JANUARY DUNGEON

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→ 1/12 Lockdown: The Final Dungeon

When preparations are complete and the team is ready to tackle the dungeons, both Attendants can be found at the castle, with Minato sitting on the armrest of the throne with a plain short sword balanced on his knees, and Souji standing to the side with several backpacks full of food, water, and blankets at his feet. "Last chance to change your mind and join the Champions of the Just," Minato pipes up from where he's sitting. "They've got trail mix." The team he's heading, incidentally, he named the Legion of the Dead and there is no trail mix or any other supplies provided by Minato, because Souji is a responsible leader who comes prepared, and Minato just doesn't care.

A several day hiking trip up the mountains for the sake of team bonding was considered but ultimately vetoed, so Souji simply opens a portal up from the forest shrine's torii to the mountain shrine's, and from there, it's only a short trek through the drifting snow to reach the honden. At the stroke of midnight, each Attendant places their hand flat on their door, the surface glowing bright blue and turning translucent: a one-way barrier swallowing each person whole as they pass through the portals.

Legion of the Dead

It's a straight ten-foot drop once you step through the ofuda door in the castle, with nothing to break your fall but hard stone— or Minato if you happen to be the next person after him. It's a large stone chamber, with two large indentations on the far wall the size and appearance of doors, but neither open when touched or attacked. The only other thing of note in the room is a pedestal at the center with three omamoris slowing burning in a weak flame, one with Rio's name and arcana, another with Kido's, and the last with Yamato's, the same ones that were thrown away at the forest shrine on New Years as a statement of rejection of the Kotengu and his lent powers. Really, it's just Rio and Yamato's, though, because Kido had two omamoris to start with and doesn't need this second one. But with nothing else in the room, the first choice is a time-limited one: will you save the omamoris from the fire so Rio and Yamato can have it to summon their Personas, or will you respect their decision and allow the omamoris to burn to ashes?

Depending on your choice, one of two doors will open.

Champions of the Just

Entering the honden brings the group to a large stone chamber reminiscent of the forest shrine dungeon: a circular hub with a dozen arches along the perimeter, clearly meant to entice the impatient to spread themselves thin. Instead of multiple Shadow ghosts appearing from the ether to ambush the group, however, there is only one: a semitransparent ghostly form of a young boy huddled against the archway on the opposite side of where everybody had entered. He looks to be around seven, with very little distinguishing features other than pale eyes staring at the group. The moment anybody takes a step closer to him, calls out to him, or tries to attack, he starts in fear and turns to run through the archway— anybody who gives chase is met with a barrier; in fact, every other archway is blocked by the same invisible barrier, cutting their potential routes in half.

The rest of the room is empty. There should be a way to get the barriers to drop in one of the five available passageways... Will you proceed all together, or divide and conquer?

There is no Velvet Room within the dungeons, and using a traesto gem or goho-m will only bring you to the beginning of the dungeon in either main hub, not outside. Falling unconscious within the dungeons doesn't bring you anywhere to be revived either; all it means is that your unconscious body lies there to rot or get eaten by Shadows until somebody hopefully saves you. So look after one another in the dungeons, and don't be afraid to rely on your Attendants. Souji will keep everybody safe.

→ MOD NOTES

⬥ Both dungeons are team-based and require some coordination with other members of their team, with some decisions involving the entire team (e.g. Legion of the Dead's first decision regarding the omamoris). The teams will make their way through several rooms to find the exit, either split up or all together, with each room containing a battle, puzzle, decision, or another obstacle. The team as a whole will bear the consequences of the actions taken, so please give each choice careful consideration. As actions may affect subsequent rooms, new rooms will become available after the previous are cleared, rather than all the information given at one time.
⬥ A toplevel for the boss will go up once a team ICly reaches the boss' chamber, and overall, this deadline is the end of the month to avoid IC consequences.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Right.

[And so, they wait.]

[ And now they wait... Ala manages about seven minutes before she gets too antsy and has to stand up and then sit back down. There's no way she's going to make it all they way to midnight... ]

Jiro, are you going to sleep? I have tarot cards, and maybe we can play to pass the time. Sometimes, when people are lost, they look to the cards for answers.

[Jiro was definitely on his way to sleeping, zoning out until everything started blurring together. When Ala speaks, he's pulled right out of that, to full alertness.]

Did you get them from the shrine?

[The crows wouldn't let him get close enough to look at the tarot cards that had appeared. Then he'd been arrested and forgot about them.]

[ Ala shakes her head no. ]

I got them from Akira last month. And inside the shrine, there was only the Moon. Was there another full set besides the one on the door?

[ If Jiro didn't pick the whole set up... probably nobody did and they're lost somewhere, possibly scattered around in the forest under heaps of snow and nobody will find them until spring comes. The relevance, if any, can wait. ]

Edited 2020-01-18 23:00 (UTC)

I dunno if they were all there, but there was a stack of them the crows were guarding.

[Looks like no one found them.]

What do you do with them?

[He knows nothing about tarot, and would dismiss the entire thing outright if the Personas weren't obviously tied to the arcana.]

It's a type of fortune telling! You do it like this—-

[ The exact process behind it she isn't well versed in, but there's a simplified version she plays with by herself sometimes, which is to take out the deck of cards, sit cross legged so her dress makes a good enough table that she doesn't have to place the cards on the snow, and spreads them all out without regard to what's right side up or sideways. ]

You pick three cards and it tells you your fortune! Like this.

[ She picks up a random card and it's... hm. She places it back down without showing Jiro. ]

Like that! Pick three and I'll tell you what it means!

[After Ala just shoved her card back in, Jiro can't expect the "fortune telling" will be anything good. However, he's very bored and it's cold and he needs to occupy himself with something.

He picks three cards randomly, but he doesn't think Ala's doing it right. Tarot scenes in movies are spreading a bunch of the cards out and then flipping them over.]

[ It was the Tower, and she would use a flat surface and make it all nice and neat, but she doesn't have that luxury, so they're going to have to do it like this. Have faith in the cards that it'll do something.

She takes the three cards Jiro picked out, and puts the rest of the deck in her pocket for safekeeping. ...On second thought, she also moves so she's sitting next to Jiro instead of across, so there's no confusion as to which one's upright or upside down. ]

Okay, so the first one represents the past, the center is the present, and the last is the future. First, you gotta give me a question! Like "How do we get out of here?" or "How do I survive winter overnight with a broken stomach?" or "What's for dinner tomorrow?" And then I'll interpret the cards, and advise you on what to do.

[Not that Jiro believes in any of this shit, but he chooses to ask a relevant question.]

Are we going to leave Hirajiro?

Alright! "How are we going to leave Hirajiro?"

[ This isn't a magic 8 ball, so she'll just make it not a yes or no question. The first card she flips over, it's the upright Fortune. ]

The Wheel of Fortune says things are up to chance, which is a lot of what this feels like, right? Not being in control of things, having things be left up to luck. And there's the repetitive nature of the wheel, which prompts us to learn from the past when situations repeat themselves. They're all things we need to accept, a cycle of good and bad times, so even though we're struggling right now, don't lose hope, 'cause it'll get better!

[ Card number two is the upright Star, and Ala brightens upon seeing it. ]

Star's a hopeful card! This is Rio's card! Right now, we don't really know what's going on in the world, but the card says not to lose hope. Consulting the cards is sorta like that, something to take comfort in, that we'll be alright as long as we do our best and ask for help when we need it.

[ She flips the last card over and it's... reversed Justice. ]

Um. The future is injustice... It's gonna be unfair and whatever decisions we make in the future, some of them aren't going to be morally right. Probably... however we choose to leave, there's going to be people who will get hurt. This card's a warning that there's no way to make everybody happy. That doesn't mean the decision is right or wrong, just that we should keep others in consideration when we make it, and it's a reminder that whatever consequences there are, we gotta take full responsibility for them instead of pretending it's not our fault.

[ In short, how are they going to leave Hirajiro? Who knows. But there'll be a decision involved and it's lose-lose. ]

[None of those things are surprising. Their entire experience in Hirajiro so far has been mostly out of their hands in the realm of luck. Because no one knows what they're doing, and over half of the group is composed of complete idiots. Yet everyone's still trying, that's where the hope comes in. Mostly, a hope that they'll go home, though some don't want to.

That's probably part of the injustice prediction. Not everyone, maybe no one, is going to get their ideal outcome here. They've fucked things up too much, if they even had a good end option from the start.]

I don't see any reason to do anything different than we have been, then.

[Some of them don't consider others, and never will. Some take responsibility, and some won't. Tarot cards are bullshit in the end. You can read whatever you want into them.]

Yep, that's right! We just gotta keep going, and whatever happens, happens.

[ When you do what you want and don't care about the effect on the rest of the world, things can be easy. It's made easier if you believe all of this is a fake world filled with fake people, or the idea that all worlds are fake except your own, or maybe everything is fake except yourself. Way too existentialist for Ala to want to consider, and she shuffles the cards back into the deck.

You mold the cards to fit the story you already have in mind, and Ala's story is one that wants to be hopeful, but can accept whatever end comes about because she doesn't feel involved in any of it, having no strong attachment to people and not having a home to pine for either. This is the beauty and uselessness of tarot. ]

Want to ask another question? Or maybe you can do a reading for me!

[No. He wants to maybe impale himself with Ala's sword if they actually have to wait here seven hours.]

I'm good.

Boo... You're boring, Jiro. Go to sleep, and I'll wake you up at midnight.

[ She has Toki's entire library stuffed into her pocket, so she can entertain herself without him. ]

[He'll eventually fall asleep, and luckily not die and end up back in the hub. Though that might get them places instead of being stuck in this room at the wrong shrine.]

[ Dying and hoping somebody comes across his unconscious body in the shrine and can revive him is one option. We can keep that in our back pocket.

Once Jiro seems like he's fallen asleep, Ala lies down next to him and curls up by his side; she's not human enough to offer much body heat, but she can at least block out some of the wind as she hums under her breath, soft and tuneless.

Three hours later, a gust of wind starts to blow, and the bell hanging over the offertory box starts to gong, barely loud enough to be heard over the gusting wind. ]

[The change in wind is what wakes him up. He's not expecting Ala to be curled up next to him like a dog, but he sort of appreciates it. Though he'll never say anything. Instead he shoves her aside and slowly gets up from the frozen ground.

The bell is barely audible, and it could just be the wind. If Ala's still lying on the ground, he'll nudge her with his foot.]

Something's happening.

Mm...

[ She's slow to get up, not exactly having been asleep, but zoned out enough that she's still present while not having to be conscious for all those hours. ]

The wind...? Like the dungeon wind, when there's a new one...

[ Except. The wind is blowing away from the shrine, not at all towards the honden she turns around and looks it, door still closed and there is no bright blue light or anything like that. ]

It's blowing back towards town. Or maybe the other side, to the school or lake or other shrine?

[ There's also the castle that might be deserted now, but wherever they check, they're only going to have the one hour to do it before having to wait another full day for Lockdown. She tugs Jiro's sleeve, leaning towards the castle, because first things first is getting Jiro to survive until the next Lockdown. ]

[Fuck. The picked the wrong place. He doesn't linger at the shrine either, following Ala towards the castle. His steps are a little shaky, and hopefully the Velvet Room is open.]

It has to be the other shrine, right? Since we're... in it.

That's so far away, though. I guess this is what the crows meant when they said we'll probably be stuck in the dungeon for a while, huh?

[ Even though literally no other group had to stay for very long. Jiro just keeps getting the short end of the stick with overstaying his dungeon visits.

Ala keeps close enough to be within arm's reach of Jiro until he's safely down the stairs and hasn't slipped and fallen and cracked his skull open on them, then looks to the castle and finds that it's deserted, just like they'd hoped. The Velvet Room wasn't originally going to exist, but I am a kind and benevolent mod, and so now it does, glowing faintly in its usual place behind the throne. ]

Fucking crows.

[The won't get any more ham sandwiches.

At least the Velvet Room is there, though they'll still have to trek all the way to the mountains after. Jiro steps inside, to who knows what's going on in there.]

[ asldkfjh it's not the crows' fault!! They did try to warn people, and if they were smart, Jiro and Ala would have brought food and bandages and extra blankets and not be in this mess.

Inside the Velvet Room, the first thing that's immediately apparent is how quiet it is. There no music playing, no sound from the kitchen, no cats wandering around, no couch squeaking as somebody turns on it, nothing. The second thing they'd notice is that the train isn't moving, when there's normally some sort of motion in the Velvet Room, whether that's smoothly forward or a slight rocking. There are no names on the placards next to the door, and if they look out the window where pinpoints of light used to drift by, they all seem stuck in place.

None of this probably matter at all to either of them, least of all Ala who makes a beeline for Souji's room to raid his closet for clothes for Jiro and then the kitchen to see if there's any straw tea or healing items in the cupbaords. ]

[Jiro's only been in the Velvet Room once, for maybe five minutes, and half of those things he'd never notice were different; like the lights out the windows or noise from the kitchen. He does notice the lack of cats and placards.

It still looks like the same train, and therefore Jiro isn't too concerned about anything else. He lets Ala search the cupboards, as he wouldn't recognize any healing things like beads and leaves anyway. He'll drink the presumably disgusting straw tea if Ala finds any.]

[ There's a whole bunch of stuff here that Ala's not quite sure which is best or how much she needs to heal up a hole in Jiro's side, but there's no overdosing on this sort of stuff; she'll just be wasting the excess, putting a pot on the stove to boil water, empty out an entire jar worth of straw and tossing in some leaves and rocks and a roll of bandages. ]

We'll let it simmer for a bit, and then you can drink it and you'll be fine! I'll find a thermos too, so we can keep some with us along the way.

[ Yeah! Dungeon prep while they're in the middle of the dungeon. ]

[Things they should have done beforehand, and heeded the crows' warnings. Jiro will look through a couple of the rooms for anything else useful, or some fruit or other food left out to collect as well. They may be in this one dungeon room for days if anything happens on the way to the shrine, or if the mountain shrine isn't the exit after all and they have to wait until the next Lockdown to try something else.]

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→ 1/12 Lockdown: The Final Dungeon

Legion of the Dead

Champions of the Just

→ MOD NOTES

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