Take a look at all the gods and demons from different cultures that exist in Shin Megami Tensei. How the world came to be is one of the common questions, so each of those cultures has at least one creation myth. Sometimes they have several, all peacefully coexisting within the same religious canon: there are two different accounts of the creation in the Book of Genesis, for example. The Mediterranean as well as the Eastern attitude was, "Oh, you have gods? Cool, we have gods too."
So the proper historical religious kitchen sink/Shin Megami Tensei approach to having a few dozen different cosmologies and creation stories isn't the modern/scientific, 'wait, they can't all be true,' (which is called proof by contradiction) but to shrug, decide that they're all true in that A Wizard Did It/A God Did It way (or just not care), and go to several dozen different sets of religious festivals, aka parties.
So yes, this fic implies DS1&2 take place in the same world. Yes, they've got different cosmologies and contradict each other, but this is Shin Megami Tensei, which has Shiva, Odin, Horus and a whole bunch of others in the same world, when their canons also have different cosmologies and contradict each other.
Al Saiduq had provided the kitchen with stuff from the category of kitchen stuff, and also fridge stuff. It looked like a very well-built and expensive kitchen, with a lot of counter space and cupboards. Lots and lots of cupboards. And since he'd only had a handful of seconds to figure out which data files from the Records he could fit into a demon's mind (even though demons could keep thousands of years of memories they weren't all-knowing), he didn't have any idea what was stored where. Plans to have him help look for things failed when it turned out that although he'd kept language, and thus knew that flour was a white powder used for baking, he didn't know the difference between it and sugar, and didn't realize that 'a white paper bag' could in fact be this flour.
Makoto banned him from the kitchen before he put salt in her coffee. Normally Makoto was pretty patient with him. She should be, she was used to handling Yamato, but coffee was coffee and JPs had burned through their supply of it during the first two all-nighters. Yamato, who never touched the stuff, hadn't considered it a necessity.
It said something about the personal loyalty he'd commanded that JPs hadn't revolted over this. They'd recruited people with trace magical abilities, and subconscious use of them took energy, like everything else. According to Otome, they often self-medicated with caffeine and everything else energy-boosting they could find, including herbs that boosted magical power and would actually make the energy drain worse, while alcohol opened minds and lowered barriers, making it incredibly dangerous. Sometimes street drugs, if JPs didn't get to them first.
The planned victory feast instead turned into hours of people putting whatever was put in front of them into their mouths in between sentences while their attention was focused on their cell phones instead of each other, or that was what one would have assumed.
Hinako tooki Fumi's phone when she saw she was fiddling with it instead of talking to people, and seeing that, Al Saiduq had offered his to Hiro. Al Saiduq shouldn't be on the JPs network, but the answer to why it worked even though the normal networks must be flooded right now was so obviously magic, even if now the answer was demon magic instead of alien magic, that no one batted an eye as Hiro carried on a three-way conversation with his father and his cousin, his mother and older brother coming in and talking on speaker after she got back from checking on their neighbors and his brother met up with their cousin halfway, since they'd both been going to check on each other.
It became a six way conversation when Joe yelled at him across the room, "Hey, Hiro, can we have the ceremony here?"
It wasn't processing what Joe said while caught in another conversation that made Hiro pause for a moment. "Of course." Had he really needed to ask?
"Yes!" Phone still held to his ear, Joe said a second later, "She says to invite everyone; she wants to meet you guys!" Then he whooped, grabbed Al Saiduq and planted an extremely messy kiss on him. Everyone laughed, and then had to explain to the people on the other end why they were laughing. Joe grabbed Daichi next, since he was in range, leading to a squawk and more laughter. "I love you guys!" Joe declared.
"Stay away from me!" These crazy people might, well, be alright and valuable allies and a lot stronger together, but Keita still was sane enough to realize they were crazy.
"Run, Keita! Save yourself!" Hinako declared nobly (except for the giggles) before Joe grabbed her.
Io was blushing, because this sort of public display was just… inconceivable, but really, she knew everyone here, and they'd just saved the world, and why not? She wanted to celebrate, to go a little crazy, to express herself. It felt like all the rules, all the social convention, the fear of upsetting others: none of it mattered anymore, after what had happened. So, "I'll save you, Airi!" she declared nobly, grabbing and hugging Joe as Airi and Keita ran out the open glass doors into the garden. Fumi followed them, because it was the closest exit and she'd been around people too long, even these people. She wanted time alone with her preciouses. She wished she'd gotten a more useful magical ability, but being able to store away all her laptops and equipment was fairly useful.
She stopped dead when someone warped into the center of the garden.
Those traditional and impractical geta sandals. That silver hair in between Yamato's and Al Saiduq's. That distinctive robe, painted with raining code: had he known all along that the world was data, stored on a great system?
She stood frozen as he took out his own cell phone. "It's clear, come on." She ignored one of the two that warped in, but the other was that lucky, lucky bastard.
For a moment, she considered taking a laptop to his head, even though there were far better ways to make it look like an accident. It wasn't as though she would have had time to be the great Naoya's apprentice, not with her work at JPs. Ever since she'd tried and failed to crack his demon summoning program for JPs use, she'd known all the rumors about him were true instead of the usual wild legends. Even though the elite were often antisocial, they knew data transmission: rumors were forwarded almost as fast as the speed of light. This Atsuro-whatever looked so ordinary, such a dork.
"Will you find him?" the third one, with hair such a deep black the slightly lighter highlights seemed almost blue, like cheap black socks that revealed themselves to have been dyed with blue as their color faded asked Naoya. "I'm worried about Haru." After what happened to her mentor? She'd sung herself into the demon realm when she felt the pressure of something trying to kill her: song was the universal language, the program code of that universe. If Lucifer hadn't been impressed enough by their battle to remember him and his companions, he dreaded to think what would have happened to her. But finally finding out what happened to her mentor, losing Gin and all the others who were on earth when it happened, if only for a moment?
Naoya just gave him a look, and then gave Atsuro one that said, 'Well?'
"I'll find him," Atsuro promised.
Naoya's smirk said, 'Good peon.' "And this is why he's my new little brother."
"Yeah, right," the other one said pleasantly enough it was hard to tell if he was being ironic, affectionately agreeing that Atsuro made a good bro or what, exactly. "See you." He warped out.
"Naoya?" Hiro seemed a little surprised, sticking his head out the door. "Did you just violate your parole?" Well, more like a treaty. Had Naoya done magic on earth in order to get himself here because he was worried about Hiro?
Naoya snorted. "Your brother brought me here. He's gone to fetch his minions." Indicating Atsuro, he added, "And I have a chaperone."
"Where were you?" Hiro blurted out. The others, who were about to surge out to greet the newcomers and ask how the hell they'd gotten here so fast and could anyone else do it, mostly froze at the hint of honest distress and betrayal in his voice. "I managed, but… A whole week and neither of you came? I thought he'd deleted you too! Did he?" Otherwise they would have come. He'd kept telling himself that he could do this, his big brother had, and he wouldn't fail either. If they weren't coming, it must just be because he didn't need them, that it would all be okay. Even when he'd found out what happened to the rest of the world, if the dragon stream could hold off the void, there was no way the King of Bel and the Prince of Heaven would have gone down so easily, right?
The leader who had forced them onwards, told them they could do it, they must do it, and in the end it would be fine finally sounded like a teenager. Even though this was half a teenager whining at their parents and half someone parental, someone who worried about others, saying, 'Damn it, you shouldn't have worried me like that!'
Naoya had far too much experience to be out-stubborned by any brat of a little brother. Except one. "We were… somewhere else at the time. For us, it's been a little less than two hours. I know I've told you that time can run differently between worlds. Or not at all." Looking around at all the faces, he asked, "Where is Commander Izuna?"
"Of the JSDF?" Makoto asked.
"Unless you know of any others. She has red hair that isn't dyed." Rare but possible even among Japanese. Just like silver, it tended to indicate a throwback, someone with a bit of inherited power. Izuna, who fought with them and lived, Haru: he wasn't surprised to see two more with his younger cousin. Those with power were more likely to survive, after all.
"She led the force dispatched to defend the first tower we lost," Makoto was sorry to say, until she remembered that they were back, all the people who died. All the casualties, all the losses, all the people they couldn't save, whose deaths they had to move on from.
Naoya snorted at that, then considered something, finally smiled. "So you didn't have anyone competent in there with you? Your brother had me, after all." Good job, that meant.
"Hotsuin Yamato, Makoto: there were lots of people who knew what they were doing. I would have been lost without them." All the demons, all the seals, all the knowledge he didn't have.
"Hotsuin? Really? Of JPs? They don't count. They lost all their half-competent officers a year before you were born, fighting the Shomonkai." The Shomonkai had Naoya's program: of course it was a slaughter. "As for the Hotsuin, Amane's father even got the children," Naoya said that as dispassionately as Yamato would have. "I don't know who they found to help morale, but the Hotsuin are… Or perhaps they aren't eliminated."
Yamato? Daichi wondered why he was surprised by the thought that he might be alive. "He died during… that, so you did bring him back, right?"
When Saiduq nodded, Daichi shrugged ruefully. "I guess I just thought that if he was brought back he'd be here with us, you know? Even though he," a moment as he searched for the right way to say it, suddenly reluctant to just say 'died,' even after seeing so much death. "Didn't join us, he did fight with us. Not just against us, I mean alongside us." Like he'd said when the idiot killed himself, no matter what anyone said, Yamato was the one who had kept them all alive.
Io agreed. "The dragon, Lugh… And he was there with Kama: Shiva might have realized he was responsible for it. And Saiduq tried to trap him there." Even though he hadn't known about that, he was in that city, with Alioth about to come down. Io thought that he might have lied when he said there weren't any survivors there, even though lying to make someone feel better didn't really feel like something Yamato would do. Especially under circumstances where so many other decisions had been 'them or everyone' and they'd just had to do what had to be done, no matter how terrible it was. "He was fighting alongside us, putting himself in danger when we were."
No one mentioned what they'd found out about how all of this was started by Yamato in the first place. Yamato's misuse of the septentrione's knowledge might have been why it happened now, but Polaris had as good as said that he intended to wipe them out. If he'd chosen an earlier or later time period, would humans have been able to defend themselves even with Saiduq's help? Without fire and the other gifts he'd given them, humans would have been far colder. Hungrier. More desperate. And this last week had proved that when people were hungry and desperate, civilization fell apart.
Without fire to warm them, knowledge to help them better themselves, surely Polaris would have given up on humanity much earlier, when it was so much harder for them to care about anything other than immediate survival, when there was so little they could do to survive without resorting to that cold, ruthless practicality that was all Yamato had known.
"We wouldn't have met you if it wasn't for him letting us into JPs," Airi said. "We would have been on the streets like the others." She glanced at Ronaldo, remembering how they'd been well-fed while others starved, but wasn't that necessary? Airi'd seen herself that Yamato was right: starving people grew weak, they couldn't think as well, fight as well.
Yamato was… Yamato, but he'd kept them alive.
"So I guess he's… back there," Joe offered, adjusting his hat.
A lot of them looked at Ronaldo, out of the corners of their eyes or not. "I hope the police find him first," Ronaldo said, and meant it. "That's what my mentor would have wanted." Not mob justice, even though Ronaldo had told himself it was an act of war, to stop him and get his food supply to feed the hungry during the crisis, used that to justify his vengeance to himself until he was lost to it.
"Or JPs," Makoto said firmly. "They'll protect him." Even after everything. Even the ones who survived long enough to hear Yamato's not so much confession as declaration.
Since Naoya didn't especially care, he was examining the house and grounds. The architecture seemed suitable enough, and he preferred traditional, tried and tested designs to stark modernism. Not that the world hadn't come up with more good ideas in the past century than in the fifty before it, with so many more people to have ideas. Of course, ninety percent of them were incredibly stupid in a good year, but that was true of everything both humans and demons did.
"He said that he was forced into training for it when he was very young. He'd never even tried okonomiyaki," Hiro considered that shocking not because it was his favorite food or anything, but because that whole conversation was just… normally, people had that kind of 'I don't wanna' reaction to healthy things. "At first I thought he was like you, Naoya," who deliberately cultivated his air of, 'I don't want to deal with you idiots, so go away,' "and then I realized he just didn't know how to deal with people as equals. I think everyone in his life either had power over him and forced him to follow his family's path, or was a subordinate." He gotten confirmation of the fact that Yamato didn't have any clue what he was doing when Yamato's friendly words moved from flattery, saying that Hiro was admirable because of such and such a quality straight to, 'We shall be together forever and I'll painfully kill anyone who takes you away from me!'
Actually, Hiro thought that Yamato actually would want to marry him, because 'together forever' was (theoretically) there in the contract and the rest was just romance and other things only idiots cared about, as far as Yamato knew.
It was then that Hiro knew that he should never let Yamato anywhere near Naoya. Naoya was a great big brother, even if he was Hiro's cousin, but that was because he liked people who did what he told them to do and got in less trouble, thereby causing him less trouble, because of it. Like most really old people, he had a lot of wisdom, although another thing about Naoya was that he shared it in as few words as possible instead of droning on and on the way Hiro's mother's old father did.
After his older brother took him the first few times, Hiro had grown up taking the subway to visit Naoya when he was bored. As he made friends, they could get permission to come with him because there was a supposedly responsible adult involved, who theoretically would meet them at the station, even if the responsible adult stayed in his computer room working all the time and didn't do any supervising except for giving them some money to get snacks in exchange for leaving him alone.
If it wasn't for running into JPs Hiro would have taken his friends there to wait it out, since Naoya kept a large emergency food supply for marathon programming sessions. Hoping Naoya would get there while the world ended around them. It wasn't just Daichi and Io that were a little cowardly, Hiro had to confess. He'd spend the entire time asking himself what would his big brother do, hiding behind that poker face because he had to keep it together, keep them together. And safe.
"No one has ever actually worked on this garden, have they?" Naoya said, voice laden with unamused doom. "It was just manifested in this state. Atsuro, help me find the toolshed."
And with that the conversation was over, Naoya's wooden geta and antique-style socks were placed on the edge of the pavement, his robe draped over a lamppost and he stepped out onto the dirt, grass and stone with a smile that was half-content and still half-triumphant, even after this many years without the curse.
The inventor of gardening, of agriculture, the first human to learn the secrets of the plants instead of the language of animals, and his grandfather had taken that away from him. Every plant he tried to nurture died.
Small wonder he'd turned to tool-making, to smith craft: in those days there was little for a man to do that didn't involve planting or killing, and when merely working alongside everyone else on a city state's irrigation ditches could blight their crops?
Even though he still programmed, still shaped metal and electrons and watched the network grow and glow, there was a reason Naoya loved playing in the dirt, that this aloof brother more than fifteen years older than him was the one to teach Hiro the best way to dig holes and mix up mud pies for the plants to eat.
"They're why you weren't surprised, were you?" Daichi realized. "By the demons." At the time, Daichi was too panicked to realize that his friend was going through the motions, far more concerned with reassuring Daichi and Io, with finding a way to survive this, than the impossibility of it all.
"Actually, I signed up for Nicaea because Naoya programmed something like that once. It was called the Laplace Mail." Hiro was going to text Naoya about it after he'd checked it out himself first. "My older brother and Naoya, who's our cousin but we call him our brother, were inside the Tokyo Lockdown. So was Atsuro. After nearly losing both of them, my parents, who raised Naoya too, decided to have me. That's why my brother's so much older than I am."
"The Tokyo Lockdown?" Ronaldo stared at him. "That's one of the classic conspiracy theories, like that American president. Even my mentor didn't think JPs was involved in it at all." The Lockdown was the province of things like the Ayakashi Monthly. The two of them might have become conspiracy nuts, technically, but they still detectives so they had standards.
"We weren't," Makoto told him grimly. "It was before my time, but Naoya's right: JPs was almost wiped out months before the Lockdown, so the government was too afraid to keep the Shomonkai from openly gathering. It wasn't until Yamato was seven that they were able to do more than just monitor the seals. That's why the JSDF created a special supernatural combat unit out of some of the survivors of the Lockdown. Even most JPs personnel don't have the clearance level to know about it. Can you imagine the public reaction to knowing that demons broke loose and a mass forget spell was cast on the survivors?" She looked at Hiro. "So you did have special training."
"No," he told her as he went back inside so they could close the doors and turn on the air conditioning: it was starting to heat up. "Even Naoya wouldn't give me any." If he was younger he would have pouted. "That would have broken the terms of his parole. He worked for the Shomonkai for awhile as a programmer, but he left and helped stop them."
Yamato kept asking him if he was anyone special, if he had any training, and he'd been telling the truth when he said he was normal. Right? But the Tokyo Lockdown was years ago, and the people who dealt with gods and demons had centuries of practice saying the right things and handling them the right way, even if now it was to avoid witch hunts instead of to advertise their services or god. Barely any whispers of demons had escaped: he'd heard lots of conversations between Atsuro, the others and his brothers about that, including quite a few he wasn't meant to overhear. "But I did already know that they were real. I mean, a couple of Naoya's demons would fight over who got to babysit me." Lily's lightning and Gaby's storms. "At first I thought those demons were attacking us because of me, so I had to make sure you guys were alright." His best friend and the girl he'd talked to for the first time just that day. "And if I told you what I knew, and the government found out I'd talked to people who didn't have clearance, my family would have been in a lot of trouble. Then I didn't want you to find out because I'd kept you from finding out for so long and I didn't want you to find out about that." It became not lack of trust, but guilt over something that might make his friends think he didn't trust them. So they understood, right? Didn't feel like he'd betrayed them by lying by omission for all this time?
After all of them had a chance to tell him that they didn't mind, Saiduq asked, "Is something wrong with the garden?"
"Naoya has issues with gardens." And one created by a god as a gift for mortals? Naoya wouldn't be able to tolerate something like that until it had the stamp of human hands placed on it. A true garden was symbiosis, humanity working for the sake of the environment instead of simply taking from it. Was art, when the word came from artifice, from craft? From something people worked hard on, tried to make perfect. "Don't worry about it. He likes pulling all-nighters."
Fumi was staring out the window. Those arms… they made her feel like, yes, like science.
Testing was clearly required. Thorough testing. And a lot of data collection.
Re DS1: Think of this as after a blend of Naoya's and Atsuro's endings, with some elements of Amane's route, where Japan isn't going to become a demonic power any more than it's become a nuclear one. Not given the Lockdown's casualty count and how close the world came to subjugation or annihilation.
There's a trope called something along the lines of 'gods, demons and squid.'
This is a semi-sequel to my Naoya character & 'first family' backstory fic, so it's probably a good idea to read that first since I decided to be lazy and not repeat myself all that much. As anyone who's ever attempted the Demifiend battle knows, Shin Megami Tensei protagonists are very dangerous people. As are social-fu black belts.