#I've talked at length about some of these ideas in other posts before

[neversetyoufree]

I've remarked on this blog a few times before that I'm fond of the theory that The Shapeless One is Paracelsus, but I've always hesitated to elaborate, as I felt like there wasn't enough hard evidence that supported this theory being true. However, something recently clicked for me regarding one big parallel between them, and now I can't stop thinking about what that connection would mean for the story thematically.

In mémoire 61, after Machina pushes him to explain what his "plot" is, Teacher declares that he wants to achieve world peace. I've had no idea what to make of this line for a while now, just assuming that we'd need more context to understand what the actual hell he's talking about. But with the Paracelsus comparison, I feel like I'm starting to grasp what's going on there.

[This post needs a VnC-standard warning for mentions of suicide, sexual assault, and child abuse].

There are a few pieces of evidence that support the idea of Teacher being Paracelsus. VnC's Paracelsus is introduced as a great alchemist, just as he was in the real world, and the Count of Saint Germain was an alchemist as well. Nobody knows Teacher's origins, but he's one of the oldest vampires and close with the queen. There's also a little drawing of six-pointed stars that appears behind Paracelsus in the first storybook illustration of him, and those same stars are seen hanging from Teacher's walking stick in the scene where he first meets Noé.

That panel of Teacher and Noé appears at the very end of chapter 6, and the Paracelsus panel appears at the start of chapter 7, meaning these images are quite conspicuously close together.

So what does this mean for Teacher's idea of "world peace"?

In the storybook version of Paracelsus's life, he's described as wanting to alter the world formula not for scientific curiosity, but because he wants to save the world.

Paracelsus, per the childish version that Teacher presents to Noé, caused the Babel Incident because he was trying to "rid the world of its ills" and "guide people to happiness." The line about the human world's "rampant ills" is read over a drawing of dancing skeletons—a Danse Macabre. This is a Medieval way of drawing the personification of death, usually for the purpose of expressing the way that death comes comes for every person inevitably (the same theme later expressed by Vanitas art).

When Paracelsus speaks of the world's ills, this is the reality he seeks to cure. The world is afflicted with suffering and death, and he wants to rewrite the world's formula so that humanity can live happily without that pain.

A world rewritten to be without suffering—isn't that world peace? "World peace" is often used to evoke an end to armed conflict specifically, rather than suffering at large, but the concepts must overlap if they're pursued seriously. How can world peace last if there are people starving in famines or dying of disease? Suffering breeds violence. And how can someone seeking to alleviate "the world's ills" not want to achieve world peace?

If this is true, if Teacher's hope for "world peace" is him carrying on Paracelsus's legacy (or carrying on his own work, if they're the same man), then what does that mean for Paracelsus's supposed altruistic intentions?

We know little about Paracelsus now, only Teacher's recounting of the Babel Incident by way of a book he's reading to a child, but I think there are two ways to interpret what we do know.

Trying to rid the world of suffering is, on its face, the most noble possible intention. To lead the world to happiness is to attempt to help every other person in the world. And I can think of a lot of ways that Paracelsus's goals make absolute sense to me. If you discover that the fabric of reality can be rewritten, and you know that there are people in the world dying of famines, wouldn't you want to reshape the world so that they no longer have to go hungry?

It's possible, depending on what we find out about him in the future, that Paracelsus really will be a noble figure whose one great sin was hubris, and all he wanted from his research was to help the world in ways that make both moral and logical sense.

However, given some of VnC's other themes, I think there's another lens through which we should consider Paracelsus's actions. We don't know exactly what he was trying to rewrite with that disastrous experiment, but that Danse Macabre does give us one possible clue.

One of the themes that VnC has been slowly developing throughout its run is the idea that, though trying to save a person's life is noble, it is not noble to deny all death as a whole. This is a story about the concept of Vanitas, the idea that death is inevitable and that all else is rendered meaningless in its face. Noé feels like he failed Louis because he was unable to kill him when he asked, and it seems like the manga's being set up to end with Noé killing Vanitas to escape a fate Vanitas considers worse than death. One big part of what makes Mikhail so unsettling is his denial, his laughing about his mother's draining and the fact that he cannot accept the reality Luna has died, and Vanitas is horrified to hear that Misha is planning to resurrect their parent. That same issue goes on to be the one thing that finally drives a wedge between Noé and his teacher, as Noé can apparently forgive the man for purchasing him on the black market and killing Louis, but he's horrified to hear that Teacher told Mikhail that resurrecting Luna was possible.

All of these scenes have other elements to them, other things that drive the characters and inform why these specific ideas of undeath are so deeply horrifying to them, but the buildup of this running theme is an undercurrent through all of it. Vanitas means that someday all people must die, so what does it mean when somebody tries to deny that?

Even further, there's the broader horror of both Noé and Mikhail failing to process the bad things that happen to them. Misha commits blithe horrors in part because he does not understand that his sexual abuse was wrong, so he seems to see no problem with sexually assaulting others now in turn—as he does when he pressures Noé to drink his blood. Noé happily recounts being kidnapped and sold on the black market, remarks on Chloé and Jean-Jacques's goodness minutes after Chloé assaults him in his sleep, and brushes off the incident of Jean-Jacques drugging him to the extent that even Jean-Jacques himself is unnerved by it. All of that is deeply concerning behavior.

Misha is written to be obviously uncanny in his denial, and that uncanniness holds up a mirror to the subtler horror of Noé's own disconnects from reality. The more recent chapters have also begun drawing direct attention to the ways that Noé's denial of the bad in the world becomes problematic. The aforementioned scene of Vani, Dante, and JJ being disturbed by Noé's "it doesn't bother me" line does this, as does the long discussion Noé and Vanitas have about why Noé's ignorance of anti-Dham racism upsets Dante so much.

There is an ongoing tension in VnC between the inherent goodness of peace and life and the horror of what comes when those concepts are taken too far. Noé and Vanitas are this in a nutshell: an endlessly clashing duo made up of a too-extreme pessimist and a too-extreme optimist. The story arcs thus far have taken turns challenging each of their worldviews, slowly pushing Vanitas to open up and let himself hope for peaceful solutions, let himself accept love and emotional closeness, while also slowly pushing Noé to confront the fact that sometimes not everything has a happy-making peaceful solution after all. Sometimes "saving" a child means she has to die, and sometimes an enemy will have an entirely sympathetic reason to hate vampires, but Noé still has to fight them anyway to save the people he wants to save, regardless of whether that enemy is "right" or not.

Noé lives in denial of his own past traumas and his own present-day potential for harm. He denies the potential that "good" people he meets might harm him, and he struggles to accept instances where he has harmed others in turn. Dominique and Vanitas go on for pages after the amusement park about how reckless and overly trusting he can be, and he turns around, unable to cope, when confronted with the truth of what he did to Misha with his claws. However, Noé also has the benefit of his proximity to Vanitas knocking just a bit of sense into him, and it might not be a sure thing that he's going to stay in denial-land forever.

One of VnC's specific points of tension is the question of if/how Noé will grow to accept the hard things that currently bounce off his oblivious denial like water off of a raincoat. The end of mémoire 1, the statement that someday he's going to kill Vanitas, suggests that perhaps he might learn to understand how death, despite its pain, is important in its own right. It suggests that maybe he'll come around to no longer denying death and insisting that salvation is always its avoidance.

However, if he can't quite make that leap, the story provides us with dark mirrors to show us what a monster Noé could become by doubling down on his idealistic, optimistic denial. Misha's current state is Noé to an extreme, an innocent child committing horrors as he utterly fails to process the truth of his own horrific early childhood. Misha's driving motivation is a hatred of pain and suffering, and he's willing to do anything to resurrect the family that saved him from that pain in the past.

Then there's also Lord Ruthven, a man who was once an optimist in Noé's own mold, but has since broken bad in a spectacular way. Noé and Ruthven recite the exact same line about liking both humans and vampires, an obvious parallel, but now Ruthven is working with Naenia. Now he's living in the aftermath of his idealistic peace plan imploding and almost costing him his life. Ruthven despairs the last time he visits Gévaudan, lamenting the wrongness of his naive past hopes for understanding, and now he's working toward some unknown end involving Naenia, Charlatan, and the Queen. Now he's committing horrors of his own, biting at least three people by force, overriding their wills, and associating with the being that steals innocent people's true names.

There's also the question of what the hell Ruthven is doing with the queen. It seems he was somehow involved with Faustina devolving to her current state, and Loki references "smashing up her corpse," so it's possible Naenia's existence may be a sign that Ruthven wants or wanted her dead and/or cursed. However, the shots of him with the Faustina-like body in the tank at the end of mémoire 18 suggest there's a chance that he could instead be involved with some form of resurrection scheme (or a scheme to preserve/save her if she's not yet fully dead).

Ruthven exists in part to demonstrate the ways that an idealist like Noé can go bad, and it's possible that he, like Misha, is attempting some sort of awful resurrection, once again denying the reality of death.

Then, finally, there's one more character with whom Noé has these sorts of obvious parallels. The man who, perhaps, is also meant to represent what Noé could become if the dangerous sides of his optimism aren't reigned in: his teacher.

Noé is fascinated by Vanitas, drawn to him out of care and connection, but also because he wants to observe and understand him to sate his curiosity. In a darker mirror of the same trend, we see Noé's teacher allow Louis, Noé, Domi, and Misha to come to harm at least in part for the simple enjoyment of seeing how they react when placed in dark new situations. Noé and his teacher are also the only crimson vampires we know of who find the Blue Moon beautiful and alluring, rather than a source of fear (assuming that Teacher is a normal crimson vampire).

Noé was raised by this man; his worldview has been shaped by him in countless ways big and small. Noé was already living in cheerful rejection of trauma before The Shapeless One found him, but he could not have remained so radically detached from the painful parts of the world around him if his teacher had not wanted and allowed him to do so. He censored Lord Ruthven out of Noé's education, and he apparently did the same with anything that discussed (or expressed) severe bigotry toward Dhampirs. How else did Teacher shape him, and to what goal?

We know that the Shapeless One taught Noé how to fight. Given that "world peace" line, I wonder if perhaps he may also have taught him his morals on wanting to avoid conflict.

Teacher is a contradiction. He talks about "world peace," but he blithely leads Louis to his doom and supposedly doesn't hesitate to half-kill anyone who calls him by the wrong name. Marquis Machina calls him an incomprehensible natural disaster for this reason. Yet, despite all his rampant cruelty, I'm beginning to think that he might be just as much of a dangerous optimist as his student.

Teacher is defined by the fact that, in every scene, he always seems to look like he's having fun. There's hardly been a single panel where he's not drawn smiling. Sometimes that fun is vicious, a cruel smile made as a threat to Vanitas when he fails to address him by his name, but just as often, his aura seems horrifically innocent. He's just a man with a sweet smile and rather dull eyes having a very good time with life.

In the past I've largely looked at this smile as an extension of Teacher's sadism. He toys with Louis and Noé for the fun of it, and I took his smile as an expression of his cruel enjoyment of the pain he creates in his wake. However, now that we've seen him interact with Machina, now that we've observed him speaking casually with a peer for an extended period, there seems to be a disturbingly sincere quality to him as well.

Based on how he's portrayed in mémoire 61, when Teacher says he does everything he does for the sake of "world peace," I honestly think I believe him. I don't believe that he's not a villain—I can't guarantee that his vision of "world peace" would even align with a normal person's definition of "peace" or "happiness," but I believe that he's speaking some version of honestly here.

There's an honest to goodness optimism in that ever-present smile. There's a hope and a genuine quality to what he announces to Machina, in contrast to his smiles of sweetly cruel schadenfreude.

So perhaps, if all that is true, if Teacher is another dark mirror to Noé and he really does want to bring about world peace, then the point of him is that "world peace" has the potential to be a horror. What is the pursuit of world peace if not the ultimate pipe dream of every idealist in the mold of Noé and Ruthven? And what is VnC if not a long catalog of the horrors that idealists can bring about if they aren't careful?

And that, finally, brings me back to Paracelsus and the Danse Macabre.

Depending on what Paracelsus wanted to achieve through his experiments, it's possible he may have been yet another character trying to escape the harsh reality of death. The line about the world's "rampant ills" is placed over the Danse Macabre, after all—a symbol of death's universal inevitability. Is that the painful ill that Paracelsus wanted to address by rewriting the world formula? Inescapable death itself?

If so, Paracelsus becomes the ultimate embodiment of what happens when one denies death's certainty and the necessity of that certainty. He's the ultimate denial of "Vanitas" and what it represents on a scale far larger than Noé, Misha, or even Ruthven could grasp. And the manga casts his failed experiment as a Tower of Babel, throwing the world into chaos and causing countless deaths in his failure's wake.

Meanwhile, Teacher seems to have some ideas about how to cheat death in the present day, as he's promised Misha that there's a way to bring "The Vampire of the Blue Moon" back to life. This could be a lie, of course, or he could be planning to bring back "the vampire of the blue moon" in a way that does not actually bring back Luna as an individual. However, even trying to bring back the Blue Moon in some other way, perhaps through the human Vanitas, still represents him trying to restore something he found beautiful that was lost because of death. It still ties him thematically to the perversion of death as an ending, the same as Mikhail and Ruthven.

So far every character we've seen that wants to undo death is cast as an antagonist. Ruthven, Mikhail, and The Shapeless One are all united by a cruelty and a perverseness in various forms, and their goal is part of this. Death is a tragedy, but although trying to save the lives of people who want to live is noble, attempting to undo or eternally escape death is a far worse horror.

If Teacher is Paracelsus, or if they're closely connected in some other way, then that serves to further this point and show how the horror of escaping death extends to Paracelsus as it does the others. Teacher is strange and cruel. Paracelsus might be a nobly hubristic historical fool in a storybook, but if these two characters are connected, that instantly reveals the unsettling truth of how wrong Paracelsus's potential attempt to thwart death would have been. Nothing Teacher is working for can be wholly good.

And, just as Noé and Misha's denial is both present and harmful beyond the most severe subject of death, even if Paracelsus wasn't trying to craft a world without death by altering the world formula, we know he was trying to create a world without suffering. Again, this is a noble goal in theory, but so long as death remains, some suffering will remain as well. Crafting a world without pain and suffering can also go much too far, can slip into denial and cruelty. Mikhail's whole motivation as an antagonist is his search for a life without pain, and look where that's led him.

A rejection of all suffering can be an extremely dangerous thing, whether it's running from one's own mental pain or wanting to rewrite the world to negate all suffering as a whole. This dream will never not be a detachment from reality.

The Case Study of Vanitas is a series that seems to be searching for a balance of optimism and pessimism, a way to approach the harsh realities of life that lies between the toxic extremes embodied by Vanitas and Noé. To lapse too far into hopeless pessimism creates a Vanitas, a Chloé, an Astolfo. It creates people who are suicidal, genocidal, or both, and dangerous to themselves and others for it. However, to go through life in a state of eternal joy without processing one's pain, or to attempt to create a world wholly free of suffering—that is just as dangerous and foolish. What are Noé, Misha, and Ruthven if not dangers to themselves and others? What is Teacher if not the most dangerous man in this manga?

Noé and Misha are unsettling because they smile through the bad things that happen to them and act as though they aren't bad. They each have some exceptions to this rule—Louis's death for Noé and the pain suffered at the hands of Moreau for Misha—but they still come across as at times disconnected from the reality of pain.

Yet, neither of them is as disconnected from the reality of pain as a man that can behead the grandson he raised with a smile on his face. Noé as a child sees the fun in being kidnapped and put up for auction. Teacher, if his smile is to be believed, sees the fun in every single thing we've seen him do, and that's what's so unsettling about him. He genuinely seems to be having a good time, including and especially when he's blithely committing horrors for the fun of it.

Noé and Misha's strange behavior stems from trauma, and we don't know that's the case for Teacher. Perhaps not, as he seems much colder and crueler in his tendencies than either of them. But either way, the happy sincerity displayed by both of them is echoed in the face of the Count of Saint Germain as he tells Machina that he's searching for world peace. That is the face of someone idealistic, someone who believes he's working toward a real goal that both justifies and delights him.

Teacher wants world peace, and his warped nature means that we have no real idea what "world peace" means to him. Is a world at peace a world where he still gets to violently beat people who get his name wrong? A world where he still gets to have fun observing the free will and choices of the traumatized children he raises? Maybe he once believed in a world that was truly without suffering, and his overly-long life and mad optimism have eroded his tether to reality, turning him into the awful person we see now. Maybe the catastrophe of the Babel incident broke him and turned him from a hubristic idealist to warped echo of his former self. Maybe he somehow thinks all the suffering he causes is justified if it's in pursuit of his noble end goal. Maybe his version of "world peace" is a world where all people can live free from the fear of death, and the smaller pains caused along the way are irrelevant in the face of that impossible dream.

Or maybe he's just a cruel hypocrite.

In the end, we still know too little about both Paracelsus and Teacher to make any grand proclamations about the truth of their characters. However, I can't unsee this connection between them now that I've seen it. Teacher is one of Noé's dark mirrors, a character that represents the horrors possible when one goes too far down his current emotional path. Noé is optimistic to a fault, convincing himself to see only the best in many truly awful scenarios, and Teacher is the man with an eternal smile printed on his face. Noé loves and wants to save Vanitas, and Teacher speaks of the Blue Moon's ultimate beauty and says he has a way to bring them back to life now that they're dead. Noé is the eternal savior, always desperate to prevent people from dying, and Teacher claims that everything he does is done in the name of achieving world peace.

Similarly, Paracelsus is defined by throwing the world into chaos and horror due to his over-optimism. He tried to go too far, tried to rid humanity of its countless ills and create his own form of world peace, perhaps even tried to rewrite the reality of death. Did he hate pain and cold like Misha? Did he want to stop unjust wars like Ruthven? Did he want to become a savior in the image of Noah?

If Teacher's goal of "world peace" is to be believed, then whether or not Teacher and Paracelsus are actually the same person, they represent the same thematic extreme. Death is inevitable, says the concept of Vanitas. It's inevitable and Noé must learn to accept that fact before he does something awful in the name of pain and death's prevention. Teacher and Paracelsus have both done something(s) awful in the name of pain and death's prevention. Teacher and Paracelsus have followed Noé's path of optimism to such an extent that they, in one way or another, both claim(ed) to want to save the world, and this requires a mad extreme of Noé-like cognitive dissonance and hubris.

Paracelsus pursued some goal, some way of granting humanity happiness that was supposedly noble but still murky in its specifics, and he warped the fabric of reality and caused the countless disasters of the Babel Incident in the process. And that's assuming the storybook is true, and Babel really was accidental on his part. Meanwhile Teacher has warped the seemingly noble dream of world peace into something that he can claim is served by the way he's tormented Louis, Misha, and Noé. There's a chance that both men tried or are trying to undo the reality of death. They're bound by the same underlying current of scientific curiosity intermingled with their dreams of world peace.

Noé is not an alchemist, and he's not particularly skilled at rewriting the world formula. He's unlikely to have any chance to rewrite the fabric of reality itself for the better. He's unlikely to have any chance to achieve "world peace" by any definition.

Noé is, however, a dangerous optimist who has not yet learned that death is unavoidable. He hasn't yet learned that death can be preferred to its alternatives. And he was raised by a man who seems like he has not learned or does not care that disrupting Death in the grand sense will inevitably lead to horror. Or perhaps a man who enjoys horrors and wants to toy with absolute death as a part of that. And all this in a world warped and defined by the folly of a man who may also not have understood the horror of evading death.

So Teacher might be Paracelsus. I think this connection between them only strengthens the odds of that theory being true. But even if he isn't, they represent a similar thing for Noé and for the manga's themes at large. You cannot rid the world of the Danse Macabre, and attempting to end that dance will only bring greater ills and greater pain than death on its own could ever hope to bring.

A strange and dangerous man proclaiming with an honest smile that he wants to bring about world peace does not make him any less strange or dangerous. Depending on his definition of world peace and his idea of death's place in it, that idealistic goal may actually make him far more dangerous than if he were nothing more than a simple sadist.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

What do you think will happen/what are your expectations for book 8?

I really wish that besides Grim, somehow Yuu also had an overblot, even without magic, maybe somehow when he is defeated Grim's blot passes to Yuu? It is said that Blot is only created by magic users, but if the blot comes from someone else, maybe it is possible for a non-magician to have an overblot, even because overblots are rare events, it makes sense that something like this would never happen before. I think it's very difficult to happen, since Yuu doesn't have a defined appearance, so they couldn't make an overblot Yuu sprite (unless it was some monstrous being without a human appearance), but it doesn't hurt to dream, right?

I don't have any specific predictions, but I expect book 8 to at the very least cover the following topics:

NRC vs RSA magift/spelldrive tournament (NRC wins?)

solving the mystery of Mickey Mouse in the mirror

Grim OB

Diasomnia returns to help us out with whatever

follow-up on Malleus's horn injury and/or character growth from book 7 (like what is he doing to repent for his actions)

Yuu has to make the choice to go home or to stay and/or something super convenient happens to keep them in Twisted Wonderland (like the reveal that they're dead or something)

reveal of Crowley's true motives

I've already spoken about my thoughts on Yuu ad nauseum but 💦 to make it clear where I stand on the question of "should Yuu have a bigger role in the main story?":

Yuu is the main character, but not the protagonist. MC =/= protagonist

Yuu is SUPPOSED to be ordinary, to show the arrogant and powerful NRC students that there is an alternative to their current methods

Yuu should be more involved, but in a way that doesn't impede the self-insert aspect of Twst + doesn't shift focus to make them the Most Important/Central Figure of Twst

I think the idea of Yuu OBing has been done quite often in fan content, but I don't think it will happen in canon. Firstly, it just cannot happen naturally since Yuu is incapable of magic (and blot is a magic byproduct). I don't think it's possible for someone to "catch" OB like it's a contagious disease either. The manga adaptation of Twst indicates that blot is caustic and literally eats away at whatever it touches, organic (grass) or inorganic (fabric, soil, etc.). It'd kill you, not corrupt you like it does with the mage from which the blot originates. Another issue is that the Phantom that arises with the blot leeches off a mage's magical energy to get by, and Yuu has none to offer. Maybe the one exception to this rule is Idia, due to the unique Shroud bloodline curse which easily munches away at the blot he accumulates and/or blot in the immediate area.

Secondly, I don't see a narrative purpose for this occurring in the script other than "it would be cool" or "it would make Yuu's presence seem ultra important". It'd also be pretty difficult to show in the narrative since each player has their own interpretation of Yuu. The OB form wouldn't fit everyone, and the post-OB flashback (assuming there is one) wouldn't be "true" of everyone either. We've never had an extended monologue of Yuu, we've never had Yuu talk at length about how they feel about being in Twst versus going home. In fact, they're given clashing dialogue options sometimes so you can pick whether your Yuu wants to stay or wants to leave.

I just think it doesn't make sense to throw in a Yuu OB. It's something that's best to stay in the realm of fan art and fanfiction, in my opinion. If it were to be canonized, surely there would be fans unhappy with the execution or the representation on their own Yuusona. Like you said, doesn't hurt to dream but it's unlikely to happen, so it's probably best not to get your hopes up.

[felassan]

Eurogamer article: 'The big Dragon Age: The Veilguard post-release interview: "It was never going to match the Dragon Age 4 in people's minds"'

The reaction, the making of, and what comes next.

Excerpts under cut due to length and spoilers.

"So where does Dragon Age go from here, and how does BioWare feel about it? As the dust settles, I sit down with two people at the heart of the project - game director Corinne Busche, and series creative director John Epler - for a chat. We talk about the reaction to the game, the making of it, and what, if anything, comes next. [...] For added visibility: some spoilers lie ahead."

"John Epler: I've been on the project for a very long time and there were definitely times in development where, especially early on, it felt like this day would never come. So the fact that it came out felt amazing."

"Q.: How has the commercial response to the game been? I've seen stories about sales and they seem mixed - inconclusive. The game seems to be doing okay but struggling to keep pace with Inquisition before it. Has it been a success from your point of view - how do you measure that? Corinne Busche: There's three axes we can measure this by: what the team was able to do and put together - the pride that they can take in that; every game that is made, especially in the triple-A space where you're talking hundreds of developers, timelines, is a miracle. That they executed at quality: internally we consider that a success. We're very happy with the critical reception to the game. It's not common to have these challenging development cycles and have a team turn around and receive the critical reception that it did. In fact, in a lot of ways, that is the harder path to take. So yeah, we're quite proud of the critical reception. Unfortunately on the sales side, that's not something we can really discuss, but of course as we know with Inquisition, that was a long burn to get to those total sales numbers."

"Q.: I was surprised to hear there isn't going to be an expansion for the game, and for me, this ties into a feeling of uncertainty around the series' future. With Inquisition add-on Trespasser, there was a clear through-line to the future, but now, there's nothing - it's as though Dragon Age has just stopped and we don't know for sure whether it will continue. There are a couple of questions here: one, can you offer us any reassurance about Dragon Age's future - is there a team of sorts working on it now? And two, when did you decide not to do an expansion - presumably this was a while ago? Busche: Oh, yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We toy with those ideas of course. In fact, John has an anecdote from years ago where there was a version of this where the Siege of Wiesshaupt is the conclusion of that block of story, and then we continue on from there. The decision was ultimately made that we wanted to take the approach of making this the most complete, contained, start-to-finish story that could deliver some of those answers and present new mysteries. I love [Inquisition add-on] Trespasser, [it] really feels integral to the story of Inquisition and, indeed, the larger tale of Dragon Age. You don't want your players to miss out on that [by not playing the DLC]. Epler: The other side of it, honestly, was Inquisition did end with some fairly hefty dangling plot threads. Obviously there's the post-credits scene with Solas and Flemeth, and it felt at the time - because I was on Inquisition, I was on the Trespasser team - we looked at what we already had and decided, okay, we want to do one last chapter, one last story beat. The difference in The Veilguard is the story ends pretty conclusively. There is, obviously, a secret post-credits scene, but that's less of 'here is an immediate thing that you now need to be aware of', and more 'here's a hint as to what the future will be'. A lesson that I've learned: don't ever try to make a direct sequel to a game 10 years later, because, oh my gosh, that is a challenge. Busche: It is a challenge. Epler: But that's the great thing about Dragon Age: you can make a sequel that does not require the same level of knowledge and investment that you would have required to go from Inquisition to the Veilguard; even though, again, we worked really hard to make it an accessible jumping-in point, it still feels like - for players who've been with the franchise - a very direct sequel in a lot of ways. We wanted to make sure that this one ended in a less ambiguous way, where it's very clear that this story is done. What comes next, you will see, but it won't require the same level of 'okay let's catch you up on what's happened'. I'm still proud of the team and what they did at the beginning of this one, but there's a lot that comes from previous games that feed into this one. Busche: Isn't it interesting how a lot of the threats that have been prevalent throughout the franchise only scratch at the surface of the mysteries and possibilities in the IP? There's been a lot of exploration of the Blight, the elven gods, the elven people, and its wonderful subject matter. However, it also makes me curious about the other aspects that are less explored and equally as interesting: the nature of the qunari, what's across the seas, what's happening with the titans, the development of the dwarven people. So in many ways, I feel like answering some of these long-threaded mysteries that are specific to the Blight and specific to the elves, this gives some space to explore other ideas in the future."

"Q.: Interesting; I would agree. I feel like we've been fighting Blights and demons in almost all of the games so far, and it would be refreshing to take a step away from that, or beyond it. But you mentioned the secret post-credits ending scene there, which is something I've seen lots of reaction to - particularly from people unhappy at how abruptly it introduces a new arch villain. From their perspective, it looks like BioWare is shunting a new big-bad in because the old ones are used up. What do you say to that? How far back to these Executors - these beings - go? Epler: That is one of those things that we'll get into in more detail in the future, but I do understand some of the reaction of 'well they're seeking a new baddie because the old ones are...' But there's a lot of ambiguity in that scene and for a very good reason, in that what people think might be the next story may not actually be what it's going to be. And I get it, it's the last piece of information people are getting, so people are going to make a lot of assumptions and guesses and theories. But it's been something that we've been talking about for quite some time. You see them show up in Tevinter Nights [the anthology book], where Solas is very clear, 'You cannot trust them; they are dangerous.' Even to someone as powerful as Solas they are seen as a threat. They've shown up in DAI. They've also shown up - I can't remember... There's one other reference where a character talked about an Exec - about a rumour that the Executors assassinated an empress hundreds of years ago, but oh, that's just a rumour, everyone blames everything on them. So it's been a thread in the IP for a while. It's just a thread that we're now starting to pull on a little bit and lay some groundwork, lay some framework for where the story is going to go in the future. But again, all it's meant to do is serve as a hint, as a tease - not necessarily suggest yes, next time you're definitely doing X or definitely going to Y. But yeah, I get the reaction. Again, there's very little information but that's by design: we want people to at least start filling in the blanks themselves, and then when we actually do start filling in the blanks, I think some people will be quite surprised by the direction that takes. Busche: One of the things we say often in the franchise is that in Dragon Age, not everything is always as it seems. Interviewer: Intriguing, and I loved how you casually referred to them as "execs" there - this big new villain. [They laugh]"

"Q.: I read that after Inquisition, there was a whole "covert commandos" theme for the game, known then as Joplin, I think, in which you'd have an underwater base - at one point a submarine, at another point, an underwater mansion - and that there would be rival teams pit against you, and Solas would summon titans and we'd ride griffons. These are incredibly exciting ideas. Epler: So the great thing about the art book, but also the thing I always want to caution, is a lot of those ideas never made it past somebody in a meeting saying 'wouldn't it be cool if...?' Or, and I say this with full-love for [art director] Matt Rhodes: "Matt Rhodes, here is an idea," and then 45 minutes later, he has a concept piece ready for you to go. So it's one of those challenges where it's easy to look at the art book and say, if we combined all of these different ideas, it would be the coolest thing ever. But a lot of those ideas, for practical reasons or for other reasons, never make it past the 'I had a cool idea and we drew some concept art and then decided, no, this doesn't work'. Early on when we were discussing factions, Patrick Weekes and I, the lead writer, were talking about "what about a faction that represents the Free Marches? It could be Chantry-themed and this and that." And we started coming up with [ideas] and "oh this is going to be so cool", and then Matt Rhodes turns around and says, "Guys that sounds really boring." And we sat there like, "Oh, yeah." We just talked ourselves into a terrible idea because we got excited about it. I'm not saying Free Marches couldn't be cool, but the version we were coming up with was not cool. That's always the challenge: somebody might draw a piece of concept art about it, but it was never going to get past that stage. That said, I was on Joplin, I was on early versions of what ultimately became Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and there were a lot of ideas that we played with, we tried out, we even put some of them into the game and ultimately didn't go forward with. On a project this long, and especially a project that everyone's heard about how at one point we're experimenting with multiplayer: what works in that environment is not what's going to necessarily work in a single-player RPG, so you end up with a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor because it's just it doesn't fit the vision, it doesn't necessarily fit scope, or you tried it out and it turns out it wasn't actually that great of an idea after all."

"Q.: You mentioned the multiplayer version of Dragon Age 4 there, which was codenamed Morrison, I believe. I've seen this described as a Fantasy Anthem - is there any truth in this? Busche: I don't know that we should spend a lot of time getting into it, but what I will say is that I joined as we made the shift to single-player, and anecdotally, I'll say the multiplayer game that we had when I joined, as a Dragon Age fan, didn't look a lot like a Dragon Age game to me. That said, some fantastic work and thoughts, ideas, the outline of the narrative, some of the beats we wanted to hit, some of the ideas behind the locales, were very informative to us."

"Q.: I'm particularly interested in the moment Morrison is benched and you're told you're making a single-player Dragon Age game again. When you sit down and look at what you've got, then, and begin, what's there - what would I recognise as a player of Veilguard? Busche: What would you recognise? My goodness. There are a few mission concepts that survived. We knew we wanted to do the Siege of Weisshaupt, and though the level and execution of the mission is quite different from where it was at that time, that beat - the general structure of it, the emotion, the tension that we wanted to evoke - very much still present. Of course there was some wonderful technology to build off of. We've spoken about how at this point we feel quite comfortable with Frostbite and it finally matches our ambition in that regard. So a lot of great tech to work with, and a lot of pre-work that had gone into the art and characters, particularly the work that allowed us to unlock the range of options within the character creator. We couldn't have gotten there in the time we had without that pre-work. Epler: I'd also say, broad strokes, companions were... You would have recognised at least parts of the companions, if not necessarily who they ended up being in the final game. Q.: Oh, what, all of them? Epler: All the companions we at least knew that we wanted to build out their arcs, but their arcs were not done, their stories weren't told, and we still hadn't necessarily decided personality quirks and traits for all of them, since we hadn't had that chance to sit down with a full cast. So they existed, some of them were close to what you see in the final game, others were pretty far away from what you would eventually see. Busche: And along those lines, John, the factions were in a similar boat. The factions survived. And in fact, in switching to single-player, we were able to resurrect some of the factions that had been cut."

"Q.: When did Rook emerge as a character, and did you ever consider having the Inquisitor as the main character again? Epler: Definitely early - very early on - we talked about the Inquisitor, but even on Joplin, the Inquisitor was abandoned pretty quickly in favor of a new character at the time. Originally, we had a handful of different names for Rook. There was Shrike - it was all bird names, I don't remember specifically why. But Rook was the one who ultimately survived. In the game we talk about Rook as a chess piece; the deep lore secret is "Rook" actually, originally, comes from the bird. Rook as the main character was always kind of where we were going, but different versions of Rook. Part of the thing with building a game over the timeline that Veilguard has been built over is what worked at one time doesn't necessarily work for a character concept later on. And we found, as we went through development, Rook was feeling a little bit more like a relic of a previous time period. One of the big pushes was getting Rook to feel a little bit more competent, a little bit more like someone who is, very clearly, very good at their job and just isn't quite sure about leadership yet. But yeah, they were always going to be the protagonist, it's just different versions of them emerged throughout development. Busche: One of the big questions that came up frequently - to John's point - is why is Rook in charge? Reflecting on it, we probably put a little too much stock in the endorsement of Varric on the next in line, so a lot of work in who Rook is to, as John mentioned, create that sense of competency, of history."

"Q.: Speaking of Varric, when did you know he was going to die? Epler: That actually came in surprisingly early. It's funny because, and this is the joys of a lengthy development cycle: early on, one of the concerns we had was we need to make it clear the stakes of what Solas was trying to do, and also make it clear that Solas is not not necessarily the nicest and friendliest person in the world, because there's a concern with people being like, "Oh yeah but Solas is still my friend-" Interviewer: I romanced Solas in Inquisition so I felt this exact way. [Corinne gestures to indicate she did too.] Epler: So we talked about having Solas kill Varric. But then we ran into the other problem which is what I describe as the DA2 problem: in the first 45 minutes of that game, we kill one of your siblings, and you've had zero time with them at all. So killing Varric would have been super-impactful for people who played Inquisition and DA2, but for the new fans - especially as we get to 10 years past DAI - it becomes a bigger problem. "Why do I care about this Varric guy? He's been there for 45 minutes." We wanted to have him kill Varric but we also wanted the player to get to spend more time with Varric or, in this case, their memory of Varric, and develop that attachment before we use that beat and Solas betraying you to really hammer home who Solas is, and what the stakes are that you're dealing with in this adventure. Busche: Earlier we spoke about the idea of this being a continuous thread, a chapter of the Dragon Age saga that we've experienced through these first four games, and in many ways, Varric had become the narrator - the one who was telling the tale of this particular arc. It was a great way to continue that. Epler: The passing of the torch as well - that's the other thing. Varric had - I love Varric, I've worked on Varric's content since DA2 - and this felt like a natural point for Varric to pass the torch, pass the buck onto someone else to serve as the new storyteller in DA."

"Q.: I'm also interested in at what point the climactic - I'm going to call it the suicide mission because I think that's how people refer to it. At what point did you know you wanted to do this, and how influenced was it by Mass Effect 2? Because there's so much about the game that feels influenced by Mass Effect 2. Busche: The answer might surprise you: that it was relatively late. We hit our alpha at a time that allowed us to play through the entirety of the game, start to finish, and that's really the moment that I look for where you can take a step back and really assess what you've got. It's very difficult to assess a body of work piecemeal or out of order. So while we had time to react, we really needed that moment to see the game start to finish and assess, and have other people provide feedback as well. It was shortly after alpha we realised the intensity and the stakes - internally we call it the consequence factory - needed some strengthening. One of the unique things about Veilguard is we really viewed that as our opportunity to revisit a lot of the history and concepts of all BioWare titles. In many ways, it is a love letter to what makes a BioWare game a BioWare game, so we absolutely looked at Mass Effect 2. It was really a privilege to be able to be inspired by what we consider one of the greatest - in the case of Mass Effect - science-fiction stories ever told. Epler: The other side of it was we were building a game that was focused on companions and characters, and the best example of that in BioWare's history is Mass Effect 2. Not that we don't focus on it in other games, but Mass Effect 2 does not exist without the companions and the companion stories. And even earlier - even before we started talking about the suicide mission - we had already talked about using Mass Effect 2 as this formula, this vision, for what we wanted to achieve with Dragon Age. Again, really building in these strong companion stories, these - we don't have loyalty missions but you have these arcs that bear a lot of resemblance [to them] and borrow a lot from Mass Effect 2. Even beyond that, in the moments where you go with companions on non-combat adventures, we borrowed that - we looked at the scenes in Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC and also, honestly, Trespasser, where you get to spend these little moments with these followers that aren't focused around fighting things or killing things, and taking that and expanding on it, because they resonate so much with people when they play through those."

"Q.: My time is up so let's end with a look to the future. Firstly, I suppose, is there a future for the series, and then secondly, if there is, what might it look like? There are those who want it to go back to its CRPG roots, and there are those who know it as a more action-like game. Which way do you turn? Busche: There's so many stories left, so many mysteries left unsolved, so I'll leave that for what it is. As for what the next iteration becomes, what that looks like, what style of game that is: well as I said, it's a franchise of reinvention. In some ways there are some parallels in that regard, to say, the Final Fantasy series. Of course, very different in terms of choice and consequences, and so many other factors, but there are those RPG franchises that embrace that reinvention, that when a new one gets announced, it really piques your curiosity about where are we going to go? What kind of adventure is this going to be? So again, I will remain of the point of view that it [Dragon Age's ability to reinvent itself] remains our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity. Epler: There's lots of stories I still want to tell in this setting. There's a lot of threads that - we answered a lot of questions in Veilguard but I think we also planted a few new seeds, and new thoughts and threads. I just love the franchise. I love the storytelling and I love the characters in it, and I am just excited to, ideally, keep telling stories in this world."

[source]

[ranchthoughts]

Happy marriage equality Thailand! 🌈

A few months ago, @colourme-feral came to me with the idea of cataloguing as many same-sex Thai QL proposals and weddings as we could. And today, to celebrate the bill passing the Senate (and the first post-bill-passing proposal and wedding), I'd like to share with you all our findings! Even though same-sex marriage has not been legal in Thailand until this year (hopefully things will be official in the fall), there have been quite a few same-sex proposals and weddings in Thai QLs throughout the years.

Big thank you to everyone who assisted on this project in some capacity (@airenyah, @bengiyo, @blmpff, @chickenstrangers, @dribs-and-drabbles, @nieves-de-sugui, @twig-tea, @waitmyturtles, @williamrikers) plus all the gif and fanvid makers whose work was instrumental in helping us double check everything (particular shout out to these gifsets by @apathetic-tortoise (1, 2) and this one by @gunsatthaphan).

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

We found 28 Thai QL shows which featured at least one same-sex proposal (the blue list below) and 15 Thai QL shows which featured at least one same-sex wedding (the green list below).

I was pretty strict with what counted as a proposal or a wedding for the purposes of this project. For example, characters who we know are married but whose wedding we don’t see aren’t counted (like Laws of Attraction’s Maya and Rose, or the unnamed Force and Book characters shown in a “Just Married” car in Vice Versa). There are many shows where there is a ring or someone gets down on one knee but the question is not exactly “popped” (Khun Chai, Star In My Mind Our Skyy 2, etc.), and there are even more shows characters talk at length about commitment and being together forever but there were no mentions of marriage or other details (like rings, etc.) that would specifically suggest it was a proposal (A Boss and a Babe, Ai Long Nhai, Be My Favourite, Cupid's Last Wish, Dark Blue Kiss, Something In My Room, Star in My Mind, Still 2gether, Until We Meet Again, 3 Will Be Free, etc.). Some of these moments might have been intended as a declaration of intent to marry by the characters and the show runners, but they weren’t conclusive enough to be included on this list. Furthermore, I think it’s interesting to see how many shows were, for lack of a better word, explicit in their discussion or portrayal of same-sex marriage (having the characters use the word marriage, showing weddings, etc.), despite being from a time before such a thing was legally possible. 

Note: I've listed the shows with the year they started airing for ease, even though some of them did finish airing in another year.

(see alt text for the full lists)

The Quick Facts

The first proposal and the first wedding in our data set both happened in Grey Rainbow episode 4, which aired on May 7, 2016. (though this is not exactly an auspicious wedding to start with, as those who know know)

12 shows featured at least one proposal and one wedding (Cherry Magic, GAP the Series, Grey Rainbow, Laws of Attraction, Love Syndrome 3, My Secret Love, Naughty Babe, Never Let Me Go, Tharntype Special: The Wedding Day, Two Worlds, Wedding Plan, and the Wedding Plan Special). 

4 shows feature two same-sex proposals (Cherry Magic, Love Syndrome 3, My Secret Love, and Two Worlds). All these shows also feature a same-sex wedding.

None of the shows in our sample had two same-sex weddings.

The Data Over Time

As you can see, generally same-sex proposals and weddings have become more common in Thai QLs over time, though of course there are more Thai Qls being produced now than in the earlier days.

Note: I'm only looking at shows which aired before the marriage equality bill passed the Senate, so the 2024 data does not include Wandee Goodday or OMG! Vampire. It will be interesting to see if and how the number of same-sex proposals and weddings in Thai QLs increases through 2024 and beyond now that it will become a legal reality.

It is also interesting to consider the production companies behind the shows in our sample. This sample includes 7 GMM shows and 5 Mandee/Domundi shows, plus 1-3 series each from other production companies like Idol Factory, MeMindY, Studio Wabi Sabi, Copy A Bangkok, Jinloe Media Work, TV Thunder, and M Flow Entertainment. In other words, GMM shows make up roughly 23% of the sample, Mandee/Domundi shows are another 16%, and other production companies comprise about 61% of the sample.

Main Couples vs Side Couples

There are 28 shows with proposals in the sample but 32 proposals, because four shows have two proposals each. 26 of these 32 proposals (81%) are between the main characters and 6 of them (19%) are between side characters.

Of the 15 weddings in the sample, 12 (80%) are between main couples and 3 (20%) are between side couples.

For interest's sake, I also broke this down for GMM and Mandee/Domundi. GMM has 7 proposals in 6 shows, with 5 main couples and 2 side couples popping the question; and 3 weddings (across 3 shows), in which 2 side couples and 1 main couple got married. Mandee/Domundi has 5 proposals in 4 shows, all between main couples, and 3 weddings (across 3 shows), also all featuring main couples.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

And now here we are, after the bill has passed the Senate. Congratulations to the Thai queer community, and the happy couples Oyei and Cher from Wandee Goodday and Sen and Run from OMG! Vampire who are the first Thai QL couples to propose and to have a wedding (respectively) after Thailand's marriage equality bill passed the Senate! (The bill passed the Senate on June 18, 2024, and episode 8 of Wandee Goodday aired 4 days later on June 22, followed by episode 6 of OMG! Vampire on June 23.)

I can’t wait to see more same-sex engagements and weddings in Thai shows as we move forward.

[andrewminyardslawyer]

The Golden Raven predictions/theories/a few wishful thinking

Last time I got all of them correct so we'll see how this goes! Sorry for the length, there was a lot more detail and explanations this time around lmao I've posted some of these separately and will probably add more after my reread 🤷‍♂️

- Andrew and Neil go with Kevin to Cali. To keep up the childhood friend pretence, and Kevin can't go alone. Andrew talks to Jean about Bee, that she is trustworthy. Nothing extreme but like "talk to Bee" and nothing else but Jean understands (I actually doubt this is going to happen but I think if anyone's going to convince Jean it's okay to talk to her it would be Andrew based off of Jean's thoughts from TSC). I want Wymack there but I don't think he will be with practice already started for the year and the new foxes there. A potential Kevin and Renee combo because Jean needs support and Kevin can't go alone but Andrew and Neil need to stay with the team. Either way Kevin will have someone with him, he won't be able to travel alone

- Kevin and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Talks to Jeremy more about the nest and we get more information on what Riko did to Kevin

- I hope the interview is not live or recorded, it needs to be an article and I want it to be done by Renee's mom even though I have no idea what kind of reporter she is. She would be the kindest option but I don't think we're in for a kind interview. I don't think it'll be completely disastrous though. Kevin knows what he's doing, he's going all the way to Cali specifically to support Jean, the interview is to control the rumors, I don't think it will crash and burn. The Kevin Jean conversation before/after however...

- We know Jeremy's dad is (most likely) military and military often become cops when they come back. Jeremy hides from the cops (valid. ACAB)...

- someone on the team tries joking around with Jean and does something to trigger a panic attack, like splashing him with water or something

- Jean and the Coaches post

- Jean and Shane become friends. Shane is a little chaotic (he's a goalie, comes with the territory) and gets Jean to start changing how he thinks about things, he can relax a little and have fun. My reason why I think it's Shane post

- Jean baby please seriously talk to Bee

- Jean crying. Please I need him to let it out!!!

- interesting to me that Jeremy's parents make him stay at the house during the week but he's free on the weekends and during the summer. Wondering if he was missing classes and he has to stay there so they make sure he goes

- mysterious potentially dead sibling is his stepfather's biologically?

- Thanksgiving break. Cat and Laila go to one of their families, leaving Jean and Jeremy alone at the house. Jeremy is required to attend Thanksgiving dinner and Jean is invited so he's not alone and Jeremy's step dad/grandfather wants to "get to know the new teammate"

- Annalise using the term investment for Jean seems like....a Choice. Pair that with Jeremy's meticulous tracking of money and his family restricting how much he gets, it seems like Jeremy has been irresponsible with money in the past

- Jeremy family event obligation. It was mentioned that if "If the Con-gressman needed a picture-perfect family for photo ops, the Knox family was duty-bound to dress up and smile bright for an exhausting number of cameras" (congressman is his step grandfather)

- "but there's bound to be a jerk or two once you pass four kids." Once you PASS for kids. Jeremy has more than Bryson, Annalise, and one mysterious probably dead other sibling. Potentially none dead and just cut contact? Maybe took sides with Jeremy's bio dad

- Jean's parents contact him some how but honestly I think if that's going to happen it will be in the third book. I feel like that part of the story won't really start rolling until then, like publicly.

- a scene with Jeremy talking to his therapist

- I feel like Jeremy's mom didn't marry his stepfather until recentlyish. Like the thing that "tore their family apart" was their parents divorcing after whatever went down Jeremy's freshman year. Or maybe they were divorced before that but still on speaking terms and the Event changed that.

- we find out what Jeremy's stepdad actually does. We know his step grandfather is a congressman but no information about his stepdad

- more of a personal wish but I don't want Jean to drink alcohol, like ever. I want him to learn how to work through things without it, I want him to avoid it because he doesn't want to become dependent on it, doesn't want to risk it

- Jean is average at pottery at first and that frustrates him that he isn't perfect at it immediately but it helps him learn that it's ok to not be good at everything or that slow progress is more sustainable

- depending on the timeline, Jean birthday. One of the team asks him when it is and they make a thing out of it on the day. Or no one knows but the coaches have it marked and one wishes him happy birthday during practice and the team, mainly the main trio/floozies, are like why didn't you tell us ☹️ and get him a few small things

- more Elodie conversations. The trio finds out

- find out what happen with Zane and Grayson but it's because Zane gets in touch with Jean after Grayson dies and they have some sort of discussion about it. Maybe Zane goes public and talks about it before committing suicide

- i've seen a million theories about Jeremy's backstory but none really bring his father into it and I think we need to focus on that a little bit more. Jeremy says he doesn't like people calling him by his last name, Knox, which must be his biological fathers last name because his stepdad's name is Wilshire. And he says ' "I've never been to Europe. Dad's been stationed there a couple times, but.." He shrugged and didn't bother to elaborate.' My immediate thought was military but with his mom remarrying a man whose father is a congressman makes me think Jeremy's dad might be more in that type of work than military because how else would she be in the same sphere as a congressman's son. Maybe high level military. Anyway! Jeremy doesn't want to use his father's last name either so something definitely happened with him as well. Whether it's two different things or all the same as the "scandal" Jeremy's first year. I don't really have a set theory about it but I do think he is involved in some way

[magexii]

lbcc au stuff

okay so I've been working on the svsss miraculous au with some moots and I have obviously been having a lot of thoughts about it.

anyways. here's a post with me talking at length about it more. ill try not to be too redundant so make sure to check out the other posts too! :>

Lady Beetle, aka Shen Yuan

holder of the ladybug/beetle miraculous

his kwamii is Xi Tong, aka The System, who I have a design for here

he's chronically ill and spent a lot of time in hospitals growing up

he has a veryyy transactional relationship w xi tong. in order for his kwamii to help his health and boosts his abilities it expects him to do certain tasks.

he has the power of creation. I'm not sure on his weapon yet but I don't think its the yoyo lol.

I think the transactional nature of his dynamic w xi tong would also extend to his use of lucky charms

obsessed w the adaptation of PIDW and luo binghe

friends(?) w sqh as airplane and cucumber online after harassing him online over writing PIDW

based a lot of his self as lady beetle after his older brother

there's only one earring for the lb miraculous btw

Crimson Cat, aka Luo Binghe

holder of the black cat miraculous

his kwamii is meng mo lol, tell me it doesn't fit

sentimonster created by sqh

hes an actor! his first role was PIDW

he became an actor to help pay for his sick adopted mothers medical bills

his power is destruction!

I think he should be able to tear a hole in the very fabric of reality, as a treat.

using his powers takes a toll on his mental state

his weapon is a bow staff

mobei jun takes the role of the gorilla here. they are friends but mbj Cannot be Normal and is like. very protective of binghe

Lacewing, aka Shen Jiu

holder of the butterfly miraculous

his kwamii is xiu ya

sentimonster created by sqh

adopted by the shen household, takes his role as sy's older brother very seriously.

also an actor, has worked w lbh before. they do not have a good relationship.

his weapon/magical object is his fan. sorry I know in canon the peacock has the fan. but sj needs it.

he's fashionable asf

he wants the miraculouses to help with sy's health :(

Ocellus, aka Shang Qinghua

holder of the peacock miraculous

kwamii is uhhhh uhhhhh

I spent so long trying to come up with a name that combined airplanes and peacocks. this man was almost named cockpit.

I chose the name ocellus! that's another word for eyespots which are markings on animals that mimic the look of an eye. they are found on peacocks feathers, butterflies, and cats ;)

symbolism is symbolisming

he created luo binghe and shen jiu as sentimonsters through is writing.

his weapon/magical object is a pen

villain??? lb and cc do not know

mbj is trying to date him so hard

he had the ladybug and black cat miraculous (for completely normal reasons im sure) and is the one who chose their current holders :)

SO UMM YEA.

big thanks to @batdog102 @jam13333 and @carlosateaworm for talking abt the au so much with me! they came up with all the good stuff here. and thanks to the anon who came up with the idea in the first place!

also the au tag I'm going w now is "lbcc au" so you can search that on my blog for all the content about it!

[tubbytarchia]

pause. zoom. enhance. good universe smallidarity being the one where joel isnt homophobic. i need to know more about your bad universe smallidarity joel <3

LMAO well "bad universe smallidarity" is how I interpret smallidarity personally. I know my following has been curated a lot by this point but I still get anxious to comment on it out in the open, so I'm just gonna: This is about characters. It's about characters. Hello I'm talking about characters and this says absolutely nothing about any relationships present in the real world and I wouldn't have it any other way than it is now. This is about characters and I am a big fucking fan of Jizzie, don't even doubt me (said in general, not to you lol)

Anyway. I made a long post about this before but it's a little bit cringe so I'm gonna try to sum my thoughts up again: I love analysing Joel's freak behavior and to me his character reads as homophobic but in a deeply closeted way. His relationship with Lizzie is extremely cute but I get more aroace vibes from it than anything honestly. Their characters would have gotten together because, it made sense to. "Hey we like each other, might as well get married" and good for them, but although they are cute and every now and then proclaim their love, it feels more like an obligatory sentiment to make to me, their characters within the Life series and other SMPs I've watched with them just don't strike me as a couple if you take away the specific terms they use that confirm it. Like honest to god someone can try and make a compilation of that and I'm willing to bet that the compilation of him and Jimmy being weird would be at least comparable in length. And frankly I don't think Lizzie gives much of a fuck anyway

Joel's treated Jimmy very undesirably in the past, main culprit being ESMP2, until out of nowhere he chooses to end their rivalry and proclaim them two best friends instead, which Jimmy very easily goes along with. This very sudden change in their relationship being enforced by Joel makes me think he came to some revelation and had a good think about it. That's a lie, he's bad at that, he probably had a meltdown instead and didn't know how to fix things other than to go tell Jimmy "hey lets be friends now and um impose new law". This is where he contributed to the Jimmy ecosystem (AKA the harmful environment and people that enforce the idea that Jimmy is inherently lesser than them) the most and then abruptly stopped. Instances of him belittling Jimmy one way or another still happen afterward but it really has changed and become both more lenient and less frequent. What has been a constant however is the weirdass homoerotic behavior

This since and before ESMP2, but it really gives vibes of someone in love but neglecting to acknowledge it and/or combating those feelings with vocal disapproval of any intimacy that could be inferred. He has a wife after all, in fact, he'll remind you every chance he gets. Joel has no problem indulging in and joking about more sexual approaches vs more affectionate ones. Eg, the neck kisses, calling Jimmy babe, having pillow talk with Tango and literally making a baby with both Jimmy and Sausage in ESMP. But anything affectionate makes him feel vulnerable and so that's a no-no. I have no good explicit examples for this other than the fact that he just doesn't engage in affectionate engages/jokes much (not even with Lizzie) and him refusing to hold Jimmy's hand in SL. It's all jokes, and if it does get too sus, no worries, he can always just proclaim "I have a wife!!" as a no-homo safety net. But methinks he's just in denial. Unfortunately when he starts to grapple with his feelings I think he becomes homophobic and has probably called himself every slur out there. It'd make sense to me given how he often acts around Jimmy. It's not that he has anything against the concept of gay, he just doesn't know how to handle himself being gay

But, along with him trying to step out of the ecosystem and instead wanting to support Jimmy, he's also become more open to intimacy? For lack of a better word. He's been much less outward about his interactions with Jimmy being jokes, eg the RL and WL kisses where they're both just fucking soft about it man and just carry on, or him declaring himself to just be flirting with Jimmy to Gem and Scar in WL with no caveat. Still, Joel absolutely can't express genuine love or care in any conventional manner to Jimmy which hmm. Why might that be... WL puts Joel's worry for Jimmy to the forefront where he is VERY vocally upset about almost each of Jimmy's deaths but can't express this to him any other way than to call him a loser. Other people might hear of his worry (eg Gem) or he'll defend Jimmy to them (disapproving of the premature grave people built for him in SL. This in general is really important in signifying his departure from the ecosystem by disapproving of others within it). He is very nice to Jimmy, like in WL (especially considering Jimmy's several attempts at killing him for no real reason) but only outside of vocal confirmation

This is why in the smallidarity compilation I included clips like him in Phasmo just saying he was worried about Jimmy TO Jimmy because this fucker never says that so this is substantial material for me. It's character development, maybe he's slowly exiting the closet and coming to terms with his feelings and that he can be "vulnerable". Anyway that's why I label him homophobic but the point is that he really does care Jimmy a lot and he's been much better to him and by virtue less homophobic towards himself

[unnatural-happenings]

A Change of Fate

I've had an idea for a Persona fic and it's been sitting in my drafts forever. I have a ton written, but somehow not a single chapter is completed. I don’t know if I'm ever going to finish it, If I don't talk about it soon I swear I'm going to explode.

It's about a Player/Reader/OC(?) that gets transported to the world of Persona after meeting their end (normal isekai things yk). They wake up with no memories outside of some vague life they feel they didn't actually live. They end up at the arcade, run into Ryuji, have all memories but their finally moments come back to them and panic. Now they have to figure out how they want to go about existing in this world. Do they want to intervene in the plot or not? Do they even have the strength to?

Still not sold on making it an OC or a Reader Insert (drafts are a mix of both rn it's hell), but it's vague either way. I don't want to name or design the Player, I only do that when I'm drawing the more emotional scenes. For the most part they're merely a catalyst for my unhinged ideas and amusement.

If you want to hold out for the teensiest bit of hope that I finish the fic and post full length chapters, then stop here. There will be spoilers ahead in the form of a vague unhinged plot summary of its entirety (oops it's around 22k words).

If I do finish any scenes I find pretty good I may or may not post them separately. If I do I'll link it to my pinned.

(The rest of this is written in second person (you/your/yourself))

(ALSO a warning that comes with mild spoilers. By this ideas very nature this is—in way—a fix-it-fic, but the ending is still very bittersweet) (ALSO ALSO it has very minimal proofreading done. I tried but it is long.)

You wake up with no memories in a house by yourself, until you find papers saying you were accepted into Shujin Academy and start in a few days. Then you get vague memories of a normal life leading up to you deciding to study abroad at Shujin. Something about the whole thing seems off, but you shake it off and start to get ready to get the last supplies they need and to familiarize yourself with the area.

As you're walking around you keep getting hit with waves of nausea until you reach the arcade. Staring at the Jack Frost claw machine you nearly collapse, but someone catches you before you hit the floor. You thank him and end up talking and enjoying the arcade together for a while. At some point you mention you're going to Shujin and the guy seems pretty happy about it, but also warns them almost everyone there kinda sucks, teachers included. That's when you both realize you never introduced yourselves to each other so the guy goes first and—

He introduces himself as Sakamoto Ryuji.

Everything clicks after that and you remember that you are in fact, a player of Persona and you should not be here. You don't remember the events leading up to you waking up, but you remember the rest of your life and start having a panic attack. Ryuji—Sakamoto (they're real people now you can't just use their first name anymore) tries to help you through it, but when he does you look around and recognize all the buildings around you and panic even more.

You try to play off your panic as just being tired. You didn't realize how long they were out for and have to get back home! You make sure to tell Sakamoto you're happy you'll know someone when you start Shujin so he doesn't think you're running away from him then quickly, but cautiously, make your way back home.

You wake up the next day, realize not only are you in Persona, you're months before the arrival of Joker. You proceed to have a breakdown.

When you start Shujin you've sort of committed to not changing anything drastic in the plot, then Sakamoto steals you away at the first chance he gets. You can't bring yourself to deny him.

Of course hanging out with Sakamoto you eventually run into Takamaki Ann and Suzui Shiho, the track team (if you could kick them in the crotch you would), and unfortunately Kamoshida.

He warns you about hanging out with the likes of Sakamoto and tries to get you to join the volleyball team. You refuse as politely as possible and speed away from him.

You've been around for a couple months now learning to live on your own and start to wonder what your in-universe parents are like. You don't imagine it's anything good. Sure they're paying for the apartment and giving you a hefty allowance, but not once have they reached out to you. You don't know if they're expecting you to be the one to reach out either. As long as they don't bother you, you don't plan to bother them to find out.

All too soon the years change and you meet Yoshizawa for the first time. You never stopped to think about which version of the world you were in, and seeing Yoshizawa Sumire—currently Kasumi—makes you realize that Maruki is going to be an issue. It would be terrible for him to learn anything about you so you have to do your best not to stand out to the school when Joker arrives. Oh and he's arriving in a few days. Great.

You spend those few days trying to think of ways to subtly help and how what you might do could affect the future, but don't come up with anything in time.

When you walk to school and see Joker standing waiting for the rain to stop you don't know what to do. You're about to talk to him when a thought crops up in your head.

"Would you even be able to get a persona?"

You don't want to be a liability so you walk past him with your head down.

Or at least you tried to walk past him, but he ends up grabbing you. You're surprised and it looks like he's surprised himself that he did that and apologies. He struggles to put his thoughts together while you stand there awkwardly wanting to get away as soon as possible. He's giving you a look you don't know how to feel about. Then Takamaki shows up and basically saves you from that encounter.

Then Kamoshida drives up in his car.

You didn't want to get into an enclosed space with him, but you knew if you didn't join you'd end up walking with the boys and getting stuck in the palace (which is honestly worse). You also remember how Takamaki looked during the cut scene and couldn't stand to leave her alone with him, so you got in the car.

Waiting for the boys to get back from their kidnapping is agonizing. When Sakamoto finally arrives after lunch and you ask hum if he's okay he kinda avoids the question. Which is about what you were expecting.

After the final bell rings Sakamoto tells you to he has something to do and runs off without you. That's fine since you know what he's gone off to do and make your way out, accidentally bumping into someone in the hall. You hear the murmurs of the student body around you and glasses hitting the floor before you lay your eyes on who it is. Of course it's Joker.

He introduces himself to you. Amamiya Ren. At least now you know which name he goes by, but this is still not ideal! He's also still got that strange curiosity in his eyes when he's looking at you. It's intense. You don't like it, so you quickly make an excuse and leave. He has to talk to Sakamoto anyway.

You're watching the events of the game take place from the sidelines, wanting to help but to scared you'd change things for the worse. It's when Suzui falls from the roof the guilt sets in and starts to eat you alive. You make your way up to the roof to stew in it and cry when you hear the door slam open and Sakamoto shouting.

You forgot they resolved to take Kamoshida down with the Metaverse today. You're also surprised you can already understand Morgana.

Yet again you're put into the position to make a choice and let yourself be known to them. You're actually about to when you look over the edge of the roof. That's when the last bit of fog on your previous life's memories clear up.

You were pushed off of the roof. It was an accident, a sore loser who couldn't get over his own ego pushed your friend, accusing her of cheating in a tournament. She lost her balance and ended up crashing into you, making you tumble off the side. Everyone that was there tried to reach for you, including the egoist, but none of them were fast enough. You distinctly remember the feeling of your head caving in before everything went dark. It was dark for a while, before you woke up in that apartment.

Your vision blurs as you start hyperventilating. You scramble away from the edge of the roof and run all the way to the station, wanting nothing but to go home.

The next couple days you try to avoid every canon character, which isn't that hard since they're focusing on Kamoshida's palace. Unfortunately the man himself notices you're on your own and tries to harass you. It's both fantastic and horrifying when the thieves start showing up again and hanging around you until you get on the train. Something must've happened in his palace regarding you. If none of them can keep an eye on you before they enter then they always ask you to go to the store for them. If you didn't know what was going on you'd have a lot more questions, but you're content to do their shopping for them.

After they change his heart they strong arm you into hanging out with them as a group. It's not at the buffet so you guess they already ate there and solidified themselves as the Phantom Thieves.

You feel you're going to go insane waiting for them to find Madarame. Important people keep bumping into you and it's stressing you out. Amamiya keeps trying to get you to talk or hangout or something so you keep having to make excuses, Kitagawa asked to sketch you 'cause apparently your solemn look down at your coffee sitting alone at a cafe was the perfect scene for him, you keep getting asked if you want to study for midterms, and you literally bump into Akechi. It's the most shame and terrified you've felt in this world. You want the plot to start happening so you can get a minute to breathe.

Finally after exams are over they start Madarame and you expect your interactions with the main cast to go down. How wrong you were.

The thieves still ask you to buy items for them occasionally, though now Amamiya seems to use it as a way to talk to you. Sometimes someone will message you asking to buy something ASAP and bring it to the passage before bolting. You think they're using you to get items during a palace run so they can stay in longer, but you're not asking. Then Takamaki practically begs you to join her for a modelling gig.

You assumed she was talking about her actual job. Maybe she picked up a more free gig and she was allowed to pick someone to join her? Suzui still wasn't able so her next choice was you. You have trouble saying no to these people so of course you agreed to join her.

You're petrified when you end up standing in front of a shack and not a studio.

One thing happens after the next and you're on the verge of a breakdown inside the palace. You can't pay attention to anything. The only thing you notice is Kitagawa getting his persona so you move out of the way on autopilot. Before you all exit the thieves try to ask if you're okay, but you wave them off and ask to leave. As soon as you do you head home.

When you get inside and after a bit of hesitation, you call your supposed mother and learn she's really weird. She does what she asks of you though and now you're home bound for some terrible "illness." She somehow got the school to agree to send your work over while you're "recovering."

It's Niijima Makoto the school sends to hand over your work. They also give her your number. You message her to tell her she doesn't have to physically give you the work, that it's excessive and sending it through an email would've been fine for the school, but she doesn't relent. You have her drop your work off in front of your door and watch you pick it up from a distance, cursing the principal out in your mind all the while.

You receive an endless amount of messages from the thieves, but you ignore them all. They never stop as the week passes, but the contents change.

One day Niijima shows up at your door with Sakamoto in tow and he basically bullies his way into your apartment. They help you air out the place and try to cheer you up. Niijima takes the work you finished and organizes what you didn't while Sakamoto gives you a ton of games to borrow and asks you to play at least one of them to completion. None of this makes you feel any better.

A few days later you're sent a calling card.

??What the fuck??

You don't know why you were sent one or how it would even feel to get your heart changed. To be frank you don't WANT to know! You're fine! They're ignoring your messages now so you guess they've already jumped in. But to where? Mementos? A palace?? Was whatever they think is wrong with you strong enough to make a palace???

If you think about it any longer you feel you'll go insane, so you try to get some sleep, hoping you can skip whatever process happens during a change of heart. You barely get any when your phone lights up. Hoping it's a message from a thief you open your eyes only to be greeted to a black and red swirling eye.

You throw your phone across the room, turn to face the other wall and go to sleep.

Much later, you wake up to someone banging on your door. Just to get them to shut up you open the door and end up nearly knocking Sakamoto out. They came over immediately after they left and they're almost frantic as they explain the situation.

Yes, you had a palace—still have a palace. They didn’t change your heart. Not because they couldn't, but because it apparently wasn't a good idea. After the fight they got to talk to your shadow and they seemed to be much better than before.

You're able to piece together that they basically handled your palace like a jail in Strikers/Scramble. Now that the scare is over you realize you feel more… put together. This is the most at peace you've felt with your place here since meeting Sakamoto.

But beyond that you have no idea what they exactly talked about that made taking your treasure a bad idea. They don't explain, and you don't ask. You're too afraid of what they might've seen inside of it and you're sure stress radiates off you in waves, but they never push it. What they end up doing is reiterating multiple times that they're your friends and can and will help you through whatever you need.

You go back to school. Madarame apologizes and the student body clowns on him. The Social Studies trip happens but you don't go. You still somehow run into Akechi again and now he wants to use you as his rumour mill. Like always you have a hard time saying no to these people when you probably should.

A few days past with Amamiya insisting that he hangout with you. Sometimes the others join, but it's mostly just you and him. The last time you were together he left just a little agitated. When you asked he only said it wasn't anything you did, which obviously didn't answer the question. There's no time to ponder though when Niijima blackmails the group the next day.

They're scrambling to find any information, but refuse to go to you for any help. They don't even let you walk around Shibuya, blaming it on you needing more time to recover from your illness. They know you weren't actually ill they just suck at excuses. It makes sense since it's the mafia, but you’re itching to do something to keep them from getting blackmailed again.

Of course between your inability to come up with a plan to save your life and constant hesitation, Niijima ends up running into the lion's den and getting them all in trouble. They basically come to you after they've already gone into the palace with their tails between their legs. For a variety of reasons, including their stupidity (and cause of the location),the hideout changes to your apartment.

The first couple days is the same routine as before. They jump in and have you get items for them, but since you know you're able to bring them more things they could use. They don't make much progress in the palace despite this though to your confusion and their ire.

One day they don't show up at your apartment anywhere near the time they should be back. They haven't asked you for items either, so unless Amamiya brought a crapton with him it starts to feel like something's gone wrong. Your nerves get shot and after almost an hour of nothing when you remember you have the Metaverse app on your phone. Fearing more for them over yourself you input Kaneshiro's palace keys and go in.

After hyping yourself up, you force one of the ATM people to carry you to the floating bank. When it gets there you bolt out of its arms and through the secret passage into the building and immediately hear the sounds of a fight going on.

It doesn't take you long to find the source of it, and as you peak around the corner to see you find the Phantom Thieves fighting a bird. A really, really fast bird. They can barely land a hit on the thing, and when they finally do it barely does anything. The bird keeps moving around like it wasn't just stabbed, electrocuted, and burned all at once.

Morgana is also knocked out cold on the floor, his bandanna and fur singed at the edges. The rest of the thieves are extremely tired and must be running low on SP.

This bird shouldn't be here, hell it doesn't even look like a normal shadow! Despite knowing this is not a regular encounter in this palace it feels familiar somehow. Once you remember why it takes everything in your power not to groan.

Unfortunately not only were you a Persona player, you were a Persona player that modded the game.

Specifically, you modded it to make it harder. Much harder.

You are now seeing the consequences of your actions, but it's not like you thought you'd be forced to fight this dogshit in real life! How were you supposed to know your methods of self torture would follow you to merge with this worlds Metaverse and create nothing but problems. If you'd known you would've saved yourself the trouble. Unfortunately you can't go back in time to slap yourself in the face for thinking of downloading all of that garbage. You just have to deal with it, but you have no clue how.

It's obvious they were not prepared for a fight like this and you can't blame them, but you can't jump into the fight to give them advice. You don't have a persona, effectively making you a sitting target. A liability. You didn't bring any items to help you for this either. You can't help them, but they also can't afford to fall here.

You back away to root through any antiques or statues laying around, hoping to find anything, but instead get ambushed by a group of shadows. They knock you into a corner and radio in Kaneshiro. You think you're done for.

It's when you hear the thieves cry out at another member falling that your resolve strengths.

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈✁━━━━━━━━━━━

"It appears this flickering lamp wants to shine as bright as the stars in the sky, but still allows darkness to cover their truest desires.

Is this still a game to you? Do their deaths not matter? Should they fall, are you expecting time to reset for many second chances?"

"Of course not. They aren't characters on a screen anymore. They're living people trying to change the world for the better, and I want— I need to help them! They can't die here!"

"Then stand and free yourself of your demons!

I am thou… thou art I…

I lend you my light to fight for what is right!"

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈✁━━━━━━━━━━━

It blasts all the nearby shadows away, leaving you standing. Not taking any time to marvel at your new power, you leap past them to save the thieves from the bird.

After reviving Morgana and Ryuji, you help guide the Thieves on how to take down the enemy. As soon as you do you're all rushing out of the palace in the Monacar and getting to your apartment as fast as possible.

When everyone recovers, They're all grilling you for answers, wondering when you got the app on your phone, how you knew what Kaneshiro’s keywords were, how you knew what to do in that fight etc. You reply with lies and excuses, which they catch you on every time. Eventually you run out and you gotta spill.

You tell them about the game (not about your original reality though), and you're surprised when they almost instantly believe you. They say it's because the way your palace worked and the talk they had with your shadow at the end.

Now that you've finally confirmed that for them they start to speculate where it could’ve come from. Yet again you're shocked they're worried more about the game then about you. They're honestly appalled and saddened you would even think that, so they reinforce you're their friend first and the knowledge you have of future events is now a really cool helpful bonus. None of them leave until you promise to use their first names from now on and confirming you're joining the team.

Amamiya—Ren stays behind for a bit longer to learn about his protagonist status. In turn he tells you he's been trying to get your confidant leveled since he learned about it (but really since he first laid eyes on you). You blame his fixation on being a protagonist to a player. He tells you he doesn't give a shit.

By the end he's relieved and explains your confidant kept locking itself, but now it's free of chains. He threatens you with the promise of him taking up multiple of your free days before leaving.

When everyone meets up again you get your code name Bug. Like a bug in a video game, you're a bug in their fate. You would’ve denied it if Ann hadn't called it cute. Ryuji called you weak for that, then was promptly hit.

On your first actual outing as a Phantom Thief you can see how bad your modding habits have affected the Metaverse. None of the bosses have become harder then they originally should be, but more shadows then you're expecting are from your mods. You highly doubt it'll stay this way moving forward.

Now that you're helping Kaneshiro’s palace is a little easier, but it's still confusing as to why modded shadows are even here. Morgana blames it on your preconceived perception being stronger than most because of the game. Basically the palace gets warped by both you and the ruler. You really wish you could call bull, but spot another bird in the distance and cry.

During down time you head into mementos by yourself to talk to Jose. You needed to know if he could tell you were from another world, and if he did to be quite about it before the rest came down for requests. You're having a nice conversation with him when fighting is heard in the distance. Peaking around the corner you find the Black Mask fighting off more of your modded shadows. He's not doing to good, and the shadows aren't making it easy to escape.

You're conflicted one whether you should help him or not. You know you should, but he's still very much Shido's lap dog rn.

Then a voice pops in your head asking if your efforts start and end with the Phantom Thieves. Of course not, so you promise yourself to save everyone you possibly can and you get your second persona.

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈✁━━━━━━━━━━━

"It appears your meddling has cause problems for more than your own.

Then end you seek goes against the will of the world, continuing down this path shall will bring great struggle and hardship.

Do you still plan to defy the gods of this world, knowing all will be against you?"

"I don't care. In this world, I'll make sure—"

Your chest burns as you gaze upon the fight happening before you. It feels like daggers are stabbing into every inch of your skin, twisting, but you stand tall. Not once taking your eyes off of what you now perceive as your ultimate goal.

"—I'll make sure no one has to die!"

"Then it would seem you have finally clipped all threads tying you to fate. I shall lend you my strength to brave this future head on!

I am thou… Thou art I…

Carve out a path of your own and show fate its place!"

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈✁━━━━━━━━━━━

You don't allow yourself a moment to ponder the implications of getting a second persona before you're jumping into the fray to help Akechi.

After a long fight and subsequently long interrogation with a sword at your neck, you manage to convince him that you want to help. Also to wait to doubt the validity of your future knowledge by telling him about Shido's plans with Medjed. He nearly slit your throat for that alone though…

Going back to the thieves you don't say shit and you all take down Kaneshiro. Afterwards it's a barrage of studying and being dragged to hangout left and right before Akechi runs into all of you in the subway. He points out your group is sus as fuck and you can tell he expects to meet up with you later.

Meeting up in Mementos again he says he believes you and is willing to work with you to change the future cause fuck fate. Especially if it means he lives to see the fall of Shido. He also has a few choice words he wants to say to the gods you described… with his sword.

You both agree to plan in the background before revealing him or your full hand to the rest of the thieves. You try to at least get Ren in on it too, but Akechi can barely handle your sudden team up. He's not immediately jumping for joy at the thought of anyone else.

Alibaba shenanigans happen. The thieves try to pry who they are out of you, but you feel it's easier if they figure it out themselves. You don't know what would change if you told them and just went in. It's not worth the risk of Futaba not overcoming her perception herself or gaining her persona.

One break-in later you're in her palace and… It sucks.

Most of the palace has changed to reflect the many mods you injected into the game. Makoto thinks it's because her palace is so disconnected from everything else, your presence effects it more. All to say most of the shadows in here are beyond irritating. When you were playing the game, it was annoying and bullshit sure, but now actually having to fight these things has put the fear of God into you.

Every fight is life or death more than before. If a shadow can hit a weakness they will, if it has an insta-kill you better bet it's going to land it at least once, if it can inflict an ailment it just so happens it will use the more BS modded version. Burn will bring someone to the brink of death, despair saps every ounce of energy someone has left, rage is now a worse brainwash, and a ton of new ailments you wish you could remember from the mod. Of course they can access moves that shouldn't exist too.

The bosses are a whole different nightmare themselves.

Slow as you all were, you were able to make through a majority of the palace. Only to get stopped by a boss only weak to bless. You're able to get around it for now, but you need to go that way eventually. Ren doesn't have anything of value and you're no help in this case. To not risk all of your lives in this shithole he chooses to grind in Mementos to fuse a decent bless persona.

You know it won't be enough though, so you rush to inform Akechi that he might be needed earlier than planned. He asks why so you tell him how everything's gone and he blames you. After staging a meetup in Mementos Akechi joins the team as Crow to everyone's disappointment, besides you and Ren.

When you fight the boss again it's still a struggle, but Akechi makes it so much more bearable.

The palace crawling goes a little smoother than before with the extra member, but it still takes a few days to get to the end. During this time you and Akechi are desperately trying to rework your plans. You also ask him how he's holding up going through Futaba’s palace, but he brushes you off redirecting you to how she would feel with him here. You feel awful and resolve to tell her when she wakes up.

The Wakaba fight happens as normal, but this time with you and Akechi included. He hates seeing her again and Ren takes notice.

When summer break officially starts for everyone Ren basically kidnaps you and Akechi. He gets you to explain yourselves and becomes the next to be in on the planning. He asks when you and Akechi planned to tell everyone else and you don't have an answer, which disappoints him. He agrees to help with initial planning to avoid all the drama that happens during and after the Hawaii trip, but only if you tell everyone afterwards.

After that you're playing the waiting game.

You hangout with the thieves, explore Mementos with Akechi and Ren, more planning + stress over the Hawaii trip after remembering the principal dies, Ren informing you over the unique state of your soul— wait what?

Apparently soon after your Mementos trip, Igor informed Ren that your soul is beyond what he’s seen before. You're not a wild card, so you can't get personas on your own, but you can still wield multiple. Then when Ren asked how you could get more, he called you a leech. Someone capable of stealing personas, no matter how strong, and keep them forever. No matter how hard he tried to get it back, he wouldn't be able to without killing you. Fusing a new one would also be impossible if you were to ever obtain one, so he told Ren to be weary around you. Maybe break the team up altogether. Hell, that Akechi guy is also suuuper sketchy and untrustworthy so he totally shouldn’t be working with either of you at all.

Akechi had nothing to say about the obvious try at manipulation, while you went of on a rant about "Igor" calling you a leech.

One more Mementos trip and figuring out what the faker meant by "leech" you gain your third persona!

Around this time you also remember your palace still might exist. Out of pure curiosity you enter and find it's nothing like the thieves described. At least not anymore. Some time between now and your sudo change of heart it's shifted from a normal palace to something more akin to the thieves den. There's rooms where your personas reside in (you count six with no room for more) and what looks like a war table in the middle.

During one of your Mementos runs a door also appears for you, leading you straight into your palace. This instantly gives you an idea you can't wait to tell the planning committee.

It has to wait though because Futaba wakes up and puts a stop to the fake Medjed. The thieves then switch gears and put their efforts into making her more comfortable with all of you. Things proceed as normal, besides her outing you being a seer immediately. You correct her ("I wish. I just played a game where all of you were the characters" "Oh… What??") and move onto the beach episode.

Later on Futaba comes up to you and asks if you know what happened to her mother.

It's a very intense, emotionally driven conversation. You're trying desperately to explain why you had to bring Akechi in did you really though? and vaguely explain his side while Futaba is rightfully pissed off. She feels gross knowing her mothers killer was in her head.

She tells you to leave her alone and you do, now wondering if you're going about this the wrong way.

You spend the next day trying to finalize your plan with Ren and Akechi, while also trying not to let the guilt eat you from the inside out. It's also agonizingly difficult to focus when a major part of the problem is sitting next to you.

Akechi ends up pulling you to the side after one to many caught glances had his irritation bubble over. He doesn't take you brushing off the problem lightly with it impeding on the planning, so you spill and tell him what happened with Futaba.

He doesn't have much to say about this situation, not much positive anyway. Though he does say you’re the only one that can tell them what's happening, so you have to get your shit together. You fucked up, but you need to focus now so people will stop dying through the Metaverse.

The meeting concludes with no solutions made again.

There's still time before you have to call it a day, so you make cookies to act as a peace offering gift for Futaba. You knock on her door hoping she responds so you can apologize for the gross negligence of her feelings. When she doesn't respond you leave a note and homemade cookies before going home.

The next meeting you're able to stay on track and able to come up with a plan. You can't deal with Okumura, at least not yet. If you were to change his heart, Akechi will be forced to either kill him or go into hiding. Letting him die isn't an option, but going into hiding is too risky. Though you can't leave him alone either. Shido wanted him dead to begin with, if it doesn't look like the Phantom Thieves are interested in looking into him at all there's a chance he might send Akechi to kill him anyway. It's easy to forge a calling card, that's what they do with the principal after all.

So during the Hawaii school trip, Akechi will take Morgana (for the support. He says he doesn't need it but you insist) and try to recruit Haru to your cause. While he's doing that you're also waiting for the poll to pop up and fester for a little. Once it has, the idea is to make a big show of it being fraudulent and how all this evidence popping up against him is too sudden. At the end making sure to note that you will be looking into this yourselves later. Hopefully by the time everyone else comes back you'll have a new member and be ready to move onto phase two.

To change Sugimura's heart.

Haru still needs to be saved before October 11th, and the Phantom Thieves still need a public target. This kills two birds with one stone. Then on the same day you plan to send the calling card to change his heart, you'll also kidnap Okumura.

You're not actually going to do that, but the plan does involve making the public think he's gone missing. Both Ren and Akechi (and you tbh) can't believe this is what your plan devolves into, but the best way to make sure he stays alive is to keep him in somewhere safe where no one can find him. Somewhere you can easily bring him where not even he will know you're involved.

The Metaverse is the easiest solution. While Mementos isn't an option, your palace will keep him out of danger. It'd be easy to have Akechi go up, trick Okumura into the Metaverse (possibly with the help of Haru if she agrees to join), and convince him to agree to hide away for a while. Then Akechi brings him to your palace. Your personas will also make sure he won't even remember his time there.

His sudden disappearance should also cause the public's uproar a little more and Shido to question what's going on. Hopefully he's more focused on finding you guys than killing Okumura.

Safe to say you're not particularly proud of this plan, but none of you have come up with anything else and Hawaii is around the corner so this will have to do.

You're plan wavers into jot notes and vague ideas after this. Plans usually never stay on course so you have to revisit what to do when everyone's on the same boat. You have 45 days after the 11th before Shido's palace is initially supposed to start. Removing days you'll be focused on something else, that only leaves about 34 days for you to figure out something attention grabbing and follow through.

Before you can get there you still have to do the first part of your plan, and unfortunately the first part of the plan requires Futaba. She's the only one that can hack the Phansite to leave the initial message. Your positive Futaba's still mad at you and there's no way in hell she even wants to be in the same room as Akechi. That leaves Ren to try and get her on board so he leaves to go talk to her.

When he comes back he arrives with Futaba in tow. You tense when she comes over to you, but are surprised when she clings to your clothing.

"I'm still mad at you, but if you promise not to hide anything like that from me or anyone again I'll forgive you."

You give her your word and tell her you'll inform everyone once you get back from the trip to Hawaii.

She ignores the massive elephant in the room for a while longer before turning to Akechi. She starts by saying she'll never forgive him, but wants to hear why he did it though his own mouth.

He evades answering the question in any satisfying way until you heavily gesture that he should be a little honest. Once he provides the bare minimum he walks out and Ren goes after him, leaving you with Futaba. You accidental sigh out wondering if you're doing anything right. Futaba tells you you're trying to save a murderer with a tragic backstory, a rich guy that exploits the working class until they die, and are sad over not being able to help your pushover, sad excuse of a principal that happily endorses the man behind the slaughter. There's not many ways you can do any of that "correctly."

You thank her and she just reminds you that you have to tell her all about the game. When you try to say that wasn't what you promised she just turns around, pretends to not listen and threatens to rescind her forgiveness.

Ren comes back without Akechi. He informs the both of you he had to head back home, but he plans to follow through on his end of the plan. So you tell Futaba what she's going to be doing and head home yourself.

Now you're nervous about how you're plan's going to go. You hope well, but you highly doubt that after you let the rest of the thieves know Akechi is the Black Mask. Then you think about how you'd be telling them after he just killed someone and realize you should tell them a lot sooner.

School starts, you meet with everyone individually to explain what's going on. With Morgana, Ann and Yusuke it goes surprisingly better than you were expecting (though you suspect Morgana is only saving it to pester Ren about it later). Though it goes as expected with Ryuji and Makoto. They both already hated the guy so this was only adding fuel to the fire. You're hoping a talk with Ren will help Ryuji get his thoughts in order before he ends up lashing out at Akechi.

The Hawaii trip starts and the first part of the plan begins.

Futaba’s able to take down the poll on the Phansite and as suspected the public lashes out. Ren makes sure to inform Mishima not to put it back up. Morgana's and Akechi's side goes through a few hiccups, but in the end Haru agrees to join and Morgana helps her get her persona. Akechi had to leave at that point to get the principal on Shido's orders then lay low.

No one was able to enjoy the trip to Hawaii.

You all get back to Japan and things still do not go smoothly in the slightest. The meeting to explain who their next target is and why is… rough to say the least. Makoto is being more antagonistic than you hoped for, Futaba is giving him a wide berth and still doesn't really talk to you (though both were to be expected), Ryuji is calmer than you thought he would be but still aggressive, and Morgana clearly makes his disappointment known. Ann, Yusuke, and Haru are the only ones able to get through it without unworkable levels of aggression.

Ann is one of the kindest people you've ever met and willing to give him a chance (even if it's just 'cause you and Ren like him), Haru knew from the start this time around, and Yusuke can see where Akechi came from even if he doesn't understand how it got that extreme.

Everyone is emotionally exhausted by the end of the meeting, but you're able to explain what's going on to everyone else. The others are a bit upset to learn of this. They're disappointed you went off and planned on your own (and with Akechi which is super dangerous btw what were you thinking—) and force you to promise again to tell your teammates when something is happening. One by one. It's embarrassing but you do it.

Once that's done the hideout changes to your thieves den and you start Sugimura’s palace. It's… better and worse than you were expecting.

In terms of difficulty it's surprisingly not complete bullshit. You were expecting everything to be harder after the hell Futaba’s palace put you through, but it's a fair mix of "harder by Persona 5 standards" and "harder by your dogshit modded standards."

In terms of palace contents… it's more subtle than Kamoshida's, but still painfully obvious what's happening. You all want out of this palace as soon as possible. You're happy the war table in your thieves den is seeing some use though!

The treasure is located at the very top of this skyscraper of a palace. Futaba blames the height on his ego. When you all notice the treasure room shift occasionally to a bedroom, you secure your route and leave immediately.

The next day your plan is sent into motion. Morgana leaves to deliver the calling card to Sugimura, Akechi and Haru are sent to get Okumura, and Makoto and Futaba have to make sure there's no evidence left from either. The rest of you wait until Morgana comes back with word to enter Sugimura’s palace.

While you're waiting Ren gives you another persona that cost him nearly all the yen on his person. You would've scolded him right then and there, but you were much too focused on your new addition.

Once everyone shows up, they check on you to make sure there's no side effects of him being in your palace and your personas give you the okay. Everyone is still iffy on this plan, but Haru assures everyone that she'd rather they do this then have him found dead somewhere.

After one last once over everyone heads over to steal the treasure and encounter Sugimura's shadow. He's almost as gimmicky as Okumura’s and it annoys the fuck out of everyone, but you all get through it relatively fine.

While waiting for Sugimura's heart to change you all enter a period of limbo. You and Akechi want to plan ahead, but everyone else tells you to relax for a second. You've been stressed and need to take a minute before you explode. They also bring up that Sugimura hasn't even apologized yet so the waiting game begins again. During this time Haru tries to keep the business afloat as best she can before you can help with her father, Ren accidentally enters Maruki's palace with Yoshizawa, Akechi's keeping tabs on Shido, and you all enter Mementos a couple times when everyone's free to train and let off steam.

The celebration is still held at Destinyland. The trip is a little stained with stress, but you try to enjoy yourself anyway before you have to think about the future. You have more fun then you thought you would running around an amusement park just for yourselves. Akechi can't join since he has to play to Shido's whims and act like he's still looking, so you and Ren take a bunch of pictures and buy him souvenirs. At the end of the day you're all sitting around eating when Haru gets notified about a live stream and your blood runs cold.

For a brief moment you think you've failed at saving someone again, but your personas chime in and say Okumura’s still in your palace, and there was no way for Shido to know about Sugimura. It still does little to calm your nerves.

When Haru tunes in it appears to be a news live stream talking about Sugimura’s apology statement. He made what you could only assume was this worlds equivalent to a twitlonger. Explaining what he did and why he was so sorry and that he'd be stepping down to better himself. While there was no death on live TV this time around (thank god), this is still a little disappointing with no promise of jail time.

Ann and Yusuke note that this whole thing felt hollow. You all took down someone obviously deserving, but it feels like you didn't do anything. Makoto marks that on top of Sugimura not showing himself for his apology, it's probably because of the public's reaction.

They seemed.. split at best of this turn of events. A majority are unsatisfied to a certain extent. A lot of people where happy when they heard of everything Sugimura was doing, but a lot of people were still upset. No one knew who Sugimura even was (he's in politics so really that's their own fault but whatever), so the apology feels hollow. Yes you changed the heart of a scumbag, but how did you even find this guy? How'd you end up investigating him when the entirety of the internet was rallying behind Okumura?

Technically, this is still good for you. The Phantom Thieves just need to get their name out there—it doesn't necessarily have to be all positive, but it still leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Some of the others are more infuriated with the public perception as well.

Despite all your efforts, the night at Destinyland still ends on a sour note.

The next day during a meeting between you all (still minus Akechi), Okumura’s disappearance finally breaks out on the news.

This makes the public unrest even more palpable. A more than insignificant amount of people blaming the Phantom Thieves for not going after him first and letting him get away. Some people note that if the Phantom Thieves could find Kaneshiro, then surely you guys could find Okumura too! Some are also going so far as to suggest you kidnapped him, which isn't that far, but he agreed to be protected in the first place and it's wild they came up with that at all.

It makes every thief antsy and hard to keep their stress at bay. A new target—or at least something else eye-catching obviously has to be found soon. No one has any ideas though, not even you. Ann suspects the public won't be happy with whatever you do anyway. If it's not finding and changing Okumura’s heart they won't care.

Then Makoto reminds everyone that you all have to lay low for a while and act like normal students. Tensions are too high to do anything rash, and you have midterms to study for anyway. Disappointed and anxious, everyone splits off.

The next few days is a barrage of studying with your friends exams. You try your best to keep your mind off of everything and all of them are really good at acting like clowns or actually helping you study.

Coming into Shujin the day after you overhear some kids talking about the police. You… completely forgot about the investigation, so you quickly inform everyone over the group chat. Ryuji bashes you slightly for forgetting. Then Akechi is brought up and why he didn't say anything and hasn't said anything for a while now. He finally comes on, types out "I'm busy" and promptly leaves again. After Makoto remarks that everyone should be careful with what they say everyone shuts their phones off.

You're stressed during your interrogation, but they don't ask you much questions so you think you got through it fine. All they really did was ask easy yes or no questions you already knew not to lie about.

After school everyone meets at your place to discuss the interrogation, then move onto the investigation. They ask you if you remember what's going on, but before you can say anything Akechi appears out of thin air. When everyone shouts in surprise he's taking out the battery in his phone and tells everyone else to do the same.

He arrived at your apartment through the Metaverse 'cause he needed to be absolutely sure no one was tailing him. After they do that he finally divulges as to why he's been absent for so long.

He was busy dealing with everything at the precinct and trying to understand the sudden cold shoulder he's receiving from Shido.

Shido's still holding meetings with him, but all of them haven't been for anything important. No exchange of information, no targets—he's not even venting anymore, Shido's giving him nothing. It's all just to waste time, so Akechi can only assume Shido's become suspicious of him and trying to fish for evidence. A change in behaviour, connections he might have made, anything. All the extra work that's been piled on top of him is also probably to increase his stress and chances of tripping up.

To add onto the horrendous news he just dropped on you, he also informs everyone that Sae Niijima is on the brink of falsifying a case on the Phantom Thieves.

They ask how they managed to deal with all this in the game, and you tell them Ren just told her everything that happened and she joined their efforts. Before they get too happy about it though, you do note that Ren was locked in an interrogation room deep underground, beaten, and drugged. This was also after she received a calling card, so who knows if she'll listen as willingly as she did then.

"The police did WHAT!?"

"Long story worth over 100 hours of game play— look it's probably not going to happen so can we move on?"

"You can't just say that and expect us to get over it!"

Pushing aside the horrifying reality how far the police brutality and corruption goes, you can't talk to Sae Niijima without something more concrete to get her on your side. Since their ticket to taking it even a little easier is off the table, you all still have to lay low for a while. Makoto enlists all the second years to help in the festival executive committee to meet without suspicion.

Planning for the festival is as boring as you thought it was, and unfortunately the student body still want to see Akechi as their celebrity guest. He outright refuses to step anywhere near Shujin unless it's for an investigation, so you have to lie to the student body and get someone else "oh, we apologize, but we couldn't get Akechi. He's currently very busy working on the Phantom Thieves case and can't spare any time to stop by. So sad… anyway—"

The Cultural Festival is still a moderately fun time despite the impending doom it feels like your group is currently facing. Spending time with everyone takes your mind off of it at least for a little while.

The next day you wake up and remember the thieves are supposed to get slapped with a large bounty and hurry to watch the news. You played it the entire morning and even on the way to school, but no announcement of a bounty ever came. The Phantom Thieves still become wanted, but the police only ask for any information

It puts you on edge enough to inform everyone about the change. While they're glad there's no bounty on their heads, it's still concerning, and gives more credence into Shido putting his efforts into investigating Akechi. He is Shido's best asset, so having even an inkling that Akechi might have turned means a tighter leash on him and less opportunities for him to help you guys.

Not wanting to sit around and wait for Akechi to plan your next steps (he'd call you all morons if you ever did that anyway), Ren decides to at least scope out Maruki's palace to see if they could possibly deal with that earlier.

When you get in everything seems normal, but when you try and go beyond the entrance you all end up back outside. Going back in and trying another door yields the same results. Hearing laughing in the distance only makes the Thieves want to figure out what's going on more, so after Futaba checks the surrounding she says to try the front door twice. You walk in, turn around, and walk right through the door you just came in and somehow it leads you to… an empty hallway. Granted it is a different room, but it's still not really progress.

Everyone is already fed up with this palace when going back through the door again doesn't lead you back to the entrance, but into another hallway with more doors.

You are so lost at this point since none of this should even be happening at all. Yusuke wonders if this is some form of punishment for trying to do this "earlier" than intended, and Morgana thinks it might be some sort of defense mechanism.

Low and behold Morgana ends up being correct! Azathoth comes around claiming the cat is right and that he is protecting the palace in his rulers place. He laughs everyone for thinking he'd let them get anywhere, ignores any attempts made to fish for answers, and leaves.

Ryuji opens one of the doors in frustration and nearly gets punched in the face by a shadow.

You all spend… more time than you'd like to admit running around opening doors. Each new pathway always taking you back to the start at the end of it. Once everyone's to exhausted to continue and agrees that nothing's going to get done at this rate you finally leave.

You and Ren tell Akechi about everything that happened and he focuses on the fact Maruki's persona was personally talking to you guys. He thinks this would be a good opportunity to get information on Maruki without actually having to talk to him. He also notes that making progress in his palace might be impossible without learning more about his powers anyway. Ren agrees with him, so Akechi does his best to get time off for tomorrow.

Akechi manages to pull through, so the next day you're back in Maruki's palace with him in tow this time, hoping to gain something out of this visit. Be it information or by some miracle, progress.

Azathoth is there to greet you as soon as you step inside and calling your group "bold" for daring to come back. Akechi steps forward to try and manipulate it into telling him how Maruki's powers work. Azathoth see's through it though being able to read Akechi's mind, and instead offers to show everyone. Then it teleports everyone to different sides of the palace and places them under the effects of actualisation. It doesn't end up working on you since Azathoth isn't actually able to read into your deepest memories. There's not enough for him to draw upon to actualise into a fantasy for you, so instead to keep you out of the way he places you onto a pedestal. It's high enough that if you were to jump off you'd without a doubt break something.

When you're put up there all you can think about is the event that got you sent to this world in the first place, and break down. You're there for a while, hyperventilating and begging for someone—anyone—to get you down from there. You freak out when something starts to circle around your waist and pull you upwards until you're pulled into somebody. It takes a bit longer for you to calm down and open your eyes, and when you do your vision is filled with floating holograms filled with code and random hieroglyphs fluttering across the walls.

Futaba continues holding onto you tightly, trying to ground you and asks if you're doing any better. When you tell yes she says she's going to make her persona spit the both of you back onto the ground now. It's a short distance so you should be fine! You give her the okay and wait for your feet to finally touch the floor before you're thanking her profusely. She's a little embarrassed, but otherwise brushes it off. You're her friend and her teammate, she would never leave you in that kind of position. Especially when she knows how awful it is to feel that panicked.

Taking another moment to fully calm yourself, you remember everyone was supposed to be put under the effects of actualisation, and ask Futaba how she was able to save you.

She tells you she was, but her persona alerted her to you being in trouble. When she arrived and saw you in that state she realized she was in a fantasy and had to snap out of it to help you. You thank her again and set off to find the rest of your teammates.

You both end up coming across Ryuji and Makoto and freeing them from their fantasies, and afterwards you hear something collapse in the distance. Futaba brings you to where it supposedly happened, and when you enter you find the place has been utterly demolished.

Following the path of destruction leads you to Akechi. He's a mess. Breathing heavily on the floor and completely disheveled. He nearly cuts your head off when you try to walk towards him, but quickly puts his sword away when he realizes it's the real you.

The others stay off to the side while you're helping him up. Makoto asks him what happened here and Akechi's only response is to call this his hell.

They would've asked why, had the room not started to shift. Akechi's hold on you tightens as everything that was broken gets put back where it was in peak condition, and a couple people start to form out of the dust that was scattered across the floor.

Oh.

It's his parents.

You don't know much about his mother, other than the fact she killed herself, but watching Shido attempt to be fatherly towards Akechi is enough to make you gag. You can't begin to fathom how Akechi is taking this himself.

It quickly sinks in for the others what the gravity of the situation is. With the way his grip on you tightens even further, and the way his other hand twitches as if ready to throw his blade through their skull.

You're positive you're moments away from entering a fight, when lightning strikes them both, shocking them in place. It's Ryuji who announces it's time to leave, grabbing your other arm and bolting off with Futaba in Makoto's grasp running beside you.

"He's your dad??? No wonder you turned out the way you did."

"If the peanut gallery could shut the fuck up and focus on escaping I'm sure that'd be beneficial to everyone!"

You're all panicking running through hallway after hallway and coming to the realization that the house has suddenly turned into maze. You're weaving through the cognitions attacks and doing whatever you can to try and slow it down so you can backtrack if you ever come across a dead end.

Eventually you find the door you used to get in here, but it won't budge which effectively makes it a dead end. You quickly turn around to try and find a different exit, but the cognitions have caught up to you and trapped you there. They fuse together with a bunch of objects in the surrounding area and become an amalgamation of things you assume Akechi's supposed to love. There's no way around it now, so you're forced to fight it.

The only thing this… thing seems to be weak to is gun, but very quickly you all run out of bullets. It seemed like all anyone could do was scratch it when trying anything else, and soon the fight turned from "is this weak to any other element?" to "is there anything in this area I can throw at it to simulate gun damage?"

In the midst of everyone outside of Akechi rooting through household objects, Futaba is able to come up with a plan. A plan that requires Akechi to enter her persona with her for a bit while the rest of you keep the cognition occupied. Akechi's the only one with gun skills so it'd be a pain to let him off the front lines, but you all trust Futaba and tell him to get in the UFO. After a moment of hesitation he eventually does.

They're separated from the fight for some time, long enough for the pressure to start being felt by the rest of you, but Akechi soon descends from Necronomicon. He walks past everyone, only to aim his gun right at the cognition. Futaba tells the rest of you to stand back before starting to charge his gun. That's when you notice the green pixels flying off of his gun in sparks.

Once it's fully charged and Futaba shouts at him to fire, you're surprised when he calls out to Hereward and is actually able to summon him.

Hereward shoots its arrow at the same time Akechi pulls the trigger and creates a massive explosion on impact with the cognition. When the smoke dissipates and you see no part of that monstrosity remained, the doors behind you opened. Everyone is swift to make their exit, and while you are too, you can't help but ask about what you just witnessed.

"When'd you get Hereward!? You've been using Loki this whole time??"

"Just now."

"???"

You're utterly confused and Akechi refuses to elaborate. When you look towards the others to see if they have any answer, Makoto shakes her head, Ryuji shrugs, and Futaba looks away.

While wandering around looking for any of the other Thieves, Makoto and Ryuji waste no time asking what the hell all of that just was. Akechi for the first time willingly answers questions asked of him (no you're not upset he answered them and not you. Of course not). The questions he chose to answer end up with him talking shit about Shido and ignoring everything else, but it does help the three not in the know understand him more.

Finally you run into the Thieves not already with you and make a b-line to the exit. It's safe to say this try at Maruki's palace was also a bust, so you leave pretty dejected having made no progress at all.

Everyone's mood—though already sour—immediately gets shot when you bump into Sae Niijima as soon as you leave the palace.

Filled with confusion, suspicion, and righteous fury, she demands you come with her to her apartment.

She was looking for Akechi. It was urgent, and he wasn't responding to her messages. When she asked around, the last place people saw him at was the stadium. She went thinking he was following a clue, only to see all of you appearing out of thin air.

Once you get there, the conversation with her quickly devolves. It turns from Sae sternly talking to you all and everyone trying to provide her with answers, to her yelling about all the trouble your group has caused and everyone frantically trying to rebut her claims. She doesn't believe a word any of you say and finds it baffling that you're somehow the cause behind Japan's recent incidents. You're at your wits end when she starts to harp on Makoto for getting involved with the Phantom Thieves, comparing her to their father, then trying to walk away.

None of you can allow her though, not when she's still so wound up and will clearly sell you out immediately. Makoto and Ryuji block her way to the door and everyone is trying to get her to listen, but it only makes her more agitated. When all seems to be reaching a boiling point, you hear someone behind you starting up the navigation app and without delay you're all sent into the Metaverse.

The house for the most part looks the same, except now there are two Makotos. It's Akechi that passes from behind you, dressed in his red and white rebel outfit, and explains why he sent everyone here. The only way to make sure she couldn't leave and force her to listen to us was to show her. What better way to show her than with her own palace?

Sae's still angry, even when looking at two Makotos she just thinks it's some form of joke, until Morgana starts to speak. Almost instantly all anger turns into confusion, and gets worse when you tell her that's your cat.

Now she's finally willing to listen to you, Ren's able to explain what's going on from when he arrived to now with everyone else chiming in here and there. To help explain the concept of Palaces to her, since you were already in one you went towards where her casino is. It's a reality check for her, when you explain what's in there and she has a brief encounter with her shadow.

Afterwards you exit her palace. She tells you she understands what you guys are doing now and that she needs a moment to clear her head. You still can't fully trust that she won't tell anybody, so Makoto elects to go with her for support.

Now that you all can finally breath everyone nearly collapses where they are.

You melt into your chair while everyone else talks about the events leading up to now. You chime in a couple times when they're talking about Sae, then they start to talk about what happened in Maruki's palace.

They each go over their own experiences when you all were separated by Azathoth. You learn Ren wasn't one of the people completely effected by the actualisation. He was put into a fantasy, but couldn't be fooled into thinking it was real so he was able to escape and help the others you and Futaba didn't find.

Despite the others mostly opening up (Everyone involved in Akechi's skirts around the topic. Akechi just calls it shit and asks to move on) you're very brief about yours and completely downplay the event, only saying that Azathoth couldn't use actualisation on you for reasons unknown and just put you somewhere high up so you couldn't interfere. You don't get to move on from it though, because Futaba ends up mentioning how awful you actually felt. While explaining the fantasy that Azathoth gave to her brought her mother back, the only way she realized it was fake was because she ended up in the room you where kept in. You were near inconsolable and could barely hear a word she was saying. The only way to help was to snap out of the fantasy herself and use her persona to get you down from there.

You get sympathy looks from some that you wave off as just your fear of heights getting the better of you, but the others look at you with some form of guilt. That's when Ann asks if it's really just a fear of heights. You're confused as to why she'd even ask, then she brings up your palace and you freeze. Then you realize everyone looking at you with some form of guilt are the ones that explored your palace ages ago.

They explain the only way to defeat your shadow without killing it was to use your fear of heights against it. It screamed a lot and they felt terrible for doing it, and one of the many things it ended up shout at them was "Please, I'll do whatever you want, just don't push me."

You're horrified that they've known this the whole time and they feel bad for forgetting to ask. Now everyone is staring at you waiting for you to say literally anything in response, but you have no idea how to tell them. You still don't even want to think about it.

Before you can say anything and therefore can keep delaying processing all of that, the TV cuts to a broadcast. Unfortunately, it'd the SIU Director.

Everyone in the room glances to Akechi for answers, but he's unfortunately just as confused as everyone else. That in itself is terrible news.

He proceeds to go on and on about how the Phantom Thieves are an egregious danger to this society, how outside of hacking their ways of "changing hearts" are completely unknown. Are they getting blackmail? Are they threatening them in person? Could they possibly be staging every ordeal? Or is it something even more sinister? Then he blames the death of principal Kobayakawa on them, how there was a calling card found in his office yet statements on it were kept quiet, and suggests that something similar might've happened to Okumura. He states these "Phantom Thieves of Hearts" to be public enemy number one and offers a fifty million yen reward for any information useful to the investigation.

Everyone is shocked and outraged, but falls silent when Akechi's phone rings. He answers the call in another room while the rest of you sit in tense silence.

When he comes back he reveals he's been given a deadline. Find and kill the Phantom Thieves before the end of November. Shido didn't say what would happen if he didn't, but it's not hard to piece together what the consequences are.

Everyone takes a moment to calm down while waiting for Sae and Makoto to come back and tell them what just happened. Sae promises that she won't sell you out and suggests that you all should go home so you can think things through with a clear head tomorrow.

The next day when you all come together you get to planning. It's clear Shido and the Director are trying to goad you into delving into the palace of someone on the investigation team. That would severely lower the number of people Akechi has to look into. You can't go after the Director since that would still be falling into his trap yet again. It seems the only way to stop this is and save yourselves + Akechi at the same time is to go after the man himself to expose the conspiracy.

So now you have to switch gears and deal with Shido before Akechi’s deadline. The only problem is you still have Okumura tucked away in your palace. You don't know how much time you'll have after you beat Shido before the Metaverse takeover, so you're going to have to complete two palaces at the same time. Knowing how each palace has gone up to this point, both are going to be extremely hard as well.

Everyone is stressed and already exhausted, so you all decide to go home and rest for tomorrow. Before you get too far away though Ren pulls you aside and asks you to follow him. He brings you into Mementos telling you he has a persona for you. You're excited for about two seconds until he tells you it's Hell Biker.

"Are you being serious right now?"

"He has fifty in magic and sixty in agility."

"I'm listening."

Ren tells you he's been working on Hell Biker alongside Arsène since he learned he could give you personas. Now seemed like a good time to give him to you since you'll need all the coverage and firepower your team can get. Also because he's worried. He's worked on this forever (3 months) he needs you to have him.

You're overjoyed you get to have one of the skeletons on your team and at how much work Ren put into him.

When you accept him into your heart you're expecting the serene experience with slight hints to their element thrown in that the other personas given to you had. What you were not expecting was for a burn so intense to bring you to your knees and adrenaline to start pumping through your veins. It's even more surprising to watch his form morph into something else. Not by much, but noticeable enough to question why anything about it was changing in the first place. Then he speaks,

"So you are the one that changes fate? Very well. I am Ghost Rider, and together we will be the saviours of the innocent! Let us show those sinners the true meaning of Hell!"

Half of his moves also mutate into better versions of themselves, before the burn fades away and your body releases its tension.

Ren helps you up as you both watch the newly formed Ghost Rider hitch up his monster of a motorcycle in one of the side areas and everything around it change to match. Switching from looking at him to his stats you find they've all increased.

"… This is the best thing you could have ever given to me."

Ren, after getting over his shock, of course acts cocky about it before you check him in the arm. He laughs it off, then sincerely tells you he's happy it got stronger for you. He still needs to figure out what the best persona would be for your last slot, so the sudden mutation was beneficial in the meantime.

The next day you all meetup again to decide what to do. You only have around a month, given the deadline Shido's set for Akechi, but who knows if he'd pull the trigger earlier then that. That makes Shido top priority, but you can’t ignore the possibility of that being the catalyst of the Metaverse takeover. If that happens then you can't do anything to Okumura. Seeing as it'd be too inefficient to do one before the other, it comes to the terrible conclusion to do them at the same time. If you split into to teams, one to work on Okumura’s palace and one to do Shido’s, then the problems they could potentially face down the line don't apply.

No one really wants to, either because they know the next palaces are going to be extremely hard or because the thought of going in with a small group in itself is difficult, but you all know you can pull it off. You have to.

After some deliberation, you all manage to decide who's going to be on what team.

On operation Shido there's Joker, Crow, Mona, Panther, and Fox, while on operation Okumura has You, Skull, Queen, Oracle, and Noir.

It felt wrong to move either Ren or Akechi to do Okumura’s Palace since they both have a personal stake in Shido's. You, obviously, were sent to Okumura’s as the only other person with multiple personas and knowledge of his palace. As much as you'd love to help them deal with that piece of shit, the firepower is needed on Okumura’s side.

That does leave both wildcard's in the other palace, so you can't help but ask who's supposed to be the leader on your team. Everyone gives you various looks, from surprised, to disbelief, and amusement. It takes you a moment to understand why.

"… Wait it's me!? I don't know the first thing about leading a team!"

"Haven't you technically already lead our team to victory multiple times?"

"Yeah, in the game! This is completely different I don't know the first thing about—"

Ren places a hand on your shoulder to stop you before you ramble yourself into a panic. He only had one thing to say,

"You'll be fine."

You don't know if you should be embarrassed that was all it took for you to calm down.

Once you discuss a little more on how each team is going to operate you split off. Each group going towards their respective targets location to start their palaces. Ren does make sure to give you half of the coffee and curry supply to hopefully make up for the half of the team your missing. He also tries to shove a majority of his healing items and smoke bombs onto you since your team doesn't have a backup member. It takes a while before you get on the train to head towards Okumura foods.

You arrive with your members and find an alleyway nearby to go over his palace in more detail. When you're about to head inside so you can use the war table in your palace to help with descriptors, you get a message from Ren. He's telling you to hold on for a moment and saying he's leaving the final decision to you. You would've asked him what he meant if the answer didn't come barreling into you at top speed.

It's Yoshizawa. She wants to help.

You want to deny her help since this has nothing to do with her at all and the stakes have gotten extremely dire, but she's still insistent. Especially since she figured out you're going in with such a small group. You can't deny that you know she's good and having an extra person would only be beneficial, so after talking it over with the others, you acquiesce and let her on the team as Violet. Though, you make her promise that this is going to be the only palace she helps you with.

Now that your team has a party of 5 attackers, 3 of which can also heal (that's including you), and a navigator, it makes you feel a little better about diving into Okumura’s palace.

You head into your palace first to get Yoshizawa up to speed and describe the layout of Okumura’s palace (at least the games layout. You don't know if it's changed or not). Once everyone's got everything down you head into his palace proper.

You find Okumura’s palace has altered in ways that makes it all the more irritating to get through. He is simultaneously, more confident in his position, yet more terrified of getting taken down one way or another. The shaky agreement you currently have with him saves him from Shido, but now he also knows Shido wants him dead. Sure you've lent out your hand to help him, but the Phantom Thieves are still a rouge vigilante group that change the hearts of the corrupt, and the Black Mask is an assassin working for Shido. Even if siding with you guys is a safer bet, to him every side is a loss.

His shadow is… without a better way to put it, completely delusional because of this. He never physically shows himself, but he's constantly heard over the speakers and occasional TV broadcast. It drives all of you insane, though it does lead you to learning how to navigate the area faster.

On one of your runs through and quickly getting tired of hearing Okumura’s shadow mouthing off, you remark how nice it would be if Prometheus could carry you all. Futaba tells you she could fit one extra person in there at most. Ryuji then says it would be nice if they could all just ride their personas, before summoning Seiten Taisei and attempting to jump onto his cloud.

It works.

That in turn makes you summon Ghost Rider to try and get on his bike. After he scoots back a bit you perfectly fit on the seat infront of him.

Makoto gets on Anat in motorcycle form, Haru is able to join behind her, and Futaba lets Yoshizawa into Prometheus.

With this revelation the palace exploration goes by much quicker. You're even able to skip a couple of the puzzles thanks to both yours and Ryuji's lack of self preservation (you both mostly just want to reach the end to make Okumura shut up).

"I bet I could make that jump."

"I could just fly over."

"How about that's a long fall with spinning gears at the bottom so neither of you should do anything!"

In about a week, your team reaches the end of Okumura’s palace and secures the route to his treasure. When you reach the rendezvous point excited to tell the others about the news, it's dampened when you notice the other team hasn't arrived yet. Makoto then notes you've arrived a little early and to give them a bit more time to show up.

Over ten minutes past the meetup time and they still haven't shown up. Futaba checks to see if their phones are even getting service. They aren't, so they must still be in the Metaverse.

Worried for their safety, you all agree to go to Shido's palace. Though you make sure Yoshizawa gets on the train home first and promise to text her when you're out. None of you want her anywhere near the politician.

As soon as you enter, Futaba tracks their location and you all set off. It's when she notices there's a powerful signature in the area with them you get her to patch you all into coms.

"Joker! What's going on over there? Are you guys okay??"

"What the— What are you guys doing here!?"

"You were late!"

You're all speeding towards the location Futaba gave you when an explosion suddenly shakes the yacht. The others are frantic on the other side of coms and when you reach the side of the boat they're on you can see why.

They're fighting way off the side of the boat on pillars of ice. The side of the ship where you vaguely remember the IT President's room is lit ablaze. Almost like a meteor struck that exact spot. You assume that was the cause of the explosion earlier.

The others are trying to ask what the hell happened here. Key word trying, since they're frantic themselves and trying to figure out a way up that won't have everyone slip and fall into the water below. Eventually Ren breaks away for a moment to give you answers.

This is the IT Director. He was just some nerd in a suit, but then they accidentally pissed him off. He proceeded to turn into Oberon, shock everyone in the room, take the letter and fly off the side of the ship. They've been trying to get him back on the ship, but he's as fast as a bullet, and anytime they get close he summons a Titania to protect him. Titania also keeps breaking the pillars and it's taking a toll on Yusuke. Akechi then interrupts to ask if you're going to stand around and watch, or get up there and help.

Ryuji and Futaba fly up to get to the fight faster while you, Makoto, and Haru have to climb up the side of the yacht to jump over. It takes all of you to enact a plan to get the IT Director back on the ship, and when he is, you and Ren waste no time trapping him there. Surrounded by a wall of fire, he has no where to go as you both pummel him into the ground and take the letter from him. At that Ren calls it a day and you all head back.

(Of course you inform Yoshizawa about what happened and it takes a long time to calm her of her guilt and to stop worrying about you all)

The next day you're debating whether you should steal Okumura's treasure now or closer to Shido's. There's good points for both, waiting mostly in favour of his safety, but Akechi brings up how useful Okumura could be if done now. He could be an immense boon once they plan to write and send out Shido's calling card since he was deep into the conspiracy. While true, Futaba does clap back that they'd still have to wait for the change of heart to fully come into affect. Who knows how long that'd take or if it'd even get done in time. Then there's the obvious problem if Shido finds out he's back he'd just try to kill him.

It's Haru that steps up next, saying she could keep his return a secret from everyone. That way there'd be little risk in taking his treasure now. Even if the change isn't finished in time, they'll at least won't have to worry about it later. When everyone asks if she's okay with the possibilities of it going wrong, she solidifies her stance. She wants her father to get better, but she also wants to make sure Shido gets convicted for as much of his crimes as possible. So she'll make sure both succeed.

The only problem with the plan is the public's opinion since they wouldn't be able to make a grand gesture of Okumura's calling card, but at this point no one cares that much. If anything they're irritated that public opinion matters that much at all. There isn't anyone with a better plan that appeases the public while also dealing with both of their targets in a better manner so it has to do anyway.

Later on, you have Sae deliver the calling card to Okumura, feigning that it was left at the door and interrogating him over it. When she tells you he read it and looked manic your previous team absolutely dreads the fight. The others that have yet to experience his palace worry for the state of it at your reactions.

Okumura's fight, for better or for worse, has barely seen any changes. The only difference is him being more frantic in his decisions and overall being more unpredictable. Which sucks since all the shadows and cognitions have more nullifications and repels that always comes back to bite you. He's also yapping the whole fight, and while your team was used to his nonsense (unfortunately), the other team was not. You're pretty sure Akechi would've shot him if he wasn't trying to be as careful as possible.

When you finally win the fight and take his treasure, you're now waiting for it to take effect and acting as normal as possible.

During the waiting game, Akechi is almost never around since he still has to act like he's searching for the Phantom Thieves, but there is one day where he asks to meet you in your palace. When you arrive he's already there, and he doesn't wait long before he's

He tells you he's giving you Loki.

You think he's insane.

Then he starts to go off on how he doesn't really need Loki, Hereward and him are basically the same. Hereward is just stronger in every way and knows Rebellion Blade. He also doesn't even need Loki's ability anymore and Hereward has a more useful ability anyway. And he's not annoying like Loki is so—

Akechi's basically giving you the worst sales pitch in the world, but you start to figure out where this decision is really coming from. Without another moment of hesitation you stop him from further making a fool of himself to give your answer.

"Sounds like a pain. I'd be more than happy to take him off your hands."

After he collects himself, Akechi begins the transfer and Loki slowly comes into your view. The feeling is just as intense as it was with Ghost Rider, but instead of the feeling of fire coursing through your veins, it's a bone chilling freeze creeping up your spine. Though this time you're prepared and continue to stand tall. You don't want to collapse encase Loki would see that as a weakness and somehow reject you, but he breaks that train of thought quickly.

"YOU ALREADY KNOW OF ME, AND I OF YOU. YOU HAVE PROVED YOUR WORTH LONG AGO. WE SHALL CLAIM VICTORY OVER ALL AND LET NOTHING STAND IN OUR WAY. MAY THE GODS FALL BENEATH OUR FEET."

When Loki's fully accepted into your heart and the pain subsides, you watch as the last room in your Thieves Den morph into one perfectly fitting for him. Then you go to check his stats and can't believe what you're looking at. His move pool is so much larger than any of your other personas. You have to do a double take and count everything just to make sure you're not making things up.

You have access to everything.

Every move or ability Loki has ever used is available to you.

Including Call of Chaos.

You're staring at the list in shock while Loki is laughing somewhere in the room. If he's laughing at you, at the mayhem he thinks/hopes you'll get up to, or just at the situation you don't know. Akechi walks next to you looking more smug than he was before.

"I hope he does you well."

You're overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that you don't think twice before you're pulling him into a hug. He's stiff for a moment, then relaxes and just lets it happen.

"Thank you Akechi."

"… It's Goro."

While you're stunned at the next emotional bomb he just dropped on you, Akechi successfully pushes you away and promptly speed walks over to the exit. He informs you he's stayed around for too long and has to get back to looking like he's doing work, then makes his leave.

A couple days later with no sign of Okumura getting out of his slump or Shido making any sort of moves, you all head back into Shido's palace. Everyone's relieved to finally have the full party back together again. Especially knowing that this last letter will probably have them run into cognitive Akechi. A fight that sounds like it's going to be extremely taxing since they're expecting The Cleaner to be hard enough.

Once you take out his goons and follow him into the Engine Room, you're unfortunately proven right. He has no weaknesses, something you were expecting since the original is the same, but he's also immune to your strongest fighters. It's completely irritating, but more doable than the last guy was and you beat him without too much issue. The real problem comes after.

Everyone heals up and replenishes their energy before leaving the Engine Room, to unfortunately be greeted by cognitive Akechi waiting on the other side.

He spouts a lot of nonsense similar to what he originally said in the game, everyone disputes him, Goro tells him to fuck off and die, and the fight commences.

This world's Shido must've thought he was some unkillable god of some kind in the Metaverse 'cause the fight is utterly ridiculous. It doesn't help that he keeps summoning shadows to his side, making the fight more cluttered than it needed to be. You all know Shido's faith in Goro has waned though, so everyone tries to figure out where to poke to get the cognition to slip.

When everyone is on that, Goro slips over to you to ask if you know how to use Loki. When you reply that of course you do, he's your persona now, Goro just says that's great and to get ready. As soon as the others find cognitive Akechi’s breaking point, you and Goro strike. The look on the cognitions face when he realizes the real Goro’s no longer the one in control of Loki is absolutely priceless.

It's a thrill moving in tandem with Goro. There's a level of sheer violence that no one else has that's so invigorating all you can do is laugh alongside him. You don't bat an eye when he shoots his doppelganger in the face. If anything you feel lighter than you did before.

That's one fate you've finally managed to change for good. Even though you still have a ways to go before you're out of the absolute worst of it, it still feels like your efforts are finally bearing fruit. The cognition you just watched Goro wipe being the proof.

Now with all the letters in your possession, you're able to open the door and secure the route to Shido's treasure. Now all that's left is to see if Okumura will change in time, or if you have to continue without his additions.

A few days after, Haru informs everyone Okumura's change of heart has finally gone through. She had to do a lot of convincing to get her father to stay put and not make any sudden announcements, but he did eventually concede. With a little bit of negotiating with Sae and a few scant sightings of Black Mask, Okumura agrees to help the Phantom Thieves take down Shido (not that he needed much convincing, but some definitely needed to be made when it came to what information needs to shared to the public and what can wait for trial).

It takes a couple more days to get the footage, but when you do

It goes over about the same as it did in the game. The Phantom Thieves hacking multiple news stations to send out their video calling card to Shido. With the addition of you of course, but Goro refused to make an appearance. Despite everything he still doesn't want to openly associate with the Phantom Thieves, and says it's beneficial for it to stay that way.

One major change does happen at the end, which makes the public go wild (and you can only hope it drives Shido mad). Okumura makes his appearance at the end, openly apologizing for everything he's done and lifting the veil on the conspiracy. Shido is a maniac, and has an assassin he only knows as the Black Mask under his belt. He is responsible for all of the mental shutdowns and psychotic breakdowns happening around Japan. All he can do now is apologize profusely for his appalling behaviour in taking apart of this and turn himself into the police.

When his section cuts off and the declaration to steal Shido's heart has been made you all jump in.

The talk with Shido's shadow at the start is… rough to say the least, but it's not like you weren't expecting that. It was already charged when it was just the Phantom Thieves with Ren. Now that Goro's here too it makes listening to him so much more infuriating.

The fight is also more or less what you expected. The horrendous fusion of Shido's ego and the bonus difficulty increase was comically easy to guess and plan around. Granted it doesn't make the battle any easier to actually fight against, but you're as prepared as you possibly could. Especially Ren, who's somehow managed to become over prepared, but at this point you can't even blame him.

When you get separated from the battle with the other Phantom Thieves, it leaves the only ones left facing Shido to be Ren Amamiya and Goro Akechi.

In any other instance you'd be worried, every fight up to this point has been made so much harder, but you already know they'd never let him get the upper hand again. No matter how much harder he may be, he's going down now, and you get front row seats for such a spectacle.

There is a moment where you're worried Goro may actually go through with his original convictions and kill Shido, but Ren manages to talk him down from that. Goro also doesn't want to squander their chances of getting the other criminal convicted and killing a god, so instead he says he hopes Shido rots in prison and dies at somebody else's hand.

That's when the palace starts to collapse.

Without another moment to spare, Morgana transforms into his bus form for everyone to hop on, while those that can ride their own personas take the lead.

It's anxiety inducing dodging all the falling rubble and trying to pick paths that whoever is driving Morgana is able to follow through. A few times you've had to go a different way or just blast your way through the falling ship, but you quickly make your way to the start of the yacht.

Not wanting to even attempt getting the lifeboat (even though your memory of the game has slowly faded with time, you will never forget the Ryuji scare) you have everyone drive immediately into your palace. You get stuck there for a bit while it's deciding where it should spit you out now that the original exit is gone, but no one cares. You've all finally accomplished one of the biggest hurdles in your way.

With both Okumura and Shido having a change of heart, the public and the police force are frantic. Sae outright tells you your group is highly suspected to be the Phantom Thieves at this point, but they don't have any evidence to make an arrest. You're forced to lay low and not draw more suspicion towards yourselves unless you want to tempt the police to take action against you anyway.

This still isn't ideal. Even though nothing happened immediately after Shido's change, Yaldabaoth could still make his move at any moment. You can't do anything if you get arrested though, so you all pick one day to celebrate your victory over Okumura and Shido to get your minds off of everything.

After waiting a few days, the police only seem to get busier and busier. Dealing with two high level people, to them, basically confessing to a heinous conspiracy at the same time, public pressure forcing them to comb through every other candidate, needing to take in the SIU Director into custody, and having the Phantom Thieves still be at large on top of all that. They are stretched thin and barely holding on, but it does let them move a little more freely than earlier.

At some point when trying to studying for final exams with Yoshizawa, you accidentally let it slip that Maruki may be your next target. This obviously concerns her, and after a bit of convincing on her end and not wanting to sit around waiting for the world to end on yours, you agree to search through the palace with her.

You don't think you'd get into any fights since you're only scouting, but just in case you inform Ren where you're going and who you're with. Ren tells you it's a bad idea and informs you Morgana will be very disappointed if you go in. You reassure them that you plan on staying outside and at the entrance, only enough for Yoshizawa to get the picture. He relents, but if you're not back in less than an hour he's going in for you.

When you and Yoshizawa get in, you walk around the perimeter with her, trying to explain why his ideals—even though are done with good intentions—aren't exactly great. You wouldn't even be here discussing this if his desires weren't distorted in some way.

You think she's starting to understand why his mentality isn't necessarily a good one, but when you open the front door to show her some of the things inside things start to go horribly wrong. Beyond the door lies bright flashing lights, accompanied by the sound of slot machines and people chattering.

This is clearly not Maruki's palace.

You ask Yoshizawa to stay by the door and go further in to see if what you think is happening really is happening. Walking around you only find more and more slot machines, until you come across a shadow at a desk. She's selling membership cards for fifty-thousand coins. You think you're going to scream.

On the way back towards Yoshizawa you notice a shadow behind her charging up some sort of attack.

Without thinking you pull her out of harms way, which unfortunately meant you pulled her away from the door. The explosion caused by that shadow was enough to close it behind you. It doesn't open again.

You both try everything you can think of to get it to open again, even just a crack, but it doesn't budge a bit. You actually do scream this time.

Knowing Ren will show up at some point to save you and to say "I told you so" has you stay put for as long as possible. You don't want to run off and make it harder for the rest of the Thieves to find you guys, but you eventually do have to move when what looks like security starts scoping out the floor. You don't know how strong they could be, so starting a fight with only two of you is asking to die.

The more doors you open the more you realize something's not right. Sometimes when you open a door you'll find yourself in a castle or a bank, but most of the time it's still the casino. Though not one of the doors has lead you back to the Science Centre. You thought the one time you were messing with a randomizer mod had somehow injected itself into Maruki's palace, but this is clearly more selective then that.

After speed walking past the fifth ass you and Yoshizawa had the displeasure of looking at, you end up in a different section of the Sae-but-not-Sae's palace. That's when you get patched through to coms and--

"Hey Glitch, we're here! Care to tell us what the heck is going on??"

"Why hello Oracle it's so nice to hear from you! I was just thinking about you. I managed to find a copy of Zephyrman earlier that we could watch—"

"Answer the question!"

While you're telling them what happened, you eventually get cut off by shouting in the distance. Looking around you realize it's coming from their side, and after they calm down they inform you they were separated. Now you all have to take part in this randomized maze of a palace.

Along the way you and Yoshizawa manage to group up with Ren and Goro, before finding yourselves in Maruki's palace again. You don't know whether to consider it good or bad that you end up in the room with the projection of Kasumi. Then her headaches start. You would tell her what's going on, but she wants to figure it out for herself, so instead you help her navigate through the areas.

After some time you finally come across a room filled with Maruki's research. It's in there Yoshizawa figures out what happened to her.

It takes a lot of reassurance, but she eventually calms down enough to continue moving. Ren and Goro lead while you stay behind with her to make sure she doesn't fall behind or get ambushed. When you make it back to the entrance of Maruki's palace, you find Futaba and Makoto are already there. Everyone else is still somewhere inside.

You lead Yoshizawa to sit on the side of the building and let her cry. Soon everyone's come over to offer their condolences, while Futaba and Makoto are able to offer more in the form of experience. When the others arrive they also go over their own false realities Maruki had them stuck in for a time, and how they pushed through it.

Yoshizawa thanks everyone and says she just needs a moment before they can move on, which everyone readily gives her. It shouldn't have been a surprise that when you were all distracted talking about what was wrong with this palace, Yoshizawa gets taken away by Azathoth.

You're all chasing after him, threatening the persona to give her back while he berates you for undoing Maruki's work.

"She was doing well under our guidance until you dismantled our hard work."

"Are you—look at where that's gotten her!" "Like she needs his shitty fucking therapy!"

With him holding Yoshizawa so close none of you can really get any good hits in that won't harm her in the process. So you're exhilarated when she starts to fight back herself. She's still distraught, but she wants to try and face herself and asks you all to call her Sumire.

Now that she's freed herself from Azathoth's grasp, you all get ready to fight him head on. Azathoth clearly didn't want to though, so in order to make sure more of Maruki's efforts to go to waste, he makes haste to eject you all from his palace. Trying to go back in leads to you getting an error message.

When you finally leave you offer to walk Sumire home before heading home yourself. You feel terrible for what you put her through, but she doesn't regret asking you to take her into Maruki's palace. She feels awful right now, but she wants to push forward like all of you can.

The next day you learn through Goro that Maruki's palace has been completely locked off. After much deliberating and learning most of the Thieves apps aren't even working properly anymore, the only thing that comes to mind is Yaldabaoth getting tired of things not going his way. This literally leaves you to sit around and wait for the apocalypse to happen.

You do as much as you can before exams start. Help Sumire get more comfortable with herself, finishing of the last of the requests that you had no time to do before, and of course studying for the actual exams.

When exam days finally roll around you're on autopilot. You're physically doing the tests, but in your mind you can only think about the upcoming fight. The others aren't doing much better than you, but you all always come together to try and do something other than worry. It's one of those times when the sky turns red and the pillars of bone start to protrude from the ground. Knowing what comes next, you all descend to the depths of Mementos to confront the false god.

The journey through Qliphoth World is surprisingly mostly normal. Sure the shadows in the area are still stronger than normal, but it's nowhere near as agonizing as the last couple palaces have been. Morgana thinks since this area is the depths of Japan's psyche, you would have much less of an effect on it. Probably the reason why the shadows are even stronger is because they all were expecting it at this point.

You reach the bottom and are greeted to the cup of giant proportions. His monologue is about the same as it was, with the addition of him openly hating on Ren and Goro for veering off the guided course of the world, and you for daring to interfere in the first place.

This fight is much harder than any of you were expecting. You let the rest of the area lower your guard and paid the price for that. Though whether fortunate or unfortunate, the rhythm of the fight is still the same. After making enough progress, the masses simply heal him to full again and eject all of you back to the real world where you begin to disappear.

Another wrench is thrown to your expectations again when you find yourself floating somewhere in the void, instead of the Velvet Room. You're wandering around completely confused, hoping to find something—anything to help you figure out where you are when you see a sliver of blue. You rush to it hoping to find a possible entrance to the Velvet Room, but when you reach it you're only left more confused. You found the Velvet Room, it's just below you.

You stand there and watch as Ren frees everyone from the cages they were locked in while Goro and Morgana wait with Igor and Lavenza. Even after everyone enters the main area, Ren continues to run around. It takes you a moment to realize he's probably looking for you. The goal to find the exit becomes more urgent since you don't want to leave them to freak out, but you still don't know where to even start. When you turn around to continue looking, you're surprised when you bump into someone.

You jump back and begin to profusely apologize, afraid whoever you ran into could be a different Velvet Room attendant (god you hope it's not Elizabeth that would be a terrible first impression), but the laugh that you hear makes you pause. It's not one of the female attendants, but it doesn't sound like Theodore either. You look up to see who could possibly be talking to you and nearly blank.

It's Philemon.

Philemon is standing in front of you and he's laughing.

You think you're about to short circuit. Never in your life—even once you got transported here—did you ever think you'd be meeting one of the Gods of this world (by your heart of hearts Yaldaboath doesn't count), it wasn't even a thought that crossed your mind, yet here you are.

He starts to talk in what you think is a teasing way, but you're still struggling to process that he's standing right there. When you're brain's finally caught up, you accidentally cut him off to ask why he's here and why he's talking to you.

He wanted to converse with you since he finds you "interesting". Of course that tells you nothing so you ask him to clarify. Then he brings up your status as an outworlder. You're just about to roll your eyes when he continues speaking. It's much more than just you being from another world. He's the one that brought you here.

He's the one who gave you a second chance at life. He grew interested in your universe when he noticed a copy of his had been made in the form of a game. He wanted to know how pulling someone who already knows of this worlds future events would affect how things change. Since he was still recovering from his last major hurdle, he couldn't simply pluck someone from your world and bring them to his. Especially with all the barriers already surrounding it. Though when he saw you fall off that roof he couldn't help but to try and at least pull your soul over. Now here you are.

You honestly can't believe anything that just came out of his mouth. He summoned you over because you happened to be at the wrong place at the right time? Truly you can't believe it. You don't want to.

God was actually just fucking with you.

You can't entirely hate him for pulling you from your original universe. If he didn't you would've died and never had gotten to meet any of the Phantom Thieves you now hold even closer to your heart. You got to improve the lives for people you care about and for that you'll forever be grateful. But none of that changes the fact he did all of this on a whim.

He continues to go on about the changes you've made to fit your perception of a happier ending. He applauds you for your commitment and ability to preserver through strife despite this being completely unthinkable territory for you barely a year ago.

You stop him for a moment to collect yourself. You have a ton of questions you could be asking, but only one rests at the forefront of your mind. Why is he telling you this now?

His gaze almost turns somber in the way he looks at you. It makes you dread his response.

"You're being has become intrinsically tied to the Metaverse. There was no other way for me to tether you to this reality whilst lacking my full capabilities. What do you think will happen once it's gone?"

It barely takes you a moment to think of the answer, and it makes your blood freeze. Philemon can only look sorry for you (as much as he's willing to allow himself). He says that's all he had to impart onto you, and that he prays you find some way around it. With that being the last thing he had to say, he teleports you into one of the many back areas of the Velvet Room.

You sit there for a moment, needing to process this alone before you run into the main room where all your friends are waiting. The thought of Thieves nearly makes you cry.

A glowing butterfly makes itself known in the corner of your vision. It reminds you of what you're currently fighting for, so you pull yourself together. There's currently a god whose ass you have to help kick, you can feel sorry for yourself and your friends later.

As soon as you walk into the room your friends are immediately on you. They're completely panicked when they ask what happened to you, and you have no idea how to tell them the news. They still don't know you're from a different universe entirely, so you'd have a lot to explain. Time you don't really have. You guess you faltered for long enough for Igor to step in your place. He doesn't explain your predicament though and only brings the conversation back to Yaldobaoth. You feel guilty and you're sure some of the others notice, but you delude yourself into thinking it's fine and that you'll have time to tell them later.

Everything from then plays out like in the game. The climb up the tower of bones, fighting the archangels, and then Yaldabaoth himself. He still hates you all for steering everything off course and making this more complicated then it needed to be. He thanks you though for the new status ailments to use and you can only flip him off. He knocks you all down, Morgana makes his big speech and you earn the belief of all Japan. Ren summons Satanael and shoots the false god in the face.

It's when the Metaverse starts crumbling away and everyone is saying their 'goodbye's and 'see you later's to Morgana that you start to disappear.

You're freaking out. Some of them are freaking out, but a few are also mad at you. You don't get to explain yourself before you're dragged away by what's left of the Metaverse.

It's dark for a while. You don't know what you were expecting when you died, but it wasn't sitting in the void for an eternity. Soon you see a butterfly flying towards you from somewhere beyond the darkness, it's glow being the only thing eye-catching in this place. It comes close enough to land on you, but when it does a shock is sent throughout your entire system. Then something you aren't able to decipher starts to pull you out of what feels like the bottom of an ocean of oil. As soon as you breach the surface—

You wake up.

You take in your surroundings, groggily, but still with rapt attention. You don't even know why you're looking around in such a fervor, your room is exactly how you left it. Though the Persona merch does make you pause. It makes you uneasy, but you can't understand why for the life of you.

Then someone barges into your room and it's… Ren? Foggy memories start to come back to you and you're starting to freak out. Then the Ren look-alike re-introduces himself as Akira Kurusu and says you must've had some lucid dream to confuse his name with Ren again.

Apparently everyone's been waiting for you to come to Leblanc to study. When you never showed up he was sent to come looking for you at your house.

You're getting a headache listening to him. Memories start to clash against each other trying to take up the dominate space in your mind. Though when Ren—Akira leaves to allow you to change, you can't find any scars on your body. At least none that would look like battle wounds, so you'll take his word for it.

When you finish getting dressed, he Akira leads you to where everyone else supposedly is. You don't know why, but you're actually surprised to find everyone actually is waiting for you.

Ryuji, Ann, Yusuke, Makoto, Futaba, Haru, Goro, Akira's (lovingly) annoying ass cat, and your old friends. You don't know why, but you cry upon seeing them again.

The next few days are fairly normal to you. You go to school, hangout and play games with all your friends, and study. Despite everything proceeding as normal, you can't stop this nagging feeling that something is horribly wrong here. It all comes to a head when Akira visits you out of the blue.

He's acting a little off. He's much more silly and charming than he usually is, but there's also a sadness—a yearning in his eyes when he looks at you. Every one of his actions and every word he says also seems to be meticulously chosen in a way. Almost like one wrong move and he'd mess everything up. You can't figure out what he's so scared of getting wrong, he's only visiting you. You don't know what's gotten into him, but you're still finding it a nice change of pace from the laid back dude he usually is.

Once he's finished looking over your room with an attention to detail you didn't know he had, he confuses you with what he says next.

"This is a nice dream, but when are you going to wake up?"

You don't even know what to say to that. You're already awake. It's not like you could talk to him without being awake?

Akira leaves shortly after, but when he does you find a figure of Joker sitting on your shelf.

This repeats with all of your friends over the next few days. All of them telling you to "wake up" in various ways, either kindly, desperately, or… aggressively, and leaving behind a Persona figure eerily similar to them. Now you're having a hard time remembering what the Phantom Thieves actually looked like, but you can't find the game anywhere to check.

This whole thing is so confusing to you, you already woke up! Multiple times now in fact! You're starting to suspect they're talking about something else, but no matter what you can't put your finger on it.

Then everything sort of collapses in on you when you run into a new girl.

She introduces herself as Sumire, and she has the same yearning in her eyes that everyone else has had, along with their determination to confuse the fuck out of you.

"Have you even seen what's beyond this neighbourhood?"

When you tell her you've lived here all your life, she's adamant that you come with her to experience something new. You should be more weary of random people telling you to follow them, but something deep within you tells you she's trustworthy.

When you both reach the edge of your neighbourhood, you notice a line drawn in the ground to signify this is the end. You're a bit apprehensive, but Sumire is very patient and encouraging with you. Though before you can even take a step towards the line, you hear someone calling out to you.

It's some doctor. Apparently your therapist. Your instincts tell you not to trust a word he says, and the feeling is only furthered when Sumire talks back to him.

Soon the rest of your friends arrive on the scene and block your "therapist" from getting any closer to you. While he's distracted, Sumire tries to bring you across the line, but a barrier stops you from making anymore progress.

Not able to just drag you out anymore, Sumire starts talking about events that you swear never happened, but sound way too familiar. You shouldn't know this person, so your head is splitting when memories of you together crop up. She must see that what she's saying isn't helping at all, so she switches to hold your hands instead.

"You never gave up on me, so I'm not giving up on you."

Then she takes a figure of Violet out of her pocket and gives it to you, completing the set you didn't even know wasn't finished. You're trying to remember where this Thief comes from, and while staring at it your memories finally click into place.

The Thieves are extremely happy to finally have you back, while Maruki is disappointed he couldn't figure out a more surefire way to keep you affected by actualisation for longer. Your unique constitution made it incredibly difficult to figure out how to get it to work on you at all. Eventually he found if he kept you separated in your own little pocket, it'd be harder for you to tell what was real.

You're honestly appalled he put you in a bubble at all, but he promises it was only until he found a different solution, like that somehow makes it any better. Sumire starts to argue against his logic, so you go to stand next to her and give your own

"This is not the future I fought for! It's not the one we went through all that pain and suffering for! This fantasy you put me in might be happy, but it's meaningless without any of our past achievements!"

Maruki tries to argue that no hard work could get you your old friends and family back like he could, but you tell him they're just sock puppets performing on a stage. Even with all his new powers, you know those aren't and never could be your actual friends. Sumire also arguing that she wants to live her life in honour of her late sister and to make her proud through her own efforts, instead of trying to be exactly like her.

At the end of your speeches, you feel the power of your original personas combine to create something stronger, while Sumire's persona awakens into Ella. With them, together you destroy the bubble keeping you all contained.

You all head back to the real Leblanc, and the entire time their both celebrating finally getting you back, and teasing you for what they found in there. Though you can feel the underlying tension in the way they hold onto you and make sure you never leave their sight.

When you reach the cafe and the conversation goes silent, you all can no longer avoid the elephant in the room.

Goro's the one to bring up your disappearing act first, suspecting you knew that was going to happen and angrily asks why you didn't tell anybody.

Emotions are high on all sides of this conversation, but you're eventually able to get it through that yes, you had died, though technically you were already dead, your soul is tied to the Metaverse, so once it's destroyed by extension that includes you, one of the gods of this world told you so and unfortunately he's a trustworthy source.

They're not pleased in the slightest you kept this from them, but are still extremely confused as to why your life is connected to the Metaverse in the first place. There's no reason to hide anything from them, especially now, so you just come out and tell them everything.

They're wondering why you thought you had to keep this from them, and thinking about the answer it forces you to face the facts. This whole time you've been running away from your problems. You didn't want to think about dying, and you didn't ant to think about leaving your friends they way it happened, or about how guilty they must feel, or how you'll never be able to talk to them again. That life is over, but you avoided thinking about it after you got your own persona and threw yourself into this one.

You tell everyone as much and apologize. They're all completely distraught, but no one holds it against you.

Now that everyone knows this is most likely your last month to live, when you're not exploring Maruki's palace you always have at least one person with you.

The palace is also more or less the same. There are some rooms that take the aesthetic of a different palace, but it's still the same layout as it originally is. The real kicker is the shadows, that are basically all their modded variants.

The section in Mementos is also harder than usual. Unlike the other floors, this also added more difficult shadows in. You assume its because this is Maruki's personal addition. Fighting in both areas is extremely annoying, but much more doable than before with everyone's third tier personas, Ren finally getting access to some of the broken moves, and an overall increase in skill.

After handing Maruki the calling card, the walk to the top is slow. Everyone knows what will happen to you after, and prolong the confrontation to say goodbye before getting swept up in the fight.

In many ways, Maruki and Azathoth are harder to fight than Yaldabaoth. The false god had used the aliments you ended up bringing to the world, but Maruki is trying everything at his disposal. They basically use your memory against you, going in to find what annoyed you the most and using it in the battle. It ironically gets easier when they ultimately switch to that gigantic gold monstrosity. Especially once he resorts to just trying to punch all of you. You help the others block his next punch for Ren to shoot him in the face.

The palace starts to crumble and Ren falls further down with Maruki, while the rest of you end up in the Morgana-copter. Watching Ren beat the shit out of an older man in real time is funnier than you thought it would be, but all amusement is cut off when you start to fade away again.

It's another tearful goodbye, even more so on your end since Ren's not even there, but they all promise to never forget you.

You're just glad you got to say goodbye.

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈✁━━━━━━━━━━━

AAaaaannd that's the gist of it. This ended up taking a lot longer then I thought it would, but that's my fault for constantly switching from describing the plot to "hey this scene is important I should make it sound important". Then it started getting too long so I had to cut things down lol.

Again, I am such a slow writer and I'm still rehashing plot points that don't really work + filling in gaps. This probably won't even be one to one once I finish it. My memory is dogshit and I think it's a little obvious where I'm forgetting what happened in the game and what I might need to change after I finish my *checks notes* seventh playthrough? Idk I feel like I've played this game both 0 and 100 times lol. This did help me flesh out certain plot points that were giving me a hard time though :)

Obviously there'd be more interactions in-between with the Phantom Thieves + Akechi & Yoshizawa. This is just going over the main plot, but there's a ton of bonding. I nearly have the whole timeline of events planned out (I put it all on a fckn calendar—) and Bug's constantly juggling who to spend their time with after getting past their "these people are characters that I can’t possibly befriend or be useful to in anyway" phase.

I've put the entirety of this group and their interactions in a microwave and they've been spinning for almost a year in my head. I don't actually think I'd ever finish this—and if by some miracle I do, I don't even know if I'd post it. I just gush over this so much I needed to share something about it, so here we are!

Here's a few more bits of this fic/au/interactions in my brain that happen in my planning document:

Bug is Joker's Aeon and Akechi's Fortune confidants

Bug has a special cognition in Kamoshida’s palace his shadow labels as "Temporarily Unattainable" or "Surprisingly Entertaining." Depends on if Bug is fem or masc I'm not sure yet.

Morgana sometimes calls Bug precious. No one will explain why and they don't think they want to know anyway.

In fact everyone has a nickname for Bug:

Joker’s is "my Aeon" and every cheesy soulmate term under the sun

Ryuji's is "Frosty"

Ann's is "Peaches"

Yusuke’s is "Muse"

Makoto's is "Angel"

Futaba’s is "Player 1" (Joker’s changes to either "Player 2/3" or "Protag" (also switches to "Glitch" when she's mad at Bug))

Haru's is "Bell"

Akechi’s is "Charm[y]" or "Luck[y]" (depending on Prince or Crow, though Crow will also use "Charmy" just to piss them off)

Bug is a pretty good crafter, and after they finally join the team they start making things for Mementos trips instead of buying. If this was a game mechanic it would be like asking Bug to make the gadgets you don't have time to, or getting them to make something only they can.

After a combination of Bug talking about their experience playing the game, the insane difficulty curve Bug's modding habits added to each palace, and Akechi being way stronger than the rest of the party when he joins, has turned Joker into a min-maxer. Whatever he has must be OP, and if something he really wants isn't, then he has to force it to be. If it's unattainable then he'll cry, get over it, and move on to the next strongest persona (He is devastated that Izanagi-no-Okami isn't actually an accessible persona for him. Bug regrets telling him.)

Joker never completes Maruki’s confidant. Unfortunately, Azathoth is a snitch, so it didn't matter anyway.

Bug is petrified of heights and that never goes away. Assume they're cowering like a baby whenever they're any substantial height above the ground. Unless they're facing Yaldabaoth. Then it gets pushed aside because they hate this guy more then their fear of heights.

Bug has a different rebel outfit for each persona (may or may not keep this. It was related to a plot point I might not write about anymore. It was waay earlier in the drafts lol)

When Bug gets Loki, Joker is a little sad that they couldn't brainstorm what their last persona could be together. Akechi may or may not have been a little smug over it.

Everyone's personas talk to them occasionally. Bug's head instantly gets more lively once Loki is added and they wonder how Akechi dealt with that for so long.

Bug does end up telling Futaba about the other Persona games and she becomes as well versed in the lore of the world as Bug is.

At some point Futaba also asked Bug who their favourite character was, which was the catalyst event to everyone constantly asking. Bug avoids the question each time.

I'm not sure if I'll write full length chapters for the spin-off games (or yk… at all), but they do happen and Bug takes every opportunity to gush over the other protagonists. They like abusing the fact no one will remember (even if they are sad they technically won't either)

[writingquestionsanswered]

Copyright, Trademark, What They Do (and Don't Do)

Anonymous asked: I'm writing a comic script but I'm a slow writer/artist, so it won't be ready to post for quite a few years. Is there any way I can submit a list of character and place names and have them copyrighted/trademarked so no one else can use them besides me? I'm not talking generic names like "Thomas Bird" or "Blue Mountains." I mean very specific, unique names that I've personally created. There are a lot of names/places in my story that I’m extremely happy with, and I’m really worried someone else is will write a story before me with these names and then I won’t be able to use them, even though I’m the one that came up with them first.

[Ask edited for length]

Quick disclaimer: I'm not a copyright attorney, trademarking attorney, or any other kind of legal professional or representative. This advice comes from knowledge and experience gained in my many years as a writer and author.

Copyright, in the simplest of terms, means no one but you can copy, distribute, or profit from your work without your permission. It protects your work from plagiarism--someone else using your ideas in the exact same way you did and passing it off as their own-- but it does not protect the use of individual names, titles, fictional places, or ideas, none of which can be copyrighted.

Trademark, in the simplest of terms, protects symbols, words, or phrases that identify and distinguish your brand or business and the products or services associated with them. In order to trademark a symbol, word, or phrase, you would need to prove that consumers do (or would) strongly associate the symbol, word, character, or phrase with your brand/product/services, and that there would be confusion among consumers if this symbol, word, character, or phrase appeared in association with some other brand/product/service. So, we are talking symbols like the Nike logo, words like Kleenex, character names like Bugs Bunny or Spider-Man, and phrases like "Finger Lickin' Good," not your unusually named characters or fictional places.

The best way you can protect your unique character names and places prior to publishing is to make sure you don't share them widely, and share them only with people you trust.

Just because you have an idea now doesn't mean you're the one that came up with an idea first. For example, if someone publishes a comic next year with a same character name, they may have come up with that character name twenty years ago for all you know.

Either way, it's very unlikely someone would beat you to publication and have more than one unique character name or place in common with your comic, and even if they do have one character that has the same unique name, that doesn't mean you can't use it. Again, character names can't be copyrighted. As long as your character doesn't appear to be the same character with minor changes, you're fine. I really, really wouldn't worry about it, though.

One final note of advice... one of the hardest things about being a writer, which you must adjust to if you want to succeed, is understanding that your ideas aren't as special and unique as you think they are. I don't mean that to be mean, but it's a hard truth. You will see "your ideas" everywhere you look, because people will come up with the same ideas you do, and sometimes that means coming up with a similar unique name or location. But what matters is how you use those ideas, and how that differs from how they used them. That's what makes your stories unique. Not your ideas, names, places, etc. themselves, but how you use them. ♥

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

[fourormore]

[Image description: A polyam flag with the words “four or more bingo” on it. End description.]

FOUR OR MORE 2024 BINGO

AO3 COLLECTION | SQUIDGEWORLD COLLECTION

You thought I would stop at a ficathon? Hell no, I have a vision: a world where we can read about polycules and complicated relationships with four or more people until our eyes hurt and our hearts can't take it anymore.

Let me introduce to you: the 2024 Four or More Bingo!

This is a low-stakes, personal challenge. There's no penalty for not finishing or running late.

Cards will be given from October 20th to December 31st. Fills can be posted to AO3, SQWA or tumblr forever.

GUIDELINES

Any medium! Any rating! As long as your work focuses on a relationship with 4 or more people, it's allowed!

All works must be your own and not previously posted. AI generated works will be deleted from the collections.

You may combine these with other events, as long as the other event allows it (examples are @polyamships ' polyartober, lyricaltitles ' bingo, etc)

Small fandoms welcome!

Don't forget to comply with the community guidelines.

MEDIUM SPECIFIC GUIDELINES

Minimum wordcount for fics is 100 words. There is no maximum

Minimum for art is a sketch on unlined paper (figure sticks allowed!). There is no limit to the quality or effort you want to put in your fills.

Minimum for moodboards is a 3x3 grid (9 images individually or edited in one image). Maximum is given by the place where you decide to post. On tumblr, the maximum is 20 images, but on AO3, you're free!

Minimum for podfic is a 100-word fic. There is no restriction on maximum length or effects.

Minimum for fanvids is 30 seconds. There is no maximum.

Other mediums don't have a minimum. Do you want to make an in-universe magazine for your ship? A cross stich pattern? A sculpture? Go ahead and do it! I look forward to all the things you can create.

Prompts, FAQ and more below the cut!

PROMPTS

The following are the prompts that the bingo card will be generated from. Send us an ask if you want a card, and if you want any prompts specifically excluded from it (you can exclude up to 5 prompts). Feel free to request a new card at any time through December 2024, even if you've already received one. If these prompts seem familiar, it's because most of them come from the ficathon! I've chosen some of the most frequent prompts + some new prompts for added spice.

Hide and seek

Growing old together

Getting high together

Moving in together

"It's complicated"

Long distance

Going to a music event together

Medical AU

1920s AU

1950s AU

1980s AU

Y2K AU

Apocalypse AU

Cyberpunk AU

Meeting the parents

"Because I'm heartbroken"

Kink negotiation

Didn't know they were dating

Truth or dare

Skinny-dipping

Aromantic character

Coffee date

Pacific Rim AU

Gamer AU

Game night becomes an orgy

Stargazing

Trust issues

"My turn"

Omegaverse AU

Sedoretu

Sharing a bed

Wedding

Introspection

Dirty talk

Birthday sex

Coming home

Case fic

Morning after

"Don't look at me, this wasn't my idea"

Royalty AU

Combat training

Dancing

Confessions

Experimenting

Redemption

"Let me/us help"

Enemies to lovers

Friends to lovers

"Why me?"

Something made them do it (sex pollen, fuck water, in heat, etc)

Outsider POV

Wearing each others' clothes

Collection

A fandom you haven't written before

A fandom with canon set before the 20th century

A fandom that's 10+ years old

A fandom that's 20+ years old

A polycule with 5 people

A polycule with 8 people

A polycule with 10+ people FAQ

Q: So how do I get a card? A: Send us an ask, preferrably off anon, but if you prefer to remain anon, leave an emoji to identify you by.

Q: How many fics do I need to write? A: For a bingo, 5 prompts in a line (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal). You can even go for a blackout (all 25 prompts). Q: Why isn't X allowed? A: Just because.

Q: I don’t have a Dreamwidth account. Can I join? A: Of course! You don’t even need an AO3 account if you wish to post only on tumblr.

Q: My work contains [INSERT WARNING HERE]. Can I still participate? A: Yes. This is a CNTW (Choose Not To Warn) space.

Q: I don’t want to see [X] content, can you please remove it? A: No. The only content that will be removed will be that that does not comply with the rules.

COMPLETION POSTS

So, you have a bingo (or a blackout!), what now? Well, to acknowledge the fact that you spent time and effort on at least 5 fics, we'll be receiving bragging posts (also known as completion posts) where you can link all of your fills at once. Please follow this format. You may post on your own blog and @ us, tag #fourormore or submit it to the blog.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to send a message.

Have fun and bon appetit!

[soapymansuds]

Eternity and Counting

Pt.3

(Pt1, Pt2)

(I am SOOOOOO sorry I didn't post on Tuesday. Full honestly, I forgot. But today's chapter is a touch longer than usual as an apology. And by just a touch, I mean almost double the length of both previous chapters<3)

Obey me! X Angel!MC (They/Them Pronouns)

TW: Suicide, depression, self-deprecation, death, big feelings, lots of sad.

MC just can't handle anything anymore and takes their own life. Imagine their dismay to find even death isn't the end for them.Keep reading

~/\~

Since that day, my life, or afterlife I suppose, has been relatively simple. When I'm not resting in the garden, I'm running small errands for Michael. It's easy enough to avoid recognition here, but for the sake of my peace of mind, I wear a cloaking spell whenever I'm out. Simeon agreed not to tell anybody about my presence, and in exchange, he asked that I let him join me on my errands, even if he doesn't recognize me. He claims I could have any face in all three realms, and my presence would still bring him comfort. Sometimes he brings me updates on how the others are doing. Usually, he talks about Luke and his growth. He often avoids talking about the Devildom, and whether that's because he doesn't want to upset me or because he simply can't face them knowing what he knows, I've yet to figure out. It's a nice thought, him trying not to remind me of the best part of my life. But it's not overly helpful, given that, even if physical representations of our bonds weren't burned into my skin, everything I do reminds me of them anyway. I know it's selfish of me to make him keep my secret. But to be fair, I decided nearly a year ago that I am an inherently selfish creature, and I've come to terms with it.

Now that I'm on my own, things are easier. Nobody relies on me for much more than fetching papers or goods, and any failures that occur are mine to handle alone. It's simple. It's lonely. But it's simple. And it's good.

I suppose all good things must come to an end though. As I follow my long-since memorized path through the Celestial Palace, I can't help but wonder why I've been summoned. Usually, if Michael has a task for me, he simply brings it to me. But today he asked I meet him in the throne room, so here I am.

I'm greeted as soon as I swing open the door. "MC! Thank you for coming so quickly."

I'm nearly caught off guard by the use of my real name in public. For the sake of secrecy, Michael and Simeon have taken to calling me a fake name for the duration of my stay here.

"How can I help?" I nod as I close the door behind me. I take notice of Simeon's presence and he looks nervous. Never a good sign.

"I have some paperwork I need run to the Devildom. Usually I'd send Simeon, but I need him for another task today and this is rather urgent." Michael grins at me, likely in an attempt to sweeten the plan he's certain I would protest if given the chance.

I'm nearly nauseous at the idea of it. "You're joking, right? I mean this so genuinely, have you lost it?"

There's a flash of amusement on his face before he responds, "I would never make light of your trauma, no I am not joking. You have your cloaking spell, and all you need to do is hand the papers over to Barbatos. Maybe if he's busy, you'll have to hand them to Lord Diavolo himself. But then you can just come straight back. Simple and easy."

I stare at him, dead eyed and confused. "Yeah, seems super simple." I groan, sarcasm laced in every letter. "There's no getting out of this, is there?" I glance desperately at Simeon who seems to have loosened some of the tension in his spine at my pseudo acceptance of the whole ordeal. He shakes his head.

"Fine." I sigh. "Open'r up." with a lazy wave of my arm.

Michael nods, same fatherly grin plastered on his face as always. I'm sure he's convinced he's won some sort of mental battle, and maybe he has. Either way, he summons the portal, and I steal my nerves to step through. "I'm getting two days off when I get back." I call, lunging through the portal.

On the other side, I take a quick moment to make sure my cloaking spell hasn't warn off before looking around. I'm right where I had assumed I'd be. The courtyard's grand arches and elegant gazebo bring a chilly feeling of recognition to the back of my mind. How many gallas and celebrations had I spent out here, in search of some form of peace from the hustle and bustle? How many times had I stumbled upon Levi, or him upon me, in search of the same thing? I think for a moment that I wouldn't mind him stumbling upon me now.

I shake the thought from my mind as quickly as it occurs. Just deliver the paperwork.

I begin the path to the castle without a thought. The trail ingrained into my very psyche. I almost laugh at the thought. I abandoned this place, yet it never left me. What is it Djo said about men and cities?

I never allowed myself to dwell on it from the comfort of Michael's garden, but God did I miss the sky here. Something about the ever present swirling of purples and blues splashed across the stars is purely... divine. Not to say that the Celestial realm wasn't stunning. But there was always this sense of perfectionism, even in the natural landscape. It never felt right to me. Not like this at least. This has always been chaotic, but in the way a toddler helping in the kitchen is chaotic. Sure, shit's a mess and you're near certain it's going to end poorly, but if you take just a moment to watch it unfold, there's beauty in it.

I wish I could have been reborn as a demon.

No. No I don't. Living out the rest of my days, infinite as they may be, facing them with my own selfishness. I'm sure it would kill me a second time.

I'm utterly lost in thought and the view of the sky as I follow the path. So much so, I nearly miss the tail swishing on the ground in front of me. Luckily for me, it bats my ankle gently before I manage to step on it. Double luck, the contact doesn't wake it's sleeping owner.

Belphegor snores softly in the grass next to the path, curled up with his back to me. Something in me instinctively wants to curl up with him, but I know I can't. So instead, I sit. Divine garb be damned, I'm sitting on the dirt, watching him sleep. I consider making a run for it, but the subtle pull he's always had keeps me calm and still. Even in his sleep, even with our pact burned away, his presence still lulls me like a child.

I shake my head as if I were actually dozing off. Was I? Regardless, I stand up, settling to move him out of the trail, just a little. For the sake of the hazard he poses to himself and others. He's as warm as I remember as I press him further into the grass, tucking his tail over his leg before quickly stepping away and back to my task.

A warm feeling I can just barely remember washes over me and stops me in my tracks. How could I, after over a year away, fall so quickly back into routine. Not only how could I, but how dare I? I made my decision, and I've got no right to just wander in here and return to my position, doting and fawning over them. I truly am a selfish creature.

I tried to explain it to them, time and time again. But they simply refused to believe me. I cared so much, not because of them, but because I needed to. I needed to care for them to feel useful. Asmodeus once told me that I was a "pleasure sub". I told him I was willing to rip my own heart out to please him, but mostly because i never much cared for it anyway.

(As always, thank you soooo much for reading. If you'd like to be tagged in future uploads, please comment to be added to the list!)

-Your Friend, The Author

*tags*

@spffldlbrnf

[brisquad-unit-4402]

wip - all of my remaining ike ideas

from the list of unfinished 4402 ike wips.

this list is entirely just fic ideas i wanted to write but never got around to making a draft for. this is really a variety of thoughts, since each of these were entries i planned on including in luxiem group posts, luxnoc for one. no order in particular, but all the nsfw prompts are at the bottom under the read more. also at the bottom are some notes

all of these are free to use without ai.

⚠ mature content under read more. content under read more is not intended for minors.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

when someone tries hitting on reader

ike very coolly describes himself as reader’s significant other while he talks directly to reader, then asks the other person if they have anything to say to his partner

this post would've been about luxiem's reaction when they see someone hit on reader. jealousy is a trope i struggle with a lot, though, so my ideas for each guy got really samey really fast. on the bright side, i ended up combining a few of them into a fic for a newer liver, and i'm much more satisfied with that draft than i ever was with this. you'll recognize it when you see it

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

when ike wants attention: hints and asks for it subtly

i think that ike would kind of expect you to read his mind for a while when he wants attention. he'll try to give tiny signals that he wants you, and by tiny, i mean sending you a link to a song or moving his laptop to the side so he can se you when you both sit at the table. eventually he'll move on to things like saying "hey check this out" while scrolling through his phone so you peek over his shoulder, and he expects that you'll give him a kiss or something but no, you just laugh at whatever meme he just showed you and move on, you know, like a normal person. and then after a few hours of dying inside he finally gets around to saying "this couch is the perfect size for cuddling" so he can still make it seem like you decided to cuddle him on your own, but no, it's just him getting progressively more and more obvious without admitting it outright

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

dress up/rp

MAID maid maid maid you’re a butler and he’s a maid

this is a rare luxnoc post. i should've expected this draft to be headcanons, not ficlets, maybe then i would've finished it...? i've always liked how wiggly ike was with gender, it's really inspired me. i imagine he probably has the generic knee-length skirt maid outfit just to wear for fun, but whenever he goes down on you he would wear a dress with the tiniest skirt you've ever seen. it barely covers black lace panties

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

ike in lingerie: something about ike in leather and one of those leather fetish caps and a riding crop and kinky boots the kinky boots are REALLY important. or more specifically high heels and legs are important. gentle dominance, he steps on reader in the heels lol. probs one of those sleeveless catsuits? with enough gap between shorts and boot for thigh to show through? goes straight into the action, he’s very coaxing bc he knows you’ll obey, reader tries to put up a fight but he also has the riding crop lol

i wanted to do a series of luxiem in lingerie, pretty much all of them had their own storyline except for ike. he was the only one out of the five that wasn't pushing their comfort zone in lingerie, since i figured he'd already worn kinky clothing before, just not with the reader yet (see: maid ike). that's why this entry was pretty much the only one out of the five where the reader was the sub

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

✧. ┊ masterpost ✧. ┊ kofi ✧. ┊ ike wip masterpost

[hangingslothcentral]

Today is the fourth anniversary of the day I launched Spirit Box Radio, and it's also the last day of trans awareness week.

I have a lot of big feelings about SBR. If you've listened to the show, you'll know that I was medically transitioning through its release. I went on T at the show's midpoint, in the middle of S2, and my voice was changing throughout the rest of the show's run. I got top surgery two months after the show ended, almost exactly to the day.

Now. We're all big enough and daft enough to be able to have a grown up conversation about this, I think. So here's some stuff about that experience I haven't really talked about before.

1. I wish there had been media which had trans creators transitioning alongside a character who is transitioning when I was younger. The main reason for this is that it would have been representation of trans people, but honestly? The main thing I wanted was to see someone transitioning over a long period of time. So often, transition seems to happen behind closed doors. Unless you are lucky enough to have lots of trans people around you (I grew up in semi-rural Wales so no luck for me there) you just do not see it happening. People, understandably, want to hide the length of the process, the messy in between stages.

2. Transitioning and playing Sam transitioning simultaneous to me was one of the most mentally challenging and emotionally vulnerable things I've ever done. I do not say this lightly; I'm a survivor of abuse and I've seen a lot of shit in my life. I've come out as nonbinary at a corporate job and argued with a university about changing my name on my graduation certificate. As much as I loved it, and still love it, and I'm intensely proud of it and SO glad it exists, making SBR was fucking brutal. Hours of editing my own voice through a period where it sounded different on a near-weekly basis. Having no idea how I sounded anymore and posting episodes anyway. Dealing with the emotional fallout of people responding weirdly to me in my real, actual life whilst portraying a character who is outcast, isolated, and terrified of himself? Challenging as fuck.

3. Many people need to examine the way they're talking about trans men. The conversations around Sam shifted very violently as my voice dropped. This is in part due to the arc this character follows, but it's hard not to notice a shift in language as dramatic as this. It started as soon as the show came back from its S2 midseason break and my voice had shifted down a bit. People talked less about Sam being cute, and for the first time, I started to see people talking about him like he was sexy. These things aren't mutually exclusive, but it was very noticeable to me, especially in contrast to conversations about Oliver, Sam's hot, cis gender, florist boyfriend, who was categorised as sexy from the off. Before my voice dropped, even though they were using the right pronouns for them, people talked about Sam with very feminine, infantilising language, and this almost entirely stopped when my voice dropped.

4. I am so fucking glad I did this. Yes, it was brutal, emotional, and I really struggled through a lot of this process, and I am so glad I did this. I will have the immense privilege of medically transitioning in the way I have over the last few years exactly once in my life. I am glad I took that vulnerable moment and made art with it. I'm glad that my transition is captured and mirrored by this thing I was making at the time it was happening. I'm glad that thousands of other trans people have listened to the show and have heard me doing this as they are doing it, or before they do it, or after, or as they're deciding not to, or finding out they can't, or realising they'll never have the chance, or any one of the myriad experiences of transness that exist. I am, frankly, honoured to have been a part of such a vulnerable aspect in the lives of so many people.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for listening to the show, if indeed you already have. If you enjoy my work, I would love to be able to pay my bills and be able to keep making it. I have never made even minimum wage for the work I do on my shows. Please consider becoming a member.

[nelliebachesneg]

Jason X Jazz

This entire post is me screaming into the void because I'm writing a fic and I'm having a lot of emotions about it. You have been warned.

I am currently processing some things through the characters of Jason Todd and Jasmine Fenton, and I need to talk about their characters before I break down completely.

Jazz is easy for me to write. Jazz is an Enneagram 5, which I'm pretty sure is my type as well. Jazz ignores her emotions - or at least refuses to identify them - in favor of logic. Truth is ultimately what matters to her. She hoards information in her attempts to find the truth, and no amount of information will be enough until she finds a satisfactory answer.

I see a lot of myself in Jazz.

Mostly good things - and in fact that's the problem. I have a hard time seeing Jazz's flaws as flaws. The orginal show calls her out for being a know-it-all, and a teenager who thinks she's an adult, but as I write this I realize that I never saw that as something that had to be fixed - or at least, not as something that had to be fixed by Jazz herself.

Because of course Jazz felt like she had to be an adult. Her parents were caught up in their own lives, to the point where they left their science experiments on the kitchen table with toddlers running around. Of course when Danny started acting differently, and her parents didn't notice, she blamed it on their inattention. And of course it was specifically Danny's need for attention that mattered; she's got her intellect to carry her through life's challenges, after all. She's the one with perfect test scores, the one who applies herself, the one who understands the importance of a life apart from ghost hunting.

Oh, she's aware of her own need for attention, of course. She'd have to be a fool not to realize that, sometimes, she gets envious of ghosts for how much her parents seem to be obsessed with them. (She's have to be a fool not to realize that, magic or no magic, she shouldn't have fallen so fast for Johnny.) But she can handle it. She can think her way through it. Danny can't; all he has are his…

Friends.

Who are Jazz's friends?

Who does she talk to besides her brother, her parents, and the occasional teacher or classmate for academic purposes?

Where does she vent all that emotional energy besides the occasional concert?

This is where I see Jazz's flaws and mine overlap. This is also something I feel comfortable writing about, because it's something that I have talked about in therapy ad nauseum. I know the answer here is quite literally to lean on the relationships you do have, and if that's not enough, to find new relationships. It takes work and more than a bit of luck, but it is possible for Jazz (and me) to break out of this idea that she always needs to be rational about everything, including herself. I think that's what the show was going for, actually - but equating emotional expression with childishness is… wrong, I think. It reeks of underlying toxic masculinity if nothing else, and considering what I've heard about Butch Hartman, that's not off-base.

And then there's Jason.

Jason fucking Todd.

Who like no other character I have ever seen in fiction, fanfiction, and all the headcanons in between, embodies the Bible verse of Romans 7:19-20:

"For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it."

Jason is an Enneagram 8. Jason, whether he realizes it or not, is obsessed with control. He wants the world to be good, to be just, and he will go to dramatic lengths to make it so - not unlike Bruce. At the same time, though, he has internalized the belief that he himself is not a good person. He's a just person, maybe - and I would even venture kind - but as much as he tries to do what he thinks is right, Jason Todd does not think of himself as good during or after UtRH. He's sacrificed his sense of empathy, after all, and that made him "the bad one" who "needs to be stopped". (Makes sense, since he's the one that was never good enough anyway.)

So is it any wonder that he struggles to believe in forgiveness? Is it any wonder that he won't allow himself to accept love when it is offered? He doesn't think he deserves it. He thinks that people who have done worse than him deserve it even less. And maybe if he can take them out, in a twisted way it'll make him better. Maybe if he can rid the world of a few monsters, it'll make him less of one.

Jason at his worst is all of my self-loathing, all of my catastrophic thinking, all of my self-delusion, and all of my fear. I've connected his struggle to accept love to my own struggles with sexual content. I've said it before elsewhere, but I think I need to say it again: radical forgiveness and love are the only way forward. The catch is that, by necessity, those things require connections with other people.

And what writing Jason in my fic is asking me to do is to imagine the people I care most about in this world discovering the worst part of me - and forgiving me for it. Helping me with it. Only for them to ultimately fail to fix me, thus making me desperate enough to turn to a stranger who may screw me over worse than anyone ever has.

Suddenly I feel like we've been down this road before.

And while I know that Jazz is someone Jason can trust, Jason doesn't know that, and it's difficult to picture - well, no, actually, it's not hard to picture Jason, after being caught in a moment of Pit Rage, to tell the worst to Jazz in an effort to scare her off. And it's not hard to picture Jazz rationalizing that behavior, and even seeing honor in the honesty of it. It's not hard to picture Jason being confused and suspicious, forced to confront his own assumptions about what's possible and what he deserves out of that possibility. It's not hard to picture Jazz having empathy for those who suddenly receive more than they think they are owed. It's not hard to imagine Jason bargaining with himself, desperate for something to work but also ready to bail at the first sign of betrayal.

Holy shit, it's easy to see how he slowly comes to accept her help with his Pit Madness. It's easy to see how after he feels like he's back in control of himself, he'd start falling in love with this girl who sees the best in him.

And the kicker is, she doesn't even see what she's done as special; she just didn't want him to feel alone. She didn't want him to feel trapped in his own head.

She's not expecting those sentiments to be returned.

She's not expecting Jason to like it when she loses her temper. She's not expecting him to treat her with respect when it comes to her hobbies, the same she gives him. She's not expecting him to want to be around her, to seek her out when he's feeling any type of way; for her to seek him out and have him be willing to listen when she wants to vent. She's not expecting the committment, the quiet support, the feeling that for once she can lean on someone else and just be herself.

Is it because he feels like he owes her? Is it because she has something he wants? Is he trying to manipulate her? There has to be a rational explanation-

Oh.

Oh.

…Well there's certainly nothing rational about it, that's for damn sure. What do you mean, Jason, you think I'm passionate and smart? Even if that's true- Well of course I'm protective of children and the disadvantaged, who isn't? And what do you mean it's a relief that I don't just know about the vigilante life, I understand the vigilante life? What do you mean it blows your mind that the killing- Well, it doesn't not bother me- But yeah it's not the end of the world. What do you mean you're thankful that I've made Crime Alley my home and you'll be here for me as long as I want you to be?

What do you mean you love me?

Do I love you too? Of course I-

Of course I do.

Because of course she does. Of course she admires his honesty, even if it makes him sound like an asshole sometimes. Of course she could spend hours figuring out his quirks, religiously studying what makes him smile and how far she can push his buttons before they're chasing each other across rooftops. Of course she lights up every time he comes over, every time he so much as texts her. Of course she's noticed that he's been able to get her to tap into her emotions in a way she's never before felt safe enough to.

Of course she loves him.

And of course he loves her.

They've made each other feel alive (again).

[steddieunderdogfics]

This week’s writer spotlight feature is: starryeyedjanai! @starryeyedjanai has 74 fics in the Stranger Things fandom and 60 of them are in the Steddie tag!

@steddieas-shegoes recommends the following works by @starryeyedjanai:

All things end and all things change.

what lurks beneath

nights like this

if i could hold you for a minute (i’d go through it again)

"Janai is one of those authors that can make absolutely anything hot. I could sit and talk for hours about how they characterize Steve and Eddie. I absolutely love everything they write and always make it a priority to open the AO3 email when the notification comes in!" -- @steddieas-shegoes

Below the cut, @starryeyedjanai answered some questions about their writing process and some of their recommended work!

Why do you write Steddie?

These two burrowed their way into my brain and just won’t leave. I can’t not write them when I am thinking about them literally all the time and am brimming with new ways for them to fall in love.

What’s your favorite trope to READ?

I’m kind of a sucker for steddie talking via notes, letters, etc. before they ever meet in person. There’s just something so special about them falling in love in unconventional ways before they ever meet in person that hits the spot, you know? I also just really love all the creative AUs that people come up with that I never would have thought of writing.

What’s your favorite trope to WRITE?

I love writing anything that has friends to lovers and especially if they are so, so stupid about it. Idiot4idiot my beloved. friends/acquaintances to lovers is So fun to explore because there are a million ways to do it. I love a good oh moment where things just click into place.

What’s your favorite Steddie fic?

It is So hard to pick just one!!! So i’ll list a few: One that I have reread a few times that I just really, really love is All I Do Is Want by novemberthorne. There’s just something really special about it—all the emotion in the beginning and then the smut which is just top tier. like a sack of bricks and literally anything by alligator_writes is great off the beaten path by pukner is also really, really great

Is there a trope you’re excited to explore in a future work but haven’t yet?

I have a fic idea that I've been thinking about for a while that involves alternate universes, like the metaverse, because if the Upside Down exists, there are probably other dimensions as well.

What is your writing process like?

It is honestly so variable. For the majority of my ficlets, I get an idea and just start hacking away at it intermittently until it’s done, so it’s safe to say that at any given time, I have like eight ficlets that are partially written. I never used to outline because I didn’t really write fics longer than around 5k, but since I’ve started writing longer fics, it is almost necessary for me to have an outline that hits all the major plot points because otherwise I will forget what I have planned. So for anything that I know will be longer than a ficlet, I’ll write out an outline, even just a few bullet points so that I can reference it when I’m writing and not lose sight of where the story is going. 

Do you have any writing quirks?

I use way too many em-dashes and my sentences are sometimes comically long, but the way I write is indicative of how fast my brain is moving, kind of. I typically headcanon Steve and Eddie to both have ADHD, so any fics in their points of view will have their thoughts coming out as fast as my own typically are. And sentence length and structure can really help convey that.

Do you prefer posting when you’ve finished writing or on a schedule?

I prefer posting once I’ve finished writing because my focus shifts around a lot and it sometimes takes a while for me to actually finish projects (like i had a fic that sat at 16k for months as I worked on other things that caught my attention and then I finally returned to finish the last couple thousand words six or so months later)

Which fic are you most proud of?

I am proud of all of my fics, but I really, really love how All things end and all things change. turned out. Some fics just come together so easily and this was one of them. I outlined the fic and let the idea marinate for a couple months and then I wrote ~20k in about a week and finished the fic.

How did you get the idea for All things end and all things change.?

This fic was for a holiday server exchange so my giftee gave me three prompts and I found ways to incorporate all of the prompts. I saw the prompt for mutual pining roommates and immediately knew I was going to write Eddie taking Steve home to Wayne over the holidays. I originally only planned on using that prompt, but the prompt for a snowy cabin getaway really called to me as I got further along in the fic and needed more tension between them. It was just a really excellent set of prompts.

When writing All things end and all things change., what was something you didn’t expect?

I did not expect it to get so long! My original estimate was 10k, but then I kept adding more to Wayne and Eddie showing Steve how special Christmas could be with people who care about him and then I added the cabin scene which added an easy 5k to the fic and then I was staring at what was, at that time, my longest complete fic. Wild.

What inspired what lurks beneath?

This honestly came out of left field for me because I had only ever written one other fic like it. I was doing kinktober for the first time and had a few different ideas for the prompt for that day and then I saw that the date of that prompt was Joey (@matchingbatebites)’s birthday and remembered her lake monster Eddie ficlet and instantly knew I wanted to explore a different version of lake monster Eddie.

What was your favorite part to write from if i could hold you for a minute (i’d go through it again)?

I really, really loved writing the flashes into the future at the end of the fic. Throughout the fic, there was some yearning and pining from afar and getting to write that everything works out in the end was cathartic.

How do/did you feel writing if i could hold you for a minute (i’d go through it again)?

Oh boy, this fic put me through the ringer. This was written for the steddie big bang and it was the first longer fic that I was attempting to write. I just had so many different ideas for this fic that it made it hard to choose the direction I wanted to go in. I probably have like an additional 20k words that just did not end up in the fic because it contradicted things that did end up in the fic or just didn’t fit with the vibe I was going for. There were times that I felt discouraged and felt like I might never finish it, but I am very pleased with how it turned out in the end! It was extremely rewarding to finally finish it and get it posted in February!

What was the most difficult part of writing nights like this?

Honestly, I don’t remember this one giving me any trouble at all. Once I got the idea in my brain, I think I sat down and wrote all 2.5k in a day. I do not know what my brain was doing during kinktober, but I think I ended up writing like over 60k that month and it was the only time that I’ve ever really been able to sit down and write a ficlet from start to finish like that and it happened with multiple of the ficlets that I ended up writing the day before they were published.

Do you have a favorite scene and/or line from any of your fics?

I really love the lead up to the smut in my fic catch the embers on my tongue. Like eddie being a little self-deprecating and in awe that steve might feel the same way he does was so fun to write. Also the summary for surface level freak is probably one of my favorite things i’ve written.

Do you have any upcoming projects or fics you’d like to share/promote?

Some of the projects I’m working on right now are things I can’t really talk about, but look forward to fics from me in the Steddie Summer Exchange, the Steddie Bang 2024, and the ST Sapphic Mini Bang!

Outside of these questions, Is there anything YOU would like to add?

Whoever nominated me, I am kissing you full on the mouth with tongue (if you’re into that kind of thing)

Thank you to our author, @starryeyedjanai, and our nominator, @steddieas-shegoes! See more of starryeyedjanai's works featured on our page throughout the day!

Writer’s Spotlight is every Wednesday! Want to nominate an author? You can nominate them here!

[casual-praxis]

“Probably no harmful side effects to this at all.”

Here’s Vio’s Slime Rancher AU design! I wasn’t entirely sure what I was working with when I went into this, but I think it turned out alright-ish in the end. ^~^’

He was supposed to have more of a scientist vibe, but I didn’t want to take too much inspiration from Viktor, so this is the route I went instead. He’s a little unhinged, but he’s keeping it together. Mostly.

More details about Vio's role in the AU below the cut if anyone is interested!

I touched on a few details already back in this post, but I've had a few more concepts in mind since then, so I'll go ahead and list them now so I don't forget later.

+ Vio was the first to arrive at the shared ranch and spent about a year alone before Shadow arrived. In that time, he explored a majority of the map on his own, save for the ruins and desert. He was actually in the process of figuring out how to get into the ruins when Shadow arrived, which sidetracked him a bit.

+ Due to being one of the first inhabitants of the Far, Far Range, Vio didn't have a lot of information to work off of with the Slimepedia, so he made his own guide for navigating the wilderness. Needing to discover more slimes was the main thing tripping him up with the ruin's Slime Gate.

+ Vio is the only one in the group to have a tongue piercing. It takes varying lengths of time for everyone to discover that fact though. Shadow noticed it the quickest.

+ Because of prolonged exposure to Quantum Slimes (one of which he may or may not have eaten, for science purposes), Vio's physical form occasionally glitches and/or becomes more transparent. Luckily, he doesn't seem to create "ghosts," but if left unchecked he does start to hear things in other realities.

These glitches aren't very frequent, and can be fixed by either inflicting pain or splashing water on him. He opts to inflict pain rather than get wet constantly, it's what his bracelet is secretly for.

+ As a side effect of his reality-warped perception, talking to Vio when he's less physically stable can net some interesting results. Mostly just jumbled or gibberish sentences and the occasional mixed topics. Something akin to, "the slime even the yet carrot gold, no, what?"

+ For at least a year and a half, Vio used his vacpack in his non-dominant hand simply because it wasn't designed for left-handed people. He wanted to wait for someone else to show up before attempting to tinker with it, just in case he broke it beyond repair.

Upon realizing Shadow, and later on, Red, were also both left-handed, he figured this might be an oversight to report to 7Zee after all.

+ Whenever someone has a question about the Slimepedia specifically, they go to Vio. He knows way too much about everything, to the point where he's actually a little burnt out on the whole exploring thing. He still runs experiments, but he's almost done with all he can think of doing out there.

+ At some point, Vio was able to talk with an alternate version of himself. Though the content of that conversation is unknown, he did become noticably warmer towards the others afterwards. The idea of becoming like that alternate self is haunting.

(Hint: alt-Vio found new test subjects to play with.)

+ His soft spot for Red and Shadow is more obvious, but he has his tells with Green and Blue as well.

He rather likes having objectives to focus on, and Green trusts him to handle the more difficult tasks, so he won't complain if Green bosses him around a little. But only a little.

With Blue, it's more subtle. He doesn't fight as hard as he used to over his lack of self-care. If Blue shows up at his lab demanding he take a break and eat food/nap/etc, he only pushes back a little before giving in. Otherwise Blue might try to manhandle him, and that's just embarrassing.

+ The little pouch on his leg is for medical supplies. Namely bandages, just in case his bracelet punctures skin and draws blood.

Bonus: Close-up details of Vio's eyes because the glitch effect there is almost always occurring, unlike his full-body one.

(The way I draw this will probably change in the future if I continue on with this AU, but it looks okay enough for now.)