personavelvetroomdr | and i ride in my red dress, and time stretches endless

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and i ride in my red dress, and time stretches endless

Ren's been antsy lately. Easily startled, prone to snapping and to cringing away from stuff he handled better when he first got here. Stressed? Maybe that's the word. Owain stirs, which happens less than it used to, but Ren squishes him back down before he has the chance to offer alternative interpretations for Ren's state of mind.

It doesn't matter anyway. Ren has a street in Shinjuku to explode.

While it will be satisfying, the real point of the exercise is to answer the list of questions he has about the immediate aftermath of an explosion and the following hours. They all walk blithely around in this place they've found themselves in, but they don't know shit about where on the cognition-reality scale it is or how the cognitions process their surroundings. They haven't needed to know yet, but that could change at any time.

Thankfully, it's pretty easy to make a bomb when you can just wander into anywhere you want and grab stuff, so Ren has everything set up. He's done a test explosion to make sure his math was right and removed the risk of little kid interlopers and everything. He's chosen a side street, big enough to get cognitive traffic but not so big that a giant hole in the road will annoy real people. Now all that's left is to clear the area and do the deed.

You might encounter him at the following times:

1: bring your salt, bring your cigarette

Ren might want to blow up a street. Indeed, he might be hoping to take out some of the shit-awful cognitions. But he's not interested in killing any actual people right now, and that means he has to do a sweep of the area beforehand to clear out anyone who might be around.

The bomb is big enough that it'll take out not just the street he's chosen but a good section of the buildings on either side, and of course there's a fair chance that a fire will start and spread, even though Ren waited for a rainy day. So he starts work fairly early in the morning. He combs through shops and the empty apartments above them, he disturbs cognitions on the toilet, he pokes his head into nearby alleyways, he puts up handwritten signs: I AM BLOWING UP THIS AREA. GO AWAY. (Those are also part of the experiment.) Being responsible kinda sucks, actually.

If he finds a real person, he's going to approach—or perhaps you see him first.

2: i'll turn your sea to a desert

A huge explosion shatters the normalcy of a drizzly early afternoon. The shockwave rocks the buildings in Shinjuku for several streets on all sides of the blast site, shattering glass and toppling signs. If you happen to be looking in the right direction, you might see a plume of smoke and debris rising over the buildings, though the fire at its heart is surprisingly small. A moment later, rocks and other debris rain from the sky, pelting those who haven't had the forethought to seek cover.

After pressing the button to trigger the detonator, Ren has taken shelter in a bank with thick stone walls several streets away. The bomb takes a moment to work, as he knows it will, but that doesn't stop him from wondering if something's gone wrong with the remote signal, or the detonator itself, or the booster—but as the countdown in his head reaches zero, the bomb detonates. The bank trembles, rattling windows in their frames, but Ren isn't stupid enough to stand near those.

Something releases inside him as the ground trembles beneath his feet, destruction he caused with his own hands. He closes his eyes as the walls settle and lets out a slow breath. But the explosion itself was only half the point; he waits for the debris to fall outside, then puts on a facemask to protect his lungs and steps out of the building. As cognitions scream and fret, fleeing the scene—and he takes note that they're doing that—he walks calmly towards the hole in the street, hands in his pockets as ever.

The buildings on either side are in ruins, half-destroyed with their innards exposed to passersby. The first of Ren's questions about the nature of their surroundings will be answered now, but he's not paying attention; his gaze is fixed on the gutted structures. They evoke... something. He can't name the feeling. Something hungry.

There aren't many fires, at least.

Anyone who is (perhaps unwisely) drawn to the source of the explosion is likely to see him there, a lone still figure, recognizable as an Akira or a Ren by his hair and eyes, even if you don't know him to identify him by his shabby clothes.

3: bring your boy, bring your bottle

It's early evening by now. Ren is back at the scene of the crime, or perhaps he never left, although he's trashed the facemask by now in light of the lack of weird fires. He's set up a little lounge chair under a beach umbrella near the site of the explosion so he can watch comfortably. The site itself looks almost like it did at first, but Ren is already starting to notice changes. And the behavior of the cognitions is interesting.

Also worth noting, in his view, is the fact that no emergency services have showed up at any point. He's seen cops on street corners and shit, but if they don't respond to emergencies, could it be that this is a de facto cop-free world? A paradise.

He has food, too. Energy drinks and soda in a cooler, and all the snacks he could grab in a giant bag next to him. He's never going to get through them all. It was just fun to take them.

He'll be here for a little while, observing and making mental notes.

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Something about Akira shifts. His chin tilts up, and though his smirk remains the same, something about the light in his eyes above it flattens and smooths itself out. "There are many Akechis running around. What about this one made you think of me?"

Ren's world narrows to just the two of them, which is worth noting when they're surrounded by the rubble of a freshly-exploded street.

"He's dead." His expression cracks as he says it, but only for a second. "But before that, he was one of the Akechis who worked for Shido. He had some interesting stuff to say about plotting against the leader of the Phantom Thieves."

Akira's face remains motionless as his smile widens; not literally, but as the mouth of a cave seems to widen as it gets closer.

"Some...interesting stuff," he repeats, voice slowly rasping the implied question over his teeth like oil over clockwork gears. "About plotting against the leader of the Phantom Thieves."

Edited 2023-09-25 04:40 (UTC)

God, the way he fucking says that. It takes Ren a couple seconds to convince himself to keep talking; to remind himself that he wants to get information, not stab Akira in the kidneys and leave him to bleed.

"Yeah. It kind of reminded me of some things you were saying when we met. About Akechi, remember?"

Akira knows what he's asking about. If he keeps playing the idiot, toying with the life of Ren's Akechi for his own amusement, maybe Ren will rethink the knife.

"And?" Akira prompts, drawing out the word with the rasp of a hand clearing sleep-sand out of eyes. (If it matches the way that the breeze laughs through the rubble around them, well, it only does so if you listen close.) "I'm all ears, kouhai." His head tilts. "If you even want to use your words."

Edited 2023-09-25 07:20 (UTC)

Kidneys it is.

(Ren's had it with Akira fucking him around. He makes fond noises when he talks about his own Akechi, but he's fine leaving Ren's to go cold in a morgue. Skull splintered by a gunshot wound, and all his brilliance and ferocity and careful kindness wiped out in an instant, turned into mangled brains splattered on the inside of his head. Akira thinks it's funny that Ren doesn't want that, Akira wants to dangle information just out of reach and give Ren that self-satisfied smile, mock him with his patronizing bullshit. Ren was using his motherfucking words. Maybe he needs to make that obvious. Maybe he needs to apply some real pressure. Maybe he needs to stab Akira in his smug fucking face.)

He doesn't reach for his switchknife. Instead, almost too fast for the eye to see, his hand whips behind his back beneath his overshirt and emerges holding a long, cruel-looking knife. Snarling behind his facemask, he lunges for Akira with the same dangerous speed, aiming to plant the knife right in Akira's side.

He's not trying to hit anything fatal, but he intends to make a statement. He wants to cause pain, he wants Akira to suffer, the sneering son of a bitch thinks he can just sit there above it all looking down on them, fucking look down on this— And besides everything else, he knows better than to draw a knife against a real opponent and not attack.

Almost too fast for eyes to see, has always been, in Akira's humble opinion,
not
fast
enough.

His hand rips his phone and his voice commands Mementos into the ashen cognitive air. Before Ren's halfway through his lunge, the MetaNav rips them from the light and spits them into the dark underground, as whatever dream makes the Shinjuku above is overcome by bile and gnashing teeth to be shoved, frothing, into nightmare.

(Somewhere in the journey between worlds, Akira feels the little toy that this Amamiya Ren considers "scary" lodge itself in his stomach. It doesn't matter where; it's meaningless all the same.)

The world stabilizes around them, musty halls and gross floor of Mementos enveloping their sight. Akira, not in his Metaverse attire, looks down at the blade.

A chuckle. Blackness, unimpressed, seeps out of his stomach. "Wow." Snort. Grab the knife. Seep. "You really..." mouth flexing, spine hunching over, oozing-- "...don't like..." -- haha, hahahaha, seeping, he can't keep the giggles in or his joints coupled to their sockets -- "...using your..." it's all teeth, all teeth in his barks of laughter and lofty, poisonous smirks and the light in his eyes is shining dead, "...words."

His form collapses into a puddle of black goop and, like a gymnast doing a backwards roll, straightens himself back into form -- Ren's form, a perfect copy of the boy standing across from him.

"Maybe," he chirps, right as rain on a summer's day, clearly in Ren's voice, "you'll like these words." A skeletal creature twirls around him. "Veles," he calls, summoning a blue ball of fire above his head. "Zmaj!"

By the time he realizes he's been baited, they're halfway into Mementos. The knife finds Akira's side with the profoundly satisfying resistance-give of a blade sinking into flesh, but the second his feet touch the almost-concrete of Mementos, Ren lets go of the handle and vaults backwards.

Akira might in the same clothes as before, but Ren is in no state to call forth anything but the shape of his truest heart. He appears as the black mask, as the Phantom Thieves call him; ruin and death, a blight on the world. His ragged outfit calls to mind the ghost of a gentleman who died fighting; his tattered hood wraps around his head, shielding everything but his mask from view; and his mask itself stares out, a blank black plate that conceals his entire face, devoid of any features except perhaps for subtle engraving, or maybe you imagined that because you can't see it anymore. Faceless, wrapped in shadow, without a trace of the humanity he once held, Ren calls forth Veles and...

...and stops to watch whatever the fuck is going on with Akira. It's eerie and terrifying, he's never seen anything like it before, and the sheer incomprehensible dread of it keeps him fixated for long enough that Akira has time to take new shape. And he takes the form of Ren, Ren as he's never seen himself, Ren as Shadows must see him; not even a person but a wraith, a bringer of disaster.

Unseen behind his mask, Ren bares his teeth as Akira summons Veles, Ren's fucking Persona, pulled out of his heart for someone else to use as a puppet. The violation is too much to stand; Veles hisses in cold agreement in his mind, just as the unmistakable form of a bear coalesces above Akira's head.

Of course Veles showed up in Akira's arsenal with all his attacks. Why else would Akira bother. Ren grimly braces himself, but Zmaj still hits devastatingly hard, much harder than he expects. The soul-rending pain of the bear's claws, the shockwave of the bull's charge, the crackling snap of the wolf's jaws; Ren is down on one knee by the time the serpent itself opens its mouth and breathes fire. He hasn't been brought so low by an attack in years.

And by the time it's done, he's standing, his Metaverse dagger in hand. The real Veles, not the cheap fucking copy, calls the dragon on Akira, as he has the fucking right to do; below him, with a ragged, furious scream the likes of which he's only loosed once before, Ren charges Akira again.

That scream...it's been a while since he's heard anything like it. Joker grins behind himself.

Since they're going mono y mono, it's only fair for him to show his "true" face, too. His face ripples from the impact of Ren's lunge, and instead of the pure blackness residing on his face, he now has his mask on: a flat, blank, featureless oval, a mask in all sense of the word, rendering him the Nightmare again.

He dodges the worst of the first half of Zmaj (he knows what it's capable of -- he isn't stupid...or Almighty-resistant), but the back half slams into him like a truck. A truck he can recover from quickly, but still a truck all the same. Like a puppet controlling his own strings, he shifts and takes out his own dagger, aiming a quick slice for Ren's chest.

He calls on Veles again, bleeding energy out into his Persona. Again and again, a constant bombardment of Almighty power, but Ren is so frenzied with anger that Veles's attacks go wide more than usual. Or maybe it's his son of a bitch enemy—he tries to twist out of the way of Akira's attack, but Akira is too fast, faster than anything Ren's fought. Blood spills down Ren's front.

He barely feels the pain. It's fine, it's good, it's an opportunity. He takes the chance to swipe at Akira in return, over and over, following Akira as he pulls back from his slash, as the incoherent noise of his scream contorts into something that resembles words.

"Dogfucking cum-guzzling shitstain! Fucking die, fucking die!"

Dogfucking cum-guzzling shitstain-- something about the "insults" makes Joker's deep lungs crack out a cackle as he wards off another Zmaj. Maybe it's how he says them with such conviction, like they mean anything to someone who's heard worse from people in the middle of drug-induced breakdowns, from alcoholics in drunken rages, from parents and policemen and everyone in between.

"Takes a spade to know a spade!" He taunts back, unhinged jaw flexing out the words. "Eigaon!"

He just manages to twist out of the way of the deadly swirl of curse magic. He could probably survive it, but he'd barely be able to move afterwards and he needs to eviscerate Akira—

"I'm nothing like you!" He slashes at Akira's stomach, his chest, his throat, leaping backwards to try to avoid counterattacks. "You think it's fucking funny that I don't want to blow Akechi's fucking brains out!"

He can't cast anything else; he's poured his entire soul, shrivelled and blackened as it is, into Veles's furious attacks. God's Hand is too risky when he's this injured. He pulls his gun— the real one he got here, not one of Iwai's toys—and unloads the entire magazine at point-blank range.

"Finally speaking! Good boy." Joker jumps backwards, bullets -- real, ouch -- scraping his skin as he dodges out of the way of the attack. "You sure about that, o mister Black Mask?" He taunts again. "Maybe I find it funny how much you wanted to stab me. Why don't you do it again? Maybe this time it'll stick and give you the answers you want!"

Edited 2023-09-27 21:32 (UTC)

Unseen behind his mask, Ren bares his teeth. In the back of his mind he knows he's being baited again, but he doesn't even care. He shifts his grip on his dagger and lunges, as fast as ever even though his muscles burn and his mind is starting to blur with exhaustion, pointing his knife at Akira's throat. That'll shut him up. That'll choke him on Ren's dagger, that'll bleed him out, that'll make him stop fucking looking at Ren like that; he can feel it even if he can't see it, he can hear it in Akira's voice—

The dagger slices clean across Akira's throat, but he just tilts his head, neutral, evaluating. His outfit flicks back to something more standardly-Joker-like, mask becoming a small domino facade and body cloaked in a large cape.

Red gushes out of his throat, alongside black -- the shadow goop is what happens when he's injured mid-transformation. He doesn't think too deeply on it. His face is neutral, devoid of any mockery or contempt. Just looking into his kouhai's eyes as his throat leaks out.

"Good aim, kouhai," he says, a little gurgled but genuine. "A little sloppy. Good form overall, though."

"...What the shit."

The whole tableau is so surreal that Ren actually stops to stare for a second. It's impossible for anyone else to see what face he's making behind his mask, but he can feel his expression twist with incredulous, exhausted outrage. "You don't even shut up when I've cut your fucking throat?"

It's an even stupider idea than it was before, but Ren's just—fed up. He's had it. Veles manifests above him again, eerie and menacing, and the crushing force of God's Hand smashes out of the sky towards Akira.

It takes the very last of Ren's strength, as he knew it might. He doesn't quite black out, but he makes a soft noise and crumples to the floor.

Edited 2023-09-28 04:50 (UTC)

Akira grins, tiredly, as the God Hand dissipates into nothing but a strong breeze by the time it reaches him, palming the revival bead hidden in his glove -- it was thankfully-unneeded insurance, though he'd by lying if he said the slice to his throat didn't make it come really close. A quick flick of his Persona is all he needs to cast a healing spell on himself to patch up the worst of the damage, before he carefully approaches his fallen kouhai. "You good now? Got it out of your system?" He asks, a genuine sort of fond amusement crinkling through his tone as he wisely stays out of melee reach. "I can talk whenever you're ready."

Edited 2023-09-28 05:13 (UTC)

Ren looks up and bares his teeth. His hands clench into fists. He starts to reach for his knife, which fell out of his hand when he collapsed—but then he takes off his mask instead and drops it on the floor. He meets Akira's eyes with bleary outrage.

"You smug son of a bitch. We could've been sent home at any time. Was it worth holding off talking to me about my Akechi's survival just so you could giggle to yourself at night about it?"

He isn't screaming anymore, at least. He mostly just sounds tired.

"Bold of you to assume I find Akechi's death funny. In any universe." In kind, Akira takes off his own mask, twirling it on his finger. "I just...really don't know what to tell you. He figured me out. Then I figured him out. Then he made me actually...feel emotions for the first time in..." a contemplative click, "...four years or so. Then he took my gun and said he'd prove I was human by splattering the insides of my skull across the wall. And then he nearly passed out from his concussion and I gave him a deck of cards with Shido's keywords inside it and booked it."

A shrug. "'Trust him, drop hints if you can, give him something to remember you by' are my sage words of advice, I guess. He's stronger than you think. I don't know how much it helps you, though." His grin is self-deprecating, some sort of bittersweet firsthand knowledge seeping into his lips. "I know it definitely wouldn't've helped me all that much beforehand."

Edited 2023-09-28 06:00 (UTC)

The story of Akechi with the gun makes Ren laugh, or at least the soft, lonely sound he makes could have been a laugh in a other life. With a pained groan, he flops onto his back. Fuck, his chest hurts where Akira sliced him open. The asshole. Ren isn't actually sure the wound has stopped bleeding. He blinks apathetically at the ceiling.

"You're the second person who's told me to trust him. Stupidest thing I've ever heard. The fuck does it even matter whether I trust him."

Akira's grin is lopsided, but genuine. "Fair enough. I don't think either of us got where we are without some serious trust issues." He hums, digging through his cognitive pockets. "If you don't want to, I can't force you to. But maybe consider that he hates or would hate Shido just as much, if not more, than you do. You have a common enemy, at least." Finally, he finds what he's looking for in his pocket; he withdraws two Dr. Salt NEOs and a large chocolate bar, presenting the latter to his fallen kouhai. "Wanna take a snap?"

Edited 2023-09-28 06:23 (UTC)

Ren saw Akira using that healing spell. He takes most of the bar for himself and sticks it in his mouth, chewing slowly.

Through a mouthful of chocolate, he says, "I know he does. The Shujin Akechi told me." He swallows. The all-over ache from God's Hand eases immediately, and the wound in his chest starts to knit. "But Akechi will want to change his heart."

Akira chugs the Dr. Salt NEO in a couple quick gulps. "Whoops, sorry about that." A snap of his fingers and Akira -- belatedly, because that fight did take it out of him -- casts a healing spell on his kouhai using his restored SP. "I assume you have more at stake that makes a change of heart out of the equation for you? As long as he was screwed, I was good either way."

Edited 2023-09-29 14:53 (UTC)

He sighs as the healing spell washes over him. He never felt anything like it until he started working with the Thieves. A temporary luxury.

He still doesn't want to get up, though. "He'll incriminate me. 'Yes, I'm awful, I even forced a kid to kill people and mindfuck them, I deserve to be taken out back and shot.' That's the last thing I need. And if anything happens to him, the whole Conspiracy will be looking for me. To make me kill people nonstop until I fall over and die. Or sell me to a trafficker, or keep me for themselves. Depends on who finds me. Open season."

His voice is hollow. His gaze has lost focus; he's gone somewhere else.

"So," Akira sums up, sitting down next to him, looking up at the ceiling of Mementos, "the Conspiracy knows who you are, regardless of whether or not you do anything to Shido. Sounds like you're screwed either way, but at least if you kill him you get to take him down with you?"

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