Darkness.
Nothing but an all-consuming black fog and the echo of his footsteps.
"Gozuki! Mezuki!"
Oh yeah, and the monsters.
Something stabbed at me from behind as I summoned Pandora. The demon burned, burned away faster than it could heal itself. The Persona cast a diarahan to handle the worst of the damage.
I got up with both lungs working fine again and summoned Ares to find and destroy the other demon while I kept moving.
I could feel myself starting to lose control, to stop caring about any fucking restraint, felt rage propel me forward as I started to gain on him. I could see his silhouette in front of me. Close enough to touch…
I grabbed the sonofabitch by his hair and forced him to the ground. He screamed as I brought my fist down and felt the crunch of his jaw beneath it. I saw him start to tear up as he looked at me with fear.
Damn it. This isn't how I pictured this going. But I couldn't stop hitting him. I didn't think he'd react with fear. I didn't think he'd be so weak that he fucking CRIED.
Wait, where's the cat?
It wasn't until he threw me off of him that I realized.
It wasn't him.
I went flying. I felt two walls give way to me in quick succession.
It was clearer inside, easier to see. The fog hadn't spread in here nearly as much. I could see the figure standing in the hole change. It wasn't the old man with long, nearly white hair.
It was me.
I reached around and pulled a rather large chip of brick out of my back. As I struggled to my feet I heard my double, his pet doppelganger, tsk. "Not quite enough," It muttered in my own disinterested tone. It rushed forward, a burning fist slamming against my cheek. The wall the blow knocked me into gave way, and the ceiling followed it down.
My leg bent in a manner it wasn't meant to as I dragged myself out of the rubble. I felt my own arm snap under the force I used to snap its head back, its neck obviously broken.
The head moved back into the proper position as it grabbed my bicep, squeezing until the bone crunched under its grip. It pulled me by the arm, and I felt my arm begin to separate from my shoulder even as it brought it's foot down on my knee.
I screamed as it held me up by the neck and-
Soaked in sweat, I snapped up from the bed. I hissed, immediately regretting the decision as my ribs groaned in protest.
A dream. Just another dream. I killed that fucking thing.
And I lost him. Lost her.
"Shit."
I need to do something monotonous, something I don't have to think about. As I unclenched my fist so I could open the door, it became obvious to me that I was in no condition to be around people. I need to rebuild masks.
I took a seat on the softer part of the floor, and began focusing on what I was. What I wasn't. What I could become. What I could protect. What I could destroy. How I could react.
The willingness to do whatever I must for power and turn that power back upon its source should the cost prove too high: Faust.
The unrestricted curiosity that will damn the world beneath its sins even as it discovers its salvation: Pandora.
The cruelty to manipulate the weak and the desperate, and the recklessness to make them into my unwilling tools with sufficient will to turn against me: Mephistopheles.
The denial to blame my failures on the world around me, and forever deny the consequences of my…
I kicked his door. Still no answer huh?
After a few minutes, Mitsuru came down just in time to see the sweat on my palms win out and make me lose my grip on the doorknob. With nothing holding me down, the pressure I'd been applying to the wall beside the door through my legs sent me flying, and I managed smash my head into the wall opposite in perfect sync with my ass crashing against the wooden floor. Oh yeah, I'm awesome.
"Oooowwwwww," I moaned.
"I'm guessing that he's yet to come out?"
"Open this door!" Ow, shouldn't have kicked it ow, what the hell is this door made of? "Ow!"
"It's possible that he knows what he's doing. Certain Personas have some incredible capabilities, his may allow some kind of heightened regenerative capability. If he hasn't left by tomorrow morning, we'll break the door down and take him to a hospital."
"He wouldn't even be worth the effort if we knew how the hell it happened…" I muttered as I followed Mitsuru downstairs.
School happened.
Practice happened.
Sleep is God, and I am the pope.
I smell breakfast.
I pulled on my robe and followed the glorious smell of bacon down the stairs.
"What the hell!" I shouted.
Minato turned from the stove, taking a bite from a muffin as he did. "You okay?" He managed past the muffin.
"You… But… wha?"
He sighed. "Well, this was going to take a while anyway, might as well cook for a dozen."
I'm not sure I'm comfortable eating food prepared by someone wearing nothing but tight jeans.
"Go… tickle your taco or something, get dressed. This'll take a few minutes."
"Ticker yu… What?" I asked as he did something to an egg.
He sighed. "Pay more attention in English. Then learn Spanish."
She ran off to do… something. Whatever, breakfast time.
An omelet, four scrambled eggs, two pans of bacon, and three bagels later, she came back down.
Hmmm, ham, definitely ham for the next omelet. Or maybe…
No. Pineapple peanut butter omelet didn't work. Maybe if I used a banana instead…
NO. No screwing around here now. Make what you know works from experience. Bacon and ham omelet it is.
"I'm assuming you have questions."
"Yeah," she said through the bacon. "First, what the hell? Followed closely by, How the Hell?"
I scratched my new cheek. "You mind being a little more specific?"
"What tore off part of your face?"
Oh. "That was my own damn fault. I fought stupid." I looked her in the eye. "If you fight stupid, painful things happen, usually deadly things."
"But what did it?"
"Something that's dead now. My problems, not yours."
"Okay, why do you have a face now?"
"One of those things that happens to your body when you grow up shattering bones on a monthly basis is a need to heal faster. My body does. Just need a night full of nightmares of the past to get through with the worst of it." Did I say that last part out loud?
Yes.
Well, that explains the wide-eyes.
"Why were you blue yesterday?"
"I'm… always blue. It's my natural hair color."
"Why were you glowing blue yesterday?"
I blinked. "I was glowing?"
"Yes!"
"I don't know." The look on her face makes me think she thinks I'm lying. "I love not knowing things. It means there's something to learn."
Well, you aren't happy about everything you don't know.
She narrowed her eyes at me. "One more. Why does it always looking like you're forcing yourself to emote?"
"Wait, you can see that?"
"Of course I can! Are you actually saying that no one has ever called you out on it?"
And I was fucking right! Suck it!
We're you. And we would Really like for you to consider the implications of ordering us to do… That.
I'm gonna be sick.
Anyone else would have seen a genuine smile on my face right now. "Not just multiple Personae, but a genuine Wild Card."
"Wild Card?"
"Igor would say that the Wild Card just makes it easy to change between your multiple Personae, but it's more. The Wild Card is to be anything. To be everything. Everything you have ever been, everything you could ever possibly be, all floating around your head with a different manifestation. I had to put mine back together earlier, I've been up since yesterday morning."
She actually seems kind of confused about that. Understandable, I guess. "How many do you have?"
"What, Personae? Well, what you see right now is an amalgamation of about four separate Personae." After all, an actual person isn't so easily summed up by how the reacts in one single situation. "But if you really want a sense of scale…" A card appeared in my hand. "This is how I summon my Persona. This card contains one of the possible people I can force myself to be. There's a different card for every Persona." I placed the card flat against the table beside my empty plate. Then I began dragging it to the edge leaving a trail of about twenty identical cards. Then I threw it off the table.
As Inoue blinked in surprise as the room was filled with blue mist and spinning cards, I continued. "A separate identity within every one of these cards, a separate degree of every possible aspect of me. The power to be whoever we want to be, whoever we need to be. That, not multiple Personae, is the true capability of the Wild Card." All of the cards and associated mist disappeared. "But to answer your question, the last time I bothered to count I had nine hundred and ninety-eight thousand, seven hundred and eighty-six separate Personae, though only two hundred and forty of them have any combat capabilities."
I reached the door before she managed to regain enough of her mental capabilities to ask, "Where the hell do you think you're going?"
"Well, I just went through about a week's worth of food supplies in one morning and, more importantly, need a new jacket. Later."
Okay, even if it is April, it's still cold. Switch to cold resistant and… There we go, nice and comfy. Much better than going back for a shirt. Besides, it'd probably just be torn to shreds again when something inevitably decides that setting me on fire would be a better idea than telling me what I want to know.
Then I'll be genuinely irritated.
But enough unpleasant things. I'm gonna wear a happy mask until killing time!
Hm… I wonder if there's one of those polar bear club things here.
I sighed as I traced my steps back to the alley. Stupid ideas like that are why we don't let you come out.
Why are we using plural- Damnit Legion, get back down there!
Anyway, the alley. Getting in there is a much more difficult process than getting out. Leaving the Dark Realm just requires a shitload of willpower, and I can bring that out fairly easily. Getting in in the first place however is a real bitch. There are certain rituals that can be performed and I don't know. There's also the option of making a contract with a demon to open the way for you, also out.
Luckily, that bastard was kind enough to pull one of those rituals the other day. I don't need to actually know the ritual he used, I just have to find a place it was done and flood it with power.
Yeah yeah, it doesn't really make the slightest bit of sense, but it works. I don't question it. It's about as productive as questioning why gravity exists in the first place.
Maybe if we think about it really hard, it'll stop. And then anyone who can't magic up a gravity field is screwed.
Another sigh. What the hell am I doing here? I just ran through a few hundred thousand separate personalities without really giving any of them the chance to settle. Should've gone straight back to sleep to sort them out.
Quiet damnit! Focus!
From the fragmented description before, this should probably be obvious, but it really does need to be said that the Dark Realm is Really Fucking Weird. Don't get me wrong, the Dark Hour is creepy too. But… the Dark Hour at least gives the luxury of a stable world that, aside from Babel/Tartarus, remains identical in terms of navigation. And despite the physical manifestation of everything people hate about themselves, it's still possible to understand the things and predict their behavior. This place, not so much.
Take the smoking crater about a kilometer ahead of me. That's from two days ago, and yet it's still burning. Nothing on the normal side would have experienced such an effect with the amount of power put into that attack. And harps shouldn't leave smoking craters.
Lyre, not harp.
Don't care.
"I don't care who or what you are, come out now." Nothing. "I'm sure you saw what I did to the doppelganger while injured. Now let me ask you, what do you think I'll do to you now if you piss me off while I'm unharmed?"
A solid minute passed before a voice whispered in my ear, "You're certainly confident, aren't you Summoner?"
I whipped around as Aeros emerged and created a wind that pinned the source of the voice to what was probably supposed to be a copy of a stone wall. "Not a Summoner. Persona User. Wild Card. Everything I've done, everything I can do, is a result of my own power. I am not a fucking coward that hides behind the monsters in little girls' closets!"
Most people would hesitate before trying to crush a pixie wearing a kimono out of sheer shock at what they were seeing. I, however, hesitated because there was a slim chance it would actually tell me something important. So I held the shoe-sized fairy at what I hoped was just beyond its spitting distance and looked it in the eye.
"Now, I'm going to ask you some questions, and if you answer correctly, I'll be in such a good mood that you'll be allowed to live. What was he doing here?"
It smirked at me. "Who?"
I returned a smile of my own as I let one arm work its way up out of my hand. I grabbed that arm with my other hand and told it, "Wrong answer," before tearing it off.
Ignore the scream, ignore the self-hatred, ignore the blood running between your fingers.
"Let's try something else. Where was he going?"
"Fuck… You…" it panted.
"Hm, I've never heard of that town." A wing this time.
It seemed to go limp.
"Don't bother with the act. I've been looking for the better part of a decade, and I will not hesitate to do whatever it takes to find my sister. I know damn well that you can survive the loss of two more appendages provided you receive treatment within an hour. Things like you are durable. Now, answer my questions."
It had the nerve to scoff at me. "Look at yourself. Would you want your precious sister anywhere near a perfect copy of you as you are? Would she want to be anywhere near you after what you did?"
That… that got through the mask.
"Aniki!"
The gunshot rung in my ears as the bullet flew forward. No time to run, no time to hide.
Do you know what a bullet does to a person? It isn't simple, it doesn't just separate body parts like a blade does. It rotates, it spins, it Tore into my flesh, leaving bloody mush where my eye had been.
I don't want to die. Oh God, why is this happening?
The bullet didn't stop there, no. I felt it dig into my brain, forcing its way out the back of my skull.
Oh god, why does this hurt so much? Why aren't I dead?
I don't want to die!
I screamed. I spat, I bled, I cursed his name and the names of all his ancestors. Mom… Why would you leave us to this?
I cried, I begged for someone, anyone, to help.
But no, there's no one coming to help. I lifted my lyre and smashed his arm, I ran my fingers across it and burned his legs, I reached out and tore his soul, his very sense of self, from his body. It twisted, it folded in upon itself. Its skin shriveled and retreated beneath the bones. Muscles, veins, organs, and blood, so much blood…
No, you can't freak out about this. You can't be that guy right now. "Naoko? Are you alright?"
No answer. I looked around the room, finding her curled up in a ball beneath a table.
"You can come out now, it's alright." I reached out to touch her hand, to hold my little sister, and she slapped my hand away.
"D-don't touch me! Just stay away!" she screamed as she moved back, running to her room and throwing anything her tiny hands could grab back at me.
The dirty socks and occasional beer can bounced off harmlessly. But, why would she run away? I should be sad, right? Upset?
Why aren't I crying?
I dropped the Pixie. I… I have to get away.
And the rest of the first time Minato fully summoned his Persona. He has a few issues as a result.
Deep Space Cowgirl: What would scare you more: Something that can beat the hell out of something indistinguishable from a god at times, or irritating the one who still came out on top? And while I'm afraid you'll have to wait until after Yakushima to see why Minato wanted the Harmonizer, I do promise that Marina will exact revenge via sandwich before Fuuka joins.