AN: Welcome to the second chapter of Foolish Errands. I don't have too much to say, but there is a large section of this chapter which is used to sum up Persona 3 and 4. There are some minor differences to explain the connection to Dresden, but if you'd rather skip them they will be brought up again within the next few chapters. Also, you may notice that the timeline from the Persona games was shifted back a few years. This is largely so that the IT can all be at least 21.

Disclaimer: I am not Jim Butcher and I do not own Persona. I have recently come in to possession of a P4 Izanagi no Ookami figure.

Ch. 2: The Three Gates

"Though it would help if I knew what was after you guys. And please don't say paparazzi, whatever hit that girl's leg has a lot more fangs than any human I've ever met."

Kanji looked like he was going to yell at me, but the silver-haired kid, Yu, placed a hand on his shoulder and stopped him. "Forgive us if we don't trust you. It's not often you meet a member of Winter willing to help somebody without anything to gain, especially when he's standing next to one of the queens."

This time, it was my turn to hold Molly back. Not that I couldn't relate. Hardly anyone outside of Arctis Tor should really know what Molly looks like. This kid wasn't a fairy, and he wasn't a wizard, he was completely human. He shouldn't even know about the Never Never. I knew this situation had to be handled carefully and with tact.

"How the hell do you know that?!"

See? Tact.

Yu shrugged his shoulders. "Something felt off when you walked in. I asked a friend about you."

Now that was wrong. We'd been in the same room as him the entire time. He couldn't have talked to anyone about us. What was this kid?

Yu seemed to read my mind. "Who we are isn't very important right now. What is important is that right now we need to get out of here. And if they see you then you'll be just as much a target as we are. I'll agree to listen to what you say, but if that's so than you can't be acting as an agent of Winter. And it has to be help from you, not her."

I felt Molly's shoulder tense when she heard him say that. As much as she had learned over the last six months, she still thought of herself as Molly Carpenter. In her mind the Winter Lady was still Maeve, the part of her that had been changed by taking up the mantle was separate from whom she really was. It was a lesson she hadn't learned yet.

"You know what he means. Just because it doesn't have to define you doesn't mean it won't affect you."

Molly didn't relax, but she at least stopped herself from pulling away from my grip. It was enough. I looked back at the young man before me. "Those terms aren't great, but they'll do. But we need to get out of here now, so how about we trade stories later."

The guitarist nodded and we ran out the door and down the hall, away from the direction Molly and I had arrived from. As we turned the corner, a loud crash resounded from the hall behind us. Kanji looked like he wanted to stand his ground and fight but Yu caught him.

"Eyes forward. We can't afford to fight here."

It was surprising how quickly the taller boy accepted the order. And Yu didn't look back to make sure he had. These kids were used to things like this, and that was perhaps the most frightening thing I'd learned that day.

I glanced over my shoulder corrected myself. The most frightening thing of the day was the mass of darkness coming up behind us. It reminded me of the elemental Peabody had released at Morgan's trial. Its form seemed to devour the light around it and it had spread out to cover the entire hall behind us. We were keeping ahead of it, but only barely. As I stared at the creature I saw a long ropey arm reaching from the darkness and gripping the floor to pull itself forward. Then I realized it. There wasn't one creature, there were hundreds, each of them a mass of living darkness. As the first monster pulled itself forward I caught a glimpse of its glowing red eyes, hidden behind a pale blue mask. Then the creature was gone, covered up by the growing mass behind it.

I turned my eyes back forward and fumbled the left glove onto my hand. I focused my will into the runes tattooed onto the leather and made the motion of throwing a ball over my shoulder.

"Fuego Cimeci!"

A ball of fire, slightly larger than a softball, arced onto the floor behind us and burst into a few dozen smaller bits of fire. It was not a particularly powerful attack, but when it touched the creatures they burst into flames. It didn't take long for Yu to lead us to an exit and he threw the door open.

We turned around and watched the fire trucks pull up to the arena. This time I swear the fire was only sort of my fault. Those things must have been as flammable as gasoline to go up like that.

I gestured at Molly who handed me her phone. I dialed one of the few numbers I had memorized. "Hey, Billy? Sorry about this, but I need to borrow The Den for a few nights."

The Den was a warehouse the Alphas had taken control of after Murph and they had taken out the Fomorians who had set up camp here. They had been putting what money they could into setting up a sort of bunker here, and after my back-pay as a warden kicked, I managed to pump in enough to set up a decent number of beds and stockpile some food for emergencies.

The Den didn't have much of a threshold, but we had made sure to have one or two people sleep here a couple nights a week to at least create a bare-bones barrier. And it had been enough for me to set some basic wards. Noting dangerous, just a few to discourage teenagers from wandering inside, and some alarms to warn anyone inside of an intruder.

I had sent Molly home. Whatever these kids knew, it was enough to distrust a fae, even one as human as Molly, and we didn't need the distraction right now. She knew I would tell her anything important later.

I flipped on the lamps and gestured to the back of the room. "There's a first aid kit on the shelf. There should be some fresh bandages and disinfectant for the girl."

Yu shook his head and gestured to one of the beds. Kanji walked over and set the girl on the bed. Yukiko and Teddie walked over and knelt by her side. They uncovered the wound and for the first time I got a good look at it.

There was no blood. The wound oozed a thick grayish blue liquid, and bright sparks jumped from within the wound to the bandage as it was pulled away.

I was about to speak up but Yu stared me down and gestured for me to watch. The two beside the girl hovered their hands over the wounds. A faint green light reached out from their hands and seeped into the skin around the wound. Before my eyes, the skin around the hole began to grow and stretch until the wound disappeared.

I watched the process closely. It looked like magic, and the two of them felt human, but the energy itself seemed…off, almost inhuman. They were too old to be changelings and they didn't give off the oppressive feelings another typed of half-blood would. Whatever these kids could do, it was something that I had never even heard of.

Yu watched me examine the process before he spoke. "It's not magic. Not by your definition at least."

"Then what is it? And who would summon monsters like that to attack a band?"

Yu hesitated. "It's a long story, and I'm not sure if I can trust you with it yet."

That much I understood at least. Trust was a rare commodity in our world. But we didn't have time to build up any real trust. And there was only one fast way to get to know a person.

The soul gaze is one of the most powerful and dangerous tools in every wizards book. It requires no spell and almost no effort. When a wizard looks into another person's eyes, he sees the very essence of their soul. He will immediately understand their emotions and motivations on a level so deep that he can never forget it. And it goes both ways. Every person who a wizard soul gazes gets to see right back into his soul.

I had soul gazed a few people over the years. Only a few of them were on purpose, and I had a choice in even less.

I didn't want to force a kid to look into my soul. There were parts of me that I wasn't proud of, and my subconscious is a dick. But right now there were monsters chasing after 9 kids in my town and I needed to know why.

I explained the nature of a soul gaze to Yu. He agreed.

It took us both about an hour to recover from the soul gaze. At least this one didn't faint. But it looked like he was finally ready to tell me his story.

Yu and his friends sat in a half-circle along the beds and I sat across from them. Yu sat in center and he grabbed Rise's hand before he started the story.

"The creatures that attacked us were working as a result of a corruption spread through the world by Outsiders."

That got my attention. I'd already learned about it last Halloween, but most wizards on the council hadn't even known, and this kid already did.

Yu saw my reaction and smiled a bit. "So you already know part of it. Good, that's less I'll have to explain. What you probably don't know is that this is actually the third attempt the outsiders have made to spread the corruption. The first attempt started in Japan, 17 years ago.

"None of us were involved in that attempt. What I know of it is mostly information that Labrys here heard from her sister. A corporation known as the Kirijo Group had been conducting experiments on creatures they dubbed Shadows. As far as we know, the experiment was an attempt to harvest the creatures' natural ability to manipulate time. The experiment ended in failure when a few of the scientists realized that the leader of the group was attempting to call down a sort of apocalypse, they sabotaged the project. It created an explosion which split the trapped shadow they had contained into twelve pieces, one of which found its way into a young boy.

"Ten years later, he returned to the city and attended a high school, where he joined a group called SEES. This group had dedicated itself to exploring a time hidden between days, where most people were placed into coffins, and only a few could remain awake. The sky would turn green and the moon and water the color of blood. They called it the Dark Hour.

"A few of the people who could remain awake during the Dark Hour also had the ability to fight the shadows. The power of Persona. The nature of this power wasn't truly known to them, but I will try to explain it later.

"For a year the boy fought shadows, and each full moon a truly powerful shadow would appear. For 11 months he fought them. Then the group learned the true purpose of the Dark Hour. It wasn't actually an extra hour in the day. It was the result of a rift created when the lab that hosted the shadow exploded. At exactly midnight every night, the rift would expand in order to allow the shadows to be slain, and to reform into Nyx, the mother of shadows.

"This was the Outsiders first attempt at corruption, though they didn't know that at the time. The rift connected to the first of three gates. The Golden Gate led to the space between souls. If they had gained access to that place then they could corrupt every soul in existence instantly.

"When the herald that could open the gate was summoned, the boy who had once contained part of it sacrificed himself to create the Great Seal. He used the energy of his own soul to bind the gate shut, and stop the being who attempted to open it, the corruptor of men."

I spoke up. "I was told the fae call it Nemesis."

Yu smiled at that. "Not exactly, but they aren't far off. The being has a different name that we can't say here.

"The second part of the story is mine. Six years ago I moved to a town in Japan called Inaba. I was staying with my uncle for a year while my parents worked overseas. My first day of class, a woman was murdered.

"She was a new anchor who had recently been caught in an affair with a low level politician. She was found hung upside down on a power line. Everyone wrote it off as a revenge thing, the politician's wife killed her or hired someone to do it.

"But it wasn't over. A few days later, another girl was dead. Her name was Saki Konishi. She was in our school, a few years older than us. She had been the first person to find the body, so most people thought the killer was covering his tracks. The three of us learned something different.

"Prior to Saki's murder, we learned of the Midnight Channel. Supposedly, if you looked into a TV at midnight on a rainy night, you would see your soul mate.

"Two nights before Saki's murder, three of us watched the Midnight Channel, me Yousuke and Chie, and all three of saw Saki. But something else happened to me. I heard a voice speaking to me, urging me to enter a new world. And when I placed my hand on the TV, it passed through like water.

I was about to ask what he meant, but Kanji glared at me and forced me to back down. Apparently this wasn't a story that should be interrupted.

"The next day, still before Saki was killed, the three of us entered the other world for the first time, a world located on the other side of the television screen. That's where we met Teddie, and we later learned that the murderer had been using this world. I don't know if he knew how, but when he threw a person into the TV they showed up dead a few days later.

"Over the year we ventured into the TV countless times. Everyone outside of us three and Teddie was at some point thrown into the TV. A person thrown inside created a new area in the world, a fortress designed to keep others out, and their own Shadow was forced out. Not the weak shadows like you saw before, but powerful Shadows, born of the suppressed emotions everyone has. When we defeated these shadows, and the one who created it accepted it as a part of them, they would transform into Personas. Personas we used to fight against the darkness."

"It was much later that we learned the nature of the world. It was a doorway created by the goddess Izanami. She was already corrupted when Izanagi abandoned her to the underworld, and she was attempting to open the door for more to be corrupted. The second wave of corruption tried to enter through the Crimson Gate. That gate led to the collective unconscious, the TV world."

It looked like he was finished, but I checked around the circle to make sure nobody else had something to add. "So those things at the arena, those Shadows, are part of a third attack?"

Yu seemed troubled. "Maybe, as far as we know, the corruption can't spread through the physical world as easily as the others. And we don't know where the third gate is. One of the reasons we formed the band was so that we could travel the world and find the source, but they've chased us everywhere."

I held back a sigh of relief, that meant my suspicion was probably right. "The third gate is in the Never Never. I've seen it. The winter court had been holding off the Outsider attack for hundreds of years."

Yu actually smiled at that. "That explains a lot. I actually suspected the third gate would be there. A physical location seemed a little farfetched."

I nodded. "What are Shadows? Those things back at the arena didn't look like they belong to humans."

"They didn't. Lesser shadows, like the ones you saw back there, are more universal. From what we've managed to figure out, they're born of collected emotions from everyone, not just an individual. Each one contains the emotions of dozens of humans. I think that the corruption is what brought them together, without it the emotions just sort of drift around."

"And Personas? You've used the term a few times but you haven't actually said what it is."

Yu nodded and gestured to his friends. As one they stood up and held a hand in front of them. Blue light shined around them and a card materialized in each of their hands. As one they crushed the cards and spoke. "PERSONA!"

A figure appeared behind each of them. No two were the same and all of them had an air of power I had felt only a few times before.

They summoned gods.