the week...!"
She let the front of the chair drop to the floor with a thump, and reached for the laptop that she'd left closed at the back corner of the desk. Pulling it forward, she opened it. It was still plugged in and turned on, with a small USB mouse plugged in on the right-hand side. Kyo punched in a four-digit PIN to unlock it, and away she went.
Within a few minutes, she'd downloaded an e-book and loaded it into a free reader-slash-editor she kept installed for those occasions when she wanted to read a foreign book or comic that was difficult to obtain legally. To her credit — she thought so, at least — it wasn't a program that she used often. Opening this e-book, she leaned back and grinned in satisfaction. A complete Japanese dictionary, that was all. All she needed was to run a screen-reader app and it would rattle off a bunch of words on its own. She could let that run while slept, if she set her phone to never lock itself. And then in the morning, she would roll out of bed and see what kind of result her cunning plan had produced!
Such a simple solution, exactly like running a password-hacking program. Just cycle through the possible variables until gold was struck. Ladies and gentlemen of the board, for your consideration: the smartest girl EVER!
Kyo set up the screen-reader and dialed down the volume of her laptop so that it wouldn't carry through the door. As the computer spat out words in a monotone voice, her phone obediently responded: "No candidate found... no candidate found... no candidate found..." over and over. Satisfied that her solution would work, Kyo paused the screen-reader and backed out of the nav app, just long enough to hit the settings menu and tell her phone to never shut its screen off. Kyo would set it back to ten minutes in the morning. Then, she laid the device back down on the desk next to the computer and switched back to the nav app. One last click of the USB mouse and her makeshift hacking scheme spun back into motion, freeing her to change into her short-shorts and tank top and crash in bed. She had to start working on waking up early before school started, after all.
The one flaw with this plan was that it meant listening to the faint robotic back-and-forth between her computer's droning screen-reader and the soulless feminine tones of the strange navigation app. After a while it became white noise in the background. Kyo didn't even register what either device was saying anymore as she drifted away into a satisfied slumber... but she would later recall the exact moment when the monotonous drone of no candidates found broke its own combo and became candidate found for exactly one second before going back to a whole lot of zilch.
She slept soundly. Until about four in the morning, that is, when her mother passed her bedroom on the way get a glass of water. She knocked on Kyo's door and barked through it:
"Kyo! Kyo! Kyo Morinaga, just what in blue hell are you doing at this hour?!"
"Candidate found."
Kyo jolted awake and sat up. "Sorry! I left the TV on," she blurted out, the first excuse that came to mind. She scrambled over to her desk and hastily shut the screen reader off. But now she found herself staring at the phone in confusion, because there was something... something not... she shook her head, clearing the cobweb residue of prematurely broken sleep. Her brain wasn't quite making sense of what her eyes were showing it.
"Please decrease physical proximity to begin navigation," the app instructed. She picked up her phone, staring at the now quite voluminous search history.
"Well, don't do it again," her mother grumped. "The walls in this apartment aren't as thick as the ones back home."
"...That so? ...Valuable information, that," Kyo answered, looking at the door with her most deadpan of expressions. "Let's just call that an unintentional science experiment, then. Now I know that I needta stay quiet."
"...So you do." Her mother's tone suggested that the implication had only just dawned on her. "Yes. You do that. Stay quiet, I mean."
"Likewise," Kyo deadpanned back.
Her mother sounded like she had been moving to return to her room, but Kyo thought she heard an awkward choke or coughing sound that suggested Kyo had hit the nail on the head with her jab. There had been more than one potentially awkward problem with the apartment's thin walls on her mother's mind just then, Kyo figured.
Once Kyo was sure that her mother was back in bed, Kyo turned her attention once more to the navigator's search history. Quite a few words had registered while she slept, but most of them were just standalone terms. Kyo noted, with a confused scratch of her head, that most of the words she had gotten right had landed in either the second or fourth slot. There weren't any new locations. Locations, it seemed, belonged in the third slot. So she needed a location for the third slot, a noun for the fourth slot... just any old noun, it seemed, there were a lot of those filled in... and... she needed some kind of action word for the second slot. A lot of the ones that had been unlocked by the screen-reader were crimes and such. Arson... rape... serial killer... pervert... plagiarism...
She scrolled to the original two entries, which were now separated by a number of items in the search history. One of them was complete, and the other, three-quarters of the way there.
The latter: ? - Pervert - Shujin Academy - Castle
And the former, the most recent item in the search history, was the most confusing of all.
Kyo Morinaga - Obsession - Shujin Academy - Cocoon
"...The flyin' fartwhistles duzzat mean?" Kyo mumbled to herself. But there were no further answers to be found that night.
Next Time: The days of rest and relaxation between a teenager and her upcoming school year inevitably pass in a blink. As a new student at Shujin Academy, Kyo must contend with a too-nice distant relative, a crime movie enthusiast, Volleyball tryouts, and an unexpected crush. At some point, she might even try to figure out what the devil is up with that weird app on her phone, too. But, you know... maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Maybe...
Author's Note:
I may have taken a few liberties in figuring out a workaround for the Meta-Nav. The unfortunate thing in how the app was portrayed in-game is that we didn't really get a grip on how it works on a technical level or what the screen displays when it's being used. An offhand remark from Ryuji confirms that it has a search history of some sort, but there's no real explanation for how it could be used to enter the Metaverse without a metric crap-ton of extreme coincidences guiding the user into figuring it out, which is mainly what Ren and the Phantom Thieves had to rely on to discover how the app worked or, in some cases, what the keywords were. There's also not much of an explanation for how someone might figure out the Metaverse or the Meta-Nav without Morgana to explain half of it.
The question that had me asking while I wrote this chapter is: how did Akechi figure out the workings of app? And the closest thing I could think of was "list out a bunch of random words and hope for the best." Kyo's thought process and her workaround for it were methods born from that idea. I apologize if anything about her method wouldn't actually work in-game. I had a thought that perhaps the Meta-Nav wouldn't accept the "distortion," "location," or "cognition" keywords until a name had been entered first, but starting out with names and working one's way to random keywords feels a bit too specific for someone to figure out without another extreme coincidence, especially since it would presumably require a full name for it to stick.
In any case, it is what it is and the logic for the Meta-Nav seen in this chapter will be what I run with for the remainder of this story.
One of the things I hope to explore in the upcoming chapters is the concept of the Metaverse Navigator and all of the quirks of its function as the game portrayed them, though. While Persona 5 established some clear rules for what it could do over the course of the Phantom Thieves' adventure and then pulled out one massive scheme near the end that capitalized on those rules for an impressive display of cunning deception... there's a lot more that could be done with those rules, much as there were many little tricks and schemes that came out of the specific list of rules written on the inside of Light Yagami's Death Note. I'm going to be looking for opportunities to mess around with the Meta-Nav in a similar fashion. Hopefully, I'll be able to dream up some interesting scenarios since the story is now free of the narrative confines of a formulaic dungeon-crawler role-playing game that needs to bring all of its actual back to infiltrating labyrinths and fighting boss monsters.
— Lewis Medeiros,
April 8th, 2018 at 3:59 AM
