cetana | [open] 11/9 hirajiro mystery gang

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[open] 11/9 hirajiro mystery gang

[ Over the past week and a half, either Kido or Akira have been going around asking Persona users to attend a meeting at noon on the 9th, with the meeting place being the first floor of the castle in the forest. People who Kido thinks will require dragging to the castle, she makes sure to find and drag over, since she wants everybody to be there in order to share their thoughts and get everybody on the same page. It's rare that everybody comes together like this, so she wants to make the most of it.

There isn't much in the way of furniture and the fridge in the Velvet Room is broken, so Kido can't rely on the kitchen to cook unending gyudon like she did last time. She'd stuck her head into the train this morning and saw something she really didn't need to see, so everybody else is also banned from entering the Velvet Room until the meeting is concluded. Instead, blankets are laid out on the ground and there's a stack of bento boxes which will be easy to eat while sitting outside. There's around three times as many bentos as the number of people, since she knows there's people who'd want seconds (or thirds or fourths or fourteenths... there's a limited amount this time, so no eating contests!!) and if there are any left over, people can take them home. ]

Is everybody settled? Food is on the throne over there, and there's barley tea and cups on the ground next to it, so eat up. Feel free to go back and get more if you're still hungry, but wait until everybody has the chance to get one first. When you're finished, put the box and chopsticks into the bag in the corner so I can wash them later. The cats have their own food, so do not feed the cats anything from the bento. If I catch you, you're not eating for the rest of the meeting.

[ She can't be sure if there's anything in the boxes that might be bad for cats, so it's a blanket ban, sorry cats... There are quite a few in the area, though, including Kano and Shiro. Kano especially does not get food. ]

Now, the first thing we need to talk about...

[ There are a few topics she wants to make sure they discuss, and then the floor is open for anything else people want to bring up, whether it's plot clues, mysteries people are looking into, general questions to bring up to the group, etc. Feel free to post a new toplevel for each new topic to discuss. Since it's a large open mingle, there may be threadjacking.

Also as a reminder, this month the reward for request 12 (two threads with fourth wall characters) is a plot clue in the form of a direct answer to any question your character may have. If there's something that comes up in the discussion that the characters are unsure of and think the Attendants might know (it's possible they might not), it's an option for getting those questions answered. ]

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[ What are people doing with Kido's cats... ]

Maybe he got pecked as a kid, like how some people are scared of dogs.

[ He's a kid, so Kido is more forgiving for him to be scared of whatever he wants. ]

But that's interesting... The owners have some connection to this castle, and are also familiar with the dungeons? Or, at least, they don't think it's weird being handed things like feathers and slime.

... This entire town has strange standards on whatever seems strange or not, actually. The hospital took in people who are obviously "dead" at first glance and performed surgery on them. I think that's the biggest one, so it's not like they're alone in being weird.

[ He honestly doesn't want to list them all... ]

Yeah, they're all kind of weird. Sometimes I wonder if they're even real, but then I see people like Suzume or Hayato and I can't imagine them being otherwise.

[ She loves her kids. Maybe the kids are all real and the adults are the strange ones. ]

Despite how weird everything is, I need to believe that it's all real.

[ Partly because Minato said so, and the other part being he'll lose himself in a philosophical spiral if he loses it. ]

It's just easier that way.

"Need to," huh? If this were all fake, I'm going to be really mad. We'll operate on the assumption everything is real, for now.

[ But possibilities!! are always open ]

... I can't believe we needed to reaffirm that.

[ Everything's been so hectic. At least back home, he had downtime before he had to suffer again?! He sighs. ]

Anyway, if you need someone camping out at the castle for a week or so, I can do it.

It's going to be all day and night, so I was thinking people could pair up and sleep in shifts. I'm not going to ask people to stay for a whole week at a time, either.

[ You should what would be smart? Surveillance cams. But it's hard to set those up to catch absolutely everything, when a person's eyes can see so much more and much quicker. ]

[ ... ... ...

That gets Terry thinking. Yeah, he has a house full of mouths to feed and he's broke, so he suggested himself without thinking. Ugh. Terry sighs in defeat, but then he realizes-- ]

I can send Rimi there! It'll charge on its own because it's solar powered too!

Rimi just does patrols, though, right? Can it cover a castle this large? There's two floors now, and somebody will have to come at midnight when Rimi won't be able to function.

[ She's also going to trust that Rimi can avoid the bears, and she doesn't know about Kano hanging out here and he'll probably mess with it and this has the potential to go well or badly. ]

Yeah. Rimi can jump high enough to climb the stairs and it has a pretty good AI to avoid being broken by external influences.

[ To which he means, it was a good AI back in 2029, so it's loads better than 2019 standards. ]

It doesn't have a set patrol route either... I can give commands to Rimi from my phone by calling it, but my phone isn't advanced enough for live-cam. Yours does though.

[ His former phone. ]

So you can check Rimi's cameras whenever you want. I can teach you how to do it later.

Sure, show me later. I don't think we'll ever get intruders in our house anyways, so we might as well put Rimi to work out here.

[ And then Zen breaks in. ]

[ He holds back what he wants to say about Kano, the door thief, but... they have Orien now. It's fine. ]

Yeah. It's so weird though... I don't think I ever considered putting Rimi outside the house because it's supposed to be a "home buddy".

[ Orien needs to eat Terry. ]

I guess we can consider all of this our home... sort of. Not just the castle, but the town and everything around it. I want to protect this world too, and keep everybody in it safe, so what we're doing here is important.

[ If Orien eats Terry, who will everyone blame...

Terry stares at Kido for a few seconds, before breaking out into another smile. ]

Yeah! I want to keep it safe too. This world means a lot to me.

[ But then Nekogami Encounter part 2 sure happened. It's sad, because Terry does mean that right now. ]

[ We don't need somebody to blame, we need happy Terry back ]

I'm sure it does. You had to wait a long time to come back, and it finally stopped raining. Can you imagine if it never stopped? It felt like everything got put on a standstill...

[ but maybe that's because all she can remember from last month is weeks of staring outside at the rain, followed by weeks of sitting there and crying. It was a bad time, and it felt like everything got stuck. It still sort of feels like that, sometimes. ]

It feels like time always passes slowly here for some reason... A lot of things happen.

[ Terry quietly breathes out. Too much happens in Cetana all the time. ]

... "But this too, shall pass"... right?

[ Every month in Cetana lasts at least a year, it's true. ]

This too shall pass...

[ No matter what life throws at them, all they can do is keep going. No matter how many times she runs away, hides her face in her arms and cries, eventually she'll come out of it. No matter how many people she loses, no matter what happens... ]

Yeah, it will. Even if it takes forever, we'll solve all of this, we'll get rid of the dungeons and the Shadows and... [ And be able to go home. ] And we'll look back on all of this, and it'll just be memories to carry with us forever.

[ Terry would have said something like "everything doesn't last forever", but he just wanted to focus on how bad and sad things will eventually stop. He's glad that Kido replied that way and he kinda wants to hold hands but they're in front of their friends, and it's not something Kido would probably appreciate. ]

It's easier to focus on the bad memories, so if we look back at what made us happy instead, we can smile again. Like when we bought the house here. It really felt like we were a family.

[ She might allow the two of them to stand close enough together to touch shoulders but that's it. Too bad she likes to talk face to face. ]

Oh, yeah... It feels like a long time ago. We only had the one couch back then, and I made you sleep on the floor.

[ It sure felt like a family. ]

Yeah...

[ They slept on the couch together, all three of them, but then Terry decided to take the floor because it was too cramped. He vaguely remembers that's how it went. ]

It was fun... didn't we take a picture to commemorate it too?

[ Kido always ran away the moment she could. The three of them haven't shared a bed together since ): ]

Mm, that's right. It was us and all the cats. It was on your phone, so you should still have it, right? The second one.

[ They had to redo the first one or something. She can't remember well, and can't imagine having to think back 40k years when she can barely do three months. ]

Yeah.

[ Terry has to use pinpointing like a memory aide if he REALLY can't remember something... It has practical uses now.

Anyway, Terry gets out his phone to show her the picture. It has all of them smiling in it, though Kido was smiling because of the cats on her. ]

[ Like a memory aide, oh my god. Must be useful, I wish I could do that.

Looking down at the picture makes Kido smile too, because yeah, she sure loves those cats. And the two other people with her but most of all the cats. She almost looks younger in that picture, maybe because Kido's never seen herself smile in a mirror or picture, maybe because all the shit that happened hadn't happened yet.

She doesn't look seven. That makes her a bit thoughtful, because that's one of the discrepancies in her memory that she can't figure out, but she's not going to talk about it with Terry because he brings it up to Akira later for Shadow things. ]

We should take another picture together someday. With all our cats.

[ All 20 cats. ]

Can we actually gather that many cats...?

[ He can try to lure them with food or catnip, but that's still way too much. ]

Yeah. Tokidoki and I did that at school, getting all the cats in the auditorium fed. We just need to put their food bowls in one room.

[ You just have to shuttle them into the room one at a time and close the door each time before they can escape. Easy. ]

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