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auncyen · 2 years ago

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I meant to post this on ao3 today as kind of just an idea? but it's too close to worktime so I'll look it over again tomorrow

Might not even work as a fic, I need to replay p3 when the switch port comes out lol

Aigis transferred into Shujin as a second-year on the third Monday of January. The Shadow Operatives did not know what year the Phantom Thieves actually were, or if they were even students; she simply picked the year because she already knew she looked the age. The passage of time did not reflect on her features the same way it would for a human.

“What a miserable thing, transferring so close to the end of the year,” Aigis’ new homeroom teacher said. “You might as well have finished the year at your old school. Not that you aren’t welcome, of course…. Ah, please ignore any rumors you might hear. We’ve had a rather eventful year here.”

“What sort of rumors?” Aigis asked. She was not planning to ignore those at all.

“Oh, that the seat you’re at is cursed, or some such nonsense….the girl who transferred out is alive, thankfully.” Mr. Hiruta looked troubled. “Anyway… here we are.”

He led her into the classroom and had her stop at the chalkboard, handing her a piece of chalk. “Introduce yourself, please? Your name, and something you’d like us to know about you.”

Aigis obediently wrote her name on the chalkboard as he went to his desk, then turned to face her newly designated peers. “Pleased to meet you all. My name is Aigis.”

“…Does she really have no family name?” her teacher muttered, paging through documents. “There’s none on the paperwork, but…”

Some of the documentation had been rushed in the haste to transfer her in. “I am a Phantom Aficionado,” Aigis announced. “I am happy to be attending the school where they started.”

“Don’t tell me that’s why you transferred in…”

His volume was still low, obviously not meant to be heard, but Aigis chose to answer anyway. He wanted them to know something about her, did he not? “It is,” Aigis said, drawing laughter from her new classmates. She did not elaborate further; a full disclosure would be counterproductive to her mission.

The Phantom Thieves seemed to have taken an insidious hold of Tokyo. For that reason, it was essential to gather information on the group. At one point their leader had supposedly been in police custody, and Mitsuru-san should have been able to learn his identity through the Shadow Operatives’ government ties, now that there was less… interference, but even now there were still problems. In this case, everyone who had dealt with the leader directly seemed to be either dead, missing… or had been given a change of heart and were adamant they would not betray the Phantom Thieves’ justice. It seemed the group no longer saw a need to disguise what they were doing as anything besides brainwashing. And yet they still enjoyed a fervor of popularity that was outright unnatural. In fact, if the excited whispers and smiles on her classmates’ faces were any indication, it was especially strong at Shujin.

“Yes, yes, the Phantom Thieves saved us from a stolen election and corrupt government,” Mr. Hiruta said, getting back up from his desk with a book in hand. “Now I must ask you to all focus on the lesson at hand, lest we all end up with corrupt minds. Aigis, that seat by Sato, that’s yours.” He pointed and waited until she had taken the empty seat to begin his lecture. Aigis turned her focus to processing his lecture, but not without noting that the teacher, while less effusive thank the students, seemed to also believe in the Phantom Thieves.

Between classes, people asked curiously about where she had transferred from and if she really had come to hear about the Phantom Thieves; she played the part of Phantom Aficionado as Yukari had suggested. She’d transferred from Port City; she’d had to transfer anyway, but Shujin had been her pick among other possibilities because she was so curious about the Phantom Thieves. In turn, the students regaled her with their accounts of the Phantom Thieves’ first victim, Suguru Kamoshida. A former Olympic gold medalist, he’d put on a jocular facade while physically abusing the volleyball team members. He’d even pushed a girl to attempting suicide. He confessed to all this after a flurry of calling cards were posted on school walls stating that the Phantom Thieves would steal his distorted desires.

Aigis understood now why Mr. Hiruta had warned about rumors. In all the crosstalk, it came out that for a few weeks the class had thought the suicide attempt had succeeded, and that had caused the vacated seat to be regarded as cursed. She would have to take care to verify anything she heard. So far, the students’ accounts agreed with what had been reported in the news after Kamoshida’s initial arrest, and contradicted the articles that had been published late in the year, claiming those targeted by the Phantom Thieves were innocents compelled to false confessions by mental illness.

Shirogane expressed frustration when Aigis shared her findings that evening. “With the entire city behaving strangely, the students could easily be under some kind of manipulation.” She pursed her lips. “However, I was able to discuss details of the case with the detectives who worked it. They gave fairly concrete details about the volleyball members who were willing to discuss the alleged abuse. I believe it did happen. That, plus the amateur nature of the first calling card, makes me believe the Phantom Thieves could have been started by either Kamoshida’s victims or someone with ties to them. Try to approach the girl who was harassed first.”

Aigis happened to find Ann Takamaki during lunch period the next day. She was laughing with a boy, and Aigis paused, trying to think if there was a way to break gracefully into the conversation, when Takamaki’s eyes glanced toward her and the girl smiled at Aigis. “Oh, hi! You’re the new transfer, right?”

“Only other blonde, who else would she be?” the boy at her side asked. “Yo! Ryuji Sakamoto, nice to meet ya.”

Ah. That both of them were the friendly sort made things easier for Aigis. “It is nice to meet you too, Sakamoto. My name is Aigis.”

“Just call him Ryuji, Aigis. I’m Ann,” Takamaki said, and Aigis was reminded of s second-year Yukari. “Are you settling in okay? I know transferring can be rough, and right at the end, too…uh, do you need any help catching up?”

Sakamoto snorted. “What, you’re volunteering to help? That’d just get her in more trouble.”

“Shut up! …I mean, Ren could help her out, right?”

“Oh, so you were gonna volunteer him. You know he’s been crazy busy!”

Aigis was starting to form an evaluation: these two could be prone to distractions and tangents. “Thank you for the concern, but it is unnecessary. The curriculum is already stored in my memory. I am more interested in learning about the Phantom Thieves. They started here, did they not?”

It was, perhaps, overly blunt. Aigis had never been much for subtlety. But the two second-years didn’t seem bothered by it past the first few seconds of surprise. “Yeah! They took care of that dirtbag Kamoshida,” Sakamoto said. “He was such a piece of shit, always looking down on everyone and treating Shujin like his personal castle. My leg got messed up ‘cause of him, and for a while I was real angry about it, him and the school coverin’ for him.”

“You were on the volleyball team?” Aigis asked, scanning his features again. She thought she had already identified the team’s members, and he had not been one.

“Nah, track. Last year Kamoshida got the track team’s coach fired, then ran us into the ground until I snapped like an idiot. You probably didn’t hear anything about it since it’s old news compared to what he confessed to.”

“He should have confessed to that too,” Takamaki said with a frown. “You deserved an apology.”

“I mean, would’ve been nice… but look, Ann, I’m over it. Even dyed my hair back, y’know?” Sakamoto pointed up at his hair. Indeed, when Aigis focused on the dark tufts, she could discern a quality to the color telling of a dye job.

“It looks weird on you,” Takamaki stated.

“Wha—oh, come on! You said blond looked weird on me too!”

“Because you used way too much bleach. But I don’t know, I got…used to that, I guess. I’ll get used to ‘good boy Ryuji’ too.”

“Don’t make me sound like a puppy,” he groused. Takamaki just laughed and mimicked a dog’s bark at him.

Aigis did not have time to steer the conversation back to a more productive direction before the bell sounded to announce the end of lunch. Sakamoto and Takamaki immediately commented about the need to head back to class, and Aigis turned away herself, filing a note to try ‘running into’ both of them again. Then she spotted a boy scowling her way at the end of the hall. From a visual analysis, this was Yuuki Mishima, a second-year who had been on the volleyball team.

She stepped toward him. “Is something the matter?”

The way his eyes shifted made her realize he’d been looking past her. Takamaki, Sakamoto? …Was Sakamoto’s dyed hair that appalling? Aigis had not seen anything unusual about it. “It’s nothing,” the boy muttered. “Don’t mind me.” He stepped past her with his eyes cast downward, but she saw a flash of the scowl returning. She wanted to stop him for questions, but they were already the last two in the hall. There were no stragglers after the bell. Rules were an important part of society, but the population of Tokyo seemed outright compelled by them now. So Aigis headed to class as well. After school, she made an attempt to look for Mishima in class 2-D, but he seemed to have already left. There was another former volleyball player there too, so she tried talking to him instead. He seemed annoyed to talk about the subject of Kamoshida, which seemed natural, and his brusque answers revealed nothing interesting, so Aigis let that conversation end briefly and went “home”, to the apartment Mitsuru was renting for her, and reported to the Kirijo heir. It did not take long. There was not much to report.

“That’s fine,” Mitsuru said, when Aigis expressed concern over not having more intelligence. “You’re at least in a position to observe should any more sudden changes occur in the city. Keep us apprised. Also, Yamagishi uncovered some information you should know….”

Aigis spent lunch on Wednesday trying to find Mishima, but just as she did he abruptly doubled back and went into the boys’ restroom. It would be regarded as highly suspicious if she intruded into the bathroom, so she waited until that seemed to become suspicious as well, judging from glances from her fellow peers, so she went to track down some first-years who had played volleyball instead. She tried classroom 2-d after school. He was already gone. She made a brief report to Mitsuru, largely that nothing about the first years had stood out so far.

On Thursday she tried to find Mishima before classes started at school, but he again ducked into a restroom and remained there until the bell for classes rang, which was suspicious for both the duration he remained in there and that he did not emerge immediately after the bell. Aigis calculated the odds that he was experiencing gastrointestinal distress two days in a row that was not severe enough to keep him home or send him to hospital. She considered how he was lingering in there, and how he had been the only straggler besides her on Tuesday.

The most probable conclusion seemed to be that Yuuki Mishima was not ill, but avoiding her. Following that thought, if he was not ill but freely choosing to linger in the restroom, a secondary conclusion seemed to be that he was not experiencing the same compulsion to follow rules that most students were.

Yuuki Mishima was the most suspicious student at Shujin thus far. She beelined to classroom 2-d as soon as lunch began, at a speed that was slightly faster than 99.99% of female humans could reach, though considering it was still humanly possible she still didn’t think it merited the looks she got in the hall. Ignoring those, she opened the classroom door and stood at Mishima’s desk just as he was rising from it, earning a very wide-eyed look from him.

“Mishima-kun,” she said. “Can I talk to you?”

“I don’t want to talk about Kamoshida,” he answered.

“Understandable.” If that was the reason he was avoiding her, she did not blame him, but there were certainly other things they could discuss. “I have heard you’re rather knowledgeable about the Phantom Thieves. Could I ask you about them?”

Mishima sighed harshly, his head half-turning to the back corner of the room before he stopped himself. “They’re all anyone seems to want to talk about nowadays…”

Strange. His mood seemed to be souring even more at the new topic, even though Tokyo was near-unanimous in its admiration of the Phantom Thieves. While he’d already proven somewhat exceptional in his behavior, didn’t he want the Phantom Thieves to be popular? After all…

“That’s thanks to you, isn’t it?” Aigis lowered her volume. “And the Phansite?”

“H-how—“ As Mishima startled, there was a flash of movement on the edge of Aigis’ vision. The corner of the room again. Takamaki sat in that area; was she listening to their conversation? She wasn’t looking their way, eyes on her phone, but perhaps she was trying to hide her interest. “Look,” Mishima said. “…Let’s talk somewhere else, all right?”

It seemed the intelligence had been correct. Fuuka was very reliable. Continuing the discussion elsewhere was agreeable to Aigis, so she stepped aside and walked alongside Mishima through the halls of Shujin. They meandered for a good thirty seconds before Mishima realized she was expecting him to decide their destination, at which point he led her up to the school rooftop.

“So, you’re…good with computer stuff too, I guess,” Mishima said. “And one of the biggest Phangirls, even now.”

“Are you a Phantom Thief?” Aigis asked. The group did seem to have a…self-promoting tendency, given how the masses’ cognition had been changed.

But Mishima immediately laughed at that, both self-deprecating and too quickly to seem anything but genuine. “I wanted to be. I wish I had been… Look, you just tried to blackmail me so I’d tell you all about the great Phantom Thieves, right? But I’m not even sure you can get me in trouble for being the Phansite admin. I panicked when you said that ‘cause a month ago, I totally could have gotten in hot water, but now I’ve thought it through, and who’d care? Or no, maybe they would care, but it’d be a good thing! People would give me credit as being the first to see how fantastic the Phantom Thieves are! So go ahead!” he yelled, throwing up his hands. “Go tell the first person you see I’m the Phansite admin! Get on the PA system, tell the whole school! But maybe think, maybe think for one second, isn’t it weird? Isn’t it weird everyone’s in love with the Phantom Thieves? Everyone loves these rebels, even the authorities, isn’t that, isn’t that weird? It’s weird!”

“Mishima-kun,” Aigis tried to interject, to get him to slow down. She could still process his speech, but he was going so quickly he was beginning to trip himself up. He sounded desperate, and perhaps that would have been helpful if he’d been a Phantom Thief, but his desperation seemed to stem from knowing how strange matters had turned in the city. He wasn’t hesitating at all to point it out to her, like he believed her feigned interest in the Phantom Thieves but, rather than enjoying it as she thought a Phantom Thief or one of their most dedicated supporters would, absolutely hated it.

“It’s so weird,” Mishima continued. “You only want to talk to people about one thing and people notice that but no one thinks it’s weird because everyone wants to talk about the Phantom Thieves anyway. Everyone in the city has lost their minds, and I’d say the flood of blood did it but most people were acting weird before that and you…totally think I’m the crazy one,” he sighed, his shoulders sagging as all the frantic energy seemed to drain from him in an instant. “Which, okay, I do feel a little crazy right now, but you all started acting crazy first.” He stared at her for a few seconds before shrugging. “So, I don’t want to talk to you about anything, I’m going back down to eat, go ahead and tell everyone I’m the Phansite admin and a nutcase, I don’t care. I don’t have the energy to care right now.” He turned away from her.

Unacceptable. They now had a new matter to discuss. “Mishima-kun,” Aigis said, stepping in front of him. “You remember the events of December 24th?”

He pulled up short, though she wasn’t sure if that was from the question or the obstacle she was posing. “…What?”

“You referenced a ‘flood of blood’. Tokyo experienced rain that was visually similar to blood on the evening of December 24th, but there were no social media accounts or news reports of any kind made about it, as if no one had actually seen it.” To the Shadow Operatives’ knowledge, no one but Yukari, present for a shoot, who’d reported the otherworldly phenomenon as soon as her phone resumed function.

Now she knew he had Mishima’s attention from the way his eyes were focused on her and his mouth gaped. “You…saw it too?”

“No, I did not. I was told about it by someone else.”

“But they saw it, at least? Can I talk to them? What else did they tell you?”

Aigis was starting to feel rather sorry for Mishima now. She imagined it would be disorienting to think he was the only one aware of the changes in Tokyo. His attitude toward her had done a complete reversal at the revelation she might have information for him. But she still needed information too. “If you are not a Phantom Thief, do you know one of them?”

He hesitated. As if he was deliberating. “…You’re not actually a Phangirl, are you?”

She would have liked to consult with Mitsuru first, but this seemed like a circumstance where she had to decide here and now. “I am not. I am investigating the cause of Tokyo’s current state. Why, as you put it, ‘everyone in the city has lost their minds’ and is blindly praising the Phantom Thieves.”

“I…. I can’t—“

The door to the rooftop banged against the stairwell as it was thrown all the way open, startling Mishima into cutting off. “Mishima! Oh, and the cute transfer, too.”

“Amamiya?” Mishima seemed to still be startled, both confusion and alarm on his face.

The boy he’d called Amamiya grinned widely. “Mishima, they called your name on the PA system. Guess you missed it up here? You’re wanted in the vice-principal’s office. It sounded urgent.”

“…R, right,” Mishima said. “Then I…” He looked at Aigis, then at Amamiya’s smiling face. “I’m going.”

“I’ll find you at the end of classes,” Aigis told him. This discussion wasn’t over.

Amamiya whistled. “And you just got here! I didn’t think Mishima could move that fast.”

Aigis’s first thought was that Mishima’s speed was not that sluggish. Then she realized, after further parsing, that Amamiya thought they were attracted to each other. She chose not to rebut the false notion, but she didn’t miss how Mishima looked at Amamiya one last time before heading down the stairs. Did the idea embarrass him? That reaction wasn’t unusual for teenagers.

Amamiya was still smiling as he looked Aigis up and down. She had been ‘checked out’ by guys a number of times before, but Amamiya was being unusually brash about it. “Excuse me,” Aigis said with a nod, intending to go back downstairs, but Amamiya stepped between her and the door.

“Hey, don’t be in such a rush. So, is Mishima really your type? I’m surprised. Ah, that’s probably rude to say, but girls always blew him off before.”

It was very rude to say, and Aigis was beginning to form a derogatory opinion of Amamiya. Still, forcibly removing him from the doorway was not yet justified, so she simply requested, “Let me pass.”

“Sure, sure,” Amamiya said, stepping to the side. But he followed her as she went down, shuffling along with his hands in his pockets. Seeing his face in profile, she placed him as Mishima’s classmate who sat behind Takamaki; he’d been looking out the window from his seat earlier. “You’re a second-year too, right? Let’s walk together for a bit. A friend of Mishima’s is a friend of mine.”

“Are you a friend of his?” Aigis had thought male friends did not typically check out girls they thought their friend was interested in.

“Ouch,” Amamiya laughed as all of Aigis’ systems buzzed. There was a strange quality to his voice as it traveled through the air. Aigis scanned the staircase, but she could not see an immediate explanation for the distorted sound.

Then they stepped out onto the second floor, and all over the hallways was plastered Shujin’s school slogan:

‘True freedom lies within the constructs of society.”

Aigis halted, observing the many papers posted up even outside of the bulletin boards to show those words in various sizes, from the font size most school announcements were posted in to a banner size pronouncement screaming across two meters of the wall. It had certainly not been there at the start of lunch.

“Is something wrong?”

Amamiya was focused on her. He did not seem to have registered the new flurry of posters, setting Aigis on higher alert. She darted to the nearest window and saw a sky tinged with red and structures formed of huge skeletons intersecting with Tokyo’s architecture. Features Yukari had described from her experience on December 24th. She had also said that while Tokyo’s residents had not been encased in coffins, they had still seemed oblivious to the changed world around them, just as Amamiya was acting. He’d followed her to the window, but still seemed more interested in her.

Aigis sent out an emergency signal, though she knew the odds were against any receiving devices being functional at the moment. What was the trigger for this phenomenon? The Dark Hour had always begun at exactly midnight. Yukari had seen this during evening, but Aigis knew by her internal clock that it was currently 12:19:48, suggesting it was not triggered by time of day.

“Amamiya, please stay close to me,” she said. Even if he was annoying, he was a civilian. She had an obligation to protect him if there might be danger.

The boy’s eyebrows rose up, and he chuckled. “Well, I’m not going to say no to a pretty girl…”

Annoying indeed. She chose to ignore his input.

“…But there’s more to you than that, isn’t there, Aigis?”

“We should go down,” Aigis decided. They needed to be on ground floor. If there were any shadows in the building, the staircases could end up blocked, which would make it harder to escape with Amamiya.

“Are you all right? You seem scared.”

“I am concerned. Follow me.” She entered the staircase again, listening to make sure he followed. It was easy to track his footsteps. There were no other sounds of movement, as if they were the only two in the school.

“What’s going on? Can’t you tell me?”

“Have you observed anything out of place?”

“Hmm….” Amamiya drew out the sound out. “Not really. Same old Shujin.”

“Then you would not understand—“

A shadow burst out in front of them on the first floor, its white body a cross between humanoid and lizardlike with the long, skinny tail trailing behind it. Aigis did not hesitate. “Amamiya, stay behind me!” she called before opening fire, her fingers uncapping to unleash a flurry of bullets. The shadow flailed as it took damage but didn’t collapse, so it had some endurance, and Aigis braced herself for the counterattack that came in the form of psi energy. It hurt, but she could endure it—

And then a bolt of electricity ripped through her systems. Aigis jolted as the shock gripped her, then staggered back, searching for the new attacker. She could see nothing besides Amamiya.

He was still looking at her with complete nonchalance as she wavered. “Thor," he called, and a Persona clad in gold helmet and white cape briefly appeared and called down with its hammer another lightning bolt that made Aigis’ frame spasm, dropping her down to one knee. “Weak to electricity, huh. So, who made you?”

He was a Persona user. Which meant he’d most likely been feigning ignorance of the altered surroundings, and had probably been acting even before that. “You are…a phantom thief…?” Aigis attempted to rise again, but the lizardlike shadow tackled her. After the two lightning strikes, she found it harder to push the shadow off than it should have been.

“Right,” Amamiya said, kneeling down by her, at ease with the disgusting shadow. “Congratulations, Aigis. You went looking for the Phantom Thieves, didn’t you? Well, you’ve found them.” Amamiya placed a hand on the breast of his school blazer with a smirk. “Now, who sent you?”

She visualized his face in silhouette, comparing it to the December calling card. “You’re the leader.”

Amamiya shrugged. “Are you go to answer my question, or should I start dismantling you now? Your hardware probably has some clues about which part of the conspiracy still needs to be rooted out. A robot like you must be one of a kind.”

“I am not part of any conspiracy,” Aigis denied. She started to prepare Orgia mode. She needed one more minute before her limiter would be disabled, so it would be best to keep Amamiya talking until then. “What about you? Why is a teenager conspiring to control Tokyo?”

“Well…I’d say because it seems fun. But I’m not controlling Tokyo, or trying to. That’d be a fool’s errand.”

“The people are praising the Phantom Thieves—“

“—Just as they’d praise a loyal dog,” Amamiya interrupted. His patience seemed to be growing short.

Thankfully, her limiter had just deactivated. Aigis threw the shadow off of her toward Amamiya. The lizard shadow twisted mid-air, righting itself before it hit Amamiya, but the burst of motion still made him retreat two steps. This time, Aigis did fire at him. The number of times she’d opened fire on a human were exceedingly rare, thankfully, but she knew that a Persona-user in a cognitive world should not be lethally wounded by one hit. Amamiya grit his teeth in pain, hissing as the first shot connected, but she would not kill him. Merely disable him.

Except then a Persona shimmered behind him with an outline that looked different from Thor’s, and then bullets began to be repelled from him.

Aigis stopped firing to not waste any more ammunition or time. She’d miscalculated. A wildcard…!

“Okay,” Amamiya ground out. “I’ll destroy you.”

Aigis did not report in at her usual time. Mitsuru tried to contact her, then contacted Fuuka when there seemed to be technical difficulties. Fuuka confirmed that Aigis appeared to be unreachable. Mitsuru then contacted Shujin, posing as Aigis’ guardian, and received the news that Aigis seemed to have decided to skip out on all afternoon classes. Highly disappointing, delinquent behavior. The faculty seemed to have decided that Aigis had chosen to miss class, not even considering she might be in trouble. Of course, she should be the last Shadow Operative who could have gotten in trouble, given her nature, but…

“She would have sent an emergency signal if she thought she was in danger,” Mitsuru reasoned aloud. “Unless—did she encounter the same kind of phenomenon that happened in December?”

“In that case, she wouldn’t have been able to get signal out,” Fuuka said, frowning as she stared at her laptop, trying to think of any way to reach Aigis they hadn’t tried yet. “T, though, if that’s what happened, maybe she’ll still contact us soon? Yukari said it lasted a while, but it’s already been hours…”

They waited, but Aigis never called.

“I heard that cute transfer student’s dropping out. What a shame.”

Mishima jolted when Ren came up to walk alongside him after school as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t sent Mishima on a wild goose chase to the vice principal’s office (as Mishima had half-expected, the vice principal had been confused to see Mishima there and had sent him away) and been the last one with Aigis before she ‘skipped’ all of afternoon classes. “Wh—what happened?” Mishima asked.

“Well, you know, transferring can be stressful,” Ren said blandly. “So don’t expect to be seeing her again. Or telling her anything.”

“I—wasn’t going to—“

“It kind of seemed like you were thinking about it.”

“Because I don’t know what’s going on! You weren’t telling me anything before! You’ve barely been talking to me! Sakamoto, Takamaki, are they just acting too?”

“I’ve been trying to not draw attention to you, Mishima. Because Tokyo isn’t kind to people who don’t fit in right now.” Amamiya paused. “You might want to consider dropping out yourself.”

“Is—is that a threat?”

“It’s a warning.”

Aigis did not often dream. She was not built to need to.

But for once she dreamed, and in her dreams, she saw Minato.

#ren amamiya #yuuki mishima #aigis #persona 5 #persona 3 #ryuji sakamoto #ann takamaki

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