#of the major NPCs I haven’t QUITE settled on Fuya Kanon and Tsugumi’s jobs but the rest I think I’ve got

[regallibellbright]

So the central roles of the Guardians AU are pretty well set and did so pretty much immediately (Joshua-Ventuswill, Rindo-Lest/Frey, Neku, Shiki, Beat and Rhyme-Leon, Dolce, Dylas and Amber.) There was a brief moment where I considered a situation where Neku was the resident amnesiac befriending a god, but Kitaniji and the GMs as Guardians instead just Does Not Work, and Neku’s the keystone that holds the rest of the gang together. (As a result, Shiki, Beat and Rhyme are all elves - half-elf in Shiki’s case - so that they could all lose Neku, be royally pissed off at him for vanishing without telling them, and then still be alive a couple centuries later to make the same choice he did. Everyone knows it’s at least as much for Neku as it is for Joshua.)

On the other hand, Megumi Kitaniji as Volkanon as first attendant/de facto mayor? Yeah that checked out, which lends itself to the following very fun dynamics:

1) Megumi, increasingly caught off-guard by the sheer Weirdness that is this year, on increasingly better terms with Rindo who’s at least as bewildered by this all as anyone else.

2) Neku comes back. Neku looks at least a decade younger than Megumi. Neku as a Dragon Priest from 1,000 years ago has seniority over Megumi’s rank, not just himself. (Sidenote: Megumi has maybe just been demoted?) Neku treats his god so informally Megumi would probably rather die than consider it, given Joshua’s the Divine Dragon of Mind. Neku now lives here and, while the other newcomers have their own bedrooms they sometimes use, is the Divine Dragon’s personal teddy bear and only ceded when the other Guardians are ALSO sleeping on the Divine Dragon’s dais so that Neku can get Maximal Amounts of Cuddles, which is about half the time.

Megumi has a lot to process.

3) We’ll be skipping Arc Two in favor of post-reunion Shenanigans, but this is not because there is no Empire presence in the city! No, it’s because Megumi has had Shiba Miyakaze’s number from the MINUTE that blowhard “mercenary” walked into town with his entourage, and the two of them are engaged in a mental cold war. Since everyone else was more loyal to Shiba than the Empire, it’s been three years, and they’re actually pretty happy with this city and their cover identities and think the boss doesn’t really want to move on either, this has derailed all plans of sabotage in favor of PERSONAL rivalry.

(In the background, the local florist-and-nutrients and poisons shopkeeper, Ayano Kamachi, has been having her own icy hostility Thing with the Dragon Knights’ second-in-command, it’s just that she and Konishi are much gayer about it by this point and in deep, deep denial. Shoka’s running a bet with the rest of the town about how that hookup finally happens.)