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c-is-for-circinate · 7 years

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I am on the seventh dungeon, but my prompt is what happens if the Phantom Thieves don't quite take the bait on targeting who they are supposed to? What if they just double down on entering palaces for anyone that seems appropriate, entering the palaces of people they judge bad as rapidly as they can to help as many people as they can, instead of leaving month+ gaps.

I really like this one, it spurred many ideas in me!

I expect that there is more in this universe but eh, this is what we’ve got so far. An evening in Mementos, in a world where stop only ever means just for a second.

(Spoilers through early October)

Every other Saturday is Mementos night. It’s nicely consistent, something they can mark their calendars by. Consistency is key for everything they’re trying to accomplish here.

“Targets tonight?” Queen asks the table at large. It is large, especially with Noir here, but the diner is the closest place to Shibuya Station’s Mementos entrance where they can congregate without attracting too much attention for loitering. They never come here as a group, except on Mementos nights. The waitress knows them and their favorite back booth by sight. It makes Mona twitchy, which means Joker is twitchy, but that’s okay. A tense Joker is as still and quiet as a cat just before the pounce. It’s hard to read the hyperfocus in his posture unless you really know him.

“Three new targets from Mishima,” Skull reports. “Plus the one from last time whose name turned out to be wrong.”

“The blackmailer?” Joker asks. “Futaba?”

“Haru got her credit card information from the flower shop,” Oracle reports, her glasses glinting from the reflected glow of her tablet screen. “I traced the fake name back to an address rented under another fake name, and followed that back a bunch more levels to a real passport. Her real name’s Michiko Sakai.”

Nods all around. “Good job,” Joker says. “Anyone else?”

They rarely go into Mementos with fewer than half a dozen targets, these days. It feels like a waste. There are too many power-hungry, corrupt, and greedy people around. If they’re going to change all of Tokyo, they can’t exactly do it one individual at a time.

“I have one,” Queen says. “Our friend at the supply shop has been having some difficulties with a couple of old acquaintances. He could use our help.”

Queen is always the most circumspect, when they have these discussions here. She always positions herself near the end of the booth and within shin-kicking distance of Skull, just in case. Joker, who sits on the opposite side of the booth with clear lines of sight to both entrances and every possible line of approach, appreciates it.

“Uh, what kind of difficulties?” asks Skull. “And…what kind of old acquaintances?”

Queen waits for Joker’s nod–the next table over is preoccupied with a small child wailing over a spilled glass of milk, and the waitress has just stepped outside of easy eavesdropping range, so he gives it–and says, “Yakuza. Akimitsu Tsuda. He’s been threatening our friend. We’ll have problems if we don’t take care of this.”

“Is that a good enough reason?” Panther asks. "Just because we’ll have problems if we don’t?”

Joker worries about Panther, sometimes. Someday she’s going to fight enough battles, kill enough Shadows, that she stops asking that question. She’s not the only one who asks, but she brings it up most often. Their unanimous decision-making won’t be worth much if that finally happens.

If it does. It hasn’t yet. They’re still warriors of justice, for now.

“He’s rejected even the Yakuza’s version of a code of honor, and he’s suggested he’ll come after both our friend and his son,” Queen says. “He’s definitely killed before, and he doesn’t appear to regret it.”

“Good enough for me,” says Skull. “Anybody else? C’mon, somebody’s got to have something good.”

“Our reporter friend is experiencing difficulties, but nothing that presents a target as of yet,” Fox says. Joker is going to need to check in on that soon. Fox has the most time and freedom to hang around in a bar in Shinjuku with a mostly-drunken news hound, but he misses things, sometimes. It’s not an ideal setup, but somebody needs to cultivate Ohya. With the number of new palaces they have to explore, her articles are just too valuable.

If Joker had all the time in the world, he’d get to know her himself. If he had that much time, he wouldn’t need a team in the first place, and he’d have nothing to spend it on.

“That’s five,” says Queen. “A light evening.”

“Six,” Noir says. “I know how to beat that gamer.”

They all look at her. Mona purrs in satisfaction.

“Told you she could do it,” he says. Joker hadn’t been so sure about setting their newest member on the trail of that Gamer King–but it had been a test as much as it was meant to be a distraction from her father’s looming change of heart. He needed to see just what Noir could do on her own terms. She’s come through with flying colors. He’d hoped she would.

“That’s a full load, then,” Skull says in satisfaction. “We ready?”

Joker looks around the table of thieves–lean, fierce, hungry. Ready. Well-honed weapons thirsty for the next rush.

“Let’s go,” he says.

There are plenty of reasons for going to Mementos. Time is too precious not to multi-task, always, always, always. Joker beckons Queen to take Mona’s front passenger seat and heads his way down.

The first hour or so in Mementos, while most of Tokyo is still awake, is always predictable. Shadows mill back and forth along set paths and go down easily when Mona hits them, spilling out forms and faces that Joker’s already worn and known from the inside out. They spend it gliding through Kaitul, picking up treasure along the way and flexing their muscles for the warm-up.

“Learn anything interesting from Hifumi this week?” Joker asks. Tactics. He will never have time to learn to be half the strategist Queen is. That’s why he has her.

“She’s been focused on teaching me defensive plays lately,” Queen murmurs. The shadow up ahead trundles past without glancing in their direction, golden when Joker blinks his eyes, then back to shapeless lumbering darkness. “I’m pretty sure I can find us an opening to escape even if we’re surrounded.”

Useful. Very useful. It’s hard to understand how a few nights of studying under a shogi master could produce a tactic that practical, but Queen’s brain is a marvel and Joker never takes it for granted.

“Can you teach me?” he asks.

Mementos is perfectly, predictably unpredictable, especially this early in the night. Every tunnel twists and splits in new chaotic pathways every time they’re here, and every tunnel is always the same. It’s practically safe, more or less. It’s the perfect time to learn something new.

“Get us caught a few times tonight, and we’ll see,” Queen says. Her smile glints in the dim, green light of the twisted subway tunnel.

Joker considers the dim shapes just around the corner, at the edge of the sweep of Mona’s eye-beams, and lifts his head. “Get ready,” he says, loudly enough to cut through the banter of the back seat. “Fox. Skull.”

“Wait,” Mona says, as he spins the wheel and guns the engine, aiming just to the right of the lumbering shadow. They should pass by close enough to lean out the window and stroke it, if they wanted. Definitely near enough to draw attention. “Joker, what are you doing–”

“It’s spotted us!” Oracle warns. “It’s going to–”

Wham. The catbus keels over at the blow and Joker springs free, knife in hand, Arahabaki just behind his eyes and ready to go. Towering shapes spin up out of the gloom all around them, spitting fire and lightning and throwing Fox to his knees before they even have the chance to move. It’s fine. He can take far, far worse. Having time to prepare would defeat the purpose of training to be caught off guard, after all.

“You’re surrounded! This looks bad!” Oracle’s voice rings clear. Joker glances over at Queen.

“Leave it to me,” she says. “And guard!”

There are three shadows ahead of them, clustered, drowsing. They flicker different colors when Joker lets his eyes go unfocused and peers at them through thief-sight, red one moment, blue the next. No telling how strong any of them are–or will be, on and off, if they change mid-fight.

Late night, as Tokyo drops bit by bit off to sleep, is when Mementos really comes into its own. It’s a labyrinth of thoughts and possibilities when the real world is mostly awake. When Tokyo is dreaming? Anything at all could happen next.

Oracle’s in the front seat–seeing out the front window doesn’t help her navigate Mementos any better, but it puts her that much closer to Joker’s attention, lets him respond that split-second quicker when she hisses, “Now, go, now!”

A moment later the tunnel to their right wavers and melts away like soft wet ice cream, sludging down around the tracks on the floor. It’ll stick to Mona’s wheels like tar if they go too slow, and if they aren’t all the way through by the time the wall forms back up they’re in trouble, but Joker’s foot is already on the gas pedal and they shoot forward with a squeal and a squish of tires in the muck. The walls around them waver like heat-mirages in midsummer, iridescent with flickers of emerald and blue and gold against the Akzeriyyuth violet. Nothing in Mementos stays stable for long, but if they pick just the right moment–

“There it is!” Oracle points triumphantly ahead and to the left without even looking. “The next target.”

“Panther,” Joker says, and then considers the rest of his party. Fox and Skull are still knitting skin and bone back together from a few fights ago, Oracle’s passive restorative powers not quite as fast or clean as actually digging into their bags of medicine or their healers’ skills. Noir is starting to tire and pretending not to. Queen’s got plenty of energy still, but the night’s only just begun, and there’s no sense tapping her out yet. “Fox, use a Life Stone. You’re up. Mona too.”

“Yesss.” The cat-bus all but purrs around them. “Let’s get ‘em!”

In the other world, Takeshi Saito is a clean-cut police detective with an easy smile, one he tends to flash to burglary victims before suggesting they make a donation to his wallet if they want him to take their case seriously. In this world his smile splits wide, wider, spilling his insides out in a great ribbon of shadow that wends its way up tall and thin, Makami’s familiar face on a starving wolf slavering for their blood.

“Mona, Garula,” Joker orders, pulls Unicorn’s silvery-white bolts of lightning up in his own mind, and reaches for his mask.

It’s a swift, brutal fight. They’re stronger than Saito’s shadow, probably have been for months, but it’s quick enough to freeze Panther solid and nearly shatter her with a nuclear explosion that even rocks Joker back on his feet. Fox dives in, katana flashing, and slices it down before Mona even has Panther back up again, and Joker stands back to throw bolt after bolt of lightning, sending the shadow crumbling to its knees.

Saito’s shadow melts back into his human face, panting on his knees. Joker takes a step forward, then another one, gun at the ready.

“I’m sorry,” the shadow cries. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just that the world and the system are so fucked already, I didn’t think it mattered if I took advantage of it.” He’s too pathetic to even want to kill. Human-form shadows get like that at the end, and Joker is grateful. They’re not murderers. Even now, they’re not murderers, and that matters.

“You should tell us about that,” Panther says, more sympathy in her voice than Joker could muster. Her health is low but she’s standing on her own two feet, stepping forward to offer Saito an understanding ear. “Who hurt you so badly you thought this was the only way to be?”

“I…I don’t…” Saito’s shadow shakes its head and rubs at its face. “So many people…”

“Who’s the worst?” Panther asks. “Not just to you. Who’s the worst person you know?”

“The district chief,” Saito says instantly. “He knew everything I was doing! He runs the whole precinct for himself, all he wants are convictions, he’ll even make us arrest the victims–”

“A name,” Joker says. “Give us a name.”

“Jirou Kazumi,” the shadow says. “Please, I don’t want to die.”

“Quit your job and atone for your crimes, then,” Joker orders. “Now go!”

The shadow dissolves into smoke. Joker snatches the kernel of Treasure out of the billowing black with one gloved hand, glances at it disinterestedly before he tucks it in a pocket. Freeze Boost. Not entirely useless, but not what they came here for.

“Well that was useful,” Mona says cheerfully. “Nice going with the information, Panther.”

“Ugh, I just want to climb into the back seat and take a nap,” Panther says, stretching her arms out and cracking her neck to the side. “But yeah, we’ll put Kazumi on our list of names to check this week.”

“Someone as powerful as a district police chief may even have a palace of his own,” Fox suggests, audibly pleased by the prospect. “Finally, another one.”

“What do you mean ‘finally’? We haven’t even finished Fujimada,” Oracle points out. The others are behind her, ready with high fives and congratulatory pats on the shoulder. Mona settles from two legs to four wheels with a satisfied beep.

“We are mere days from sending that calling card. It won’t do to be without a new palace for long,” Fox muses. “I wonder what it will be this time.”

“How can you start thinking about that when we haven’t even met the guy?” Skull shoves Fox up and into the bus. Joker hides a smile with long practice as he settles in behind the wheel.

“Two more targets to go,” Oracle proclaims in satisfaction. “C’mon, Mona, let’s hit the road.”

Time warps oddly in Mementos, when they stay for long enough. Their phones don’t help, blinking bright NO SERVICE notices whenever they try to use anything more than the Meta-Nav app, but Joker has a watch he scavenged from a shadow two months ago that hasn’t broken yet.

By 2 AM it never matters what path they’re on. Tiny Pixies that spit Ziodyne and dodge bullets spring up next to enormous, winding golden dragons along Adyesach just as Qimranut, and the walls flicker color and substance at every glance. Enemies appear and disappear mid-fight, or change form and abilities just when they’re inches from destruction and need to be defeated all over again. It only gets worse as the team’s eyes start to blur in exhaustion, and weariness drags their reflexes slower and slower.

It’s far too late to leave now. Out in the real world the trains from Shibuya aren’t running any more, and there’s no telling what sort of hell they’d have to pay if any of them were caught sneaking home at this hour. Better to stay put through the night and slip out in twos and threes in time for the 5:00 early train, fall into bed and sleep Sunday morning away as best as they can manage.

It used to be that they could barely last a couple of hours down on the twisting rail paths of Mementos, but they’ve gotten stronger since then. They only need a twenty-minute break. They sit clustered close together in the island of yellow light at a rest floor on some path or another, wailing winds whipping through the tunnels outside, dozing against shoulders. Panther pours still-hot coffee out of a canteen and offers it around.

“Not as good as Joker’s,” she says, but it’s warm and full of caffeine and that’s all that really matters here in the dark.

Fox is snoring gently with Mona a dark-furred lump in his lap, Oracle curled up beside him. Queen and Noir are tucked up against each other like pressing together can hold off the darkness. Joker nudges Skull’s ankle with his toe and passes the coffee to the side.

“Gah, hate that stuff,” Skull complains, but he takes the cup and downs it in three big gulps. “Shouldn’t we be saving it for this week’s Palaces?”

Panther shrugs. “I can always call Kawakami and have her make more,” she says. “Not that I like blackmailing our teacher into helping us out, but…”

“She’s helpful,” Joker says. Then, quietly, not loud enough to wake the others from any naps they might be managing–“How’ve you been?”

“Who, me?” Skull elbows him in the ribs, gently, where Joker is still a little bruised and healing. “I’m fine, man. Busy week, but hey, aren’t they all?”

It’s true enough. Joker’s barely seen Skull since last Saturday’s successful foray against Ryuunosuke Kuroda’s treasure, outside of the two days they spent slogging through the hot and sticky morass of Hina Fujimada’s jungle palace. There’s always a lot of work to be done, and never enough time to do it.

“You run into Takeishi or Nakaoka again?” Joker keeps the question casual, something that could be brushed aside, but his tone is serious enough. Skull stares down at his boots.

“Yamauchi’s fucking with them,” he says. “I know he is, and they’re all going to end up hurt or worse servin’ his ego, but I can’t…” He shakes his head. “Damnit, I know we could find him down here easy, too. No way Yamauchi doesn’t have a shadow we could beat the shit out of.”

“But we can’t,” Panther says, leaning forward, all worry and sympathy in her voice. “There’s too much attention on the school already. First Kamoshida, then Kobayakawa…”

‘I know, okay?” Skull shoots back. “I know already. And we can’t solve every problem in the world, those guys are going to have to work some shit out for themselves. I just hate knowing exactly what they’re getting themselves into and not being able to do anything about it. They’re–they used to be my teammates, you know?”

“It’s not your fault,” Joker says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Queen’s foot twitch in something only a trained observer could possibly recognize as empathy. “If there’s anything we can do for them, we’ll do it.”

“I know,” Ryuji sighs, exhausted and defeated. For just a few moments he’s more boy than skull mask, more person than Phantom.

It’s important to remind the team of that, once in a while–Skull himself and all the half-dozing eavesdroppers who’ve surely been listening in for the past five minutes. Being Phantom Thieves is less of a career and more of an entire lifestyle. There’s never much room for any of their more human selves underneath.

“C’mon,” Ann says, patting Ryuji companionably on the knee. “Cheer up. Let’s wake up the others and go beat up monsters for cash.”

“Hell yeah,” Ryuji says with just a little more brightness. He lifts his head and that’s it, he’s Skull again, mask in place and ready to go. “C’mon, guys, shove some coffee down your throats and let’s hit it.”

Joker has his own tradition of slipping into the Velvet Room for the last half hour or so of Mementos night, while the others slowly trickle away one by one, avoiding the curious eyes of station attendants and curious police as they go. His Personas are always stronger after a night’s work, and he always seems to pick a couple of old ones back up along the way.

Today Orthrus and Lamia and Rakshasa latched on and clung to him, desperate to save their own lives, which was foolish of them. All Joker’s personas die sooner or later. He’s already got all three in his Compendium–now it’s just a question of how they die, sacrificed for items or turned into power for Queen Mab, for Scathach, for weak, unlevelled Hecatoncheires.

If Akira Kurusu ever had a true self, he sent it to the guillotine to fuse into a Kelpie six months ago. The Joker can’t be precious about protecting parts of his own personality.

“Wow, inmate. That’s dark.” Caroline chuckles approvingly, a sick nasty grin on her face as she and her sister head to the gallows. Joker doesn’t point out that feeding Daisojou the power it couldn’t get when he first fused it is really more about boosting light spells. It’s really all just sides of the same coin, after all.

It’s important not to get too cynical. Mona reminds him of that, once in a while. Too much cynicism, despair at the doomed and failing nature of humanity, is its own kind of distortion. Not everybody they’ve changed so far has thought their warped world represented reality as it justly ought to be–only reality as it actually is.

“Have you finished?” Justine asks after a while, as calmly as though she hasn’t fried and hanged and sliced her way through Joker’s selves one after another. He slips back from Velvet Room blue to Mementos shadows-and-red with a silent nod of thanks.

The light’s just coming up, filtering into the warped turnstile where Oracle is waiting for him cross-legged with her laptop, Mona by her side. It’s never bright down here, but morning always seems to make it a little less dark.

Palaces all blur together after a while. For Joker it started happening months ago, somewhere in between the flying bank run by Junya Kaneshiro, mob boss, and the high-security mafia compound holding the heart of Ichiro Shimizu, banker. They tend to repeat, after a while. There’s always another would-be king in their own castle, another cathedral built to honor some awful adult’s worst delusions of grandeur.

Last week they stole a tattered paperback copy of The Tale of Genji from the Heian-era Imperial Palace inside the heart and courtroom of a vicious, prideful judge. Their current target looks out at the dance floor of the largest nightclub in Roppongi and sees a dark, steamy rainforest full of hungry tigers and venomous beasts ready to devour each other at any moment. Next week they’ll check out Jirou Kazumi, for whatever that tip is worth, and maybe his world will turn out to be a fortress or a cave or a cattle ranch. They see the world through so many people’s eyes, one by one.

Mementos is easier somehow. Cleaner, maybe. It’s everyone’s palace and that means it’s nobody’s, a sliver of chaos and dreams, not anybody’s full world. It’s a nightmare, that’s all, and that means it dissolves with the dawn.

“Are you done zoning out at nothing?” Oracle asks. “Can we go home now?”

“Let’s.” He offers her a hand up from the floor and she scrambles to her feet, computer safely disappearing into whatever bag Oracle keeps it in when she’s not working. The others have all gone, as usual on a Sunday morning.

Sojiro tends to open the cafe later on Sundays. If they hop the next train to Yongen-Jaya, Joker should be able to help Oracle slip through her bedroom window and make it back to his own bed before Sojiro is there to notice he hasn’t been home. They’ll probably catch hell someday, but it hasn’t happened yet.

It’s October already, a chill in the early-morning air when they slip from Mementos back to reality. Has it really been six months already, since everything began?

Six more months until Akira Kurusu is supposed to finish out his probation and go back home to the middle of nowhere, a quiet, biddable boy who’ll have learned his lesson one way or another. Six more months to finish changing the world. They’d better get moving.

“Look into Kazumi this afternoon,” he murmurs. The train is nearly empty at this hour, nobody there awake enough to question the two teenagers slumped tiredly in their seats or the cat riding on their lap. “We’ll have a strategy meeting for the week tonight.”

‘Got it.” Oracle nods sharply. “We’ve got work to do.”

#mc2rpg #C writes stuff #C plays persona 5

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