#Hey ryuki have you heard of Nero and Sporus. Is that IP you’re familiar with

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oh my god how does ryuki fit into this new au what is happening omg saito is there I NEED THESE DETAILS... what is this au i’m begging to know

Talked a bit about their current dynamic and the AU in previous asks (please feel free to scroll down my tag for it, which is just “aitsf au” because I am trying to be as spoiler free as possible) but of course I love to ramble!

AINI / AITSF SPOILERS

We’re playing a bit fast and loose with the overall plot to be honest because the AU initially was just about Hitomi and Renju saving Iris Sejima from the worst house on earth and then we expanded after Nirvanai, but we haven’t ironed out any fine details because we focus so heavily on the family aspect, so it’s kind of up in the air and subject to change. But the general premise thus far is that Bibi and Ryuki (no Date here, because he is Falco) are ABIS agents who are investigating the various disappearances of people after the release of the weird internet video Bats490. Canonically we know that that was just the Naix version of Cicada 3301 and no people actually went missing after they posted weird videos but who knows in this AU. Ryuki’s investigating Naix and his research eventually leads him to the Sejima’s, because they find out the family is funding Naix Japan (it’s just Uru, but they don’t know exactly which one of them it is, or if it isn’t the entire family on board).

Ryuki gets caught up in Saito’s mind games, one of them being that Saito manipulates an insane situation so that Ryuki ends up “saving” him from a deadly force encounter (on behalf of Uru — it’s a long story LOL), leading their relationship to end up being something like “hero” and “victim who the hero saved”, which further convinces Ryuki that their relationship is a legitimate thing based in reality and goodness and not completely made up nonsense on Saito’s part.

The problem is that Ryuki is unfortunately kind of weak to subliminal messaging (which I translated to being prone to artful manipulation), has an underdeveloped taste for righteous violence (making it actual child’s play to trick him into committing evils), REALLY likes it when people tell him what to do (which Saito naturally prefers to do, being a bossy spoiled brat and the oldest sibling), and likes praise but thinks he deserves to be punished (and Saito is very good at lying through his teeth when complimenting + dishing it out in a really cruel manner), which is making all this rather easy.

It must be said that anything regarding Saito and Ryuki is completely and absurdly indulgent of me specifically so you can imagine the toll it takes on Mads to have to watch me do this to the rather one-dimensional serial killer of AITSF and the town blorbo of the sequel. But I promise I do reason everything out and I gave Jeff the Killer some depth here. So to some degree, despite everything, he does enjoy Ryuki’s company, because he’s something like his first “friend” outside of his family. If it weren’t Saito Fucking Sejima, it would be nice if something kind of good could be borne of this but he’s honestly too far gone in rich family dysfunction and murder mind games as far as we know.