Thursday, November 9th
Kasumi Yoshizawa's pen quivered in her hand. Her eyes trembled as she desperately tried to keep them glued to the paper in front of her and ignore the specter hovering nearby. It felt like the classroom was getting smaller, walls shrinking in as if to crush the girl where she sat.
"Where is he?" The semi-transparent 'other' Kasumi asked.
"Quiet!" she spit-whispered back. "We're in class!"
"Oh, come on, Sumire!" it said.
"I'm Kasumi!" she retorted. Nearby classmates turned their heads at the girl's mumbling.
"My hair is brown! Sumire's was red! You're Sumire!" the girl who looked alarmingly like Kasumi Yoshizawa yelled.
The past 20 or so hours had been incomprehensible to the young redhead. Ever since the encounter with that horrifying green cube thing, Kasumi's brain felt like it had been split into two. Literally. When she first started seeing the 'other Kasumi' as a half-opaque phantom of her mirror image, she thought she was going crazy, but after it started talking and interacting with her directly, that doubt turned into outright disbelief. It talked like Kasumi, moved like Kasumi, called itself Kasumi, and looked identical to the real thing save for a brown ponytail instead of a red one. The only other difference was that, aside from Kasumi Yoshizawa herself, nobody could see, hear, or touch the 'other Kasumi'.
While staring at the ceiling in her bed at 3 in the morning last night, she recalled one of Dr. Maruki's many asides. One mentioning MPD: Multiple Personality Disorder. Though a lot of the psychological jargon went over her head, she'd understood MPD as a condition wherein multiple distinct individuals inhabit a single body and mind. It sounded like a bad nightmare back then, but seeing her doppelganger phase a hand uselessly through her desk in a vain attempt to grab her cell phone, she truly wished it were just a dream.
"We have to go to the bathroom." The brown-haired Kasumi said just a bit too loud for a classroom setting.
"No, you don't!" The red-haired Kasumi whispered back from her desk.
"Yes we do! I can feel it too, you know! You haven't peed since yesterday!"
"I'm never using a bathroom again after what you-!" she almost yelled. More distraught heads turned to her.
"Oh, yeah…!" The phantom lazily leaned a hand on Kasumi's shoulder. She could feel its grip. "That was pretty good, huh? We should do it again. I always took you for the type, but you really don't-?"
"Miss Yoshizawa, is something the matter? You've been restless all morning." Her grouchy professor asked, sounding more annoyed than concerned.
"S-sorry, Mister Tanaguchi, N-n-nothing's wrong!" She replied, flustered.
"I've had enough of this…" The other one said.
Suddenly Kasumi lurched from a harsh shove to her shoulder, and then felt incredibly lightweight, like a ghost.
"W-why you!" the redhead looked to her right and saw herself sitting in her chair much like she had just a second ago. The brown-haired Kasumi had taken over her body and forced the original, red-haired one out.
"Mister Tanaguchi, may I use the restroom?" it asked.
"Give it back!" Kasumi yelled desperately. The only person who could hear her was ignoring her.
"Go ahead." The professor sighed and Kasumi watched herself bolt up from the seat and make her way to the door.
"I thought we agreed we weren't going to push each other out like that!" red-head Kasumi protested once she caught up to herself in the empty hallway.
"You gave me no choice." Her body whispered back. "You were going to wet yourself!"
"Ughh… Fine!" Kasumi shoulder-tackled herself, forcing the other Kasumi out and reclaiming the body "But I'm doing the peeing!"
"Wha-hey!? Didn't you just say you weren't going to force it!?" the now-translucent brunette complained.
"I said we! And you already broke that rule!"
"Grrr! This is why you died, Sumire!"
"I'm Kasumi! If anything, you're Sumire! This is my body!"
The two snapped back and forth like this the entire way to the bathroom. Kasumi was thankful that all the stalls were empty, as she had trouble keeping her voice down with the incredibly annoying brown-haired double constantly pestering her and begging to take consensual control of the body again. By the time they'd finished, the bell had already rung and students began pouring out into the hallways to loiter between periods.
"Okay… Truce. From now on, let's agree not to swap places unless we explicitly agreed upon it prior, or an emergency presents itself." The phantom brunette said.
"Truce…" One downside of piloting the body was that physiological factors like exhaustion and nausea could nag at the girl far more directly. When Kasumi was in her 'ethereal state', she could sense what the body felt at a distance, but it felt disconnected and 'simulated' for lack of a better word. As such, brown-hair looked no worse for wear as she idly walked straight through the students that had congregated in the halls while the poor corporeal Kasumi was forced to slither her way through and fight the headache alone.
"Can't we at least get something to eat? You know we're starving."
Thankfully, the decision to buy some Jam Bread from the school's store had been quick and unanimous. Kasumi groggily waited for her turn in line, doing her best not to let the fatigue of a restless night catch up to her.
"If you want to swap for a bit to take a break, let me know." The brunette said.
Kasumi groaned imperceptibly. She wasn't going to be so trusting of her new companion. Last time she accepted the wraith's offer to hand over the reigns, she used the body to bolt straight to the station's bathroom and defile Kasumi's garden of youth! Even with the layer of dissociation that came with being outside her own body, Kasumi had never felt so disgusted and ashamed. All while thinking about-
"Emergency!" it said.
"Wha-?" Before Kasumi had time to react, another shove to the shoulder pushed her out of her body, and she saw herself pushing her way through the crowds, beelining towards a certain shaggy-haired individual that caused the red-headed girl's every ghostly muscle to tighten.
"Hi, Akira-Senpai! How are you?" Kasumi asked cheerily.
Normally her upbeat voice was refreshing to Akira's cold heart, but her bubbly attitude managed to tick him off a bit today; His and the boys' brief encounter with Luciano yesterday had broken their spirits more than he was prepared for. It was a struggle to muster up enough motivation not to crank out one last suicide-fap on his bed the previous night and he had to tie morgana's paws up behind a houseplant to keep the cat from ending it all and gag the thing with a sock just to get enough quiet to sleep.
"Hey, Kasumi. I'm alright. You?" He tried to hide the groaning in his voice.
"I'm doing fantastic!" she hooked her arms around his. "Specially now that you're here~!"
Akira recoiled away just a bit. Neither he nor his dick were ready for such physicality so early in the morning.
"T-that's goo-" he stammered.
He felt a jolt from her.
"WUAHH!" Suddenly, she screamed and pulled her arms back like his sleeves were on fire. "S-s-s-sorry a-about that S-s-senpai! Ahahahahaha!"
"… N-no worries…?" he gulped.
"I-I-I-I D-d-didn't get enough rest last night…" her face was tomato-red "S-so I k-k-kinda l-lost my b-balance! A-and-"
Her entire body twitched violently again.
"…Do you want to help me catch up on some slee-" she cooed.
Kasumi jerked again "I-I-I-I s-s-should probably go to the nurse's office for th-!"
Another lurch "Come with m-!"
"I-I-I'll see you l-"
"TAKE ME! TAKE ALL OF M-"
Akira and several agitated students watched in complete astonishment as her body fell limp to the floor. Perhaps, if he were able to see the two nearby Kasumi ghosts fighting over what counts as an 'emergency' he'd have a better clue as to what was going on, but with the information he had all he could do was stand there like a tree staring down an encroaching forest fire. He tried to blink the confusion away before picking her up princess style, deciding that listening to her request wouldn't be such a horrible idea. Akira did his best to ignore the dozens of uncomfortable stares from wary students and faculty and single-mindedly power-walked her to the nurse's office.
Back near the school store, a transparent redhead Kasumi had her arms and legs wrapped around her equally transparent brown-haired double's torso, pinning her to the ground and immobilizing her. Kasumi had managed to pull the other Kasumi out of the body instead of pushing, leaving the vessel empty and the two souls wrestling on the ground embarrassingly.
"Ooohh! He got us!" Brunette Kasumi flailed. "Maybe he's got a thing for unconscious girls!"
"You're disgusting! How can you even think that!?"
"I act! I don't just sit around and think all day like a certain someone! I know all about those weirdo 'daydreams' you have of him! You should be grateful I'm here!"
"AAAaahh! Don't say iiittttt!" the redhead tried curling herself up into as small a ball as possible in humiliation, squeezing the brunette's stomach like an empty juicebox in the process.
"Ugh-gaaahh! Okay! Okay! You win, you win!" she choked.
The couple seconds when she softened her grip was all the brown-haired Kasumi needed to wrench herself free and vanish into the crowd.
"Wha!? That was dirty!" the redhead scrambled after her, but found she couldn't make it very far. Kasumi still wasn't used to being in this ghostly form, unlike her doppelganger. Her limbs moved awkwardly without the air resistance and mass her body had learned to account for, and all of the small calculations her brain usually made to get her legs to run properly were being thrown out of whack. Her gallop quickly turned into a clumsy, despairing belly flop onto the cold, hard floor.
"Ooof!" she picked herself up and tiptoed down the hall angrily "Get back here!"
"You'll never catch me, Sumire! You're going to be a mother whether you like it or not!" she could just faintly make out the double's voice over the murmurs of the other students.
"I'M KASUMI!"
"Excuse me! Pardon me! Medical emergency!" Akira pushed his way through the crowds, his speed only somewhat hindered by the unconscious freshman dangling limp in his arms.
Akira all but kicked down the door to the empty nurse's office and lay the girl gently onto a bed. He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead and looked down at the girl, searching for any kind of clue as to what the heck was going on. She was breathing shallowly and her skin still had its color, so maybe she really had just fallen asleep spontaneously like a narcoleptic? Whatever the cause, at least she would be okay here until the nurse got back and found a solution…
When the sudden realization punched him across the back of the head, his tongue shot up to the roof of his mouth and his fingers curled.
This situation… Akira has seen it before…
Picture: Girl falls unconscious, guy takes her to the nurse's office, nobody's there, she wakes up, clothes come off… Boobs?! It's like it was ripped straight out of a porno! His little guy began uppercutting the inside of his pants in time with his hastening heartbeat.
'No, Akira! Get your head out of the gutter!' he shook his head frantically 'This exact same thing happened yesterday in Mementos with that plumber plotline! This is the real world, there's no way something like that would ever happ-'
Suddenly Kasumi jolted awake with a sharp inhale, startling Akira. She quickly patted her clothes down and relaxed with a sigh.
"I guess he doesn't have a thing for unconscious girls…" she mumbled under her breath.
"S-sorry, what was that?" he couldn't hear her over the pounding in his ears.
"Ah! Don't worry about it!" she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the thin medical bed. "Thank you for carrying me here, Senpai… I don't know what came over me…"
"It's alright…" he stuttered. "A-are you okay?"
"Yes, I'm feeling much better now…" she leaned forwards slightly. "Your arms were very comfortable."
"G… glad to hear…!" he gulped audibly. Uh oh.
The conversation went deaf for half a second too long.
"Well! The, uhh… T-the nurse should be back soon, so I should probably g-" He stiffly turned for the exit to make his leave, but froze at a soft familiar sound.
*Pop!* a button came undone.
"When I was younger, I suffered an injury, Akira-senpai…" Kasumi whispered, her tone did not match the subject matter and the silence of the nurse's office compared to the bustling hallways suddenly became overwhelming.
"It was a collapsed lung, I had to get surgery to fix it…"
"O-oh. That… sucks…" His back was still turned to her.
*Pop!* Akira's pants felt a lot tighter around the crotch area, now.
"It happens again every now and then… It makes it hard for me to breathe, and sometimes I even pass out~"
"Y…y-y'don't say…" his voice was tight.
*Pop!*
"But… I can't tell on my own…~" Akira heard the bed rustling and felt a pair of slender fingers pinch at his sleeve.
He turned around. Slowly, as if moving too fast would wake him up from this dream. He was at full mast.
"Won't you help me, senpai?"
The red-headed phantom that was Kasumi Yoshizawa's spirit finally made it to the nurse's office, knees aching from the many falls she'd endured along the way. She ignored how little sense that made and poked her head through the door (literally). Her jaw dropped and her pupils shrunk to needlepoints when she took in the sight.
She saw her own body, evidently piloted by the brown-haired Kasumi, laying face-up on a nursing bed with its overcoat unbuttoned and white shirt exposed. It would have been a perfectly innocuous image of a girl resting at the nurse's office, were it not for Akira kneeling beside her on the floor…
…With his head planted firmly on her breasts!
The translucent girl clutched at her own chest, now becoming acutely aware of the faint pressure that her physical body was transmitting. She also felt an electrifying heat between her legs. The lewd tint of red on the cheeks of her body's face confirmed it. The brunette Kasumi was enjoying this, and it meant she would be forced to enjoy it, too.
'Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck' Akira thought to himself. 'Titties! Melons! Knockers! Bazongas! BOOOOOOOBBBSSSSSS!'
"Does it sound okay? My breathing." the gymnast purred.
"S-sounds good…!" Akira could feel the vibrations of her voice buzzing in his ear through her sternum. A train horn could go off in his ear and his response would not change.
Never in his wildest imaginations did Akira ever think he'd be in this situation. Sure, Kasumi didn't have much in the way of endowment, and it's not like this was Makoto's chest he was laying on (He'd probably die instantly if that ever happened), but who was he to complain! He focused his mind on all the nerves in his face, trying to memorize every single sensation and engrave the experience into his brain permanently. This would become a memory that would follow him to the grave, whether he completed No Nut November or not. He shifted his head a bit, sneakily trying to inch his cheek closer to a titty.
"Ahn~!" Kasumi moaned. Akira's member reached for the stars "Careful…~"
"Sorry." Akira sounded like he hadn't had a sip of water in 30 years.
He felt her body convulse again and suddenly she sat up so fast that Akira thought his head was going to come off.
"WAOW!" she frantically squeezed her blazer shut and jumped off the bed at light speed. "LOOKS LIKE MY LUNGS DIDN'T COLLAPSE AFTER ALL! AHAHAHAHAHA! I-I-I-IHAVETOGETGOINGNOWBUTTHANKSFOREVERYTHINGI'LLSEEYOULATERBYE!"
Her face collided with the door at a speed that could not have been comfortable and reeled back for a second. She corrected her mistake by pulling it open with the grace of a raging bull and throwing herself out of the room like the floor was made of lava.
Akira blinked a few times, trying and failing to make sense of anything that had occurred in the past 10 minutes. He slowly pulled himself off his knees and collapsed on a nearby bed to stare blankly at the ceiling. His hand cupped his cheek.
"What the fuck was that…?"
.oOo. .oOo. .oOo.
Goro Akechi leaped through the stale oppressive air of the endless red caverns and slashed at the hideous shapes below with his saber.
The shadow's guttural bellows of agony as it disintegrated into black smog was like music to his ears. He gracefully bounded off the ground again with the other foot and slashed at three more airborne shadows in his arc through the tunnel. It had become almost ritual for the young detective to come to this accursed labyrinth every few days and mercilessly lop the heads off anything that moved. He wouldn't go so far as to call it a dependency, though the rush of adrenaline that pumped through his veins with every slice was just what he needed to keep a mostly normal façade when interacting with the real world and all of its rotten, selfish scum.
It was during breaks like these that his mind could truly wander. Ordinarily, his every waking thought was devoted to maintaining an image of professionalism, curtness, and refinement. But here, under this slightly ridiculous red mask, his body acted on its own and finally gave his brain some room to breathe. Often, he found, these wandering thoughts would land on Akira Kurusu. Arch-nemesis might have been a bit much, but exacting a form of perverse justice upon the young high-schooler had gradually morphed from a simple goal to a domineering obsession for Akechi. If he focused, he could imagine the wails of the shadows he decapitated as belonging to the leader of the Phantom Thieves. It was a sick, twisted sort of joy that Akechi only allowed himself to revel in on his semi-frequent trips to Mementos, lest it leak into reality and cause him trouble there.
He'd stopped wanting to take the Phantom Thieves down the old fashioned way long ago. Even Akechi struggled to fully compartmentalize what it is he would do if he ever got his hands on the bespectacled boy and his little gaggle of misfits, but he imagined it might involve a pair of fists and a lot of punching. All he knew for sure was that he wanted Akira Kurusu to suffer. To feel pain, to cry. To scream.
A man like Akira should not be allowed to smile, not while the truly miserable like Akechi roamed this Earth.
He reached the simulacrum of a train platform that marked the end of the floor and whipped his blade to clean it of the excess blood, chuckling at how it literally felt lighter in his grip. How many floors had he cleared today, 9? Akechi decided that one more to make an even 10 would be enough. Truthfully, he could go all day, but he was far above giving into temptation like a lowly addict, and a quick release of his frustrations with the world would more than suffice.
He walked towards the escalators that descended into the darkness and, for a reason he could not quite explain, decided to take the left escalator instead of the right as he usually did. In his mind, he only vaguely registered something amiss as he acknowledged the change in routine, but with a system pumped to the brim with dopamine he was not able to parse it as anything other than a fleeting whim.
The floor that greeted him was barren, large, and silent. The tunnels looked larger than normal, the rail tracks on the ground were duller than usual, and the echoes of his footsteps felt louder than ever with not a single shadow visible for what looked like kilometers of empty caverns. Akechi considered turning back – he was here to let loose, after all – but the same invisible force that drew him to that left escalator tugged at him once again, pulling him deeper into the depths. Again, he only had a vague sense that something was not quite right.
After what felt to his brain like an instant, but to his legs like an hour, the haze in Akechi's eyes vanished and he found himself standing in front of an enormous concrete wall, featureless save for a single metal door topped by a dimly glowing exit sign. It was only now that he realized that he had not come to this wretched place of his own free will.
Someone or something wanted him here.
"Good afternoon, Detective Akechi." A voice to his left said.
Upon hearing the words, seemingly coming from all directions and yet none all at once, Akechi's muscles tensed and his eyes widened. Without moving his head he orbited his eyes in their sockets and saw in his periphery a pale-looking humanoid figure of likely American origin, wearing white shorts, a white button up, a belt, and brown boat shoes. It may have looked human, but a twitch at the back of Akechi's brain screamed it him otherwise. The creature was leaned on the wall with its hands in its pockets. Were the aura of pressure emanating from the air around it not so oppressive, nobody would be blamed for assuming this was just any old tourist that somehow managed to find his way into Mementos.
"My name is LuckyLuciano17k, Luciano, if you will."
Akechi steeled himself and summoned his persona. Not his manifestation within the Metaverse, Robin Hood, but the literal suppressed personality he called forth when social situations became unavoidable. He summoned the humble, agreeable, detective prince Goro Akechi. In situations like these, it was best not to show fear no matter how difficult it might be. He put on his friendliest smile and turned to face the demon. It's expression of glee was terrifying in a way that defied explanation.
"Mister Luciano, a pleasure! I apologize if I'm intruding, I appear to have gotten lost."
"Now, now. There's no need for formalities. You know why you're here." It pushed itself off the wall and took a calculated step forward. Akechi tensed up further. "The Phantom Thieves."
Akechi paused for a second, then sighed and stretched his shoulders and neck, sending audible pops from his joints reverberating trough the chasm. With each release of a joint, he could feel a part of his kind façade crumble, giving way to the same Akechi that moments ago was slaughtering shadows for fun.
Whatever this human-shaped thing before him was, it knew too much. There was no point in hiding behind a mask anymore.
"Excuse my frankness," The upbeat bounce in his voice was gone, replaced with a cold, calculating stoicism. "But what is it you want from me?"
"Hmm hmm hmm hmm." The smile on its lips curled unnaturally upwards.
Akechi's eye twitched.
"You could say I'm a sort of…" it paused. "Examiner. They are currently undergoing a test of their resolve. If they pass, they'll become stronger than anything you or I have ever seen."
It chuckled.
"But if they fail… Well, let's hope for their sake that they don't. It might not be your cup of tea, mister detective, but…"
The thing called Luciano kicked off from the wall complacently, took a few steps towards Akechi, and stuck out a hand. Its lips curled demonically upwards and it held back laughter. The detective's jaw clenched subconsciously.
"…Ya wanna help me give 'em hell?"
A/N:
Another one down, boyos. The first chunk of this chapter was insanely difficult to write with having to juggle two Kasumi's, but I had a blast with it! I hope all of the bodyswapping wasn't too difficult to follow along with, but just in case, here are some tips to follow along.
The real Kasumi got split into two personalities that are forced to share the same body: the red-haired Kasumi (the Kasumi that shows up in the game (who is actually Sumire thinking she's Kasumi)) and the brown-haired Kasumi (the Kasumi who died in the car accident). If you've read Chainsaw Man Part 2, think Asa and Yoru. When one Kasumi is in control, the other is forced to watch as a ghost who can only interact with its body. It is impossible for them to share, though they can both be outside of it. Brown haired Kasumi is the 'anomaly', and red haired Kasumi is the original owner of the body. Brown haired Kasumi is the one who accuses red haired Kasumi of being Sumire a few times (which is true, but neither of them know), and while both incarnations of Kasumi have a crush on Akira, brown haired Kasumi is the one who acts on it, while red haired Kasumi is more passive. Hope this helps! I'm not sure how apparent all of this is in the story itself, so feel free to ask any questions about which Kasumi is in control at which point in the text. Don't worry, I won't shift into Kasumi's schizophrenic perspective all that often, this is just an establishing scene to explain how she may act in future chapters.
As for that little bit with Akechi? Yeah, I re-wrote that one like 5 times, even though it was so short, I really struggled for some reason. But alas, Akechi has finally met Luciano!
Anyways, I that's it for this one! See you next time!