personavelvetroomdr | (no subject)

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"Oh, what the fresh fuck is this."

Next to Shinji, Koromaru whines. He has no idea either, but it doesn't smell dangerous.

Shinji sighs. "Good to know, I guess..." He maneuvers his coat around in his hands until he can reach in the pocket - okay, keys are still there, he should be able to duck back out to Liminal Space whenever he wants. Cool.

Now to figure out what the fresh fuck this is.

He ignores Igor entirely, and almost does the same to the conspiracy board until the word 'Tartarus' jumps out at him. Well, shit, that's not a good sign. Oh well. At least he knows where he stands with the Dark Hour, and he's actually way better equipped to handle it than the last time he had to.

Anyway, that gets him to stop long enough to scan the information, and then he's off to Iwatodai. Reading can only tell you so much, after all. Actually seeing what's out there is going to work a hell of a lot better.

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'Want' is a strong word for anything involving Tartarus. Besides, the dorm's as good a home base as any right now, until he figures out if he wants to use another one.

"Not necessarily, but it's probably the quickest way to see what's up."

Koromaru barks. Hi Aigis!

Aigis smiles at Koromaru, kneeling down and petting him. "Hello Koromaru."

She looks back up at Shinji. "Tartarus seems to be holding the Shadows in this cognitive Iwatodai." She figures he knows the basics if he knew how to get here from the Velvet Room. "A few people have gotten lost, but it seems fairly tame for Persona users," she explains. "Do you still wish to explore it?"

"Not alone, I sure fucking don't." Or without something that can do some healing, since all of his actual damage-dealing skills are physical.

"I am willing to accompany you." She just thinks there aren't very many answers about, well, anything in Tartarus. That and Shinji doesn't seem very pleased about going even if it turns out that he is hell bent on going. "However, I doubt it will serve the purpose you are seeking."

"Dunno that I'm seeking much of anything right now, but you're probably right." And if he feels the need to do Persona shit for a while, there are... less fraught places he can go than Tartarus.

Besides, he doesn't even have an Evoker with him. (This is not the impediment it would seem like, but it is something Aigis might notice regardless.)

"Home works just as well."

She stands up from petting Koromaru. "Good. From the looks of it you do not have an Evoker." If it turned out he didn't need it that wouldn't really surprise her either. She'd seen him get reanimated and a group of teenagers that use masks to summon their Personas, so she'll accept just about anything at this point.

"And good fucking riddance to it." Shinji has always been firmly in the 'Evokers were designed by sick fucks' camp, even if not having it with him in Liminal Space was more because he didn't see a need to carry it around at that point.

Where was he even gonna need it? Inside a TV or something? (Maybe so, as it turned out.

Besides, he needed time to heal in multiple ways before he made the attempt again.)

"Not havin' it wouldn't slow me down much at this point anyway."

"You are able to summon your Persona without it?" She's not really surprised, just curious. She stands up and starts her way back to the dorms. "May I ask when you come from?" Even in her 2017 her friends still used Evokers, even if the other Persona users had other summoning methods.

"2010, but it's complicated. Spent a lot of time somewhere else."

"Like another reality?" She wouldn't be very confused if that was the case. They were standing in another version of Iwatodai as it was, to say nothing of the ways in which her own reality was warped beyond recognition.

"Like so many I lost count."

Koromaru barks again. Eventually Shinji brought him there too! Koromaru thinks it was a good thing. Shinji and Minako were both kind of sad. Other people were kind of sad, too.

"You work with Minako, or the blue-haired kid?"

"I suppose you could say the same of me." Aigis smiles slightly.

Shinji asks her who the leader of SEES was. Minako didn't ring a bell for her, but blue hair did. "His name is Makoto where I'm from," she says softly.

"Oh yeah?" Look, now he's curious. And not sure whether Aigis was responding to him or Koro-chan.

"Blue-haired kid, then. Minako got the impression he's more common than she is, for some reason."

"I am from 2017. My reality has been altered, those who were deceased are among the living as though nothing occurred." There was more to it, but that was the biggest change she saw.

Shinji mentions that this Minako is a girl. "If timelines are as vast as they appear to be I doubt that is the case." She tries to think about Makoto as a girl, it's not quite as odd as she would expect someone else to think of it.

"...How the fuck. But assuming I wasn't just as lucky in your timeline as in mine, that'd explain why you weren't surprised to see me."

So yes, he knows how that usually goes, if there's no one to find his stupid watch.

"It was not just you." Yes, he was one of the two, and she had seemed to be the only one to notice something was off about that at first. "But to answer how...a man seemed to be able to control the new space holding Shadows, and used the yearnings of humanity to rewrite events in reality. Such as your passing." A man playing god seemed to be the root of many of the issues with Shadows, she's noticing.

"Yeah, I bet not." Even he would've wanted to buy a little more time with Minako, so he can see where that's going.

"The fuck kind of good did he think that was gonna do?"

She figures that Shinji is plenty aware of the other person that was brought back from their friend group. Aigis was still trying to decide if she could truly bear to see Makoto go a third time.

Shinji then asks what good Maruki thought using the Shadows would do. She shrugs. "From what I understand his goal is to alleviate the suffering of humanity in ways that he sees fit. There are new Persona users and one of them was made to believe that she was her deceased sister in this reality."

Holding Nyx off is an unfair thing to ask of anyone. But if Makoto's anything like Minako in one important respect, he wouldn't leave the job for someone else to do, either.

"Well, that's not going to help anybody in the long run." Seriously, what did that poor girl's parents think of what she was doing? "This the Phantom Thieves or the TV world shit?"

Shinji knows the basics of both, but nobody mentioned anything like this.

"The group that I know would be the Phantom Thieves." Aigis clarifies. Shinji mentioning that Maruki's method wouldn't help in the long run does make her feel a little bit guilty that she was so hesitant to lose Makoto again though.

"I am not sure Yoshizawa's parents were aware this change had occurred, to answer your question."

The hesitation isn't a bad thing. It's... well. It's a human thing.

"Okay. Met one of 'em before here, but she didn't mention anything like that." And he's pretty sure Haru would've said.

It's entirely possible the Yoshizawa he knows had entirely different circumstances too. She opens the door to the dorms when they get there.

"So you have spent time between realities as well?"

"Yeah. Few years or so? It got real difficult to try to actually track time in any meaningful way, other than havin' Christmas parties chucked at us."

A few years. Does that mean... "You survived that October?" She's sure it was possible, but the fact there's a world where that just happens is a little bit surprising.

"I was fucking lucky. Wouldn't have made much of a difference to Liminal Space or the people running it, but I was fucking lucky."

If Minako hadn't gotten it in her head to find his stupid watch...