Me, working hard on this chapter, felinized: /watch?v=GMsviBcf_ak

Literally: moral hangover
Meaning: guilt, remorse, a feeling of regret of sadness for doing wrong

Sumire put the four tapes on the desk in a neat little stack.

"All of them are tagged 'turning point', correct?" Yusuke asked.

"Yup!" Futaba replied. "The data pool is small, so a brute force algorithm should be sufficient."

"Can someone translate from Oracle to Japanese?" Ryuji asked.

"The tapes are short enough that we can watch all of them at once and then try to judge which of the depicted events was the most pivotal," Makoto spelled it out.

"Correct," Futaba replied, shoving a tape into the machine. "It'll be less hassle this way."


The static faded, revealing Maruki standing in the corridor, his hand on a doorknob. He was visibly hesitating to proceed.

"Man up, Takuto," he muttered to himself. "She needs your support right now. On three: one, two-"

He turned the doorknob and entered what appeared to be a well-maintained hospital room, lit up by the setting sun. A young red-headed woman was sitting on the bed, staring blankly at the blank wall opposite her.

Maruki grabbed a chair standing in the corner and sat by the bed. "Hi, Rumi."

["That explains the password back in Da'at," Makoto remarked.]

She didn't respond, continuing to stare into the distance, in a way half of the Thieves found uncomfortably familiar, and Futaba in particular found distressingly relatable. "They have arrested the culprit," Maruki went on, undeterred by the lack of reaction. "There were witnesses that saw him in the neighborhood and he confessed to everything. It's an open-and-shut case."

A pause.

"Y-you know," he continued, desperate to break the lull, "I've been doing some research on the topic. A- a lot of criminals see the world through a distorted lens, shaped by their past experiences or psychiatric disorders, and removing this distortion could have lowered recidivism significantly – or maybe stop first-time offenders! It's… it's just theorycrafting for now, but I've been in touch with people willing to sponsor further research, and maybe, just maybe… penology will be forever changed by cognitive psience." Beat. "It's a placeholder na-nngh!"

He doubled over in pain. The video split into different-coloured channels, like a badly printed newspaper.

seek… me…

"S-sorry," Maruki hissed, "it's the migraines. They keep getting worse..."

"I don't care."

It was unmistakably Rumi's voice, as he had remembered it, but her lips didn't move.

"My mom and dad are dead," the voice continued. "I close my eyes, and I see their bodies in a pool of fresh blood. The image is burned into my soul. Whatever they do to the killer, whatever you'll do to make things like this not happen again, it won't bring them back."

Maruki wasn't sure if that was his mind playing tricks on him or if he managed to hear Rumi's actual thoughts, somehow, but it made him lose steam. He grabbed his head in exasperation. "I'm sorry… I just…" he muttered. Rumi moved her hand a bit towards him and he gently grabbed it with his other hand in a gesture of reassurance. "I don't know what to do. It's… unfair you've been subjected to this, and you're suffering, and I can't do jack sh-gah!"

Seek me…

With another visual glitch, the pain became intense enough to throw him off-balance, and he tumbled forward to the floor. With difficulty, Rumi turned towards him, shades of concern showing in her thousand-yard stare.

I am that who manifests thought itself. I shall echo your blasphemous fury with reality, so that we may together change the world...

A thought appeared in his brain. "If…" he tried to vocalize it, so it wouldn't get drowned out by the headache, "if it would be possible to… to actualize the patient's sense of self… the accumulated traumas could've been overwritten…"

"Can…" Rumi attempted to speak to him. "Can you… make me… forget…"

Call me forth!

"Yes!" Maruki raised his voice. "Whoever you are, lend me your power!"

"Do it…" Rumi whispered. "Make… it… stop..."

The visuals broke down to the point of incomprehensibleness. When the glitch disappeared, both Maruki and Rumi were roughly in the same position, but there was a noticeable change in the air. The two stared silently at one another for a period of time, before Maruki blurted out. "R-rumi?"

"Excuse me?" she replied, confused. "Who are you?"

"Uh…" Maruki let go of her hand and inched away. "I… I think I walked into the wrong room."

"You can stay, sir," Rumi reassured him. "It's not like anyone else will come to visit."

Curiosity just barely overrode his desire to leave immediately and he sat back down on the chair. The migraine was seemingly gone as well. "Um, and why is that?"

"My parents died when I was little." She glanced aside, dejected – which was still an improvement over the stupor she was in a moment before. "My grandparents raised me and I… I never got around to making friends, I guess." She looked at him again. "But back to you: who are you? And how did you know my name?"

"Uh," he sprung up from the chair, "as I was saying, I walked into the wrong room. I was here to visit my girlfriend – funny coincidence, she looks a bit like you, and she's also called Rumi." He backed away, towards the door. "She's probably worried that I'm late, I gotta go."

Rumi tried to protest, but he promptly retreated from the room.


The tape ejected from the machine and landed on the desk with a clunk.

"That musta been the first time Doc used his powers," Ryuji stated the obvious. "His girlfriend's parents got murdered, she couldn't handle the trauma, and he overwrote her cognition."

"Murdered parents are a debuff and a half," Futaba commented. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone." After a split second, she added, "Whoever you're thinking about – not even them."

"One detail puzzles me," Goro remarked, trying to change the subject. "Why didn't his override… contain him in any capacity? I-I mean, he screwed himself over by this, didn't he?"

"He didn't know the full extent of his powers, or if he could reproduce the results without making the situation worse," Makoto pointed out. "She wasn't suffering anymore, and he probably deemed that sufficient."

"Um," Sumire piped up, "do any of you know what that… weird voice was? The one calling for blasphemy and everything?"

Everyone else had a theory – the same one, in fact. And that theory seemed to contradict what they already knew about practical applications of cognitive psience – but even that wasn't set in stone, what with the differences between Goro and Akira's Wild Card powers, for example. "We're not sure," Morgana said. "Maybe the other tapes will offer more information."


The scene focused on Maruki and a guy his age with a side cut sitting by the table in a bar. There were some snacks between them, a few empty beer bottles next to Maruki, and two empty beer mugs next to his friend.

"I don't get it," the friend remarked. "They seemed optimistic about your findings. Shit, they wanted that designated research station in Odaiba, and now they just… dropped everything? Overnight?"

"I woulda…" Maruki had the alcohol go to his head already, "I woulda assumed it's some kinda conspiracy against me, but… why? This research could change the world, why would someone even want to suppress this?"


"Wait, pause," Futaba said, stopping the video. "Something doesn't compute."

"What is it?" Goro asked.

She turned to him. "Shido had people murdered for knowing less than Maruki did. How come he didn't order you to kill him, Crow?"

He had ordered it, in fact. With the target having no Palace at the time, Goro spent a whole afternoon and evening searching for his Shadow in Mementos, to no avail. When he reported back to Shido, he got thoroughly dressed down for being "useless" and told to not return until Maruki bites the dust. Out of a mix of fear and stubbornness, he then spent the next seven days combing through Mementos in search of a Shadow; an experience that strained his sanity to the point where he shoved his own pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He regained consciousness near the Mementos entrance with one bullet less in his handgun, and decided to go back to his handler and tell him that if he's really that useless, then he can do his own fucking wetwork. Shido, in a rare moment of wisdom, didn't push the topic any further; unsure if he could've gotten away with faking a 'conventional' suicide at that point, he settled on suppressing Maruki's research.

And if you believe Goro would have admitted to all that and let the other Thieves throw him a pity party, then you weren't paying attention. "I don't know," he shrugged, with the best poker face he could muster. "I was stupid enough to not question things. Can we return to watching the memory?"


"I don't know," Maruki's friend replied. After a pause, he asked, "So what are you gonna do now?"

"I'unno," Maruki replied. "If they can pull the plug on this, my… my friggin' life's work… they could do that with anything, so why bother?" He took a large glug from his bottle. "I wanna drop out. I can continue my work alone, that college doesn't offer me anything anymore."

"What about scholarship money?"

Realization flashed on Maruki's face. "...crud." He took another glug of his beer. "I need a job."

"Maybe go for therapy?" Beat. "That came out wrong – I meant that maybe you could become a therapist? Or a school counselor? Like, you probably got a good grasp of the human psyche after all the work on… on wossitsname."

"Cognitive psience." Sigh. "The name's… eh, but I didn't come up with anything better, and that's the name I used in the notes I've shared with people, so it's probably gonna stick."

Cue static.

When it faded, Maruki was sitting by the same table with a single bottle by him, in a much better mood. He beckoned at someone off-screen. "Shibusawa! Over here!"

The friend from earlier, who I don't have to call "the friend" any more, sat down in the same spot as before and put a glass of beer on the table. "Hey there. You had some news you didn't want to share in a text message."

"I got a job!" Maruki beamed. "I'm a school counselor at Shujin Academy!"

"Oh." Shibusawa scowled in response. "You do know Shujin was on the news recently, right? And not for anything good."

"I know, I know," Maruki dialed down his enthusiasm. "Yes, I was probably hired for damage control, but that doesn't mean I won't be able to actually help people that need it. And it's a part time job, which means I'll have time to focus on my research."

Shibusawa allowed himself a smirk. "You still didn't drop that, huh?"

"How could I?" he responded. "It's my life's work. It will make this world fair. So nobody will suffer like Rumi did."

"You're a stubborn S.O.B.," Shibusawa chuckled, then raised his glass in the air. "But I'll drink to that. Maybe a change of surroundings will help you with your research."

Maruki raised his bottle. "I believe it will. Cheers."


"Wait, these were two memories," Ann said, as the second tape got ejected.

"They were connected closely enough, I suppose," Makoto shrugged. "They are set in the same location and complement each other."

"And why does Doc consider these a turning point?" Ryuji asked. "They didn't look important."

"Igor-sama theorized that Maruki gained his powers because all the Phantom Thieves had confided in him," Sumire pointed out. "Most Phantom Thieves attended Shujin when he was working there, so that directly led to our current situation." She glanced at Ryuji. "Didn't we mention that during one of the recaps?"

"I, uh, musta missed that detail."

"And lest we forget," Goro grabbed the third tape from the desk, "Joker considered Maruki a friend, last time I asked." He put it into the multiplayer and pressed 'play'. "I assume they-"

The screen displayed Maruki inviting Akira into the nurse's office.

"-met each other there."