Chapter Twenty: The Auspicious Souls

Sojiro Sakura still remembers. The sensation of tile and cobble against his soles, the way a suit fit on his shoulders and the constricting hold of the microphone-rigged tie. He remembers the sour taste of tension that lingered on his palate before and after. And he remembers the way he would examine his own reflection on the silver lighter he used to carry, simply to know if the shadow of his scowl lingered at the end of the day. Sojiro Sakura remembers these fragments of a past life years ago: they inevitably return sometimes, when anxiety and dread compel him to action.

It got this bad only once before, when he found a Phantom Thieves' calling card in his daughter's room. The weeks that followed felt like an extension of that initial moment, with a few spikes and a few merciful valleys in-between. After his surrogate son was released from Juvie Hall, Sojiro believed he may never again feel that ghost of his walk alongside him. But then Futaba and Akira disappeared, as did their friends on the evening of their latest get-together. He felt foolish, naïve – and the shadow of his former self ridiculed him for it.

It has been three days now since the former Phantom Thieves disappeared. Even if he tried chalking up those first few hours past the time as youthful carelessness, his gut made him suspect early. It felt wrong, from the moment Makoto picked Akira up at LeBlanc, from the moment Futaba made her way hour before that.

It felt wrong from several days ago. And Akira would not tell him a thing.

And now, because of perceived as his own carelessness, Sojiro Sakura stood before the Niijimas' apartment, steeling herself for the audience with the elder sister. Makoto could easily intimidate; Sae could demolish with just as little effort. The conversation on the phone beforehand did not paint a promising picture. Sojiro "Boss" Sakura was prepared for anything once the door was opened.

Anything but what he actually saw. Sae Niijima looked as if all life had been sucked out of her. The look in her eyes and the wear in her voice when she actually spoke was a tragically far cry from what he expected. He knew it would be frivolous and useless to try and comfort her; he wasted no time finding words he could not believe himself. Both were stuck in a point where nothing short of the kids turning up would be of any help. There was nothing to say or do but address the imperative essential.

"No news?" Sojiro asked.

"None." Sae stared at her own clasped hands on the dining table. One hardly needed to notice the paleness on her skin and the bags under her eyes to know she has not slept since day one of their disappearance. Due to the Niijima history in the Police Force, the procedure to file and search for missing persons was hastened beyond the common standard. Hearing those words from the Senior Commissioner was hardly reassuring. Sae interiorised a baleful reply, wondering if such urgency was only a luxury afforded to a select few.

Without that preferential treatment, would they even care to find her little sister? With it, would it make a difference?

Sae's thoughts wandered briefly, to their father, Akihiko Niijima. A man of a rare breed, some would say. What would he say now if he were alive? It was an untold understanding that Sae was to take care of Makoto, but he never pressured her with it, not even after his wife's passing. But now that things had gone this way, would he be disappointed on her for failing, would be hate her? What about Makoto, wherever she was at the moment? In her time of need, away from her sister, is she calling Sae's name? Is she crying for her like she did when waking up in the middle of the night and seeing nothing but darkness around her?

Is she disillusioned on her sister for failing her once again? Is she hurt? Is she…

"I went to that joint the cops visited. I did some asking of my own." Sojiro spoke gruffly, a few decibels louder than before, breaking the silence in just the right way to pull Sae out of her own thoughts.

"Anything we didn't know already?"

"They said the same thing the cops old us when they went over. The kids were at the table they booked. And one hour later, they vanished. It was a big group. Nobody say them leave together, or one at a time." The man did not need the decorum of being offered a seat at this time. As he walked over to the dining table, he picked the chair right across from Sae – unbeknownst to him, Makoto's seat. Feeling the remnants of his old life permeating his senses, he focused on the words he was about to say. "But I caught something interesting from one of the waiters."

Sae looked up at once.

"Turns out one of those waiters is a friend of the kid, from Juvie."

"I see." Amidst the deathly concern for Makoto, a pang of lingering guilt assaulted her about Akira Kurusu.

"Far be it from me to mistrust law enforcement, but it seems to me they weren't very thorough. This waiter kid, Yasunori Kujo…"

"That name rings a bell." Sae rummaged through her memories. "Small time juvenile criminal. Multiple offences. Nothing big, but his name had a tendency of coming up in association with mafia-related cases. A reliable patsy by the sound of it." She clung to the line of thought to distract herself from her own abyss. "And now he landed himself a job as a waiter? Curious…"

"Very. Now that you say it." Sojiro acknowledged. "I'd be thinking this could be mafia-related, if not for one thing he said when I told him I knew the kid."

Sae lifted an eyebrow.

"He never went into details about his history, but he did say that he decided to go legit because of Akira Kurusu." Sojiro leaned back. "I'm just paraphrasing what he said, but Akira was the only one to stand up for him when something happened in Juvie. Even since, he vowed to look out for the kid and his friends. That's why he did a little bit of eavesdropping that afternoon, he said."

"Eavesdropping?"

"According to him, there was a strange mood around the table from the beginning. Like something was wrong with Akira. Futaba, your sister, and the others were trying to help him. He said things got heated for a moment, but they got better. Way he says it, Makoto got Akira to cool down. That's when the kid says something strange. This Kujo fella was a bit vague here but he overheard something about Akira not feeling like himself and red curtains."

"Red curtains? What's that supposed to mean?" Sae's expression turned inquisitive.

"Beats me. But apparently, everyone at that table vanished shortly after. Said he didn't see it happen himself but they were gone by the time he went to check up on them, two or three minutes afterwards."

"Quite incredible, even if one were to believe it." The older Niijima expressed cynically.

"I'm not sure I don't believe it myself, if I'm honest." Sojiro prepared himself. "I'm starting to think this is not merely a case of missing persons, or even a crime-related disappearance."

"What else could it be?"

"You're not telling me you haven't contemplated it yourself, Sae-san?" Boss allowed himself a little smirk. "It took me a while since I heard this guy out, but I may have to accept this has something to do what with whatever the kids did as Phantom Thieves."

"Stealing hearts, exploring a world of altered cognition, seeing and doing things few others can do?" Disbelief gradually faded from Sae's voice with every word. An actual methodical understanding of what the Phantom Thieves did in the Metaverse was beyond her, even when the plan to elude Goro Akechi's scheme to murder Akira was disclosed at LeBlanc. But despite having no observable evidence for it, the truth behind their disappearance may truly fall within that realm of the uncanny. "… The police won't be able to do a thing if you're correct in your assumption."

"Same for us, unless we somehow understood what goes on in there, wherever there is. If it would be of any help, I'm perfectly willing to let you have all of Wakaba's research. Maybe you could make sense of it. And I may as well camp where the kids were last seen. It's not like that business is precisely booming in that place right now."

"It could also be a waste of time, you know." Sae dropped her gaze back to her hands.

"Perhaps. But it's still an alternative. Our hands are tied otherwise." Boss stood up and took the liberty of heading towards the kitchen to put the kettle on the fire. "I'd do it all to keep those kids safe, and happy. Two of them see as my own, you know. My daughter and my son…" He paused as he browsed through the recipients of instant coffee. "Would you really leave any road unexplored for Mako-chan?" He asked rhetorically, already knowing the answer.

Sojiro eyed the coffee mugs neatly lined up behind the small window on a cupboard. Most of them unadorned, coated in warm, suitable colours – safe for one of them: a white mug with black polka dots, and a panda bear face at the bottom. Sojiro could brew a cup for Sae in that mug, fully aware of the leverage it could represent – cruel and shameless, but efficient. He saw no necessity for it.

"I got the heap down in my car, in case you'd like to start early. I'll help out here as much as I can, but I'll have to visit the soda joint again before it closes."

"Alright." Sae went towards the mugs on the counter, ready to pour the boiling water. Despite Boss choosing two orange mugs, her eyes still gravitated towards that Buchi-kun mug in the cupboard. Once upon a time, it was merely a souvenir from a leisurely outing between sisters. It was not until Makoto developed a proper taste for coffee that she actually started to use it. Given the timing of events, she started drinking from that mug after she became a Phantom Thief - after she met Akira Kurusu.

That young man.

Did he have a role in all this, given Yasunori Kujo's claim?

While Sojiro went to his car to retrieve Wakaba Isshiki's research, Sae allowed herself a moment of quiet reflection. The multiple faces of Akira Kurusu crossed her thoughts like cars on a train. The unassuming transfer student who wished only to keep his head down, the glowing young man whenever Makoto was around, the daring rogue in the mask, the vulnerable and wounded victim of interrogation.

Beneath that face lay another hidden layer, an episode that lasted only a few seconds during his interrogation: a face of unfathomable horror and grief, a thing most ill-fitting for a person his age, or perhaps for any person at all. Events followed their course afterwards, leaving the bizarre distortion forgotten. But why was this memory being brought back now?

To some extent, great or small, Akira Kurusu had a favourable effect in Makoto's life. If not for him, and for the fold that gradually assembled around him, life as Sae knew it would probably be no more. If not for him, Makoto may be aimless, empty of the resolve that guides her every day. If not for him, Sae may remain a prisoner of her own misguided obsession with success. After a certain point, there was no denying it. Akira Kurusu had done nothing but good.

She could repeat this line of thought countless times, but at the end of it, a bitter thorn of blame pierced through every time.

It surely was not so simple so as to reach a conclusion this quick.

Sae Niijima could not help it: If it was all true, Akira stood responsible for Makoto's disappearance.

She poured herself into the stirring of the coffee to get some needed distraction from the cruel duality of whens and ifs, and from the shadow that hung over Akira's name. Sae correctly guessed Sojiro was undergoing a similar inner tempest. For all the ways he had to keep his cool, his brain twisted over the possibility that something was happening to his surrogate son right under his nose.

During times like these, when the wrong thoughts came at the worst times, both guardians could only resort to activity to keep themselves from tipping over. Pouring oneself into a purpose, however important or trivial. Her time would come to fully put her shoulder to the wheel, but for now, stirring the coffee would suffice to keep her mind focused on the activity itself. Makoto was the only thing she could not shut out – everything else had receded, both in thought and sensory reception.

It stands to reason that she never once noticed the flickering image of red curtains at her back. Gone as swift as it came.

[ ]

For a long time, Yuuki Mishima considered himself the unluckiest boy who ever lived. He now looks on this with some levity through the power of hindsight; but at the time, it felt much worse than that. All that experience should have prepared him for the events that kickstarted his second year at Shujin, but that somehow made the past torments seem trivial in comparison.

Every day was an ordeal, from the moment he woke up to go to school to the final exhausted seconds before he gave it to restless sleep. His torturer (and that of many others) was one Suguru Kamoshida, and during the peak in his reign of terror, he menaced to leave a permanent mark in everybody's lives. It heinously happened that way for some, for Shiho Suzui - but not for Yuuki himself.

Then the Phantom Thieves happened, and Yuuki Mishima thought he may not be the unluckiest boy who ever lived after all. He, Shiho, everyone, now had a group of champions to protect them. Some wounds could not be undone, only cared after, but with the possibilities the Phantom Thieves made possible, all could at least look at a tomorrow to hope for. That was just what Mishima did. He found his own purpose in that tomorrow – and the luck that may have once shunned him now gazed in his favour.

But fortune was not what he saw after the strange girl in blue finished speaking. At the end of this awkward, outworldly inquiry, he saw responsibility. Akira and the others saved him. They gave him, and many others, a future. He helped them already once; he would do so again without a second thought. All he needed was to understand the situation.

There was no point holding the conversation at Mogami's now that Lavenza had eaten everything in stock, and LeBlanc was not an option either at the moment. They spoke on the matter outside of a convenience store nearby while Yuuki humbly ate from a bag of crisps.

"So, this place, the 'Velvet Room' is in danger, and you need the Phantom Thieves to heal it, otherwise something bad could happen?"

"A very bad thing." Lavenza eyed the bag of crisps, allured by the colourful design and the feint smell of salt.

"But what is this bad thing? Do you know?" Yuuki discreetly kept the crisps away from Lavenza.

"Hmm…" The young assistant went quiet in contemplation. "I do not fully know the extent of what could happen if this problem went unchecked. But the Velvet Room is a place connected to the human psyche, and the human soul through the space between conscious and subconscious. It exists because man thinks and feels, and dreams. If something bad happened to a place so intimately linked to humans, consequences for you all could be terrible."

"That… does sound bad. And the Phantom Thieves visited this place?"

"Yes. But most of all, it is where their Leader amplified his powers."

"By strengthening his Persona."

"Personas."

"I see." Yuuki still could not entirely comprehend what a Persona was, but he felt intrigued nonetheless. It was this budding fascination that took hold of him for a moment.

"You do not believe me." Lavenza took his silence as scepticism.

"It's… it's not that. Everything about the Phantom Thieves defies science. It's almost like magic, fantasy made real. I'm just wondering if that has anything to do with their disappearance."

Lavenza blinked mystified.

"Disappearance?"

"Yeah." Yuuki's expression turned sour. He decided he could not bring himself to digest anything but this situation, so he let Lavenza have the bag of crisps. The bag went ignored as the girl fixed him with big, yellow eyes. "Akira, and the rest. They just vanished. Not a trace left behind." His voice broke. "It's been days now."

"This cannot be…" Lavenza shook her head, suddenly looking very much like a little girl, as if he held back tears; vulnerable and human, and completely at a loss on what to do.

Just looking at her, Yuuki himself felt so much smaller and frailer. There was no denying it upon verbally acknowledging it, which he had not done until now. The last time anyone said anything was when Sojiro's concern started turning cold and harsh. Something inside of LeBlanc's owner went dead after he received the phone call from Sae Niijima. Yuuki overheard it all, and he dreaded just being around him as he grew more and more tense. He was sure Boss would trash the place in anger, but his reaction was not what he expected.

Leave. That is all Boss said. It sounded like a word come out of an old grave. LeBlanc was dark and closed the next time he came by. Where life once varnished the walls and the air with warm vigour was now empty and dead. It was wrong, all of it. In principle and outcome.

Mishima could not allow it to be this way.

He thought days back, about Akira's strange behaviour, about meeting up with Makoto to discuss it, about their plan...

…. Which led to the place of their disappearance.

"No…" Yuuki said with hands balled into fists, trembling. "No, no. I mean, yes. You're right. This cannot be. It just cannot!" He stood straight, as if shaking his frailty off his shoulders. "This place, the Velvet Room. From what you're saying, it's beyond our world, right?"

"In a way." Hurt was still in Lavenza's expression.

"Close enough. Then, maybe, they disappeared off to a similar place? Somewhere outside our world? The cops say nobody saw them leave the building. It'd make sense, right? That they could somehow crossed over somewhere else?"

"Somewhere else… Possibly."

"If we look at the place they were last seen, m-maybe you could find out how they disappeared and to where!" The volume in Yuuki's voice increased, both to face his own fear and doubt, and to open a way forward, just like the Phantom Thieves did.

Lavenza fell quiet, pensive. Mishima's words made more sense to her than he may have guessed. Everything is cognition, after all; the right mentality and the right eyes could possibly find a way where physical procedures and means have failed. The small girl stood tall, with the veil of welled tears clinging to her yellow eyes.

"Take me there." The girl said with stoic vigour. As if to seal the resolve of her future actions, her hand plunged swift into the bag of crisps for a large, decisive, salt-sprinkled handful.

[ ]

Yuuki's sense of temporality felt violently tampered with after Akira and friends' disappearance. The hours felt longer than they were supposed to, and night still seemed to catch him unaware since. The lights of Shibuya did nothing to soak him with the collective energy of countless strangers, each a world of their own, each far extracted from the mystery taken place in Arancia's second floor. Fortunately, Lavenza looked to have energy to spare for both.

The little assistant's words were fresh in his mind. He was no closer to fully understanding it, but he sensed the urgency and the rise of the stakes as a conflict of his own. He should be prepared to accept, and if necessary, confront the unexpected. But in spite of this alertness, seeing Shogi sensation and former idol Hifumi Togo lounging by the soda joint's entrance visibly threw him off balance.

His most immediate, and most inappropriate thought was that she looked even better in person. She radiated a traditional, dazzling kind of beauty, even with trouble written on her face. As if seeing the rising celebrity was not a shock on its own, the moment when he turned to look at Yuuki and Lavenza made the former break out into a sweat. The young man correctly guessed Lavenza's strange appearance could get attention from even the briefest glance.

"Why are you stopping?" Lavenza asked with a frown. "Have we arrived?"

"Y-yeah. We're here." The way he broke eye contact from Hifumi was a most deliberate action. "It happened on the second floor, I think."

"Very well." Lavenza said nothing more. With no further instruction or questions, she walked into Arancia. Yuuki thought it best to go after her to keep her from making even more of a scene than she already, surely was. Furthermore, neither thought of any preparation or plan to justify their presence in Arancia. The establishment still provided service, but there was nowhere near enough of a clientele tonight to mask Lavenza's presence.

"Excuse me." Hifumi stopped suddenly. Yuuki swallowed audibly. "You mentioned something about this place's second floor. Something happened in here, correct?"

"Um, yeah." The young man stared wide-eyed despite himself.

"Do you know if it has something to do with one Akira Kurusu, or Makoto Niijima?"

"Well…" His hesitation to say was an answer in itself, and so was the fact that if he opened his eyes any more, they might fall out of the sockets.

"Are they okay?"

"I don't know, to be honest." Yuuki looked down. He was unbearably anxious, not only because of Hifumi herself, but from knowing there was only so much he could tell. "Are you friends with them?"

"Yes. They're my friends. Akira was my pupil for a time. I thought I overheard something last night when I passed through here. I tried asking, but nobody would tell me anything."

"I see… Yeah, he and some of his friends went missing in here." Yuuki carefully picked his words. As admin of the defunct PhanSite, he had a relatively close knowledge of their activities. He knew now that Hifumi Togo was a friend of Akira and Makoto, but he guessed she probably was not aware of their other facets as two of the Phantom Thieves. Since their disappearance could be linked to that second life, Mishima's breathing room was also restricted on the event itself.

The young woman went silent for a moment as she processed this information. "Are you their friend also?" Unbeknownst to Yuuki, Hifumi also weighed her words carefully. She knew Akira was a Phantom Thief, but she had no way of knowing how many others had that knowledge. For that matter, she did not know if his girlfriend knew it herself.

"Yeah. I came here to help them, somehow."

"How do you intend on doing that?" Her voice cut with a little bit of an edge – a shade of her inner spirit, often translated into competitiveness.

"Uh, well, I… I thought I could start by getting some information." He managed to improvise an answer both vague and sensible.

"I wish to help as well." Hifumi said, as if ignoring his response. The young woman fixed him suddenly with a look not at all unlike a wild cat ready to pounce and kill their prey. "I will help find them, no matter what."

From this moment on, Hifumi would add her own efforts to his. But in gaining her as an ally in the search for the vanished Phantom Thieves, he was confronted with a daunting fact. She would inevitably find out the truth, one way or another. Perhaps that knowledge was essential if they were to succeed, but the uncertain consequences would surely await. Yuuki Mishima could not see past the menacing shadow of those consequences, but in this present moment, there was something he knew at his core: Hifumi Togo was terrifying.

[ ]

Sojiro Sakura still remembers. The sensation of tile and cobble against his soles, the way a suit fit on his shoulders and the constricting hold of the microphone-rigged tie. The sour taste of tension that lingered on his palate before and after. The way he would examine his own reflection on the silver lighter he used to carry, simply to know if the shadow of his scowl lingered at the end of the day. Night hangs over him, and exhaustion takes its toll. The man has not rested for a minute since the kids went missing. But as the wear and tear of the days past blackmails his eyelids into giving in, the mementos of his past cling to his senses.

They are a harsh reminded of the kind of man he was once – the kind of man that he needs to be now. A man of action, cool and sharp. Nothing would escape him then, not like Akira's troubles escaped his attention now. And now Futaba and the rest were paying the price for his complacence. He would not stand idly by and let them pay for his negligence.

He came back to Arancia while Sae went through Wakaba's research to try and find a way to rescue the kids, to try and find something that went unnoticed to other, more detached eyes. But this place had nothing to tell him, and if it did, he was too tired, too dulled-down to catch it.

Nothing to go by, except for how odd this place felt. The furniture and its arrangement was no less peculiar than anything downstairs. Colours were the same. But the atmosphere was different. It was as the air in this room belonged to different altitude, as if the sounds outside this place were more distant than they should be.

Was there actually something wrong about this place, or was it the feeling of loss permeating the room, left behind by misfortune?

One by one, the mementos of his past faded to obscurity. Boss was giving it to sleep, nodding as he tried to fight it. The orange around him became dark red, and the surfaces of the walls looked as if they were made of velvet.

A chill in the room.

Something wrong.

He knew it was there, but he could not put his finger on it.

Whatever it was, along with every single thing beneath the spectrum of visibility, was eluding him now.

The last thing Sojiro "Boss" Sakura thought he saw before the world went dark under the coat of sleep was a small blue form with big, yellow eyes.

Lavenza would have looked at him for longer. Same as Iwai, same as Yuuki, this man was close to Akira – she could sense it almost immediately. But no sooner she would, another sensation took over. This was alien and oppressive. Though her eyes sat unblinking on one place, the dreadful invisible surrounded her like a beast of a thousand eyes coiling with her at the vulnerable centre.

And beneath it all, the trace belonging to the Phantom Thieves of Hearts.

Lavenza reached one hand forward, slowly and very carefully, as if fearing the slightest excess would give her away to the hunting senses of some unseen predator. A gloved index finger poked hesitant at the air, causing a small ripple in front of her eyes.

There was no mistaking it now. This place was unlike any other she ever experienced before. It may have once served a much different, much more mundane purpose, but that was forever changed, altered. Beneath the stifling sensation of forbidden otherness in this room, the trace of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts' fading presence pulsed the strongest. Lavenza could not tell if something incidentally caused them to vanish here to some other place, or if they were plainly snatched away.

If she concentrated the right way, if she put all of her intention into it, she may be able to fashion a door out of the ripple, a path that led her to Akira and the others.

But even with the menace that hung over the Velvet Room and the uncertainty of their well-being, would it be wise for her to simply cross over? Lavenza formulated an answer to that question by factoring in all she knew. The Velvet Room has never been compromised like this. The Phantom Thieves disappeared in this place, where cognition has so limited an influence. But if she could already feel its wrongness from this side, what would she be facing when she, inevitably, braved into the other side?

Everything is cognition.

Lavenza bit her lower lip with apprehension. She knew what she had to do; she only prayed it would not be too late by the time she reached them, wherever they were.

The little assistant cast one glance back at the ripple, fading now into stillness, as if it had never been there at all. When next she returned to this place, she would be prepared, in excess if needed.

Lavenza left the room, making towards the stairs down, but not before laying a compassionate palm on Sojiro's hand. She did not need to 'look' to see how troubled this man was – how badly he was hurting right now, even in his sleep.