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megaten: akira kurusu

[OPEN] 1/1: Personal Shadow Event

SHAPESHIFTER

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→ PART ONE: REAL WORLD

On the morning of January 1st, someone wakes up in Akira Kurusu’s bed. It’s not Akira Kurusu. It looks exactly like him, talks with his voice, reads as him at a cellular and spiritual level on any supernatural or mundane tests. But it’s not Akira Kurusu.

During the daytime of the 1st and 2nd, he calls in sick to whatever work obligations he may have that day, and then leaves. On the first day he heads into town, making a point to avoid any other Persona-users he sees. There is definitely some picking fights with villagers who offend him, which is not unusual for Akira as of late, and the NPCs will complain to each other and the Persona-users about that awful boy with the glasses. On the second day, he will instead fuck off willingly into the ice-cold wilderness, looking around the mountains.

Things get worse during Lockdown. Both nights, the Nasty Crimeboy can be found skulking around town during Lockdown instead of in the dungeons like usual. He’s deliberately being stealthy and covering his tracks, even though the only people who are here to see him are a bunch of children who collectively share three brain cells, and Rio. On the first night he breaks into shops and takes their inventory, ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining things he needs that the villagers refuse to sell to him. Seamsters are missing a few winter garments, blacksmiths are down a pair of very high quality daggers and a sword, and the one gun shop in town is missing some of its stock of ammo — some for handguns, but some for other kinds too, so it’s not immediately apparent who took them. If someone checks Akira’s car in the Velvet Room after Lockdown, however, they will find the stolen goods hidden in various spots there.

Sometimes he gets in… other places. On the second night, both the mayor’s house and the police station are broken into. The mayor’s house is almost comedically simple to enter, because he has very little in the way of home security, and what he does have is completely useless during a Lockdown where he’s not physically there. Either way, the Crimeboy mostly takes any cash he can find from the mayor as well as valuables that could be inconspicuously sold to the shady folks who peddle phosphorus.

The station is unfortunately better protected, so eventually the Crimeboy realizes he has little option but brute force — so he locates the police chief’s office from the outside, and uses Mara to smash a hole in that wall. (The crash can be heard by any Persona-using prisoners who happen to be in the station at this time.) The next morning, the chief’s office looks like a tornado came through it. All cash and valuables either stolen or destroyed, all locked drawers or containers picked open, and so on. The chief’s desk has had everything knocked off of it onto the floor, and the word ROTTEN is carved deeply into the top of the wooden desk.

After Lockdown on the morning of January 3rd, the boy is nowhere to be seen or detected. You start to think that maybe something is wrong.

→ PART TWO: METAVERSE

School dungeon, third floor.

The entire floor is still on fire, but now there’s a new reason — lightning bolts. There is no rain; they just come down from the smoking skies. They strike environment, Persona-user, and Shadow alike, and become more and more frequent as you approach the palace. Some of the Shadows and FOEs are now on fire, having been struck by the bolts; their HP is lower, but their Attack is higher, and every hit has a chance of additional Fire damage. Any semblance of order that the FOEs may have had is gone, and they are now running around and attacking indiscriminately.

KOPPA TENGU
Type Shadow	Resists Wind	Weak Dark
These Tengu-based Shadows will flee once they see any sight of danger, including (especially) the lighting bolts. This means they tend to stay at the start of the floor, where the bolts are less common. They will fly high into the air and blow people away by conjuring large gusts of wind with their wings. They don't have a lot of attacks and their defense is low, so they are easy enough to defeat, assuming that they don't fly away first. Curiously enough, none of the other Shadows or F.O.E.s pay them much attention... A Tengu mask and a blank scroll can be collected as loot.

CHIMERA
Type F.O.E.	Null Fire, Light	Weak None
Larger than any other Shadow, these F.O.E.s act as guards of the dungeon. While the Shadows are the disposable troops that wander the area and simply attack whomever they see, the F.O.E.s specifically seek out intruders and attack with the sole purpose of killing them. They lurk throughout the dungeons, using their many eyes and noses to track down Persona users and charge without hesitation when they spot one. Also, they are on fire. Their physical strength is tremendous and a single swipe of their mighty paws or talons will surely knock out anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with their training. They are unaffected by fire or light-based attacks and they have no weaknesses. If a Chimera is on fire, its HP is not reduced at all, but its Attack is still higher and there’s still a chance of burn if it hits you. You might be strong enough to take them on, but these things are no joke…

Even from a distance, it becomes obvious that the palace is also on fire. Lightning strikes this building more than anywhere else. The gates around the palace have transformed, each stake now looking like the ribcage bone of some giant creature curling out from the ground. The gate itself hangs open and unattended.

There’s smoke pouring out of the palace windows, and the tallest tower has fallen off, lying in a blazing heap in the courtyard below. Investigating this tower will take you to the empty boss room where the Daitengu used to be, but there’s nothing of note there. The front entrance of the palace itself is clearly where you need to go; forget about sneaking in the side, because the front doors have transformed into an accursed portal, the strange obsidian-like material creeping into the stone walls like a virus.

Upon entering, the interior of the palace has changed drastically, and there’s nowhere to go but down. There is only one spiral path apart from a straight drop down the middle; it’s a very long one that leaves you in an indefensible position, and hiding in the darkness, the tobi tengu are all waiting to ambush you from land and air. Sometimes if you look over you can see their eyes staring from within a spinal column.

TOBI TENGU
Type Shadow	Resists Light, Wind	Weak Ice
Although they are solidary creatures, this Shadow is accomplanied by smaller versions of itself. It strays away from the other packs of Shadows and spends its company with a minimum of one to a maximum of three mini-versions, flying around the lower depths of the dungeon. It doesn't attack characters directly. Instead, it uses its mini-versions to cast a wide range of status ailments that either causes team members to fight among themselves or hinders their progress, such as sleep, confusion, charm, or rage. After you are incapacitated, it will rush in with Dark-based attacks, but as soon as you are able to snap out of your afflictions, it will retreat and send its minions to immobilize you and your team once more. A Tengu mask and magical healing leaves can be collected as loot. The masks they wear and drop are different than normal, but Crow’s is by far the most common.

If you can make it past all the birdfolk and ominous skeleton imagery, you’ll reach the bottom, where that awful orange glow comes from. It’s a vague approximation of Tokyo, where the sky is searing orange and all of the buildings are built out of that same black and red-veined obsidian material. There are giant bones sticking out of the ground and snaking through buildings, reaching up into the sky, some of them even taller than the full size skyscrapers around them. Somewhere in this hellhole, if you search for long enough, you’ll find a boy in a long black coat…

→ PART THREE: NOTES

⬥ ICly, this dungeon appears on January 1st, and one way or the other the event will conclude by the 5th, though of course you can backtag and fit things into this span of time.
⬥ There are certain conditions that must be achieved for this event's good ending. Failing to meet these conditions will not result in Akira's ego-death; rather, it will result in Joker becoming a permanent fixture of the game.
⬥ Since Joker and Akira share a body, any damage Joker sustains will of course affect Akira long-term as well. Killing Joker is not recommended.
⬥ The Nasty Crimeboy will be evasive and try to get out of all conversations with others as quickly as possible, but if you would like to speak to him, let me know and we can set up a toplevel.
⬥ Ganba, everyone.

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[She'd spotted him during one of those brief moments in the light. Were this an old scenario, she would have shot him dead on the spot.

But it's not. So, ducking out of the shadows herself, she gives up that advantage - although her hands remain gripped around the handle of her revolver, finger over the trigger even if it's currently pointed at the ground.]

So is this the result of those fears of yours, then?

[ Rio, why would you just shoot Akira no questions asked??? If this were that scenario, Ala would have cried. Even this scenario is more hostility than she bargained for, with her first instinct being to run up to Akira and see if his Shadow/Personas are doing okay, but she remains standing a little to the side of Rio, her own hands empty and dangling limp by her sides.

... "Hi, Akira," she sort of mouths silently at Joker, because she always has that urge to say hi first instead of jumping straight into things, but now's not the time and Rio sounds like she has a better grasp on what's really going on. ]

[Joker freezes in his tracks as soon as the girl's stupid squeaky voice rings out. He's still half-covered by darkness, but Rio can see him, and as he turns around he finds Ala there too. He looks over to her just in time to see her mouth her greeting. His expression is drawn tight and defensive, and that doesn't change at all.]

[Joker takes a step back, reaching into his coat and picking out what looks like a new gun. Only then does he straighten up into a small slit of orange light.]

Yeah.

[And he can't help but add:]

...You were the first one to hear me, Rio. My voice.

Edited 2020-01-03 01:53 (UTC)

[Which of them is the quicker draw? They may end up finding out if this escalates.

It takes her a moment longer than it should have because two years is a long time, but...]

You were in the mirrors.

[ Y'all. Ala is this close to standing in between the two of them so their trigger-happy fingers don't do anything they'll regret. But she doesn't do anything more than look from Rio to Akira, hands bunched up in the fabric of her dress.

Yeah, all this is lost on her. Like 45, Kano never went inside the Halloween mansion. ]

That's right.

[And if either of you get in his way, threaten Akira or him or the plan they've made, he'll shoot readily. Gathering intel is one thing, because the Persona-users have to find out sooner or later, and he told Akira that he would explain to everyone and not gun them all down from the start... but some times he has more patience than others.]

They were all conflicting, weren't they? "Make them pay", "we can't do anything". "This world's not worth saving," "why can't we save anyone".

Yours were all unified. Your fears spoke with one voice.

There aren't many things I fear. But you're full of conflicting thoughts, aren't you?

[It's Rio, so good luck with that. She's got winter clothes on, which includes many pockets, and her usual backpack. Chances are high that she has explosives tucked away on her, and who knows how much of a blast each of them are packing.]

[ I can't believe Ala would have to protect Rio in order to save Akira, because if Rio dies, she can be revived, but if Akira's Shadow gets torn to shreds, he's ego-deathing. This is so stupid! If Ala couldn't protect Rio on the way down here and a Shadow had gotten her, would Rio have exploded back on the floor??? ]

Being scared of a lot of things is good, isn't it...? It means you care about a lot of things that aren't just yourself, and can see different sides.

Some of them came from me. Some of them came from him.

[But at Ala's comment, Joker fixes her with an accusatory glare, because he doesn't appreciate the implications that he's afraid of anything. Even though he totally is, his response to fear is to wash it out with anger and destroy whatever scares him.]

All those fears? Complaining about how useless we are? Sure wasn't me.

[She exhales slowly, remembering those little details, the mnemonics she used to store away everything that seemed pertinent about Akira at the time. Back then, she'd been so much more paranoid, so much more guarded.

She couldn't afford to trust that the people here wouldn't kill her on the spot if they learned who she was.]

"Who are we?" ...Was it? You've been dealing with this for a long time now.

[ It's a general "you," with Akira and Arsène and ...everybody, because Akira is a Wildcard, with all these voices screaming in his head all the time, and no wonder he's lost grip on who he is, if there are so many different ways he's being pulled, spread thin in trying to be everything people need him to be.

He wears so many masks. Ala can only sympathize because her host was the exact same way, but she keeps quiet for now to let Rio talk with Joker, looking like she recalls something specific Ala has no part of. aka skip over her until guns start flashing or people start exploding or whatever, if it comes to it. ]

This is what being a wild card is. Fracturing and fracturing and fracturing, taking others as your own -- and if you ask me, we were only made a wild card in the first place because we were fracturing already!

[Is Akira like this because he's a wild card, or is he a wild card because he's like this? Being able to house so many Personas requires a certain flexibility of the mind that many others are not capable of. He can take any power, and through collaboration and psychological connection, make it his.]

[So it's no wonder that the concept of "Akira", as opposed to Joker (anger, defensiveness, trauma) or Sandalphon (selflessness, virtuousness, love) or Lucifer (rebellion, conviction, courage) or Mara (greed, lust, gluttony) or any of the hundreds of others who have borrowed his mind over the past two years, gets lost in the shuffle.]

I've been here for years and years -- since we were a kid -- well before we ever came anywhere near a Velvet Room! Arsène appeared as a name and a face, different from Lucifer's, so I took it! Akira knew this as soon as Lucifer came back, because there shouldn't be two of us, but he accepted me anyway -- because he knew that we were connected too!

[The real Arsène, the one he met in Kamoshida's Palace years ago, stands as Lucifer now. This Arsène is a duplicate. A fake. Its power is different, disconnected from the mythology and the meaning of the original. So instead of the will of rebellion like Lucifer, this one is the will of destruction.]

[She remains impassive, taking all this information in.]

Then was it your friends that helped you handle that before? Your fractured nature.

[At the mention of his friends -- Joker frowns a bit, because it's a veer into a new direction. But he tolerates it, because he actually likes those people. The Phantom Thieves, Mishima, Boss -- he trusts them, too. But when Akira pushes in to take the front, Joker relents, because he's not the best person to talk about this.]

...They didn't know it, but yeah, they did.

They saw me shooting the shit with them in the halls, playing games, doing whatever. They told me all their secrets, and I told them some of mine because I wasn't afraid of what they'd do. I was glad to have people who wanted to see me. They saw Joker in Palaces, charging through and backflipping over Shadows to tear off their faces, and they called him a showoff but they trusted his judgement, and they gave him something to work towards that was actually helping society.

We were getting better because of them.

[He sounds... not quite hopeful, because all of this is in the past.]

But now we're getting worse again, because they're gone and we're... here. We're acting like we did before we met them, and all we could count on was ourselves.

Having people who you can be yourself around... it's more important than people realize.

We were the same. The Blade Children. [Willingly surrendering that information of her own, since he did with her.] The reason we could keep fighting was because we knew we weren't fighting alone.

But... then one of us isolated himself. None of us could get in contact with him. That's when he decided for himself that we were all better off dead.

That he should be the one to kill us.

[...Ha. Akira gives her a smile, but it's bitter and self-deprecating.]

Think we're gonna be that guy?

[Really, Rio. What do you think? He wants to know.]

Edited 2020-01-06 00:35 (UTC)

You could be. If you chose to.

[That's what it is, in the end. His choice.]

You're the one who wanted to know more about me, aren't you? Akira, I mean. [Not the Shadow.]

In the end, I'm a murderer who's still seeking salvation. But even if it sounds ridiculous, I can't give up hope for it, either.

[He nods... slowly. The smile drops. He murdered plenty of people in that bunker, and even before that, tampering with people's will made them totally susceptible to become victims of Yaldabaoth.]

...Salvation isn't coming. Not for us, anyway. Sandalphon keeps saying it is, but Sandalphon's wrong.

In the end, no higher power will save you. Most of them probably want to extort you for their own gain. So you have to save yourself.

[It's always been somewhat strange to him that Sandalphon stayed for so long, even though he thinks the Arcana is the main reason it's there. Sandalphon doesn't seem like it... fits with the rest of them.]

That's all I want to do now... if I can save myself, I might have a chance to be happy.

I'll give you partial credit.

There is no god or savior who can grant you salvation. We're the only ones who can save ourselves, it's true. But beyond that--

It's those who have suffered and wallowed in the darkness who can better understand and guide others. To ensure they don't make the same mistakes. That's why I'm here now, facing you - facing Akira.

There is still a chance to walk on a path towards hope. One that can bring yourself and others happiness.

[Ding. There's a flash of golden light in the darkness. You were talking to Akira before, and now you're not.]

That's bullshit and you know it.

[Rio can't seriously believe that. Joker thought she was smarter.]

Is that what you think you're doing now? Guiding us?

All that's gonna happen is-- what? We give up, go back with you, and every last Persona-user in Hirajiro will go back to spinning their wheels and getting nowhere!

It's what I do now, Akira. [She'll still speak to him, even if his Shadow is out and about.] It's the path I chose when I decided to save myself. I'll put all the knowledge I gained from my sins towards making the world better for the people I was born to kill.

Dealing with your Shadow like this instead of fully accepting it is giving up. Deciding it's better for the world to burn is giving up. You're the one who's quitting right now, Akira - but I won't accept that. I'll push everyone to the end if I have to.

Including you.

We're not giving up! God, you just left for two years and came back a fuckin' bodhisattva, huh?

[So pretentious... This offends Joker's sensibilities even more, because he is Definitely Not Giving Up At Any Point, Ever. And even if Akira is... taking a breather right now, which is kinda like giving up, he's totally coming back so IT'S FINE and NO ONE IS GIVING UP!!!!]

We're getting out of here alive, and that's all that matters, so go jerk yourself off to your own self-righteousness somewhere else!

[She laughs a little at that description, honestly. It's such a ridiculous suggestion.]

I don't think a bodhisattva should be teaching people how to make bombs, or encouraging civilians to murder.

I've just been through enough shit to show you how to avoid screwing up the same ways I did.

I don't wanna hear it.

[There is no way in hell he's going to accept help like that from Ascended Bomb Lolita Rio Takeuchi. Remember that gun that was pointed at the ground? It's no longer pointed at the ground — pointed at Rio, not Ala, because he doesn't want to create a three-way standoff situation.]

Fuck off, before I make you!

[She's frowning again, but he hasn't shot her yet, so...

It's never on the first attempt with these people, is it.]

Think about it instead, then. Come on, Ala. Let's go.

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parhellia - 2020-01-06 05:11 (UTC) - Expand

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[OPEN] 1/1: Personal Shadow Event

premise ⬥ taken ⬥ faq ⬥ navigation

→ PART ONE: REAL WORLD

→ PART TWO: METAVERSE

→ PART THREE: NOTES

1/1 DESTINED FOR FAILURE BUT HERE WE GO Rio > Ala > Akira

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