"Don't let the past control you, and don't look to the future: simply live in the moment."- P3
Strega (P3)- Chidori Yoshino 28/05, Takaya Sakaki 23/07, Jin Shirato 27/11
You are a teacher.
You are the one who taught them how to read, and the basics of math.
The one who knows computers are important, who sets out to learn the code so you can bend it backwards over your kneecaps and break it.
Just like you break into doors and files, you break codes.
You know the importance of public perception, that it's important to look between the lines and lies to read that which is being kept hidden from everyone
Its all about people, and who you can trust. And you can't trust people who don't understand. You teach them that too.
They need to protect each other from the world after all. The world is damned. You lack the faith to fix it.
You are a researcher, a strategist, not a leader.
But Takaya, he inspires faith. He can lead. He is what kept you alive during the experiments.
He saved you. Her. Them.
He taught you to live for today. The past is pain and in the future lies death. There is no tomorrow, only today.
He will lead the world with his vision. You will clear his way to bring it to fruition.
Chidori is an observer of the world. She doesn't participate, but records it in the pages of the paper.
Takaya gets her all the sketchbooks she has ever owned. She appreciates it, as much as she appreciates everything.
Chidori is numb with it all, the watching. The waiting.
There will be suffering before the world ends and becomes a heaven instead of the hell of the earth.
Chidori's suffering comes in the absence of it all.
No feeling, pain, no excitement. Yesterday is the same as tomorrow, the only passing of time marked in the waxing and waning of the green moon, and the slight variations of missions.
She watches, she witnesses, and she records. Someone must remember the old world in order to fully appreciate the new, and Chidori is someone.
She watches for years,the world goes by, the full moon shadows descends, and the apathy grows.
She has a persona, but she feels filled with apathy herself, feels it slooshing around in her veins instead of blood. She checks sometimes, red staining her skin until her persona heals her.
It hates her, and loves her, just like she hates and loves herself.
Sometimes that hate is a close, choking thing. Hands wrapped around her throat, hers or her persona. I am thou, thou art I.
Does it matter whose? This life is suffering, next time will be better.
I am going to die.
I have long since accepted that.
After all, everyone dies in the end after all.
Memento Mori, as they say.
When it comes, death will be a mercy.
An end to the misery.
You know that you are all broken as human beings.
Different, from those you see around you, that you hear about online. The cold hand of death has wrapped around your ankles and left, chilling you all to the bone. You all deal with it differently.
Chidori shuts down, shuts everything out behind a wall of fire and apathy. She chooses to walk through life lost in the haze of the smoke. Nothing to see, nothing to feel, no pain nor joy. A fire that blots out the life of the sun.
In contrast, Takaya embraces it. Live in the moment. Feel everything. Be everyone. No regrets or hesitation.
Unlike Chidori's dark haze, Takaya is the sun that breaks through and lights the way. A beacon burning brightly, short and intense. A shooting star.
You want to burn with the force of that star, put yourself in its path in hopes that some of it might land upon you, setting something alight in your soul. You stay with him, hoping to clear his path across the heavens.
They will see.
You will help them all see.
She watches the world go by. And more and more often, she watches one person in particular.
At some point, he starts watching her back.
He seems curious.
The curiosity is mutual.
The endless days that pass under the green moon take on shapes and forms, gain shades and colours. Suddenly they are distinct. Clear images among a montage of blurred ones.
The change is startling, but not unwelcome. Maybe she can see where this goes.
I remember how the other kids died.
Some turned into shadows, others into monsters with human skin, demons inside.
I had to fight them. The older children protecting the younger ones, the best we all could.
Until one day I looked around and saw that my comrades had dwindled to ten. The ones I had saved, and the ones she had saved.
By the next testing that number had been divided by half.
I killed her. She is the last death I will regret.
You watch. You wait. You kill.
You fail.
You jump into the red sea together.
She has the thought one day, that she will miss him when this is over.
The thought startles her so hard that she rips through the page.
She looks at the tear. At the weakness in the barrier.
She cries, the first tears in many years.
And maybe this is what being alive is meant to be about.
She hates it.
(She wants more of it)
I never asked for the power of Persona.
But I have it, unnatural though it may be.
It was not given.
It was no gift of grace, but forced.
My eyes are open. They are wide open.
The gun felt strange in my hands, in contrast to the familiarity of the evoker. Stranger still, to not turn it upon myself. But for now I must keep running.
There is no hope for humanity.
But there is hope for salvation.
Death is a blessing.
I will lead the way.
It is fate.
There is nothing they can do to change it.