Author's Note: Please don't pass this story by without reviewing if you've got this far! It doesn't have to be positive, you know, just an acknowledgement that you've taken the time to read the story. Even if you've just wandered in out of the web rain and put your feet up on the paragraphs for a little R&R, don't forget to leave a written tip for your hard-working host. Also, this story is rather experimental, what with the fact that all the main characters are the same person, so I'd appreciate constructive criticism as much as anything else.

#03: That's what I'D do

The past few days would presumably have been a living hell for Kanji Tatsumi, except he'd been unconscious for a good chunk of it. All he remembered was being alone at his house, and when he tried to prod his memory further in time than that, the images melted into mist. But then, of course, there'd been this god-awful place, and he'd been quite disturbed by what it was seeming to be, but until very recently, he hadn't doubted the notion that he was just having a really uncomfortable dream.

So he'd been vaguely but earnestly throwing himself at whatever situations arose, the way one would in a dream, taking everything at face value and not really thinking too hard about any of it. He'd gotten angry once or twice; there were the voices, for starters, all talking trash about him, and he'd nearly been sick trying to shout over them. And he'd been aware the whole time of another presence, the reason why this whole place existed, its denizen. The damn thing had his voice, too, and it was infuriating to hear it talking, well, the way it did, sounding like him and all.

But then the floor had torn open, as if forced apart from below by a savage pair of unseen hands. He'd scrambled back with a yell and shielded his face from the splinters as the rift in the floor widened, the space filling with pulses of red light. Amid the clouds of steam, a dark blob of a shape had writhed its way out, and had melted away into the walls. There'd been a muffled thump, and the light had vanished, leaving a tall, frightening ring of wrenched-up floorboards.

And even for a dream, that was really frikkin' weird.

It had been loud, it had been sudden, and it had shaken Kanji clean out of his sleepy trance. Suddenly he'd realized that what he should really do, and hadn't once thought to try, was start looking for a way out. Maybe it was the fact that, with the hole in the floor, the whole place wasn't quite identical anymore. It was like encountering a landmark in a featureless desert, and finding that if he walked away from it; his mind began to feel that he would be getting somewhere. Setting forth didn't seem like heading down another futile loop anymore.

Not that he was trying to get away from the room where things exploded without warning, he told himself. He wasn't frightened at all of this weird inexplicable shit. Just, you know, kind of done with the place. And that meant he was leaving.

He'd found a flight of stairs and, feeling rather empowered, he'd bounded down them. In dreams, a person could walk by a perfectly good exit without thinking twice, but he wasn't falling for that anymore. Kanji was wide awake; he was sure of that now.

And then he opened a door, stepped into a bent and significantly less steamy hallway, and heard voices. Well, one voice, but it was layered with resonance so that it could have conceivably been many voices, all speaking together. The most distinct of them, though, was Kanji's own.

"I am a Shadow," the clone of himself was saying, a bit indistinctly. "A reflection of the true inner self. But I'm not supposed to be your inner self! This is all wrong!"

Wait… did that mean that… But the clone, the Shadow, wasn't talking to Kanji, was it? The Shadow was talking to someone else… So there was someone else here!

This changed everything. It wasn't about Kanji escaping anymore. It was about getting this other person out as soon as possible, before they saw too much of this place and got the wrong idea about— uh, before they got hurt, that is. He barreled around a turn in the hallway and saw that creepy copy of himself, nearly butt naked as usual, talking to either a very girly boy or a girl in very boyish clothing. No, it had to be a girl, because if not, the shadow-person would have been acting a lot more lewd to the new kid. And sure enough, it was in the middle of its absolute favorite subject – how much it loved men.

Bullshit. Like Kanji was going to let it get away with this kind of slander. "What are you goin' on about?" he said angrily to his double, who was looking past the girl and right at Kanji. "You ain't my true inner—"

The girl turned around, and Kanji thought he saw the figure behind her widen his grin. Indigo smoke began to swirl around the other Kanji… Kanji-shaped creature… he wasn't sure what to call it, exactly… and the darkness started to pool into shapes. Horrified, Kanji rushed forward. "Hey! You! You can't be here!" he yelled to the girl. What had she even been doing talking so incautiously to some shadowy monster anyway? "What… what the hell are you playing at?"

The girl's face crumpled with disgust and she clenched her fists. "Excuse me for existing!" she snapped. "Jeez… what's your damn problem?"

"You're my damn problem! Don't be an idiot!" He pointed behind her urgently. How was she this thick? "Get outta here, now!"

But she still wasn't getting it. "Yeah, like I wasn't trying to!" the girl retorted, clearly thinking that Kanji was speaking in a more general sense. "Why does everyone think I want to be here? I never wanted to…"

Kanji could see the moment that she realized what was really going on. Her eyes had been squinting with furious exasperation; now they went almost comically wide. She was turning, now, recognizing the danger, and the black shapes – three distinct forms at this point could be clearly discerned, from the three flat painted faces – were pooling their amorphous bodies into limbs and claws and weaving about like snakes ready to strike. But the girl wasn't backing down. Did that chick think she could fight them off or something?

"Are you freaking nuts?!" Kanji yelled. He ran forward and caught the girl's wrist, hauling her steps backwards with a sharp tug, just missing the monsters as they dove into the spot where she had been standing. "Do you have some kind of death wish?"

The girl yanked her arm out of his grip sullenly. "No! It just caught me off guard for a second! I would've been fine!"

The black shapes, having missed their target, splashed to the floor and then erupted upwards again. "Stop doing that!" Kanji growled to his lookalike. "Call your freak show off! Just… leave her alone!"

"I'm not controlling them," the thing said, its own voice, Kanji's voice, backed by the whispers of countless others speaking in time. "But you're still too late… Looks like the fog is almost done clearing on this side. Once it's gone, there's just no stopping them… teehee!"

"Them?" the girl repeated. "Who the hell's 'them'?"

"Sheesh, honey… you really are slow…" The demon rolled its eyes. "Why, they're Shadows, of course! None of them are nearly as personable as I am, since they're all just echoes of the collective human subconscious… and most humans are all boring, mindless sheep…" He covered his mouth in mock distress. "Whoopsies! Looks like I said too much…"

"No way!" Kanji shouted. "You're going to have to explain a lot more than that! Otherwise I'll—"

"Watch it, you moron!" interrupted the girl. She shoved Kanji out of the way of a diving Shadow with her shoulder. "They're coming straight out of the walls!"

"You didn't have to… I saw that one coming a mile away!" Kanji protested. He took a swipe at the mask, which dodged smoothly backwards while the body it was attached to refused to budge. "That's right, back the hell up if you know what's good for you!"

Shadow Kanji seemed riled up with anticipation – unless, for some reason, it was agitation instead. But that wouldn't make any sense, would it? "You don't really think you can fight them like that, do you?" it said. The words were trying to come out as mocking, but they seemed to have passed through a hitch in its throat and turned rather panicked. "How do you expect to turn aside all the petty-minded judgments of the masses when you treat your own inner self the same way? You'redoing this to yourself!"

"So where does all this get you?" the girl retorted, trying to keep two encroaching Shadows within her line of sight. "Why the hell should you be happy? If you're a part of him and he dies, then won't you stop existing too?" She brandished a fist at a Shadow that was getting too close for comfort. "Piss off!" she told it.

"There's no way that thing is any part of me!" Kanji insisted. "It… it isn't even a frikkin' human; look at it! You sayin' I'm not human?"

"Would you shut the hell up already?" the girl hissed. "I ain't saying he's actually a part of you… I'm just trying to get him on our side!"

It hadn't occurred to Kanji until now, but there was something about the girl that was strikingly familiar. Too worried about his Shadow's shenanigans, Kanji hadn't focused on the girl's appearance at all, but now he wished he had spared a moment for that. The two of them were facing back to back now, and Kanji couldn't afford to take his eye off the Shadows to sneak a look, but he had a weird suspicion about her. It was the way she spoke, the way she bore herself…

The halo of smoke around Shadow Kanji was deepening. "Why can't you just accept me!" it wailed. "Is that sooo hard? You know I'm you, deep down!"

"I don't want it on my side," said Kanji out of the corner of his mouth. "And just because it looks like a person doesn't mean it you can reason with it! It just said it was the same kind of thing as these blobby monsters. You gonna get them on our side, too?"

"Just admit that I'm you, dammit!" the Shadow boy suddenly snapped, sounding more like its human counterpart than it ever had. Its fists clenched. "Or I'll take you down!"

"Take us down, huh?" said the girl. She snorted. "I wouldn't try it if I were you…"

Shadow Kanji's normal mannerisms returned, and it looked at her disdainfully. "I didn't mean you, honey," it said, rolling its eyes. "I probably won't even bother with you since it won't be a fair fight… why don't you go have a slap fight with your own Shadow if you're so keen? You know, back in your own dimension, where you belong?"

Though he couldn't see her expression, Kanji could tell the girl was fuming. "What? You think I can't take on a punk like you?" she screamed. "Get bent! I'll show you a fair fight!"

The light bulb went off at last. Finally, Kanji risked a look back over his shoulder at his companion. "H-hey…" he said slowly, as a wash of realization spread over him. "Wait a sec—"

The girl charged at Kanji's double, but her path was blocked by the three Shadows that had first attacked her. The closest one surged forwards, and Kanji started to yell out a warning, but he didn't get past the step of filling his lungs with air. Without breaking stride, the girl pulled back a foot and kicked the Shadow squarely in the face. "Nnf!" she grunted. The Shadow lurched back, spewing smoke; its mask was half-shattered. As Kanji watched, a chunk of the face detached itself and gloomily slipped down the Shadow's neck.

"Uh. Okay…" Kanji said, dumbstruck. "You could do that…" He blinked. "Cause… cause… well… 's what I'd do…"

He wasn't sure, at this point, if she was another construct of this place, supposedly another facet of himself like what his Shadow claimed to be, or if she was from somewhere else entirely. Still, there wasn't a chance, barring even the gender difference, that two completely separate people who had never met each other in their life could be more alike.

The Shadow that Girl-Kanji had punted was wobbling; then it exploded in a burst of smoke. For a moment Kanji thought this was a victory, but then in the smoke the fragments lashed themselves together into a far more solid form. It had become, out of gelatinous darkness, a giant painted hand that was perched on its fat fingertips. The mask, still badly cracked, stared out from the back of the armless wrist.

"What the hell is that?" Kanji yelped.

Without warning, the hand rushed at the girl and swatted upwards, the blow landing hard on the underside of her jaw and smacking her through the air all the way back to where Kanji was standing. He had to admit he was impressed. That hand had socked her a good one, but the girl version of him didn't cry out in pain when she was struck, nor when she hit the floor. Instead she swiped away a trickle of blood from her nose with the back of her hand and, dizzy, put her fists up and tried to stand, eager for a second round.

"So much for tryin' to make friends with 'em, huh?" Kanji asked the girl, crouching next to her and keeping a wary eye on the Shadows.

The girl blanched at this for some reason. "It came after me!" she insisted. "That was… self-defense! I got every right to… Anyone would've …"

"And… you're gonna go try and beat the crap out of it now," Kanji pointed out. "Self-defense, sure." He aimed a death glare at the hand, which was skipping restlessly in place. "Back off, ya shit!"

The girl pushed herself to her feet stubbornly. "We gotta do something!" she insisted. "You think it won't try to attack us again? The best defense is a good offense, right? So let's take it down already!"

There was another round of smoke puffs, and two other Shadows coalesced into restless Hands. They hopped from finger to finger, dancing closer to their targets.

"Uh," said Kanji. He leaned back, throwing out an arm as if to ward the Shadows off. "M-maybe we should…"

The hand with the broken face leaped off the ground and sharply pointed its index finger at them. Kanji wondered for a moment if this was a sign for the other two to attack, and then saw the fingertip glow. He and the girl both shouted, "Watch out!" and then shoved each other out of the way. Light shot from the Hand's fingertip through the spot where they'd been standing and burned a sizzling scar in the far wall.

"Well, then," the girl gasped. "R-right. So. Time to bail?"

"You mean we're gonna back outta this?" Kanji asked incredulously.

Girl-Kanji nodded.

"Are you kidding me? That's the—" Kanji glanced back at the Hands, then at his girl double. "That's the best damn idea I've heard all day."

Without much further ado, the two of them fled.

Finally, just to assuage any fears you might have of there being only Kanjis in this story (though I personally feel you can never have too many Kanjis), I will let on to the fact that a full genderbent P4 cast will be making an eventual appearance. Look forward to it in a few updates!