Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The halls of Mementos echoed faintly with the sounds of frustration. A high school boy in a dashing outfit had been battling with a lock on a treasure chest for the past fifteen minutes. He’d tried time and time again to line the pins up, but it just wasn’t happening.

“Joker, this is taking forever,” A bleach-blond boy echoed Joker’s own thoughts as he leaned out of the car window.

“I noticed,” Joker replied curtly, losing the pins once again.

“Can’t we just, I don’t know, break it open?” The bleach-blond boy whined.

“Such force would likely only end up damaging whatever was inside,” the other boy in the vehicle replied, polishing a katana.

“Fox is right, Skull. You can’t just brute force everything,” the childish voice with mature words came from the car itself.

“Fiiiiine.”

“Maybe we should continue exploring this floor and come back for it later,” the brunette behind the wheel chimed in. She saw him flinch, having lost his progress once more and continued with a slightly guilty expression. “We should be fine as long as we don’t head down an escalator.”

“No, I’m getting there, I just need a little more time,” Joker reassured, flashing her a grin to allveiate her guilt. In truth he wasn’t quite sure he believed his own words. Given he was the leader, no one persisted, and they passed another few moments in silence.

“Hey, did anyone hear that just now?” A blonde girl with pigtails leaned forward from the back seat, her eyes were flitting around nervously.

The others in the car looked at her in confusion.

“Hear what?” Skull asked, giving her a sideways glance.

“That noise." she whined impatiently. "Just a second ago.”

The driver looked at the blonde girl with a puzzled expression, then shook her head, “I didn’t hear anything.”

The blonde girl turned to the boy with the katana, seeking support. “Fox, what about you?”

The boy with the katana mirrored the driver’s motion. “I can’t say that I did.”

The blonde girl huffed. “Okay, I’m not crazy, I just heard it. Mona?” She looked down at the floor of the car.

“Sorry Panther,” the cat-faced vehicle replied sympathetically, “I only heard wind and Skull’s obnoxious voice. But whatever it is, you don’t need to worry. We should be strong enough to handle any shadows we come across here.”

“Even if we couldn’t,” Joker added, still fiddling with the lock, “Queen’s a pretty good driver, we’ll out run anything we can’t fight.”

“Thank you, Joker.” The driver smiled in reserved gratitude.

Joker got all but the last two pins in line, “Okay, I think I-”

“There it is again!” Panther suddenly cried out, breaking his concentration and losing his progress.

“Wait… nope… never mind,” Joker sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Okay, that time I heard it,” Skull confirmed, suddenly upright and tense in his seat.

“Me too,” Mona agreed.

“See, I told you I’m not crazy,” Panther grumbled.

“It’s as Mona said though,” Fox replied, still lax, “no matter how intimidating the sound, anything we find here is likely weaker than us.”

“I’m not so sure.” Queen’s hands tensed a little on the steering wheel. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Finally Joker heard the noise. Chains. Rattling chains. It was short, but the sound carried an eerie gravity to it. It vibrated through the skin and bones, right to the soul. The way it echoed through the tunnels didn’t seem to fade in power. A kind of dread began to creep into his mind.

Clearly everyone else was feeling it to. “Joker, I think we should leave the chest,” Queen called from the window, more than a little urgently.

Joker put his lockpick away, giving one last disdainful look at the box. “Yeah, you’re right.” He turned around. “Let’s head to…”

It had a long black cloak and a pistol aimed at them. He jerked his head to Queen, catching her eye. “MOVE!”

With the reflexes of a cheetah, Queen’s foot hit the pedal. Mona’s wheels squealed in the second it took to catch friction with the ground. The car headed one way, Joker headed the other. He’d just started to lunge forward when the shot came.

It missed them, but the shockwave from it simply passing by sent both him and the car flying. The bullet struck the chest, completely disintegrating it and whatever was inside.

By some miracle, Mona land on his tires. Joker wasn’t so lucky. He was sent skipping twice across the ground, only stopped when he hit the wall. As he scrambled back to his feet, he saw their attacker drift across the ground until it was between him and the rest of his team. A burlap sack was tied over its head and a single hole showed its eye, shifting its gaze from him to them and back again. Joker looked past it to Queen and Skull, sitting in the front.

“RUN! NOW!”

After a split second of shock, Skull shook his head vigorously, shouting a protest. Queen on the other hand, looked him solemnly in the eye and nodded. Joker took out his pistol and fired off two shots at the thing. It wasn’t much of a surprise when it didn’t flinch. It clearly directed its attention at him though, which was plenty. With that, Queen gunned Mona’s engines, made a sharp turn, and sped down the track. Skull’s cry of shock echoed back. The shadow heard the movement and looked back, raising one of its pistols. Joker fired on it until he emptied his magazine, bringing its eye back to him.

“That’s right, come and get me,” Joker muttered before turning on his heels and sprint away as fast as he could. The chains began rattling again as it gave chase. The first corner he found, Joker rounded, and not a moment too soon. The shock wave of a bullet nearly missing him was still enough to throw him forward several dozen feet. The inadvertent head start turned out to be an advantage.

Soon as he was back to his feet, he rounded another corner and hid in the darkness, pressing himself against the wall and staying as still as humanly possible with his level of exhaustion. His chest heaved from the combination of terror and physical exertion, but he did his best to quiet his breathing.

“Where did you come from?” Joker muttered to himself after a moment. It was nothing like the other shadows. This thing had a definite form, it wasn’t a twisted mass with arms and legs. It was closer to the monstrous forms of the palaces' rulers. But Kamoshida, Madarame, and Kaneshiro, they didn’t stack up even close to this thing. The cold, deathly chill that polluted the air around it, it was a feeling unlike anything he’d ever felt.

Now he was stuck here, on foot, with it moving around. He hoped Queen was smart enough to keep the others from trying to find him. If they ran into that thing, it was over, even with all of them together. She, Fox, and Mona were fine, but Panther and Skull were no doubt worried sick.

It was faster than him and it had a ranged attack that would kill him in one. He was going to have to move smart, but that was only going to draw to this out. There was a reason they drove in Mementos.

“Hello there.” A young voice came from behind him.

Joker whipped around and drew his pistol.

The young boy didn’t flinch. He just smiled. He stood just over half Joker’s height, dressed liked he was fresh out of Igor’s prison. His skin was eerily pale, like he was sick, and he wasn’t wearing and socks or shoes. The kid cocked his head curiously. “Are you lost?”

“Uhhhh,” Joker lowered his gun and stared for a moment.

“Are you?” He asked again, patiently.

“Yeah, kinda,” Joker replied warily, deciding not to put the gun away. Nothing about this child even whispered “normal”. “Listen, kid, you need to get out of here; there was one heck of a monster floating around nearby.”

“You mean the Reaper?” The boy replied knowingly.

Joker stopped and pursed his lips. Yep. Definitely not normal.

“I saw it attack you before. It was a good idea to run from it.”

“Felt like the only idea at the time,” Joker crouched down to the boy’s level. “The Reaper, huh? You seem to know what’s up. Mind sharing?”

The boy only shook his head. “I’m afraid knowing any more than you do now wouldn’t help much. It would also take quite a while, likely more than enough time for it to find us. All you need to know is that it’s far too powerful for you to stand a chance right now.”

“Lucky me, fighting wasn’t the plan,” he cast a nervous look over his shoulder, half expecting it to already be there. “How do I get around it?”

“You can’t here, it’s too fast. That car was your only chance.”

Joker heaved a sigh, but then had a thought. “What do you mean, ‘here’?”

The boy’s smile widened just a little, satisfied that he’d caught on. “In this part of Mementos, it moves faster to traverse the tunnels.”

“So, there’s a part of Mementos where it doesn’t do that?”

In response, the boy turned around and began to walk away. “Follow me.”

Joker turned back for just a moment, debating whether to go with the evil he knew or the one he didn’t. In the end it was the choice between possible death, and certain death. The boy was just disappearing around a corner when he started to follow him.

“Hey, wait up!” He ran to join the kid. But when he turned the corner, he didn’t see him.

He also didn’t see the familiar dank, dark tunnels of Mementos.

“What the hell…” Joker trailed off, looking around. He backed up a few steps to try and take it all in.

But his back quickly touched a wall. It took Joker by surprise and he yelped, spinning around and staring at it. He couldn’t go back.

“Are you kidding me?” He shook his head, smiling to himself at the absurdity of it.

A gurgling growl from deeper in the twisted school ensured him that no, they were not kidding him.

Whoever “they” were.

Once more finding himself a prisoner (seemed to be an ongoing theme lately), Joker turned around to look at his new surroundings. It was very obviously a school, much more well-funded than his. But it was… wrong. Everything had green tinge to it. Blood seemed to leak out of the walls and pool on the floor. His vision even felt a bit messed up by this place; every once in a while, part of his view would distort just slightly.

Nothing about this place felt good and that feeling was only heightened when he realized he was wearing his school uniform.

“What the-!” He looked at his hands in disbelief, not only was he stuck in Mementos with something called “the Reaper” on the loose, but now he didn’t have his thief stuff. But that also meant that while he was here…

“I’m not a threat,” he muttered. What did that mean? What was this place? Who was the kid? What was the Reaper? And most importantly, why was he here?

He didn’t know what to make of any of it. But there was nowhere to go but forward. With a sigh and a shrug, Joker started down the hall.

Chapter Text

Not that Joker was surprised, but it became clear very quickly that this place wasn’t operating on any reasonable kind of architecture. Hallways branched off at random, stopped at dead ends, walls randomly divided rooms, short stairways went up and then right back down, and there was no pattern to any of it. It confirmed he was still in Mementos, but it presented another issue. As he went further and further, a feeling of helplessness set in. There was no sign of actual progress, just walls and windows far as the eye could see (which wasn’t far here), staring out into nothing except the moon, which looked massive. His footsteps echoed off into the dark murk that pervaded the atmosphere. It made it dramatically apparent how alone he was.

At least until he started to hear the breathing.

It echoed through the air around him, making it hard to say where it came from. It belonged to a girl, and it came in labored gasps, like she was exhausted… or scared.

“Hello?” He called out reluctantly, not sure what would answer back. The breaths turned slowly to weeping, and he picked up his pace a little. “Hey! Anybody here?!” The breaths became deeper and deeper, to the point of hyperventilating, like some kind of panic attack. “HEY!” He broke into a run. It was impossible to tell where he was going, how many corners he turned. The surroundings always stayed the same, the breathing never got any closer. He couldn’t say what it was that drove him forward, but there was a desperation pressing down on him. He had to find whoever it was and he had to do it now.

“Takeba, wait!”

The command came out of nowhere, as did the powerful voice of the woman that gave it. Joker flinched and stumbled to a halt, nearly tripping over himself. The moment he was stable, he whipped his head around, scanning the area for the source. Aside from him, the hallway was still empty; he was just as alone now as he was before. And now he was hearing voices. This place was starting to get to him.

Before he’d even fully recovered, a clatter once again jolted him into looking down the hall. Out of the darkness, a glinting shape skipped and slid right past him. It slowed to a stop just a few feet behind.

Joker turned around and looked at the object.

It was a gun, about the size of something he’d use. Slowly, carefully, Joker made his way over to it. He scanned the hallway for even the slightest movement, ready to bolt in a second, before gingerly picking the firearm up and looking it over.

“S. E. E. S.” The letters were inscribed along the side. There was no hammer, nor anywhere to put in a clip. “It’s not any kind of model I’ve seen,” he said to no one, trying to break up the silence. With no more to look at, he promptly held it out ward, aimed down the hall, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

“Don’t know what I was expecting.” There was no reason to get rid of it, and nothing else to hold onto at the moment, he pocketed the gun and looked back the way he'd been walking. A girl, out of breath, having a panic attack. Who was she? Why was she out of breath? Was there even a girl? And who was telling who to wait?

“My name is Mitsuru Kirijo,” the commanding voice came again, as if answering him directly. It sounded like it was right behind him. Joker spun around again as fast as he could, but unsurprisingly, found no one. After letting himself be annoyed at this place for a moment, he took a moment to process the new information.

“Mitsuru Kirijo?” He knew that name, but he couldn’t place it. Hell, he couldn’t place a lot of things right now with this place messing with his head. He was lucky to remember his own name. He’d heard it before, he knew that. As he continued walking, he tried to think of the places that he could have heard it. At school? No. LeBlanc? Maybe. Train? No. TV?

He rounded a corner and stopped dead, losing his train of thought instantly. The hallway in front of him finally had presented a distinguishing landmark. Despite that fact, its appearance wasn’t what one would call “welcoming”. Handprints, jet black ones, covered everything. On the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. For at least ten meters of hallway, nothing but hundreds of handprints all over.

And a boxing glove.

It just sat there, a lone splash of red among the sea of black, defiant.

“Man, Yusuke would love this,” Joker chuckled. Comforting himself with thoughts of his friends, he braved the art piece, and approached the glove. Now that he was closer, he could he see that it was damaged, and pretty badly at that. There were slashes in multiple places, the thing was actually barely holding together. It certainly seemed to mean something, that was obvious. But what?

He tried to call back to the many ramblings on symbolism that Yusuke was prone to. Black meant death, red meant… passion? Anger? Love? Fists were power, though the glove was destroyed.

“You can’t overpower death?” He guessed out loud, but that didn't sound right. He lamented his phone's camera not working in the Metaverse, Yusuke would definitley be able to help with this.

Like so many times already, a new sound brought Joker out of his thoughts. It was a consistent, continuous noise, far too quiet for him to make sense of. It was clearly coming from close by, though. It seemed that was his cue to keep moving. With a last look back to the art piece, he did just that.

As a certain point, he figured out that it was music. But it sounded tinny, distorted. The possibility of this being a trap crossed his mind. Could shadows set traps? The ones in Mementos never had. Actually, now that he thought of it, he hadn’t seen a seen any since he got here, gun-toting or otherwise. He wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not.

The volume of the music increased steadily as he walked. He took a few experimental turns at random, testing to see if anything here really had any spatial consistency. It didn’t matter which way he went, all paths seemed to lead toward it. Even still, it was hard to make out anything about the song from the distortion. It wasn’t much longer before he came to the source. An old MP3 player lied on the floor in the middle of the hall, attached to a pair of head phones.

“Huh,” was all Joker could really say to it. He walked over and picked up the device, holding up one of the speakers to his ear. It was a pop-sounding song, normal vocals mixed in with rap. He looked at the small screen at the artist name. “Lotus Juice?” Never heard of him. After a moment of debate, he pocketed the player, hanging the headphones on his shoulders. Not like anyone else was going to use it, and he appreciated the ability to break the silence.

He headed back for the landmark. If he was going to find anything important, it would probably be there. As he appraoched it, the music cut out abruptly, replaced with the slightest bit of background static. Joker looked at the screen again. It read “4/7: The Fool”. A voice started coming through the speakers.

“April 7th,” the boy on the track started, sounding a little nostalgic, and a little sad. “Not the day it started, but definitely the day it got moving.” Joker stepped back onto the handprints as he listened. “It’s a weird experience, walking off a train in a new town to find nothing but coffins,” the voice gave a wry chuckle. “Even weirder when you arrive at your new dorm and find no one but a little kid wearing prison stripes.”

Prison stripes? Joker looked at the music player like it just slapped him. The kid from before? What the hell was going on here?

“It didn’t seem like a big deal. All I did was sign my name. Not sure if that’s what triggered it, but I wouldn’t be surprised. After all, less than a minute later, someone pulled a gun on me.”

Static took over for just a few seconds, then the track changed. “4/9: The Magician”.

“It was… terrifying. Only two days after I get here and we were attacked by that… thing. Yukari tried to fight back, but she was scared. When I look back on it, we probably still would have died if I was the only thing that awakened. If Akihiko couldn’t stand up to it, what chance did I have? I’d only just gotten my persona.”

Joker stopped walking, his eyes widening.

Other persona users? There were other persona users? He took a second to process the revelation. He supposed it wasn’t impossible; the world was a big place. But the idea that they weren’t the first had never really crossed his mind. He cast a glance down to the MP3 player; if that was anything to go off, they wouldn’t have had smart phones. How did they get to the Metaverse without the app?

“But I guess fate had other plans. Well, I know it did. We ended up with Akihiko injured for nearly two months, but it wasn’t a total loss; the shadow was dead, and they had a new persona user.”

As the monologue ended, the screen flashed a low battery signal three times, then died, once more leaving Joker in silence. He looked at the hallway around him, the slashes on the glove. Clearly there was a story to tell here. Whether he was going to get all of it, only time would tell. For now, all he could do was move on.

Eventually, after an unknown amount of time spent walking, Joker came to a staircase. The sight was an uplifting one; vertical change meant progress. At least, he hoped it did. As he began to climb the stairs, voices drifted in from the ether.

“This is Yukari Takeba,” the voice of Mitsuru Kirijo explained.

“…Hey,” another girl greeted reluctantly. Yukari Takeba, the one who got told to wait, the one who hesitated with the shadow. There was some connective tissue in this narrative, at least.

“I’m Junpei Iori, Nice to meet ya.”

“Nice to meet you too, Junpei, can you tell me where I am?” Joker said, mostly to himself. Naturally, Mr. Iori didn’t respond.

“My name is Shuji Ikutski,” came the voice of a man. “I believe I mentioned him earlier,” it continued, “but this is Akihiko.”

“How ya doin’?” Came the young, but gruff sounding follow-up.

Why was he being introduced to people? Was this their team? Before he could try and think it through, the sound of footsteps besides his quickly appeared and grew in volume. Just as he was turning to look back, someone passed him. He barely got a look at the guy, but the dark hair was the same color as the kid from before. Just behind him was another guy in a baseball cap, and a girl in a pink cardigan.

All three were armed and none of them acknowledged him. They passed by him as if he wasn't there.

“Hey, wait up!” Whether or not it was going to work didn’t really matter, he had to try. When they didn’t respond, he took off, taking the steps two at a time as he tried to catch up. In just a few moments, he hit a landing. He’d reached the top.

Sadly, all it presented was more nightmare school hallways.

Chapter Text

Joker pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Why does everything about this place have to be so cryptic and unhelpful?”

As if in response, a train rushed by the window next to him, blaring its horn as it went. With a yelp that he was glad no one else could hear, he backed up several steps from the window, taking a moment to calm down. Finally, something familiar. Maybe it meant he was close to the end. He kept walking, seeing the cars rush by the windows every once in a while. He was grateful for the noise, however loud it was. It didn’t seem to matter where he went, the train was still there, just outside. He started counting how many times it went by. It was on the fifth counted pass that something caught his eye. He stopped and stared at the window, waiting for it to come again.

When it finally did, he confirmed it. He could see something in the train. Lots of somethings actually. Shapes. On the seventh pass he could see what they were.

Coffins. Dozens of floating coffins.

“Wait a sec…” he muttered to himself, “nothing but coffins.” Was this the scene from The Fool? No, it wasn’t. He’d only mentioned coffins when getting off the train. But then, what was it? On the eighth pass, there was something new. A single figure, barely more than a blur, moving through the car.

The ninth showed two more, trailing a car behind the first.

He could barely make them out just standing there though. The hallway he was in wasn’t long, but it was enough. He stopped at one end, and tensed his body. He waited for the tenth pass to come. As soon as he heard the horn, he took off sprinting. The added time he got running alongside the train was minimal, but it was enough. Baseball Cap, Pink Cardigan, Dark Hair. He was still following the same story.

He kept running for as long as he could, getting a look at what they were carrying, two swords and a bow, before he came to the end of the hall, passing by the corner. There was a moment of breathing heavily, and a mental reminder to thank Ryuji for the track practice. When he stood up, he was faced with his second landmark. Just as unsettling as the first.

Hair.

It seeped in through the windows, cracks in the wall, and came down from the ceiling; endless locks of thick, tangled hair. The strands were either black or white, they covered the floor entirely. As he looked up, Joker noticed something tangled within the thousands of strands hanging down from the ceiling. It was a train; a model train like the kind a kid would play with. It was also an exact replica of the one passing by the window every so often. Lights were visible from inside the little train; Joker contemplated approaching it, seeing if there were little models of the three mystery kids inside, but decided against it. He was having nothing to do with this one.

“Junpei! Wait!” The voice of Yukari Takeba rang in Joker’s ears. He spun around just as a body sprinted past him, into the hallway of hair. He caught just the faintest glimpse of a hat. He turned toward the hair again, seeing Baseball Cap, who he could now confirm was Junpei Iori, disappear into the darkness.

He knew it was a sign. Mementos wanted him to go that way. But he’d seen enough horror movies in his life time to recognize a kill spot and he had enough on his plate without adding ghosts.

Clearly, the labyrinth begged to differ, and it did so in such a small, but effective way: somewhere, a ways off but still too close for comfort, there the was the sound of a chain being rattled.

“That’s just not fair,” Joker growled, looking between the direction he’d come from and dark mess in front of him. The chain sounded again, closer this time. The cold dread from earlier started creeping in. That alone was enough to make the hair seem a lot friendlier. There was always the chance that it was just an image, not real, not anything dangerous, but he wasn’t going to take it.

The boy spun and booked it onto the hair, giving one last glance to the train as he passed. Any hope that it might not last that long was quickly killed off. With the lights mostly covered, it was even darker here than out there. He couldn’t see anything more than two inches from his face, including the floor. Luckily, it remained relatively smooth, no bumps or loops to trip him up. When he didn’t hear the chains again, Joker decided to slow down a bit and let himself assess the situation. If that thing was still here, he was still in Mementos. But everything looked different. Even with all the floors he'd been through, there'd never been anything like this. Everything they’d seen here up until now was just train tunnels, albeit it nonsensical ones. Why was this place different? Did Mementos have rules?

There were no answers to be found. A change in the sound of his footsteps made him stop. He’d gone from the tap of tile to the tink of metal. It was still far too dark to see any detail, but the floor had definitely changed. He kept going, and found the hair starting to part, just a little. It gave him enough light to see he was definitely somewhere different.

He was in the train.

The world outside rushed by as the train sped along its track. There was no way it should’ve been going this fast. The coffins weren’t here anymore, he had no idea why. The green sky outside was clear, populated only by the moon, beaming down like a massive spotlight. “Well, I’ve been in weirder,” Joker muttered to himself. There was still no sign of the chains rattling anymore, so he took a second to sit down on a seat and breathe.

How long had he been gone? How long would the others wait? Would they go back? Would they try and come find him? Neither option sounded good. He hoped they were okay.

A small light shining up at him caught Joker’s attention. The MP3 player was on again. “5/9: The Priestess.” He quickly held the headphones up to his ears.

“We were still early on, still newbies. We’d been in Tartarus a few times, gotten a good ways up, but Akihiko was still recovering and Misturu had to stay on the bottom floor to coordinate. So it was just Me, Yukari, and Junpei. Our first mission nearly got us all killed. Junpei’s a good guy, but he was really dumb when we started out. We had a hell of a time playing catch up, but we did it. Good thing too, because he was really outnumbered. I’m probably gonna be saying this a lot, but it was pretty terrifying. The train was out of control and we had 8 minutes to beat the shadow that took it over. Even then, if I hadn’t found the brake… We survived, that’s what mattered. Still, it was a close one.”

As soon as it was over, there was the screeching sound of brakes. The train started to slow, they were approaching a station. When it came to a halt, one of the doors opened. A glance out the window showed another staircase leading up. “Finally,” he breathed a sigh of relief and stood up. The second he stepped past the doors, they slid shut and the train sped off. Joker turned around to watch it go, but found only the hallway… and a boy.

“Hello again.”

The small, frail shape caught him off guard. He took a step back and stared at him for a second.  The reaction only lasted a second or two; Joker had experience with kids being more powerful than they looked and freaking out wasn’t going to get him anywhere. So instead, he breathed and asked, “How’d you get here?”

“I’m always with you…” the boy began, but stopped himself, smiling fading as he put a hand over his mouth pensively. “No, that’s not quite right, is it? We’ve only met today. And yet…” He paced past Joker and over to the stairs, sitting down on the bottom step, looking puzzled

Joker watched him for a moment, comparing him to the dark haired guy he’d been getting glimpses of. Aside from the hair color, there was nothing major, but that was just appearances. When it was clear the kid wouldn’t have a follow up to his thought, he spoke up again, making his way over and sitting down next to the kid. “What is this place?”

The boy looked up at him, then all around them. “This is Mementos, don’t you remember?”

Joker shook his head, unsatisfied. “This is not the Mementos I know.”

The boy nodded, closing his eyes, “I suppose you wouldn’t. After all, Mementos is the collective unconsciousness. Even if those who reside within it forget, it never does.”

“What isn’t it forgetting?”

The boy opened his eyes and looked into Joker’s. “Do you remember the year 2009?”

Joker stared at him for a few seconds, cocking his head a little. “Bit of an odd question.”

"But a relevant one, nonetheless.”

“Does it have anything to do with what I’ve been seeing?”  Joker guessed the answer, but decided to double-check.

The boy gave a good natured, almost affectionate chuckle. “You’re learning. It was a very important year.”

“Why?” Joker thought back, not quite remembering anything major about it.

“You’re seeing the story bit by bit as you go. About this place, those who traversed it… and about Death.”

The slowing of his speech, the hesitation in his voice, Joker could practically hear the proper noun in “Death”. “Who are you?”

The boy lowered his head once more, “I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you yet,” he looked up with an oddly cheerful smile on his face. “But next time, I think the time will be right.” Joker blinked, and the boy was gone. Because of course he was gone. With a sigh, he stood back up and began moving up the stairs.

It wasn’t long before voices started floating through the ether once more. The first was Shuji Ikutski.

“Would you believe me if I said that a day consists of more than 24 hours?”

“If you asked me back in April, I’d say no. Now…” Joker knew he couldn’t hear him, but he didn’t care.

“The Dark Hour – a time period hidden between one day and the next,” Mitsuru Kirijo explained.

The voice of Akihiko joined in. “Normal people don’t realize it, since they’re all sleeping inside their coffins. You saw those creatures, we call them ‘Shadows’.”

Coffins again. Were they saying those were people? Had he been on one of those? “Long story short,” Ikutski continued, “we’re the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad.”

Joker suppressed a laugh. “Heck of a name…" then he stopped walking, "wait a minute.”

Even as he lifted the gun, the voice continued. “SEES for short.” There it was. What the hell was this thing? “On paper, we’re classified as a school club. But in reality, this group is dedicated to defeating the shadows.”

“Defeating the shadows.” Joker’s brow furrowed and he held his chin thoughtfully. “So they’re definitely persona users. But not Phantom Thieves. None of them had masks. So how…” He looked at the gun again. It had their name, was it a weapon? Did it work on the shadows?

“Fuuka Yamagishi… Do you guys know her?” Akihiko spoke from nowhere.

“She gets sick a lot, from what I heard… I don’t see her at school very often,” The disembodied voice of Yukari Takeba replied. So a new member was being added to their team. Unlike the first set, these stairs didn’t have walls. They led off into some murky void all around him. Joker looked off into the abyss outside the staircase, curious if he’d see anything to give him context. All he got was a mix of images that he couldn’t make sense of.

A guy in full kendo gear ran on a school track for a while before falling over and clutching his leg. A kid in a school uniform reached out to an adult woman as she walked away, a box of chocolates behind his back. A teacher in a pink suit set down her chalk and walked over to a computer, opening a beer can and playing a video game. It all just seemed completely random, but everything so far had been connected.

As it turns out, these were no different.

A guy showed up in each of the three scenes. He helped the guy in kendo gear off the ground, comforted the guy with the chocolates, and sat down at a computer across from the teacher, sending her a message in their game. All of them with the same dark hair as the kid in the stripes… and the guy with Junpei and Pink Cardigan.

Suddenly, the scenes started feeling all too familiar, a smile found it's way to Joker's face.

“Hey! Will you guys wait up a second!” The voice of Yukari called from down the stairs. Once again, just as Joker turned to face them, four bodies ran up the stairs towards him. Dark Hair, Junpei, Pink Cardigan (who he could now confirm was Yukari Takeba), and a new guy. Slightly taller than the others, with a red vest adding a bit more color to the party. Something told him this was Akihiko. The last time he followed them got him to the top of the stairs, so he followed suit this time. Before long, he hit the next landing and stopped to take in the new surroundings.

The new floor was very much not the nightmare school anymore. But what it was, he couldn’t really say. Black and purple dominated the color scheme, the walls seemed ribbed, almost like bone, and there was a gigantic human face coming out of one of the them. “Well this is decidedly different," was the only thing Joker could mutter. He’d planned on looking around a bit more, but when his eyes met someone else’s, he stopped.

He didn't know if finding another person in this place should have been calming, but it wasn't.  Boy was it ever not.

Among the dark surroundings, this pale wisp of a man that stood before him stuck out.  It was hard to guess his age with how thin and ghostly he looked.  If he wasn't standing upright and confident, he would've looked sickly.  Blond hair fell around his head, barely kept in check by the band around his scalp. He wore no shirt, showing off the intricate tattoos on his arms. His shoulders sagged, but not out of exhaustion.  He looked unsettlingly relaxed. His eerie appearance set off plenty of alarm bells on its own, but three factors set off every last warning sign imaginable. The face attached to the body was cold. Its eyes were devoid of pity, fear, or kindness in any form. The smile beneath them did nothing to help. One arm hung at his side, the other rested on the handle of a revolver, tucked into his belt.

They stood there, silently watching each other. A prickling nervousness crept up Joker’s back. Finally, the pale man broke the silence.

“How odd to find someone new in this… faded nostalgia.”

Chapter Text

Joker took a reflexive step back.

Apparently, that was the wrong move, because the cold smile only widened. “Oh? A curious reaction. Surely, you know by now, there’s nowhere to run back to.”

Joker had a feeling, but he had to see the wall that had replaced the staircase before he admitted it. He only gave it a half-second glance before gluing his eyes firmly to the pale man. “Who are you?” He demanded, trying not to let the creeping dread into his voice.

“A memory of the dead,” the man replied vaguely, smile seemingly permanent on his face. “A fleeting existence at the edge of the world’s thoughts. Just as everything else here.” He spread his arms out and glanced around, gesturing toward their surroundings. "Except of course,“ his eyes landed back on Joker, "for you.”

“Yeah, and I’m feeling real special,” Joker snarked.

“As you should,” the pale man laughed, “after all, it’s not often one is allowed to experience memories that aren’t theirs.”

“And whose memory are you?”

“Whose indeed,” the man’s smile widened further. "A question you’ve no doubt been asking since you arrived here. Who would remember such odd architecture? These infinite, winding halls?“

"Oh, buddy,” Joker’s hands tightened into fists, “you have no idea how sick I am of people being vague when I ask them questions.” Even standing as threateningly as he could, he couldn't escape how hollow the aggression was when the other guy had a gun.

The pale man didn’t answer. Instead, he took a step forward.

Joker took another step back, hitting the wall.

With clearly defined, punctuated movements, the man wrapped his fingers around the revolver’s handle, and tugged it from the belt. “Would you care to join us? Here in this labyrinthine recollection? Recalled only by a select few?” He pulled the hammer back and steadied his arm. Joker’s heart pounded like a drum, he was stuck at a wall, too far away to have any chance at closing the distance before he shot. All he could do was stare in horror, jaw in a vice grip, as the man’s hand tensed, and it slowly pulled the trigger.

Click.

He flinched hard and his heart skipped a beat as he prepared for death. But there was no shot.

After a moment, Joker opened his eyes, finding the man still pointing the gun at him. The hammer was no longer pulled back, the trigger had definitely been pulled.

At the sight of his confusion, the pale man chuckled. “Feeling a little skittish?”

Joker’s eyes narrowed and he bluntly replied, “You aimed a gun at me.”

“Are you so afraid of death?”

Joker didn’t answer. He wasn’t playing into this psycho’s game. Instead, he looked at the four way intersection they were in, taking account of every detail that he could of the creepy purple architecture.

There was an odd gurgling growl, identical to the one that he’d heard upon first stepping into this place. He didn’t think the pale man’s smile could get any bigger, but it found a way. “Do you hear them? Man’s folly, crawling to get you.” The gun went back into his belt and he turned around. “You should start running, they’ll be here soon.” In only a couple seconds, he had disappeared into the dark entirely.

What replaced him was a set of glowing dots. It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were eyes. More quickly appeared.  They varied a little in height, but all of them were fairly close to the ground.  For just a brief moment, all they did was stare at him.  Then, the silence was split by a wet slap.  A hand came down on the floor out of the dark. As soon as it found a grip, it began pulling the attached body forward. The creature was a strange, darkly color blob, almost like a moving puddle. Its other hand came forward, gripped the floor, and pulled itself further along. Quickly more hands joined it in the light, revealing more than a dozen other identical creatures.

Strange and alien as they looked, Joker knew a shadow when he saw one.

“Oh crap” Joker muttered. Once again, he stepped back and once again, the wall was there to meet him. "Oh, crap!“ He frantically scanned the area, evaluating the left and right pathways. Without a second thought (or a first one really), he took off sprinting. In response, the shadows heaved themselves forward with disturbing vigor, lunging to head him off. At the last moment, Joker hung a right, barely dodging a swipe aimed at his head.

Then he ran. The heavy impact of each step echoed as he ran through this new, equally unwelcoming environment. Behind him, the shadows desperately hauled after him, reaching out with enraged gurgles. He was only barely faster than them; he was gaining distance, but not nearly fast enough to lose them. The shadows showed no sign of slowing down either. They were going to chase him until they caught him.  It was even more impossible to keep track of where he was in this place than in the school. The abstract gothic patterns around him were entirely foreign, there was no way to figure out where anything was.  Already, his legs ached with fatigue, his arms felt heavier, and his lungs burned. He needed a plan. He needed a weapon. He needed his persona. But none of the above was coming to him. He was lost, on his own, getting tired, and with a horde of shadows stampeding after him.

“Wait, the gun!” Joker pulled out the SEES gun and aimed it backwards, pulling the trigger.

Nothing.

"You know, I guess it’s my fault for hoping!” He yelled at the useless piece of garbage. He started hanging turns whenever he saw them, desperately trying anything he could come up with to lose the shadows. He didn’t even try to keep track of which ones he took, he was plenty lost already, couldn’t get much more.  He didn’t know how long or far he ran, but the next time he had a conscious thought was when a sound caught his attention. Somewhere off in the distance, a motorcycle revved its engine.  “What the…?” Joker couldn’t tell where it came from, but he definitely heard it. Makoto? Much has he didn’t want his friends out here looking for him, Johana splattering these things all over the walls sounded really good right about now. He looked back to check the shadows, still there.

And so was the bike.

It wasn’t Johana, but it clearly didn’t care about the shadows either. It cut right through one, sending bits of black slime flying as it did. Joker hugged the wall, but didn’t stop running. As the bike neared him, he got a better look at the rider. White shirt, black skirt, red armband. That was all he made out before it passed, heading down the hallway in front of him and turning a corner.

He’d seen that arm band before. Dark hair, Junpei, Yukari, and Akihiko had all been wearing one. “Mitsuru?” He wondered. She was the only one he hadn’t seen yet. Unless that was Fuuka. “No, that was Mitsuru,” he decided. She sounded like the type.  The train of thought couldn’t get much further, the sound of wheels screeching and the bike crashing saw to that. “Uh oh.” Joker forced himself to move just a little faster, heading for the turn the bike had taken.

What he found was only half what he expected. The bike had indeed crashed, pieces of it were scattered across the floor away from the main wreck. But there was no sign of the rider. What there was, was a massive bubble, just sitting in the hallway, spanning nearly the entire width.

Joker couldn’t say what made him choose running into the bubble as his course of action, but that’s what he did. He ran right into it, literally. He passed through the surface with no resistance. With no impact, he ended up stumbling a few steps forward before regaining his balance.  There was a moment of confusion, followed by the terror-filled moment of realizing he’d stopped running, followed by several loud thunks behind him. He turned back to look at the shadows, who had all run into the bubble too. But unlike him, they couldn’t get through. Joker stared at them for a moment as they relentlessly charged into the bubble again and again. Finally processing the fact that he was safe, he fell to the ground, panting heavily as he caught his breath. The agony of fatigue took a good couple minutes to subside.

The bubble held against the shadows, for the moment at least. That gave him time to examine the new landmark. It was definitely the motorcycle from before. It was mounted with some weird-looking electrical equipment on the back. He couldn’t tell what any of it did. The bike was totaled, something had hit it hard. There were two crowns stuck into the blown out tires. Joker tried to pull them out, get something sharp to fight with, but they didn’t budge.

A noise caught his attention. Static. Among the equipment, there was a small radio that still seemed to be working. Static was coming through the speakers, cutting for just fractions of a second to let a voice through.

Galvanized, Joker grabbed the radio and frantically started messing with the dial. It took several minutes, but he managed to start making out full words. The voice coming through was Mitsuru Kirijo. There was still way too much static to hear full sentences, but he managed to make out the words “Akihiko” and “Shadows”.

He grabbed the responder attached to the radio. “Hey, can you hear me? Hello? Mayday, mayday, is anyone there?!” The few seconds of solid static seemed like an eternity with the shadows still knocking at the barrier. He was about to throw the thing to the floor in frustration. But the sound of Mitsuru’s voice stopped him.

“Who CRRSH this?”

Adrenaline in full swing now, Joker talked as quickly and clearly as he could. “My name is Joker, I’m a persona user like you, but I can’t use my persona here. I need to know how you summon it.”

“Do you CRRSH evoker CRRSH gun CRRSH.”

Gun? Joker looked down at the SEES gun. “What about it? It doesn’t shoot.”

“I need CRRSH your head CRRSH trigger.”

For a moment, Joker thought he'd just heard her wrong.  "Run that by me again?"

"Put it CRRSH head and pull the trigger.  CRRSH crazy CRRSH only way."

Joker felt a pit form in his stomach. Even in its depleted form, the message was clear. She was telling him to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger. Despite the fact that he was fairly sure it wouldn’t fire, something about the idea made him shudder. He cast his eyes down to the nonweapon in his hand. For some reason it felt a little heavier than before, the polish looked a little darker. If this was still Mementos, then there was the chance it would fire, just like the model guns did. But this wasn’t a model gun. Hell, apparently it wasn’t even a gun. And it hadn’t fired before. But then, he’d seen lot of crazy things in the past few months, maybe it only fired when pointed at him. Was Mitsuru telling him to kill himself?

He growled and ran his fingers through his unkempt hair, he was thinking about this way too much.

The sound of a crack behind him drew his attention. He slowly turned around to face the facts. The bubble was starting to break. “Uh-oh,” he said with a deadpan stare. Time was up, he had to decide. It was either use it and possibly kill himself, or not use it and guarantee the shadows would rip him apart. “Well, here goes nothing.” He faced the shadows taking the gun in his right hand. With slow, reluctant movements, he raised it up and placed the barrel against his temple. He breathed in, then out, then in again. The world seemed to slow. His hand tensed, he screwed his eyes shut, and he pulled the trigger.

There was no heat, no pain, no blacking out. But there was the sound of a gunshot right in his ear, along with breaking glass.

"Thou art not I, but I am still thine. From the sea of a sleeping soul, I come forth."

The feeling that overtook him was different than what he knew. He was used to the pure rush of seemingly boundless power that came with summoning a persona. But this felt… more controlled. He was used to it bursting forth, rather than building up and flowing out. The words he heard in his head just moments before seemed to hit the nail on the head. This wasn’t his power.

At that moment, the shadows broke through the glass, swarming into the orb.  Finally able to get in, they threw themselves forward like starving animals, reaching out to grab and tear him apart. But before they could get any closer, three chords from a harp played behind him. A wave of searing flames flowed forth, enveloping the shadows. They writhed in the heat, quickly burning away into scorch marks on the ground. Just like that, the threat was gone.

Joker stood there for a moment, acclimating to the energy flowing through him. Come to think of it, didn’t even know who he was summoning. He turned around to face the persona and stopped.

He didn’t know this one.

Discovering new personas wasn’t uncommon, but typically he either met them as shadows, or through Caroline and Justine. Yet here he was, looking at a marionette-esque thing with a harp on its back. The only other one that had ever just shown up was Arsene.

And that similarity to now probably meant something.

The static on the radio cut out abruptly, replaced by a hum. Joker looked back at it. The readings on the machines had all lit back up, and all said the same thing: “6/8: The Empress and the Emperor”. A voice started coming out of the speakers, crystal clear, and not Mitsuru Kirijo.

“You know, one of the things that's actually kinda funny in retrospect was just how much went wrong whenever the big shadows showed up. Fuuka was already in Tartarus. She’d been stuck there after some other girls locked her in the school gym at night. Now those other girls were supposedly hearing ghosts and then ending up in the hospital. That meant they were waking up during the dark hour. One of the last ones, Natsuki was her name, we took her to the dorm to keep her safe.  We had no idea what part of Tartarus the gym turned into, so the only way we were going to find her by doing the same thing. So, we broke into school. Well, Junpei unlocked a door at least.”

As Dark Hair spoke, the persona faded away.

“So me, Akihiko, and Junpei head in to find Fuuka, while Mitsuru and Yukari stayed down below. We found Fuuka just fine, but it was right after that that everything just went to hell.” Dark Hair chuckled. “On the way back, Akihiko puts it together than the big shadows come on the night of the full moon. Guess what tonight was?  Mitsuru sends us a broken up transmission that they were under attack and that Natsuki had shown up. Oh yeah, and there were two shadows this time, because apparently they were going easy on us before. We booked it back down there, took out the shadows and got acquainted with Fuuka’s persona. From that point on, she took over for Mitsuru on being the navigator. Which meant Mitsuru was coming with us. Another month and two more shadows down.”

The moment he stopped, the static returned. There was no sign of Mitsuru’s voice either. With the shadows gone, the only thing left to do next was move on. Joker held tightened his grip on the evoker and walked away from the bike, feeling far more confident.

“His name is Orpheus, by the way.”

Joker spun around just as the lights on the radio finally died for good.  No static, no hum, just silence.

Chapter Text

Orpheus. Joker knew that it was a Greek myth, but nothing else. Even now as the power settled within him, it was palpable just how different it was. He thought about staying by the bike a little longer, but something told him it wasn’t going to give him anything else. The messages from Dark Hair were coming around once per landmark, with the exception of the first one. He was being shown the events in order, he knew that much. As he walked, Joker started making comparisons.

Dark Hair called what they were doing “missions”. It wasn’t the word Joker would use for the Phantom Thieves. He also talked about nearly getting killed. Between Kamoshida, Madarame, and Kaneshiro, it wasn’t a foreign concept, but Dark Hair talked about it differently. He said he was terrified, mentioned things going wrong, the shadows going easy on them. This didn’t sound like something they were doing because they wanted to, they sounded like they had to. Like they didn’t have a choice.

“You have a special power that you can use to help others.” The voice of Mitsuru Kirijo echoed down the hall. “We call it ‘Persona’. Will you lend us your strength?”

“Are you asking me to join you?” The voice was one Joker hadn’t heard yet. A timid sounding girl. He ventured a guess it was the voice of Fuuka Yamagishi. “I’ll do it.”

“…Wait a minute,” Yukari’s voice joined them. “Aren’t we dragging her into this a bit fast?”

So it wasn’t unanimous, but it sounded like they needed Persona users. Every new addition to the Phantom Thieves had been an accident. Ann, Yusuke, Makoto, there wasn’t a plan for them to join. But this group, SEES, was explicitly trying to recruit more. Why? Did it have something to do with whatever Tartarus was, or their missions and the big shadows?

“Now, then… Those special Shadows showed up again.” Shuji Ikutski seemed to be reading his mind. “We still don’t know where they come from.”

Showed up. Come from. They weren’t seeking these shadows out, they were being attacked by them. Joker thought back through the recordings again. A train out of control. Students ending up in the hospital. That’s when it hit him.

They’d established that the Dark Hour, their Metaverse, wasn’t a place they went to. It was a period of time. Which meant everything they were fighting…

All of it was happening in the real world.

Suddenly it clicked. This team of Persona users weren’t seeking anything out, they were defending. And it sounded like their battles were only getting harder and harder. The sound of paper crumpling under his foot made him jump. It was a newspaper page, just lying in the middle of the hallway. He gingerly picked it up and looked at the headline.

APATHY SYNDROME CASES SOAR FOR NINTH STRAIGHT WEEK, MEDICAL OFFICIALS BAFFLED AS TO CAUSE

Apathy Syndrome? The phrase felt familiar, but Joker couldn’t place it. Where had he read it before? Had he read it before? He looked down to the rest of the article, hoping to get some clarification. But there wasn’t an article. Instead what he found was a single sentence, repeated over and over again, in all capital letters.

THE ARCANA IS THE MEANS BY WHICH ALL IS REVEALED.

As he stared at the words, Joker felt a chill crawl slowly up his spine. In the past few months, he’d become pretty familiar with the tarot arcana. His world seemed to be governed by it these days. But the invocation of it here didn’t feel familiar. It felt… cold. Dark. Consuming. Like a giant black void. Joker hadn’t felt this before. Not when Kamoshida’s shadow was first going to kill him and Ryuji, not when they fought him to steal his treasure, not when Madarame turned into a bunch of grotesque paintings or when Kaneshiro sicced a giant robot pig on them. He hadn’t even felt it when he was being chased by the Reaper just a little while ago. The words felt less like a cryptic message and more like a simple statement of fact, some truth that he just couldn't comprehend.

“You’ve prevailed yet again,” the familiar, timid yet wise voice of the kid in the stripes shook Joker from whatever deep hole he’d found himself in. He snapped his head to the kid, not being able to reply for a second. The boy only smiled at him. “But it’s funny, it doesn’t seem so certain considering the vast potential within you.”

Joker looked back to his hand, only to find that he wasn’t holding anything. Of course. With an effort, he set it aside for later. “Not feeling like I have much potential right now.” His legs still ached from the mad dash for his life. Again, he had to remember to thank Ryuji if he survived this.

“Your power seems to have changed quite a bit,” the boys eyes fell to the Evoker, still in Jokers hand. “Almost like it isn’t yours.”

“I have a feeling that’s pretty spot on,” Joker snarked. “Why don’t we keep walking?” The boy obliged him and they made their way down the hall. It was nice to walk with some company. “I think I get why you said 2009 was an important year, even if nobody knew it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” Joker nodded. “There was a war going on while everyone was asleep in a coffin.”

Pharos didn’t answer, but smiled and asked, “How are you and Orpheus getting along?

At this point, him knowing about Orpheus wasn't a surprise. “He’s handy in a pinch, I’ll give him that.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” The boy was silent for a second, then spoke up again. “Can I be your friend? I’m very curious about you.”

“You’re curious about me?” Joker replied with a laugh then held out a hand to shake. “Sure, what’s your name?”

The boy was clearly surprised at the gesture for a moment but smiled. “My name is… Pharos.” He reached out his own hand.

The moment they clasped palms, reality itself felt like a record that skipped

It was somewhere between falling asleep and whiplash. For a fraction of a second, he wasn’t in Mementos anymore. He wasn’t shaking hands with Pharos either. Instead, he was in a familiar doctor’s office, with a bed to his right and a counter to his left. Standing in front of him, right where Pharos had been a second ago, was Dr. Tae Takemi. Except her face was wrong. It was pale, with a wide, empty smile and nothing but black sockets for eyes. It looked almost like a mask. Staring into the empty voids of that face, even for just a moment, soaked him in absolute terror. In that split second, he felt like there was nothing beneath him, like he was about to Fall. But he didn’t have any time to process the feeling before he was back in Mementos, staring at Pharos.

The boy clearly didn't share his absolute panic, but his smile had faded from his face. After taking a few deep breaths the calm down, Joker finally found his voice again. “What the hell was that?”

“I’m not sure,” Pharos answered with a furrowed brow. “I think I may have almost tread on someone else’s territory.”

Joker was going to ask him to explain himself, but the now-familiar gurgle came from just around the next corner. With a surge of frustration, he stepped in front of Pharos and pulled out the Evoker. “I guess anything else can wait, I’ll handle this.”

Instead of charging him, the shadow closed in a few more feet and stopped. Its blob-like form sank to the ground, turning into an inky puddle. The gurgling dried out into a growl and a matching form emerged from the darkness. The lion with blank white eyes stepped out like it was coming ashore from a lake, dragging a chain along with it. At the end of the chain, there was a large iron ball with a blue mask bolted to it. There was something different about this shadow than the usual fare. Most of the time he could feel something, the essence of the persona that was hidden under the corruption. But he couldn’t with this one. There was no persona here, this was a shadow, through and through.

“Then I don’t have to worry about trying to talk,” Joker decided. He put the evoker to his head and pulled the trigger. Just like before, Orpheus came forth and with a strum of his harp, sent a wave of fire at the lion. Joker had hoped that would be the end of it like before, but when the flames cleared, the lion was still there, clearly hurt, but still angry.

“Uh oh.”

It charged before he was ready and rammed him in the gut. With the wind knocked out of him, Joker was sent sprawling backward, coughing and sputtering. He wasn’t used to fighting alone. Normally, when he took a hit someone was there to back him up. He climbed back to his feet and look at Orpheus, still hovering behind him.

“Alright, let’s try this again. Orpheus!” With a call of it’s name and a mental command, the persona charged forth, taking it’s harp by the handle at the bottom and swinging it at the lion just as it started to charge again. The blow connected right with its face and the shadow flew back, hitting a wall and slumping to the ground. Within a few seconds, it had faded away entirely. Joker took a second to let the rush of battle wear off. In that time, he noticed something. Pharos was gone.

“Of course he is," he growled to himself.

And that meant no answers as to what the hell just happened. Why Dr. Takemi? What was the connection? And what the hell was that face? As Orpheus faded away, Joker kept moving, trying to parse it out, but after another several minutes of walking, he had nothing. He ran his hand through his hair with a sigh and cast his eyes to the ceiling…

… or the sky.

Joker did a double-take, shaking his head and blinking a few times. He was staring at clouds, clouds in the sky. He threw his gaze all around him, finding brick walls on either side. By all rights, this looked like an alleyway, a perfectly normal alleyway in the real world.

And there was absolutely no way Joker bought that for even a second. He took his phone out and dialed the first number in the list. No service.

Alright, definitely still in Mementos. Was it another landmark? No. He couldn’t say why, but it felt too soon. So then what was this? There were boxes for storage, green metal barrels, a couple wooden pallets and some concrete stairs leading up to a slightly raised platform. He could see an entryway into a building on it, just next to it there was a sign reading "Mah Jong". A bit further down there was a chain-link fence surrounding another set of stairs, going down.

“Hey, kid!” The voice came from just a few meters away. There was seven of them; five guys, two girls. By all accounts, they looked human. All of them had some form of disdain on their face. They also hadn’t been there two seconds prior. Two of them got up and started walking toward them. “What do you think you’re doing, walking on to our turf like that?”

The comment was so straightforward that Joker didn’t process it for a second. “What?” Was all he could get out.

It was apparently the wrong answer, because the guy only got angrier. “What, are you deaf?”

“Just baffled,” the snark was almost on reflex by this point. Before he could react any further, the guy was in his face, hands on his collar.

“Think you’re funny, pal?!”

The others had surrounded him while he wasn’t looking. He had no way out, and with the now obvious yellow eyes on these thugs, he was just waiting for them all to turn into Shadows. Even with Orpheus, six on one was going to go poorly.

Wait… six?

Hadn’t there been seven of them?

“Drop him.” The voice held an odd mixture of detached laziness, and cold severity. It was enough to make all six of the thugs surrounding Joker freeze. The one holding onto him turned around, giving Joker and look at the source. The seventh guy was coming toward them.

The unkempt hair under his knit cap, the way his back slouched, and his hands stayed in pockets of his dark red coat, it was the look of someone who’d forgotten how to care about anything a long time ago. But his expression was didn’t line up at all. The glare on his face looked almost cruel, the bags under his eyes didn’t help. Whatever else he was, this guy was dangerous. And he knew it.

The others seemed to know it too. The guy that grabbed Joker’s collar let him go, turning to face the newcomer. “Who do you think you are, Shinjiro?”

“Stronger than you, that’s who.” The words were punctuated by another step forward. One of his hands came out of the pocket, holding a familiar gun-shaped object. “Now start running before I grind you into the pavement.”

They were all gone in a few seconds, tearing down the alleyway and out of sight. Joker watched them go, feeling oddly detached from the incident when he thought about it. When he turned back, the cold, uncaring glare was now trained on him.

“Uhh… hi,” Joker attempted.

“You don’t belong here,” was the guy’s reply.

“No kidding, how do I get out?”

“Don’t know,” the guy, Shinjiro they’d called him, walked right past him and kept going. “Follow me.” If he didn’t know, where were they going? Still, Joker did as he was told. He didn’t have a better plan.

“You’ve got a persona, right?” Joker spoke up after a few moments of walking, hoping to stave off the awkward silence.

“Yeah.”

“Are you a real person?”

Shinjiro glanced back at him with a questioning look. Actually it was more like a glare, but that seemed to be his default. Joker clarified, “I ran into another guy here, called himself a ‘memory of the dead’.”
The guy snorted. “Sounds just like Takaya. Rat bastard.”

“Are you like him?”

“Seems that way.”

“You gonna send shadows after me too?”

“Didn’t plan on it.”

Joker sighed. Trying to get more than a few words out of this guy was proving impossible. “Why am I here?” He finally asked. “What is all this? Where am I?”

Shinji stopped, muttered something under his breath, and turned around to look at him. “Where do you think you are?”

“Mementos,” Joker knew it was the wrong answer before he even said it.

Shinjiro snorted. “Try again.”

Joker thought back through the whole story he’d learned so far. Pharos said it best: even if those who reside within it forget, it never does. There was really only one place it could be. “Tartarus.”

“Finally catching on, huh?” Shinjiro turned around and kept walking.

“Alright, but why am I here? What’s the point of all of this?”

“You might figure that out if you actually paid attention.”

Maybe it was worrying about the others; maybe it was feeling like he’d made no progress since he got here, maybe it was a million other things; but something about the dismissive tone set Joker off. He picked up his pace and grabbed Shinjiro’s shoulder, ready to haul off and punch the guy. But the moment his palm touched the coat, everything got blurry. The movement was fast and violent. Before Joker even knew what was happening, he was up against the wall and Shinjiro’s forearm was up against his neck, partly cutting off his airway. The contempt in his eyes was like nothing Joker had ever seen.

“Must be real nice having a persona, huh?” The words were almost spat out. “Tear a mask off your face and suddenly you’ve got superpowers right?” Joker grabbed at the arm to try and pull it away, but Shinji only pressed harder. His hand came out of his pocket again, holding the Evoker up for Joker to see. “Why do you think it’s shaped like a gun? Because they’re not super powers; they’re weapons. And just like any idiot who picks up a gun without knowing how to use it, personas can get people killed.”

The gurgle of approaching shadows made itself known. Joker could see them approaching from both sides. He couldn’t get a word out, so he pleaded with his eyes to be let go so they could fight. In response, Shinji simply put the Evoker to his own head. “Take care of them, Castor.” As he pulled the trigger, Joker heard was sounded like a crazed horse.

It came in as a blur, colliding and bursting right through one of the shadows. Shinjiro’s persona was a rider saddled atop a horse that looked halfway to a chess piece. The steed looked almost entirely robotic, with a metallic ribcage as its body, and a single leg and hoof behind it looking almost like a tail. As it stood up tall, Joker got a look at the rider himself. The shape was bulky, his head was no more than a skill, with long blond hair flowing backward. It looked like a spear tip was lodged into his chest, just about where his heart would be.

The horse gave another mad whinny and the rider spurred it forward, charging back and forth, cleaving through the shadows like they were nothing. By the time it was over, they were all gone. Shinji took his arm away from Joker’s neck, letting him finally take in a few much-needed gasps.

“If you’re not careful,” Shinji start walking again, “personas can do more damage to you than the people you’re trying to fight.” His tone held a kind of certainty that screamed "first-hand experience".

It was a short walk from there until they arrived at a staircase. Shinjiro didn’t say another word until they got there. “This’ll take you to the next floor. I don’t know how aggressive the shadows are gonna be from here on out, so be careful.”

“Thanks.” Joker bit his lip for a moment as Shinjiro turned to leave. Just before he lost sight of him, he called out. “Are you dead?”

He didn’t get an answer, but Joker noticed a dripped trail left behind as he walked. Blood.

With that foreboding image in his mind, Joker turned and began to climb the stairs once more.

Chapter Text

Once he was between floors, it didn’t take long for the voices to come drifting in again. This time, as he looked off into the ethereal nebula outside of the staircase, he could just barely make out a scene in the distance. It was a room with a bunch of leather furniture, a group of people sitting and talking to each other. He could just barely make out the familiar features of the SEES team.

“I wanted to let you know how my research has been going.” It was Shuji Ikutski whose appearance fit his voice pretty accurately. “This concerns those Shadows that have been appearing during the full moons. Shadows can be divided into 12 categories, according to their characteristics. It’s like their class and order. Those shadows belonged to categories 1 through 4, in order of their appearance.”

The arcana. It clicked immediately. He’d found four recordings so far; 4/7: The Fool, 4/9: The Magician, 5/9: The Priestess, and 6/8: The Empress and The Emperor. Arcanas zero through four.

Fuuka was the next to talk. “There’s 12 in all. 8 we haven’t seen yet.”

That confused him. The shadows that he and the other Phantom Thieves fought were from all the arcana, and they didn’t stop at 12. But he’d seen the shadows these guys fought, they were different than his. Maybe this was different too.

Ikutski picked up the conversation. “They don’t kill their prey: they feed on their minds. It can be considered predation, but is it really? Is there an underlying intent behind their behavior? The purpose of the shadows as a whole… that’s what we need to consider.”

Yeah, these ones definitely worked different. There was no “feeding on minds” in the palaces, just straight up murderous intent. The shadows they were fighting sounded almost animalistic.

One by one, the figures of the SEES team began to fade away and disappear. Yukari’s voice came in just before she was gone. “What about Tartarus, why does it even exist?” By the time sentence was done there were only two people left: Mitsuru Kirijo and Shuji Iutski. But even then, Ikutski faded away, leaving Mitsuru entirely alone. Nothing he had been shown was coincidence; Joker was willing to bet that the answer to Tartarus has something to do with Mitsuru.

Mitsuru Kirijo…

The Kirijo Group!

Joker’s palm slapped his forehead. That was it. Mitsuru Kirijo was the head of the Kirijo Group. Everyone knew about them, they were involved in pretty much every industry out there. Yusuke had brushes with their name on them, Ann modeled in some of their clothes, heck, he was pretty sure Ryuji had a pair of their shoes.

The head of one of the largest business empires on the planet was a persona user.

He kept climbing the stairs, watching over the edge as more silent scenes showed Dark Hair’s different bonds. A girl was yelling at a bunch of guys in track suits who clearly weren’t paying attention. An old couple stood crying at the base of a tree. A little girl sat on a swing with her parents too busy arguing to push her. He stopped for a moment and waited for the follow up.

Just like last time, Dark Hair came to save the day. He led the girl to a group of kids who were clearly excited to see them. He joined the old couple and knelt with them, praying at the tree. He showed up and started pushing the girl’s swing. The way it looked, they seemed like his confidants, the bonds that gave power to his personas.

…The wild card…

Bark!

The sound came out of nowhere, breaking the ominous silence of the staircase as well as Joker’s train of thought. It didn’t float in like the voices, it was loud and sharp, like a dog was actually close by.

Bark! Bark!

It was high-pitched, a small pup, wherever it was. Actually, it sounded like it was coming from below him. He’d met multiple people here already, so a dog wasn’t impossible. But it still seemed out of nowhere for one to just show up here. It wasn’t a shadow, was it? Could shadows attack him here? The thought made Joker keep going just a little faster. He didn’t know what would happen if he got knocked off these stairs and he wasn’t keen to find out.

Bark! Bark! Bark!

It came again, no further away than it was before, but not any closer either. Joker slowed down just a little bit and listened for it again.

Awoooooooooo!

“Aw,” Joker said involuntarily. The small howl sounded like the least threatening thing he’d ever heard in his life.

ARROOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
ARROOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
ARROOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

The three unified howls that followed it were much deeper and their volume was almost deafening. Instantly, Joker broke into a full sprint, booking it up the stairs as fast as humanly possible. Whatever that was, he wanted no part of it. As he went, he could see more scenes fade in and out. The first showed Yukari standing next to come kind of computer console with a timid looking girl that had to be Fuuka Yamagishi. The second was the pale guy from before, Takaya, standing in an alleyway that looked identical to the one on the previous floor along with two other people, a guy in a green coat, and a girl dressed up like a doll. The last looked like a ramen shop, where he could see Akihiko…

…sitting next to Shinjiro.

Joker barely had time to process that before he stumbled. He had tried to take the next stair, only to find there wasn’t one. His foot hit the landing hard and he had to take a few extra steps to keep from falling over. He’d arrived at the next floor.

He took a second to catch his breath and let the adrenaline cool off. He was still in the black and purple nightmare zone, apparently he hadn’t earned a change in scenery yet. Not too far away he could hear the shadows wandering around. Looked like they were a permanent fixture now. He wouldn’t be able to rely on Orpheus for everything, especially if more than one shadow turned up. He needed a weapon of his own.

Like an answer to a prayer, there was a clatter behind him, making him flinch. There was something lying on the floor, just in front of the wall where the stairs had been, it. A saber, shimmering silver, with a slight curve to the blade. Joker walked over and picked it up, testing the weight. It was longer than he was used to, but it could easily be used in one hand. He wasn’t about to complain.

With newfound confidence, he started making his way through the floor.

As he began his battles with Tartartus’s shadows, he noticed a pattern about them. They were abstract. The foes the Phantom Thieves faced were all creatures, even if some of them were really weird ones. But the shadows that manifested here looked like… concepts. A cross with weighing scales on it, a table with weapons flying over it, a pair of prisoners joined by manacles. Sometimes the blobs that crawled around simply adopted a mask over their… faces? Every once in a while, he found one that took on a concrete form, like the lion from before, but for the most part, he got hands walking on their fingers.

Every once in a while, he’d hear another set of footsteps, or see a SEES member round a corner a ways down. Sometimes he’d even hear them fighting, somewhere else on the floor. Whether it was actually happening or just another illusion, he didn’t know.

At some point, the shadows thinned out, giving Joker some time to breathe. He took the opportunity to think through what he saw on the staircase.

Mitsuru seemed like a leader, she was the one brought their group together. She and Ikutski seemed to know the most about Tartarus, and they were the only two left after Yukari had asked her question. They definitely had a bigger connection to this than the others knew. What about the other things he saw, Takaya and his cronies, Akihiko and Shinjiro, Fuuka and Yukari, why were those important?

“Shinjiro was a persona user,” Joker said the words aloud to break up the silence. “He was a persona user that knew Akihiko. Maybe he was a part of SEES too. But then…” He trailed off. If he was a member of SEES, why hadn’t Joker seen him running around with the rest?

“My power ain’t worth shit.” Shinjiro’s voice made it clear that the statement wasn’t up for debate. But Joker had seen what he was capable of, that persona had power way beyond what his team could do.

“Ten years ago, a lot of students missed school for some reason,” Yukari’s voice followed shortly after. “Do you know anything about it Fuuka?”

Fuuka? Joker had seen them talking on the staircase. He’d seen Shinjiro and Akihiko as well. Was that what he was hearing? But then what about…

“Your notions of right and wrong are irrelevant. My client’s wishes are all that matter.” The now-familiar, deadpan voice of Takaya echoed down the hall. “People hear what they choose to hear, and believe what they want to believe.” There was the sound of someone yelling and running, then Takaya finishing with, “You squeal most magnificently.” The gunshot that came after was deafening, loud enough to make Joker cringe and cover his ears. When he recovered, there was a noticeable change in the atmosphere. The color of everything. It was…. Pinker. He looked up and found light reddish-pink lightbulbs in the ceiling.

“Alright, what’s with the mood lighting?” He pondered. The hallway in front of him had changed. It had been a turn before the gunshot. Now it was long and straight. And it wasn’t empty.

In the center of the hallway, a good ways down, there was a chair. No fanfare, no build up, just a chair.

As Joker approached it, he could make out more and more details. It was actually pretty fancy looking, look like it could’ve been made of gold. It was cushioned, but the cushion was flattened, sinking in like a well-used couch. The front legs were, well, legs; as in they were actually shaped like a woman’s legs, complete with leggings and red high-heels. The arms looked relatively normal, but had ornaments hanging off them in the shapes of crosses.

Random object from out of nowhere, obviously brimming with symbolism; it looked like he’d come upon another landmark. He took out the headphones and put one in his ear, closing the gap between him and the chair to just a few feet. But there was no recording.

After a moment of waiting for it, Joker looked around. It was a random object in an otherwise empty hallway, how could this not be the landmark? Was there another piece to it or something he had to do first? None of the other ones had any triggers. Well, the motorcycle kind of did. But this hallway was totally empty besides this one chair. Maybe he was supposed to sit in it? He pursed his lips and squinted at it, not keen on the idea. He turned around to look for anything else he might’ve missed.

Out of nowhere, Joker felt the chair hit the backs of his legs like someone had shoved it. His feet went out from under him and he fell back into the seat. The moment his butt touched the cushion, the MP3 player lit up with “7/7: The Hierophant”.

“For the first time, we were ready for it. We’d figured out the pattern, prepared as much as we could, went as high as Tartarus would let us. The victims this time had been showing up in couples. Fuuka tracked the shadow reading to a hotel… on Shirakawa Boulevard.”

Joker pursed his lips and stifled a chuckle. Everyone knew what was on Shirakawa. It explained the victims showing up in couples.

“So there we were, a bunch of high school kids at a love hotel in the red-light district. It seemed pretty straightforward, even if everyone was a little uncomfortable. We fought our way to where it was on the third floor and took it out. You’ve probably already figured it out that it wasn’t that simple. When we tried to leave, and the door was shut tight. Fuuka tells us there’s still a shadow in the room. A different one.”

The very second the recording ended, Joker felt a breath on the back of his neck and arms fold over his chest like a hug from behind. He lunged out of the chair and several steps away from it before turning around.

Naturally, there was no one there.

In fact, there was nothing there either. The chair was gone, replaced by an empty hallway and… steam?

The hallway in front of him was hazy and humid as a bathhouse. At this point, confusion was a thing long past, he’d already accepted that this place reveled in not making sense. There was no way of telling whether whatever hugged him was an actual person or not. It was just as likely another version of the kinds of stuff he’d been hearing and seeing.

Somewhere off in the cloud of steam, the sound of a girl’s giggle caught his attention. Tartarus clearly wanted him to go this way. Going backward would give him a dead end at best, and an invincible gun-toting shadow at worst. So he made his way forward. The steam quickly got thicker as he went. It wasn’t long before he lost sight of the walls. His footsteps started to echo out into the distance.

Tap, tap tap, splish.

Water. A thin layer coated the floor as far as Joker could see. He drew the silver saber and tried to focus his hearing. If something was going to ambush him, this would be the place to do it.

For a while, it was just eerily quiet, even more so than the normal hallways. The sound of his footsteps never seemed to make it very far before being swallowed by the steam. Every once in a while, he would hear the giggle again, far off in the distance. It sounded playful, enticing, like it was trying to coax him to follow it. Or maybe he was overthinking it. Either way Joker stayed the course. Eventually, a hissing sound also made itself apparent. It took a few seconds before Joker realized what it was. Showers, it was the sound of water coming from a showerhead. There were definitely more than one, if they were real any-

CLUNK!

Joker stumbled backward with a cry of surprise and pain, hand covering his face. “What the…” he trailed off, looking around the completely empty space for what had hit him. No… that wasn’t right. It felt more like he’d walked into something. But… what? He took a step forward with his hand outstretched. It flattened against something smooth and invisible. Joker looked down at the floor and found the water pooling up against it. It was a pane of glass. And from what Joker could tell, it stretched off on either side beyond what he could see.

Behind the glass, the steam seemed to get a lot thicker, so much so that he couldn’t see more than a few feet further. There was definitely more hallway past it though. More hallway, and a person.

A girl.

A naked girl.

The fog was too thick to see any details but the body shape was clear. There was a naked girl, seemingly taking a shower, on the other side of the glass.

Joker… wasn’t quite sure what to make of the situation.

On the one hand, there was a naked girl a few yards away from him and he wasn’t about to not think about that. He could even hear her humming as she washed. On the other, he knew where he was and there was no way this was just some naked girl taking a shower in front of him. The MP3 player lit up, giving him an answer at least for the moment. Joker put on the headphones and started listening to “7/7: The Lovers.” Dark hair started off this time with an uncomfortable laugh that reflected Joker’s current mood pretty accurately.

“I’m the kind of guy who typically doesn’t like to stand out. I keep to myself a lot. So when I wake up in a room in a love hotel with a foggy head and no memory of what I was doing, it throws me off. Turns out the second shadow was using the other to hide. Once we beat the first, it came at us. It messed with our heads, we ended up separated, and me and Yukari ended up together in a room. There was… a voice in my head. It wanted me to just lie back and enjoy. Stop worrying about everything, let pleasure take me away. I’ll be honest, after the months prior, it was hard not to take it up on that offer. But even if I had, I’m pretty sure Yukari freaking out and slapping me after she came out of the shower would’ve shook me out of it. We regrouped broke the mirrors it was using to protect itself, then took it out too. For the first time, it didn’t feel like we were a hair’s length from all dying.”

As the recording ended, the fog on the other side of the glass thickened even more. The woman faded from view and soon, he couldn’t see anything except steam. A single feminine hand emerged from the cloud and pressed its pointer finger against the glass. Slowly, delicately, the finger traced over it drawing a heart in the condensation. Then it beckoned him as it slowly retreated back into the haze and Joker heard the same giggle that had he’d been hearing for a while now.

“Well, no way to go but forward, right?” Joker asked no one in particular. He’d pretty much just been told that he had to go through the glass. Getting cut up by the shards didn’t exactly sound appealing. So, he took a few steps back, and raised up the saber to a stabbing position. He had no way of telling how thick it was, but this was probably going to take some force. At the count of three, he took off sprinting.

“So, you’re the hero again, huh?” The words of Junpei Iori came dripping with spite like he was standing right next to him. The sudden sound made him flinch in mid run…

And he slipped.

His shoes lost traction on the wet floor and he slid forward with no control. With a yell, he crashed right through the glass and fell forward, rolling a few feet further before coming to a stop right on his back. He kept his eyes squeezed shut as he groaned half from pain, half from how angry he was. He’d never wanted to punch someone he never met before, but right now, Junpei was really cruising for a bruising. Coming out of nowhere, while he was running on a wet floor, holding a freaking sword. He was lucky he hadn’t stabbed himself! Somewhere along the way he’d lost the saber, so now he had to go collect that too. Luckily for him, no one was around to see it.

“Why hello.” The timing of the girl’s voice felt like a joke and Joker had to work hard not to laugh. He slowly opened his eyes and meet the gaze of his witness.

He hadn’t been expecting the gaze to be quite so… yellow.

The girl standing over him looked to be around his age in terms of physical features, but that was about it. The smile she wore spoke to something much older. It was good-natured, amused, and a little mischievous, but there was an unmissable otherworldly element, especially in her yellow eyes. Speaking of which, yellow eyes had become… a motif in Joker’s life recently. Shadows all had yellow eyes, so they were typically a sign that things were about to get bad. But this was different. There was more to this girl than just her eyes. Her bob-cut hair was a greyish-ish white color that he’d only seen on two other people and her dress was a very familiar shade of blue.

If Joker was a betting man, he would put money down that it was made of velvet.

Chapter Text

Joker wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, let alone how to react to it. First off, she was smiling, and he was 90% sure he’d never seen either Caroline or Justine even crack a grin. Second, he’d been to the Velvet Room more than a dozen times by this point and he’d never seen this girl in there. Third, he was in Tartarus, a fantasy land where random people and things seemed to just... show up. And fourth, he hadn’t quite yet recovered from smashing through glass and tumbling onto the floor. Apparently his stunned silence had gone on too long, because the girl turned around, crouched down, and lied back next to him.

She gave a ponderous “Hmm…” as she stared up at the ceiling. “Just as I thought. It is quite uncomfortable down here.” She spoke the words in such an odd, genuine way, like a detective concluding a mystery.

“Then… why did you lie down?” Joker found himself asking.

In response she turned her eyes to him, looking just the slightest bit confused. “I was under the impression that you were lying down for a reason. Further, I assumed that perhaps your reason was that this spot of the floor was exceptionally comfortable. Was I mistaken?”

“I wasn’t down here on purpose,” Joker replied, still mostly at a loss as to how to react to this girl.

“Oh!” She brightened immediately now that she had confirmation. “Then might I suggest we stand?”

“Sure.” Joker conceded, sitting up and climbing to his feet.

The girl did the same, taking a moment to dust off her dress despite the fact that, from what Joker could see, there was no dust. He took a look around the area. With the way things seemed to shift at a moment’s notice around here, it was a bit surprising to find the hole in the glass wall still there as well as the thick cloud of fog now trailing out of it. In the other direction, forward, was the staircase to the next level.

The girl appeared in his vision again, yellow eyes peering at him curiously… from an inch away from his face. Joker took a step back to reclaim some personal space. “You’re from the Velvet Room, aren’t you?”

Her eyes widened in a look of genuine shock, but very quickly a smile spread over her face. “Well, you have the most interesting way of starting a conversation.” She held out one gloved hand to him, the other was occupied by a book. “A pleasure to meet you, my name is Elizabeth.”

“Call me Joker,” he took her hand and gave a hardy shake.

“A joker you say?” She seemed to latch onto the idea. “What kind of joker, I wonder? Do you make mirth and merriment for the benefit of others? Or are practical japes and tricks more your domain?”

“A little bit of both,” Joker replied.

“Oh? A delicate balance of sowing humor and reaping it for yourself, how intricate.” She was clearly pleased with something, whether it was her own flowery words, Joker’s explanation, or something else entirely, he couldn’t tell.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Joker reminded her. Elizabeth blinked at him for a moment, as if not understanding what he meant, then put a finger up to her lips in a ponderous gesture.

“I was once a denizen of the Velvet Room, a lifetime ago.” Her voice turned nostalgic as she reminisced. “Now I am just a wanderer, on a journey to find an answer.”

“What’s the question?”

“How does one bring back the dead, without the world unravelling?” Her smile faded, replaced by an introspective expression. “I’ve been searching for quite some time.” She cast her eyes all around her. “I daresay, I had never dreamed it would lead me here.”

“Tartarus or Mementos?”

“Both.” Her coy smile easily returned to her after a moment and she looked back at him. “And what about you? You piqued my curiosity quite thoroughly. I simply must know, how have you come to know the Velvet Room?”

Joker thought for a moment. Not even his team could see the Velvet Room, and whenever he tried to bring it up, they gave him weird looks for a second and then kept right on talking. Having someone directly talk about it was new. “I kinda just… woke up there… in a jail cell.”

“Curious.” Elizabeth drew out each syllable of the word as she thoughtfully tapped her finger against her chin. “A prison is a place of isolation and punishment, with it’s occupants there as recompense for some past misdeed. Yet they exist for the purpose of redemption.” She paced a few pronounced steps. “Did you commit some transgression for which you must atone?”

“No,” Joker answered resolutely.

“And yet you’ve been imprisoned. All the more mystery.”

“Igor told me that I needed ‘rehabilitation’ and that the world is facing ruin. I’ve been doing this for about three months and I’m still not entirely sure what that means.” Joker walked over and sat down on the stairs, leaning back a little.

Elizabeth joined him. “What is ‘this’?” She asked promptly. Joker gave her a look of confusion so she continued. “You said ‘I’ve been doing this for three months’. Do you mean using your persona?”

“Oh, yeah.” Joker nodded as he confirmed.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I pry just a little, but I’d like to know what your call to action is.”

“Call to action?”

“What are you fighting for?”

“That’s a loaded question.”

“Then why not a loaded answer?”

Joker laughed at the quick response, thinking it was a joke. But when he looked at her, it became immediately clear that she was serious. “Start from the beginning,” she coaxed.

So that’s what Joker did. He told her about moving in with Sojiro, meeting Ryuji, the Metaverse, Mona, each palace and everything they entailed, changing people’s hearts, becoming the Phantom Thieves, adding Ann, Yusuke and Makoto to their team, and finally the other persona user, the one with the black mask. When he laid all of it out, it was hard to comprehend everything that had happened in just three months. He’d barely even mentioned all the people he’d met and formed bonds with along the way. For her part, Elizabeth became more and more engrossed in the story the further it went. By the time he was done, her hands were clasped together and her eyes were practically sparkling with excitement.

“Phantom Thieves,” she sighed dreamily, “fighting tyranny and oppression with rebellious fire, forcing villains to confess their crimes with their own mouths.” She picked herself back up and began to both pace and twirl around at the same time. “A romantic revolution taken right from the literary masterworks. Leaping from shadow to shadow, never detected, uncompromising, endlessly, deter-oh!” She’d spun around so many times that she’d lost her footing and tripped. On reflex, Joker pushed off the stairs and caught her before she hit the ground. When their eyes met, she had an odd expression that Joker couldn’t quite place. “And yet, you look so ordinary.” She finally said, seemingly unaware that she’d nearly just fallen over. “Surely the work of a Phantom Thief calls for more than a simple school uniform?”

Joker couldn’t help but smile at the girl’s single-minded antics. “Usually it does. But this place doesn’t let me use my normal equipment or my personas.” He stood her back up and let go when he was sure she wouldn’t fall over again. “Instead it gave me this,” he drew the saber, “this” he pulled out the Evoker, “and Orpheus.”

The moment he said the name, Elizabeth’s smile vanished. It was replaced with another look of pure astonishment, then almost nervousness. Clearly Orpheus meant something to her. “If you would grant a… request,” she spoke the words in a much more controlled manner than anything else she’d said so far, “I would like to see it.” Joker didn’t know why, but he could tell that there was some gravity to the words. He didn’t see any reason not to, so he put the Evoker up to his head and pulled the trigger.

Orpheus appeared with a flash a blue light and Elizabeth’s eyes widened. The smile that broke out on her face was different than the one she’d been wearing before. This wasn’t amusement or excitement. It was satisfaction, content, maybe even peace. She opened the book she was holding and flipped through a few pages before giving the same smile to whatever she was reading. She took out a blue quill and wrote down something before closing the book. “I was having quite some difficulty finding his page, it is a relief to see it once more.”

Joker gave a mental nod of recognition. It didn’t look like the list Justine carried, but that book was definitely a compendium. It was more than a hunch at this point, Elizabeth had done for Dark Hair the same thing that Justine and Caroline were doing for him. As he let Orpheus fade away, Elizabeth looked past him to the staircase. “Shall we ascend together? I have a feeling it will be quite the experience this time around.”

“Sure.” Joker put his saber in its sheath and the Evoker in its… holster? He looked down at his belt and, sure enough, there was now a holster on it, perfectly sized for the Evoker. He tried to think about when he’d stopped just carrying it in his hand, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember. With a sigh, he reached the point of just rolling with it and followed Elizabeth.

It was quiet this time. All the other staircases had some sounds off in the distance, some kind of ethereal cosmic noise that he could just barely hear. No voices drifted in like before, and there were no visions of scenes off in the distance. It was a little unnerving. It would’ve been worse if he was alone though. Elizabeth added an undeniable element of levity to the atmosphere. She walked with a small hop in her step, humming to herself in a tune that Joker didn’t recognize.

“Hey Elizabeth,” Joker started. She turned around to look at him without breaking stride, continuing to walk backwards with no trouble at all. “You talked like you knew what Tartarus was before; what is it exactly? And how did I get here from Mementos?”

Elizabeth once more took on her inquisitive, ponderous expression. “If I had to venture a theory, it would be that this Tartarus is a memory of what once was. Mementos being the collective unconscious, it represents the minds and memories of many. However, only a select few remember this place.”

“You means SEES?”

She nodded. “As for what Tartarus is, I have an inkling that you’re going to get that answer quite soon.”

“How soon?” Joker had barely gotten the question out when his foot landed on carpet. The distinct sound of it made him stop and look down. The weird, crystalline staircase was gone, replace by wood and carpet. He looked back up and the rest of his surroundings had changed to match. It was dimly lit building interior. He was only a few steps down from a landing, so he caught up with Elizabeth at the top. “Alright, where are we now?”

“I believe you’ll come to recognize it once we you walk through there.” She pointed to a pair of ornate double doors. With a shrug, Joker approached the doors and pushed them open.

It came to him almost immediately. This was the SEES meeting room. Just a few meters away was the arrangement of leather furniture that he’d seen before. But… why? What were they doing here?

“Before we go on, I’d like to ask Mitsuru-senpai something.” Yukari’s voice split the silence, causing Joker to jump. Suddenly, she was occupying one of the seats around the table. She had a dead-serious look in her eye.

“Me…?” In an instant, Mitsuru appeared, sitting across from her on the long couch, confused and cautious.

Yukari nodded and took in a deep breath. As she exhaled, Fuuka appeared beside her, looking incredibly uncomfortable. “Since I joined, so many things have happened… I went along with it, without really understanding what was going on… But now, I need to know.”

As she talked Joker slowly approached to see if they would react to him being there. When he was only a few feet away from Yukari, he gingerly reached his hand out to poke her.
“I don’t imagine that’ll work,” Elizabeth’s voice caught him by surprise and Joker yelped. She was already on the other side of the room, leaning over the back of the couch next to Mitsuru. Her finger was buried to the knuckle in the girl’s cheek, having phased right through her. “At least, not if she’s the same as Miss Kirijo here.”

“What is this then?” Joker asked her. She smiled at him in response.

“The answer to your question.”

“I’m gonna ask you straight out…” Yukari took one more deep breath before meeting Mitsuru’s eyes. “You’ve been hiding something from us, haven’t you, Senpai?” Misturu bit her lip, looking away as Yukari continued. “You act like you don’t know anything about the Dark Hour and Tartarus, but they’re related to that accident ten years ago aren’t they?”

Mitsuru immediately look back to Yukari, eyes wide and shocked.

“What accident…?” Junpei materialized next to Fuuka, looking at Yukari in confusion.

Yukari clearly recognized that she was passed the point of no return, so she went on ahead. “There was an explosion near our school and a lot of people died. It must’ve been big news back then. You know about it, don’t you?”

Mitsuru closed her eyes as if to compose herself, then nodded. “…Yes.”

“Luckily, no students were injured. But around the same time, a large number of students were recorded as absent. Seems like more than just a coinci-” Before she finished the sentence, everyone just kind of… jolted. Yukari, Fuuka, Junpei, and Mitsuru seemed to shift position ever so slightly. It was almost like… someone had skipped ahead in the scene. It wasn’t clear how far, but everyone was till in almost the same place so it couldn’t have been too far. There were two more people present now as well. In the easy chair at the head of the table was Shuji Ikutski, sitting with his arms crossed, looking pensive. Right next to Mitsuru was Akihiko, hands folded together, leaning forward. There was only one open seat, just next to Akihiko. There was also one person missing: Dark Hair.

“What really happened on the day of that accident?” Yukari leaned forward, her face filled with a mix of determination and anger. “The Kirijo Group built our school so you must know something! Tell me the truth!”

Mitsuru was quiet for a moment. When she finally opened her eyes, her expression was pained. “I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you. It just never seemed relevant. But…” She trailed off, looking down at the floor once again.

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault.” Ikutski spoke up now.

The words seemed to give Mitsuru a little more strength. She took another moment to gather her thoughts, then looked back up at Yukari. “Alright… I’ll tell you the whole story.” Joker circled around the back to the open seat, casting Elizabeth a curious look as he did. She followed him, taking a spot on the arm rest next to him.

“The shadows have many mysterious abilities. Some research indicates that they can even affect time and space.” Research? People were researching shadows? Joker threw another look to Elizabeth, who only continued to smile. How many other people knew about this stuff? “We think of them as our enemies, but what if we could somehow use them to our advantage? They would be a source of unimaginable power, wouldn’t they?”

Yukari’s eyes widened in a look of horror. “What…?”

Mitsuru kept talking. “Fourteen years ago, one man pursued that link of thinking…” As she said the words, the faintest image of another person appeared behind her. “He was the former leader of the Kirijo Group, Kouetsu Kirijo… my grandfather.” As his name was spoken, the man appeared fully. He was large, balding on the top, but the white hair around the side was long. His face was devoid of any positivity like it was permanently in a severe scowl.

Mitsuru’s expression changed, her eyes grew a little dimmer, her tone almost haunted. Her hands gripped into fists against her lap. “My grandfather was obsessed with shadows. He wanted to harness their power and create something extraordinary.” Only now did Kouetsu Kirijo’s expression change. His lips curled up into an ugly, unkind smile.

“Harness their power,” Fuuka spoke up, trying to understand.

“He assembled a team of scientists and over several years collected a significant number of shadows.”

“He what?” Now it was Junpei’s turn to be astonished.

“However, ten years ago, during the final stages of the experiment, they lost control of the shadows power. Consequently, the nature of the world was altered.”

“You mean…” Joker and Fuuka both asked in unison.

Mitsuru’s eyes were locked to the floor, but it was clear she wasn’t looking at anything. “Yes. Tartarus… and the Dark Hour.” She came back to reality and looked back up at Yukari. “By their account, the mass of shadows they collected split into several large ones that then dispersed. These are the shadows we’ve been encountering on the nights when the moon is full.”
The scene skipped again, this time to Mitsuru in mid-sentence. “… the experiment was conducted at Gekkoukan High School.”

Yukari had been quiet for quite some time. But from her white knuckles and trembling form, it was clear she was ready to burst. “Does that mean all we’ve been doing is cleaning up their mess!?” She shot a glare to Akihiko, the only one who hadn’t seemed surprised by this. “You knew too, didn’t you, Senpai!? They’ve just been using us! Or do you not care as long as you get to fight?”

Akihiko tensed for a moment, clearly the words stung. “That’s not true.” He lowered his gaze to the floor. “I have my reasons.”

“Think what you’d like…” Mitsuru finally spoke up again. “It was my decision not to share that information.” She looked Yukari in the eye again, resolute now. “It was never my intention to deceive you. Convincing you to join SEES was my highest priority. As absurd as it may seem, only we – with our personas – can fight the shadows.” Once more, she lowered her eyes. “Besides… some of us were never given a choice. I…”
Her resolve left her and Akihiko put a hand on her shoulder. “Mitsuru, don’t.”

“Yukari,” Ikutski spoke again, acting as a voice of reason. “It’s those in the past who are to blame. And they lost their lives as a result of what they did.” Kouetsu Kirijo’s form faded from sight as he talked. “We’re all in the same boat here; none of us deserve the burden that’s been thrust upon us.” Ikutski leaned back a bit his chair and steepled his hands in front of his mouth. “It’s been ten years since that incident. No one knows why those shadows suddenly reappeared. But since they’re active, at least we can find and destroy them. Do you realize what this means?” Everyone turned to him with a curious expression, Joker included. A smile appeared on his face.

“What if I told you that those twelve shadows are the cause of everything?”

Ikutski's words hung in the air... literally. A few seconds after he spoke, Joker heard them again. This time, they echoed, the sound warping with each repetition going from higher to lower in pitch, louder to quieter.The lights in above them started to buzz and flicker. It got louder and brighter until with a series of pops they all flashed and blew out, bathing the room in darkness. When Joker's eyes had time to adjust, he found everyone else had disappeared, except for Joker and Elizabeth. Joker breathed in deeply, then let it out slowly. He leaned back on the couch and tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. Elizabeth dropped onto the seat next to him with a small bounce and giggle, them mimicked his position. “The hubris of man, long documented to be the source of his misery, yet so well disguised that man hardly ever recognizes it. So often he never does, and it is left to his children and his children’s children to pick up the pieces.”

“They’re school turned into Tartarus, didn’t it?” Joker responded.

“During the dark hour, yes.”

“Did the Kirijo Group make the Metaverse too?”

“I’m afraid that is beyond what I know,” Elizabeth replied in a remorseful tone.

Joker stayed quiet. There were so many questions. Every time he thought of one, he thought of another ten instantly. The Dark Hour wasn’t still around, was it? No, because he had a persona and he never experienced it. Unless it didn’t go away, it just turned into the Metaverse. There was still so much about the Metaverse that they didn’t know. Did Mitsuru know about the Metaverse? If she did, would she intervene? If Shinji’s persona was anything to go off of, she had way more power than they did. If it came to a fight, they’d lose. But would it? Maybe she’d be on their side.

“You appear to be quite deep in thought.” Elizabeth cut into his mental cacophony. Joker looked at her, smiling coyly, and let out a breath he didn’t know that he’d been holding.

“There’s a lot to think about.”

“Assuredly. It’s impossible to tell what connection there is to their circumstance and yours. However, we can’t dally too long. We’ve much more story yet to be told.” With that, she hopped up and off the couch, spun around toward him, and held out a hand to help him up. With a sigh, Joker took it and she pulled him up with surprising ease. “Shall we?”

“Lead the way,” Joker replied.

Elizabeth held up one finger. “Ah, but before we go, there is one last thing I must show you.” She walked to a window and beckoned him over. From where he was, Joker already had an idea of what she wanted him to see. Outside was a cityscape, probably the place where the SEES team lived. But the skyline was pierced by something that towered over all the buildings. As he approached, Joker could make out more and more details of the structure. Massive didn’t even begin to describe it. It was a monumental mass of twisting buildings seemingly melted into one another. It seemed to be cut into different layers as it stretched up into the sky. Even though it had to be at least a couple miles away, Joker still had to look up to see the top. He could only stare a moment, trying to find the words to describe what was seeing. In the end, only one came to mind.

Tartarus.

“It’s…”

“Truly staggering, isn’t it?” Elizabeth mused. “An endless, ever-shifting labyrinth, where you never find the same floor twice.” She glance at him with a smirk. “Does that sound familiar?”

“Yeah.” Was all Joker could get out.

“Now then, let us continue our trek.” She did just that, confidently marching back to the double doors. “I believe our only path away from here is back down the stairs, though I’m unsure I where that will lead us.”
Joker was a few steps from the stairs when he heard it. The unmistakable sound of creaking leather, like someone sitting down on the couch. Joker snapped to attention and turned around. Just as the door to the SEES meeting room closed, he caught someone’s gaze, sitting down right where he was a moment before. For just a moment, time froze, a single eye held his attention entirely. He imagined there was a second eye to go with it, but it was hidden…

…behind a head of Dark Hair.

Even sprinting, he wasn’t able to make it back before the door closed. Even with all his weight thrown against it, it didn’t budge. Even though he knew there was no way this place would let him back there, he still had to try. After pushing against it for another moment, Joker stepped back a bit and looked it up and down, shaking his head.

“Did you forget something in there?” Elizabeth asked from the stairs.

“I saw him.” Joker replied without looking back at her. “In there.” He expected her to reply with something cryptic and flowery then urge him along. What he got instead was entirely different.

A rush of air, a blurred form streaking past him, and a massive BANG of an impact. When Joker finally processed what happened, he could see Elizabeth, just now falling out of the air, boot still against the doors. The moment he told her what he saw, she’d thrown a flying kick at the thing and from what he just felt, she’d hit it way harder than he had. Her face was an image of pure determination.

No.

Desperation.

It was a kind of ferocity she hadn’t shown up until now. In that moment, way more than him, Elizabeth had been consumed by one thought: she had to get into that room. She’d become so single-minded about it, that she didn’t seem to notice that gravity was taking affect on her once more.

With a quick step, Joker caught her for the second time. Her eyes stayed locked on the doors for just another moment before her surge of emotion calmed and faded. She blinked a few times before meeting Joker’s eyes. “Oh, why thank you. I don’t imagine this floor would have been any more uncomfortable than the one before.”

“Anytime. Are you okay?” Joker asked.

“Oh!” It seemed to dawn on her what she’d just done as her face reddened. “I apologize for my behavior. Composure is normally so easy for me to maintain that I’m not always the best equipped for intense emotions.”

“I can understand that.” Joker let her down. She walked back to the double doors and gently, longingly placed a hand on them. Joker put a hand on her shoulder and gestured toward the stairs, there being nowhere else to go. “Shall we?”

Her smile returned, a little sadder now, and she nodded. After one last look back at the doors, they left them behind and descended the stairs.

Chapter Text

Going downstairs in this place felt weird, but things were different right now. These clearly weren’t the same stairs they’d been climbing before. Instead they curved around, leading to a new floor. Off to one was a sitting area with some tables, chairs, and a couple vending machine. On the other was a hallway, lined with a series of door.

“Alright, now I’m lost. What is this place?” Joker asked. Elizabeth, who had ignored the chairs entirely and simply had taken a seat on one of the tables, kicked her legs and stared at the ceiling.

“What, indeed. I’ve only trodden here once, on a very special occasion.” There was a personal tone to the words that Joker didn’t feel the need to intrude on. Instead he walked down the hallway, trying the doors. Locked; all of them.

“No luck.” He turned back to Elizabeth, still kicking her legs. “There’s more stairs, wanna try those?”

“I shall remain here, in case something else should change while you’re away,” she said distantly. Joker raised an eyebrow at her but didn’t press. At the bottom of this next set of stairs was another floor, almost identical to the previous one, aside from different furniture.

“Guess that means I gotta try these-“ Joker stopped as he found one door was already open. “Oh, alright then.” He wasn’t used to this place giving him anything for free. As he neared it, Joker could hear the distorted sound of someone talking, but he couldn’t make out any words. He pressed himself against the wall until he was at the frame. Now that he was closer, it was clear that it was coming from a TV. He peaked his head around to get a look.

The room was a bedroom and a nice one at that. Just next to the door, there was a minifridge, a sink, and an entire shower. It had normal furnishings too; a bed, desk, even a TV and an easy chair, but it also had a significant portion dedicated to workout equipment. Trophies lined the walls, all with “Akihiko Sanada” engraved on them. This was Akihiko’s room. With that in mind, the rest fell into place. This was a dormitory. This was SEES’s base of operations.

The TV was playing what looked like a choppy, corrupted recording. It was the alleyway where’d he met Shinji. He and Akihiko were talking.

“…to try and convince me, then forget it.” Shinji was in the middle of saying.

Akihiko shook his head. “It’s nothing like that. I just wanted to see how you were doing.” Akihiko took a seat on the concrete steps. The video corruption overtook it for a second, and when the image came back, he was in mid-sentence. “…14 years since we met at the orphanage,” he lowered his head and smiled. “You, me, and Miki… we used to run around here until the sun went down. Back then, it seemed like we had all the time in the world.”

“Miki?” That was a new name.

“If you wanna get all sappy…” the corruption worsened again before Shinji could finish the reply. As it cleared, he could see Akihiko standing.

“We finally know a way to get rid of Tartarus and the Dark Hour.”

For the first time, Shinji’s expression changed, he looked legitimately shocked. “No shit?”
Akihiko’s fists tightened. “To be honest, all I’ve been thinking about lately is getting stronger. But yesterday, someone made me question my reason for fighting.”

“Your reason for fighting, huh…” Shinji looked down at the ground. “That’s different for every person. But, if you don’t have a good one, you can always quit… like I did.” As he talked the corruption got worse and worse until static was the only thing on the TV. Something about it seemed… weird. It wasn’t just normal white noise. It was almost like there was… actual smoke behind the screen. The sound had changed too. It was… crackling.

Then the TV turned off and the crackling stayed. With nothing to distract him, Joker became acutely aware of the heat of the heat at his back with the crackles now at a deafening level. Fire.

The moment he put it together, there was a voice behind him. The voice of a little girl. “Aki?” Joker spun around as fast as he could, just in time to get a glimpse of the new world outside of Akihiko’s room. That world was consumed by flames. A raging inferno so big that Joker couldn’t see anything else behind it. At the precipice of the doorway was a figure, a silhouette against the blaze. A little girl. Joker had only started his first step toward her as the flames consumed her and the door slammed shut.

There was a surge of panicked energy through his body that drove him forward. He couldn’t think of another time he’d run as fast as he did now. He sprinted to the door, throwing it open less than a second after he lost sight of the kid…

Only to find the hallway, back to how it was.

No fire, no little girl.

Nothing.

He threw his gaze all around, panting heavily, looking for any sign of the flames or the girl, but everything was back to how it was before, no sign of the horror he’d just witnessed. He curled his fingers into tightly balled fists. Showing him someone who needed help, only to tell him it was too late…

“You can’t do that!” He kicked the door as hard as he could, causing it to swing wildly and slam against the wall on its hinge. His breathing was ragged, every muscle tense, knuckles white. He didn’t even know who he was yelling at.

A hand gently touched his arm. Elizabeth had apparently joined him while he was raging. Her face was sympathetic. Joker gave a wry smile. “Guess I don’t always keep my cool either, huh?”

“Under the right circumstances, it is an admirable trait,” she responded.

He laughed humorlessly and ran his hand through his hair. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Do you wish to discuss it?” She suggested. “Or would you prefer to explore the door that opened upstairs?”

“Something else opened up?” Joker’s attention was caught.

She nodded, “I attempted to call your phone to tell you, but the signal seems to get lost here.”

Joker gave her a look. “Wait you have… How do you know… nevermind.” It wasn’t worth it. He took a deep breath and headed for the stairs. “I saw a little girl… in a fire,” he said as they climbed.

“Likely a vision of the past.”

“I think her name was Miki.” He let it go at that. The newly opened room was the polar opposite of Akihiko’s. The pink wallpaper, uncluttered floor, flowers on the shelves all made for a very pleasant, feminine atmosphere. There was a short table in the middle of the room with a laptop and a piece of notebook paper on it. After a moment, he looked over to Elizabeth, who’d taken a seat on the bed. “Who’s room is this?”

“If I recall correctly, I believe this room was home to Fuuka Yamagishi,” Elizabeth replied, poking her head in and looking around.

Joker looked at the computer, which was still on with a single window open. It looked like some kind of report. There was a lot he couldn’t make sense of; scientific terms, measurements, and references to other documents. But shadows were mentioned several times, as well as an experiment. He guessed it was referring to the incident he’d just learned about upstairs. Joker picked up the paper and turned it over. There was a letter on it, written in neat, proper handwriting.

Fuuka,

Thank you again for doing this. I hope I’m not putting too much pressure on you, but I need to know everything about the incident. You’ll be able to use my ID card and the password “Takeharu” to access the database. Once you’re in, it’s up to you to get access to the files. I’m not worried though; you’ve proven more than capable of gathering information.

I’m glad to hear that you feel welcome here and I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly. While I may not be the best at it, should you ever feel the need to talk about home, my door is always open.

Mitsuru.

Looking back at the table, Joker noticed something that had been covered by the paper before. It was an ID card, specifically for the Kirijo Group. Mitsuru’s face was on it.

“So Mitsuru had Fuuka look into it,” he said, mostly to himself. “Which means she must’ve been quite the computer whiz.” The more Joker thought about it, the more he realized: the Phantom Thieves could use a computer whiz. Something to think about later, at least.

There was a ding from the computer and a message popped up. It was labelled “Mom”, but the text accompanying it was scrambled beyond anything Joker could read, it was weirdly hard to even look at. Another ding went off and another message came with it, this time labeled “Dad” with pretty much the same eye-assaulting symbols. A third ding, louder this time, and another Mom message. Then another, and another, soon the screen was filled with pop-up windows, and every one got louder and louder.

Before long, the sound started to hurt. Elizabeth, who had made her way over to Fuuka’s bed by this point, took the pillow off it and covered her ears with it. Joker instinctively tried to closed the laptop, but the thing would budge, at all. He covered his ears and turned around just in time to see the door close on him. “Oh, are you kidding me?!” He yelled above the noise. With a running start, he rammed it with his shoulder, to no avail. The room was starting to vibrate, the flowers on the shelves rattled toward the edge, same with the TV. Joker did whatever he could to prevent the noise from getting in, but it was too loud now. The text in the messages was getting bigger too, like they were yelling as loudly as the dings.

Then it stopped.

The ringing in Joker’s ears took a second to go away, but when he realized it was over, he cautiously removed his hands and looked back at the screen,

In the middle of the pop-ups, there was one message. The border on the window was colored pink as opposed to grey of all the others. It was the only one with a different name; “Natsuki”. All this one said was “Hey Fuuka, wanna hang out after school?”

After he read it, he heard the door slowly open behind him.

Joker looked at Elizabeth, who had switched to lying face down on the bed with the pillow pulled over her. “What was that?”

She removed the pillow and got up, making her way over to where Joker was, and looked at the screen. After a moment, she replied simply: “The power of friendship.”. All Joker could do for a moment was stare at her, trying and failing to think of a response. “Shall we check for another door?” She asked with a smile.

“Sure.” He said shaking his head. He’d heard the name Natsuki before, but he couldn’t remember where. After finding the other doors still closed on this level, they headed for the stairs. “So we’ve seen something from Akihiko, Fuuka, and maybe Mitsuru. Which means we’ve got Yukari, Junpei, and Ikutski left, right?”

“I believe that is a reasonable presumption,” Elizabeth agreed with a nod. Sure enough, when they came to the other floor, one of the doors was open.

This room was a wreck. There were posters, magazines, clothing, and garbage littered all over the floor. Impressively, there was a stack of manga next to the bed that came up to Joker’s chin. One of the walls was mostly occupied by a large poster of a woman in skimpy clothing. “Junpei.” Joker confirmed to himself.

There was only one clean spot in the room, and that was half of his table. In that spot was a sketchbook with a few pencils aligned on top of it. I looked out of place compared to everything else. He gingerly moved the pencils aside and picked up the sketchbook. Opening it up, the very first page was a sketch of Junpei himself. It was immaculate, everything from the life in his eyes, to the cocky smirk he had on. Was Junpei an artist? It never came up before.

He turned the page over to look at the next one. It was the interior of a train, unmistakably the train from the second landmark. The TV turned on, just like in Akihiko’s room. But this time where was no picture, only static and audio, in Junpei’s voice. “So Tartarus and the Dark Hour will be gone, huh… Tch.” He spoke slowly, sounding both contemplative and angry. After a moment of waiting for him to say something else, Joker turned to the next page. It was a picture of Junpei again, walking in Mementos. “That’s good. That’s what we’ve been fighting for,” came Junpei’s voice once more.

Joker raised an eyebrow and turned to next one. It was it was picture of Yukari and Fuuka looking shocked at him, with Junpei looking… almost hateful. “So why am I so pissed?”

Now he got it. Each picture had a thought to go with it. In the next picture he was sitting on a concrete step, hunched over. “I know why.”

The following page switched perspectives, looking at him head on. A figure stood behind him, humanoid, but with massive wings connected to its arms and feet. There was no mistaking what it was, this was Junpei’s persona. “I was like, ‘Fighting is my duty.’ But hell, it’s all I’m good for.” The next was the same, but his persona was replaced by the unmistakable outline of Dark Hair, shadowing over him. “I can’t fight worth shit, anyway… Not compared to HIM, at least.”

The final image was Junpei’s silhouette, screaming in either rage or agony. The audio on the TV degraded and Joker could barely make out the words “good enough.” But the static in the image cleared for just a second, giving the vague shape of what looked to be… a girl in white. Then it was gone, and the TV was dead.

He put the notebook back where it belonged and crossed his arms thoughtfully. Junpei had tied his worth to his persona and Tartarus. He felt for the guy, but he’d seen what happened when someone put all their value into only one thing.

“So it sounds like,” Joker started out loud, “everyone was taking the news about Tartarus differently. And Mementos wanted to use this place to show me more about them.” He’d seen bits and pieces of who the people in this story were so far, but only bits and pieces. Now he was learning new things about them, outside of just being in SEES.

“Peaking into a stranger’s inner turmoil with them none the wise,” Elizabeth mused. “Almost voyeuristic, one could say.”

Joker pursed his lips and looked over to her, leaning on the doorway. “I’m not sure that’s the right word.”

“Oh?” She cocked her head at him. “Isn’t the act of voyeurism simply an expression of extreme interest in another’s life and matters?”

“It’s got a… specific context.” Joker’s mind was racing, he had to find a way to end this conversation as soon as possible. “How about we talk about this later, we’ve got more rooms to get through, right?”

“But I’m curious to know what-”

“Later, I promise,” he lied through his teeth and sped to the door. The sound of paper flapping behind him made him stop. He turned around and saw the sketchbook was open again. Even from this distance, he could tell it was a new picture. As he walked back to it, he felt the hairs on his neck stand up.

The picture was of a woman-like figure. But her limbs were long and thin, her body bent over, and her head covered by a goat skull. This was a persona, he could tell that much, but he didn’t know who it belonged to, and the feeling he got from it was… hostile. “I think we should leave,” he said, feeling the urge hit him hard. Elizabeth didn’t object and they headed for the next room. When they reached the stairs, the door slammed.

The newly opened room on was Yukari’s, no doubt about it. Pink bedspread, neat floor and desk, it mimicked the personality she displayed pretty accurately. But it seemed oddly sparse compared to the others. Everything was in its place, barely anything had been left out. It was also dark; the lights didn’t work, even after hitting the switch. The light from the hall was enough to see, but it was unnerving. As he looked through, there was only one item of note that Joker could see. It was a piece of paper on the bed. He picked it up for a closer look. It was a letter.

March 6th, 2000.

To my family,

Tomorrow, I’ll bring this letter to the opening ceremony for the Moonlight Bridge. It’ll stored in a time capsule and sent to you ten years from now.

Yukari… You’re so small right now, but in ten years, you’ll be sixteen. You’ll be in high school. I know you’ve been sad because I have to work so late, but you still always greet me with a smile. I’m really proud of myself. Kirijo-san appointed me Head Researcher. I’ll be starting on a big project soon, and I’m happy to be receiving so much recognition for my work. But, I swear to you that nothing is more important to me than you and your mother. Yukari… are you remembering to enjoy life? Are you still bright-eyed and hopeful, like you are now? No matter what happens in the next ten years, I hope you are happy.

Well, I hope this letter brings a smile to your face.

Love, Dad.

The moment Joker was done reading, the TV came on, bathing the room in bright light. After Joker’s eyes adjusted, he saw that Yukari was nowhere to be found on-screen. Instead, it was a tired, haggard looking man, wide-eyed and frantic as he spoke into a camera.

“I pray that this recording reaches safe hands…” he started, looking behind and around him, like he was expecting someone to come in any second. “My employer has become obsessed with a loathsome idea. This experiment should have never even been conceived.” He breathed deeply and wiped some sweat from his brow. “I’m afraid what I’ve done will result in unprecedented disaster. But if I hadn’t, the entire world may have paid the price. The shadows that were amassed here have been dispersed as a result of the explosion.” He leaned closer to the camera, making his desperation clear. “To end this nightmare, you must eliminate all of them.” He leaned back, clearly trying to keep calm and clearly failing. “I am to blame for this. I knew the risks, but I was blinded by the promise of success. And so, I didn’t raise any objections.” He paused then, breaking out in a shuddering sob and looking away from the camera. When he turned back, his gaze was different somehow. It was less like he was looking at the camera, and more like he was looking right at Joker. “It is all my fault,” were the final words he spoke before the video cut out, leaving the room in darkness once more.

Joker didn’t move for a moment. He was sweating, shivering even, and he’d only just realized it. Without another word, he gently laid the letter back on the bed and left Yukari’s room. It had been one thing to learn about the incident secondhand, it was another to see it. The panic in the man’s eyes was… all consuming. “Hey Elizabeth.”

“Yes?”

“Was that… Yukari’s dad?”

“It was.”

“Alright.” Joker nodded and headed for the stairs. As he descended them, he heard the sound of something rumbling and moving. Upon arriving on the boys’ floor, he found what it was. There had been nowhere else to go from here before, just a wall next to the stairs. Now that had changed. There was a way even further down. With a glance and a shrug back at Elizabeth, he pushed on to the new area.

To his surprise, this looked to be the bottom floor. There was a lounge, a check-in desk, a dining room, and a door to the outside. “This is a pretty fancy place, eh?” He called back to Elizabeth. When she didn’t reply, he turned around to look at her, only to find no one there. “Oh, great,” he growled. “Elizabeth!” He called back up the stairs but heard nothing back. Suddenly alone again, he couldn’t help but feel a little vulnerable. He ventured cautiously out onto the ground floor.

Everything was… untouched. All the dishes in the cabinets, the chairs pushed in around the table, it was like no one had been down here in years. When he came to the desk, there was a single piece of paper on it. The only thing that didn’t seem to fit in.

It had flowery filigree on the top and bottom of it. Between them was the work “Contract” in large letters, and four short lines of text underneath it.

Time never waits.

It delivers all equally to the same end.

I hereby agree to the statement above,

And I chooseth this fate of mine own free will.

At the bottom, just above the filigree, there was a signature.

Minato Arisato.

The first recording immediately came back to him, almost like something forced it back into his mind. “All I did was sign my name…” Joker said to himself. Dark Hair’s name was Minato Arisato.
“I believe you’ve stumbled upon quite the artifact,” Elizabeth’s voice came from right next to his ear. He cried out in surprised and spun around to face her.

“Where have you been?” He asked, halfway making it sound like an accusation.

“I had something I wished to give one last look before heading downstairs.” She replied vaguely. “I apologize for not mentioning it before.”

“What was it?”

“A door that had not been opened. Alas, my best efforts to unhinge it were for naught.” She left the thought there and turned her eyes to the paper. “This is quite the memory.”

“Igor made me sign a contract when I started using personas. Is this Arisato’s then?” He asked, testing out the name.

“Indeed.”

“A bit depressing,” he remarked.

“A hard truth the be sure, but one that must be spoken.”

“I guess,” he looked around the room one last time. “Seems like there’s only one way to go.” He walked to the front door, beyond which he could see dark city streets. How far was this place going to let him go? “So I guess we’re headed for a night out on the town. With that, he pushed the door open.

But he was not greeted by a town.

Instead, what Joker found waiting for him was a beach of white sand with clear skies and a bright, warm sun.

Chapter Text

Joker took a moment of silence for his lost “night out on the town” line, then another to process the change in scenery.

“What a wonderfully sunny place!” Elizabeth cried, entirely unaffected. She stepped out onto the top concrete step and sat down, quickly removing her boots and socks, then skipped the rest of the stairs and jumped right into the sand. She took pronounced steps through it, digging her feet in with each one. After some slight hesitation, Joker chuckled to himself and followed suit.

Carrying his socks and shoes, he stepped onto the sand. It was soft, warm, and pleasant. He heard the door close behind him, and when he turned around, there was no building there. Only the sand and a tropical jungle. In the distance, he could see other islands. The one closest to them was about half a mile away. The tops of buildings were visible over the trees, it looked like a resort town. He was pretty sure he could see people on the beaches too, but his was empty. Aside, of course, from the blue-clad girl currently getting sand on every part of her dress several yards away.

“To think that this place would persist, even in a memory.”

The new voice was a strong one, and if Joker had to describe its owner in one word, that word would be “severe”. He wore a dark grey suit like it was his default outfit, his hair was cut neatly, his features were sharp, and one eye was covered by an eyepatch. The man looked like a villain from a spy movie. Yet despite all that, there was nothing hostile about him. His posture wasn’t exactly relaxed, but it wasn’t tense either. His expression, while stern, was by no means angry.

“What do you mean by ‘this place’?” Joker ventured.

“Tartarus, of course,” he replied without looking at him. “A clinging blight that should have been forgotten.” He spoke with controlled distaste. “After so many battles, so many sacrifices, it almost feels like an insult to those who remain.”

Joker approached the man as he paused to take a long drag of a cigarette. “Why do you think it’s still here?”

“If forced to, I would propose two theories.” He blew out a cloud of smoke before he elaborated. “The first is that those who fought through and conquered it still live and they still remember. The second is that the aftershocks of what we did have never left and might persist into perpetuity.”

“What you did?” Joker furrowed his brow. “Were one of the researchers?”

The man closed his one eye and shook his head. “No, but you’re close.” He finally turned to face Joker and held out a hand. “My name is Takeharu Kirijo, the late former head of the Kirijo Group.”

Former head. Kouetsu Kirijo was Mitsuru’s grandfather, so that made this guy… “Mitsuru’s dad.” He shook the man’s hand as he said it.

The man nodded. “In blood, at least.”

“Which means your dad was the one that caused Tartarus and the Dark Hour.”

He nodded again. “As well as, if my theory is correct, the widespread existence of shadows in our world.”

“You guys discovered them, does that mean they existed before?”

“We believe they did in a much more limited capacity, existing more as reflections of human beings than their own form of life.”

“Is Mementos part of those aftershocks?”

He took another drag of his cigarette. “I couldn’t say for sure, but that would seem a fair assumption.” He was silent for a few moments then, looking out over the water with something between nostalgia and regret in his eyes. “Are you a persona user as well?”

“Yeah.”

“Interesting,” he smiled sadly. “At least that too has persisted.”

They went quiet again, Joker because he wasn’t sure how to keep the conversation going, and Kirijo because he didn’t seem too interested in doing so. Finally, something came to mind.

“Mitsuru said she wasn’t given a choice in fighting shadows,” he looked over at Kirijo. “What did she mean by that?”

The man gave a deep sigh as he threw his cigarette down and stomped it out. “She couldn’t have been more than ten when she first summoned it for the first time. To witness Penthesilea was… quite something. A scientist who left before the incident theorized that there was a way for humans to make peace with and control their shadows, giving them new shape and powers. We’ve come to know these as personas. We’d made headway with developing weapons along these lines, but in humans, the phenomenon was still only theoretical. Most of the time, the shadows of children aren’t complex enough to form a persona, if they even exist at all. Yet, she had been through so much at that age… it was easy to see why she could manifest it so strongly. But consistency was a problem, which led to the development of the evokers.”

“Wait, so you developed this thing?” Joker pulled out his own.

“We did.”

“Why didn’t you ever use it then?”

“I lacked the potential.”

“Huh?”

“Do you understand the significance of the coffins, yet?” He asked, turned to him now, asking the question pointedly.

“They’re people, right?”

“Correct. And within the human population, there is a subset that do not transmogrify during the Dark Hour. Within that subset is yet another, these are the ones capable of summoning personas. A subset of a subset of the human population was able to combat the shadows in the Dark Hour. You can understand the need to develop anti-shadow weaponry.”

“What would anti-shadow weaponry even look like?”

“Automatons, artificially infused with personas.”

Joker’s eyebrows shot up. “Persona robots; you’re telling me that you people invented persona robots?”

An amused smirk came to Kirijo’s face as quickly as it disappeared. “Yes, though the process itself was grueling, some would say cruel.” He paused for a moment then breathed deeply. “Should you ever meet, I would like to ask you tell Mitsuru something for me?”

“Sure,” Joker accepted.

“Tell her that I’m sorry, that I’m proud of her, and that I love her.”

In the silence that followed, Joker took a moment to glance back at the other island. The people were gone now, the beach was bare.

Except for one figure. There was a pier on one end. The only person still on the beach was standing at the very end of it. Even from this far away, it was easy to tell that she wasn’t wearing your average swimwear. She was clad in white robes that waved in the breeze. She held a spear in one hand and a shield on the other, and atop her head was an ornate helmet with a mohawk of feathers. She was statue-esque, both in that she stood tall and regal, staring out over the water, and she herself didn’t appear to be moving whatsoever, staying eerily still.

It took Joker another moment to realize, but she was also staring directly at him. Even from this far away, he could somehow make out the bright blue color of her eyes. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t tear his gaze away from hers. He started to feel woozy, dizzy, disoriented. His vision stared to lose focus, his body started to feel heavy, and he was quickly fighting to stay awake.

Judging by his waking up moments later, it was a fight that he apparently lost.

The beach was gone, as was Kirijo, Elizabeth, and, from a look down at his feet, his shoes. He was inside a building now, but apart from that, it was hard to tell.

The room had several… he wasn’t sure what they were but they were lining the room. They looked like booths, cylindrical, easily big enough to fit a person inside. In fact, from the chair that was also inside each of them, it seemed like they were supposed to. There were cables and machinery connected to each of them, but most of them seemed like they didn’t work anymore. In fact, only two seemed to have any power going to them. One of them was closed, Joker couldn’t see inside, but the other was open, lights on, with a computer reading out some type of error message that Joker couldn’t decipher.

Finding nothing else that seemed important, Joker took the only exit he could see. After walking through a few halls with a bunch of locked doors, he finally came to what looked like a Lobby. He still wasn’t sure what kind of building he was in, but from the amount of foliage in the front room, the expensive looking couches, and the marble of the floor, it had to be expensive. Beyond of pair of glass doors at the front, he could see a tropical environment just like the one he’d come from. That meant he hadn’t gone far at least.

He could also see a girl. She looked around his height, clad in a pale blue sundress. It definitely wasn’t Elizabeth, this girl had blonde hair. Her body language was also worlds apart, walking in a smooth, strangely uniform manner, away from the building.

It was clearly something Joker was meant to follow, so he made his way to the front door. Whether this place was messing with him or she was just faster than he thought, Joker wasn’t sure, but by the time he got out the doors she was way further away, heading toward a clearing in the trees. Joker took a step out of the building and paused momentarily. He still didn’t have his shoes.

“One thing at a time,” he told himself, kicking the problem down the road for later. He took off at a brisk pace after the girl. He had to take a few turns through the jungle, barely keeping her in sight as he did. It didn’t help that he had to constantly be looking out for rocks and roots so he didn’t end up destroying his feet. Luckily, the chase didn’t last long.

It ended at another beach. In fact, the moment he saw the pier, Joker knew which beach. He could even see the island he’d been on prior, but neither Kirijo nor Elizabeth (nor his shoes) were visible on the white sand.

The girl was standing on the end of the pier, right where with woman had been prior. Just like the robes, her dress was swaying in the wind and her body seemed still as a statue. From here, Joker still couldn’t see her face, though given the effect those blue eyes had on him made him question if that was really a bad thing or not.

Joker slowly walked across the beach, never taking his eyes off the girl. Something about this felt… different. He’d met several people while he was here. Pharos, Takaya, Shinjiro, Elizabeth, and Kirijo. But those we all… meetings. He ran into each one of them without any kind of advance warning. But this, this felt like… an introduction. Like he was being presented something. Whoever this girl was, she was important.
He stepped onto the pier and called out. “Hello?” There was no reply from the girl. He took another few steps and tried again. Nothing. Another few steps and there was a change. Not in her, but in him. His ears started ringing. With another step, it got louder. Not only that, but he felt… heavier. The next step after that was even harder, like his entire body was being dragged down. Each time he moved forward, he felt it more, the ringing got louder, and his energy drained further. Each passing moment became a constant struggle to stay on his feet, to block out the deafening noise. His vision was blurring again, his head was starting to hurt. He was going to collapse any moment now, but he was almost there. Just a few more steps.

He reached out his hand and finally touched her shoulder.

The moment his fingers touched her, he flew back like he’d been hit by a train. With everything blurred, his balance distorted, and his head pounding, it had been impossible to parse his surroundings. Now was much the same, but as he tried to make anything out in his weightless, rushing existence, he could make out just a glimpse of a scene every once in a while.

On a bridge, standing before a shadowy figure, resembling the Reaper.

Standing at the end of the pier, staring back a both the island, and Minato Arisato.

The bridge again, but look this time looking at a boy Joker didn’t recognize.

The moon, bright and huge with a thin, angelic silhouette standing in front of it.

Among the relentless deluge of sights, sounds, and feelings that were being thrown at him, it seemed to hang on these for just an instant longer than all the others. Every time he showed up, the eyes of whoever he was looking through focused on Arisato.

The last view he saw was sitting on a bench, looking down at Arisato, who’s head was on a girl’s lap, seeming to be asleep.

Then it all went black.

Chapter Text

When Joker came to, he was back on the stairs between floors. The cloudy, ethereal, atmosphere that surrounded it was just like always, unchanged. It was like it didn’t even know about his detour. The only proof he had that it happened was the fact that he still didn’t have his socks or shoes.

As he climbed to his feet, Joker felt shaky. His body ached and his thoughts were swimming, but things were slowly starting to come back into focus. The stone… glass… marble? Whatever, the material of the stairs was a little cool, but not cold, against his bare feet. There hadn’t been anything littering the floors on the previous levels, hopefully that stayed true for all the rest of them. When he got back to Mementos proper, he’d hopefully be back in his thief outfit, boots and all.

There was no sign of Elizabeth, and there was probably no use in going backward, so he started climbing. As he went, he tried to make sense of the images that had flashed before him. But everything about them seemed so disparate and contextless that he couldn’t find any pattern. In the end, he filed them away for alter. Hopefully, this place would make good on the foreshadowing and he’d learn what they meant at some point.

Just like every time prior, visions of people in Arisato’s life faded into view. A boy with slicked back hair knelt down over something on the floor and was approached by a couple others, not looking friendly. A girl walked with her back hunched, giving a wide berth to every guy she walked past. A boy sat on a bench, holding a stack of papers, only to throw them, scattering them to across the ground.
But before the unfriendly pair reached the kneeling boy, Arisato showed up, backing him up. The hunched over girl found him, straightened her back a little, and they walked off together. He showed up just as the boy on the bench desperately started to pick up the pages and immediately helped him gather them.

It was impressive, the number of people Arisato had managed to reach. There didn’t seem to be any shortage of new examples.

“Oh, hi Ken, what’s up?” Yukari’s voice startled him. A ways off, he could see the shapes of SEES as well as Ikutski, and a boy. This one was young, looked like he might’ve been in elementary school.

“He doesn’t leave during the break because of his… circumstances.” Ikutski offered.

“It was just me and my mom, but she got in an accident and she… she died.”

The image began to fade as Ikutski’s words echoed. “I decided to move him to your dorm for the summer… he has the potential.”

Joker raised an eyebrow. This kid was a persona user? What next, animals? Could a dog get a persona too?

Apparently, Tartarus took this as a challenge.

A small, but familiar growl echoed around the stairs. Another vision appeared. It was a Shinto shrine with a playground next to it. A shadow was dragging itself up some stairs toward the structure, where a lone shiba stood, fur bristled, teeth barred.

Clearly the fight had already been happening, the dog was wounded and bleeding. But as the shadow got ready to lunge at it, something pounced. Something big pounced. The shape standing behind the shiba had been mostly transparent until it struck, but when it moved, the massive, three-headed hound fully materialized. It bit into the shadow and tore it apart, ending with a deafening, three-pronged howl.

Dogs could get personas.

As Joker contemplated that fact, lips purssed, he turned his attention back in front of him. Just in time too, he’d arrived at his next destination.

Gone was the purple nightmare zone. Now he’d come to the land of abstract architecture.

The path before him was relatively straightforward, but the walls were plastered with imagery that he remembered seeing at a gallery with Yusuke once. Stairs leading into nothing or curving until they were upside down, random windows that looked almost like stained glass. It wasn’t just flat images either, they stuck out from the wall, blocked and twisted. They took on every single shape except one that made structural sense. Joker drew the saber from his belt and tightened his grip on the evoker and began moving through this new floor.

He had to wonder where SEES got their power. The Phantom Thieves got it from the spirit of rebellion, and after all the reading he’d done about them, it was pretty clear that their personas reflected that. Arisato had Orpheus, and it wasn’t hard to figure out that the dog was using Cerberus. Both were Greek figures. This place was called Tartarus, also from Greek mythology. Which meant he could only assume the lady in the Greek clothing and helmet was related to this too. If he had to guess, Athena.

“Why do they always run and hide when I approach?” The calm, cold, and collected voice echoed down the hallway to Joker’s left. He recognized that voice. It was Takaya’s. Except this wasn’t echoing in from the ether, this was physical, joker could almost tell where he was from it. “They’re like back alley rats.” While the idea of seeing him again wasn’t appealing, Joker had a weapon and a persona now. So he made his way toward where he heard the voice.

“…Beat’s me.”

Joker knew that voice too. The deadpan, disinterested tone belonged to Shinjiro. He talked before like he knew Takaya.

“Jin… give him the capsules.” Takaya voice came again.

“I’ll pay you the same as-”

“Hold up.” A new voice joined the conversation, one Joker hadn’t heard before. It was only two words, so there wasn’t much he could tell about him, but he sounded… smug. If he had to guess, this was the guy in the green jacket that he’d seen before.

“This time, information will suffice.” Takaya took back over. “Your acquaintances have been busy lately. I’m referring to their activities on nights where the moon is full. They’ve spent a great deal of time in the tower as well. Why did they take this burden upon themselves?”

“I don’t know the details, but… supposedly if you destroy all those creatures, then the tower will disappear, and with it, the Dark Hour.”

“You mean… they intend to eliminate the dark hour? Why would they do such a thing!? With the power they have… They wish to destroy the Tower of Demise as well!?”

“Who wouldn’t wanna take out that damn tower?”

The voices had gotten steadily clearer as he went, like he was getting closer. By the time he got to that line, they were just around the corner. But he’d been tricked a lot by this place, he wasn’t about to take anything for granted. He pressed himself against a wall and kept listening.

“How lamentable.” Takaya sighed. “Now we have no choice but to intervene. It is up to each individual how he will use the strength granted him, but to erase the Dark Hour would be denying the very power they possess. We cannot tolerate that.”

“I know they asked you to come back.” The smug sounding guy accused.

There was a moment of silence thick enough to cut with a knife before Shinji spoke again. “You’re startin’ to piss me off.”

“They’re going down, you hear me? And if you’re on their side, then you’re going down too.”

The voices stopped after that and everything went quiet. After a few moments of waiting, it was clear that nothing else was going to come up, so Joker stepped out from behind the corner.

There were no people, but he did come face to face with a massive door. Just inside looked like a dirt tunnel with… a tank. Just a military tank like something from World War II. On the tip of the barrel there was a statue; a large bird of prey with its wing spread out.

Static crackled from the headphones as the MP3 player came to life: 8/6: Justice and the Chariot.

“They called themselves Strega. Takaya and Jin. Up until now, we’d thought we only had to deal with shadows. We hadn’t even considered the idea of other persona users, let alone ones that weren’t on our side. People were getting hurt, apathy syndrome was getting worse. That felt like all anyone could ever need to want to get rid of it.”

Joker walked into across the threshold, keeping an eye on the dirt floor for anything he might step on. He approached the tank cautiously, half expecting the bird to leap off the tank and fly at him. Neither object moved.

“But these guys, they talked about Tartarus like they worshipped it. The lost, apathy syndrome, the dark hour, they didn't care about any of it. They thought we were the crazy ones for wanting to get rid of it. They called it a blessing, acted like we were chosen by it.”

He looked past the tank into the depths of whatever cave he was being directed toward.

“I still don’t know if that’s how it works, but I don’t really care. We were getting rid of it, all of it.”

There was a screech of metal behind him. Joker’s gaze snapped back to the entrance as the doors began to close. Takaya was standing just past them, smiling at him.

“No no no no no!” Joker yelled as he took off sprinting for the door. Even before he got there, he knew that he wasn’t gonna make it. Just before he got to it, the last of Takaya disappeared and Joker was left in pitch black. After spending a few moments banging on the door and yelling obscenities, Joker turned around and leaned against it, sighing.

There was no light at all, he couldn’t see a damn thing. Even if he waited for his eyes to adjust, it wasn’t going to help. With his fingers crossed, he took out his phone. Even if calls and cameras didn’t work, maybe the flashlight would. As the beam of light shot out, Joker gave another sigh, this time in relief. Alright, he had light again, now to get his bearings. He shined the light up toward the ceiling.

And saw the bird. It was perched on a metal scaffolding structure that hadn’t been there before, stony eyes staring daggers at him. Joker quickly turned the flashlight back to the tank to check the barrel. Just as he thought, it wasn’t there anymore.

The barrel was also now pointing right at him.

He stood there for a solid minute, half expecting his world to end in an explosion right then and there. But the machine didn’t deliver on its threat, just stared him down with its gun. Slow, cautious steps carried Joker out of its line of fire. He wasn’t sure if he actually expected the thing to fire, but the fact that it was moving without him hearing it unnerved him. Speaking of moving without him hearing, Joker shined his light back to the bird.

It was gone.

His jaw tightened as he started to move the light around the room. Now that he was looking, there was a lot here that hadn’t been a few moments ago. A lot of it looked like reinforcement to the tunnel, but there were munitions, weapons, and a bunch of other military equipment. The one thing he couldn’t find was the bird. The longer he went without seeing it, the more nervous he got. Phone lights were strong these days, it should’ve been lighting up the whole room. But for some reason, it didn’t. It was like the beam was barely cutting through the darkness and anything outside of it got swallowed.

Finally, Joker decided that he couldn’t just stay here. None of the landmarks have been directly hostile so far, but he didn’t put it past this place to start. He took one last look to the tank, which had not moved, and took off at a brisk walk down the tunnel. He kept the light locked to the ground, keeping an eye out for stray things to step on. With the uniform shape of the tunnel and the pitch black that filled it, it was impossible to tell what kind of progress he was making. It would have bothered him more, but even outside the tunnel, progress in here seemed to happen when this place wanted it to.

A noise behind him instantly shut down all other thoughts and Joker spun around to face whatever made it. It was a continuous sound, like a clanking. With a sinking in his gut, Joker made a guess at what it was. Before long, the clanking got loud, real loud. Right before his eyes, the barrel of the tank slowly came into view, with the bird once again perched on top of it. The treads were rolling, making steady progress toward him.

He’d seen all he needed to, Joker took off at a run.

Caution went to the wind, the tunnel hadn’t taken any turns so far, so he had to trust it wouldn’t. Joker did his best to keep the now bouncing light ahead of him, hoping that the ground would stay as flat and even as it had thus far. Whether or not that gun worked didn’t matter anymore, the tank could definitely still crush him.

The clanking got faster, which could only mean it was speeding up. Joker picked up his pace too, once again reminding himself to thank Ryuji for the track training. If he survived.

Stuck running from a tank in an underground tunnel without shoes. Being a Phantom Thief was the only reason this wasn’t the weirdest thing to ever happen to him. He glanced back and shined his light to check the distance. He barely had time to register the bird being gone before something screeched and his phone was ripped from his hand. He yelled out in surprise and nearly lost his footing, but even in the dark, he managed to right himself.

Running from a tank in an underground tunnel without shoes and now in pitch darkness. Great.

Joker ran blindly, straining his eyes as hard as he could to make out even the most basic shapes or details. There was no light ahead of him, no turns, not clearings, nothing but the tunnel, going on forever.

Wait a second.

Joker’s hand went down to the holster on his belt. The evoker. “Oh, I’m an idiot,” he growled to himself as he yanked it out and put the barrel against his head.

“Orpheus!” He called out as loud as he could, pulling the trigger. Blue light flared around him, cutting through the darkness. The puppet-esque shape of Arisato’s persona floated before him, ready to meet the tank.

“Whoa! Hold on, now!”

The tank was gone.

In its place was a single man, leaning slightly backward, hands up in a gesture of surrender. The long hair, the brown suit, the turtleneck; Joker recognized him instantly.

“Shuji Ikutski.” The fighting spirit died down and Orpheus faded away, leaving the flashlight in the man’s hand as the only light.

“Oh!” Ikutski’s look surprised for a moment, then gave a good-natured smile. “Looks like my reputation precedes me.”

“But… where’s the tank,” Joker asked, almost disappointed that he wasn’t going to fight it.

Ikutski stroked his beard quizzically. “Tank?”

“There was a tank in here, chasing me, trying to run me down, but…” he looked past the man, “it disappeared when you showed up.”

“Oh? I made the tank disappear, hmm?” A sly smile appeared on the man’s face. “I guess that means you should be ‘tanking’ me, eh?” With that, he started cracking up like a giddy child. The joke wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but the man’s laugh was infectious, and Joker couldn’t help but crack a smile. Once Ikutski had calmed down, he reached into his pocket. “Oh, I almost forgot. I picked this up as I was walking, I think it might be yours.” He took Joker’s phone out and held it out to him.

“Oh, thanks.” Joker took the phone, which seemed entirely undamaged, and put it back in his pocket. He walked past Ikutski for a moment, straining his eyes down the tunnel he came from for any sign of the tank. Nothing. Nothing at all.

“Excuse me, if you don’t mind my asking,” Ikutski drew his attention back. “That persona you were using just now, that wouldn’t happen to be Orpheus, would it?”

“Yeah, it was,” Joker confirmed. The answer made Ikutski’s face light up.

“Fascinating. I didn’t know anyone else could be capable of summoning a Persona manifested by a different person, even someone with your and Mr. Arisato’s unique skillset.” He began wandering down the tunnel, forcing Joker to follow him. “I have to wonder if it’s because you both share that skillset, maybe something about your specific powers create a link between you two. It makes one wonder, how many people in the past have had this power.”

Joker hadn’t thought about that. Arisato having the wild card nine years ago meant that there was a chance he wasn’t the only one. There might’ve even been other people between him and Joker.
“Ikutski, can I ask you a question.”

Ikutski, who had still been talking, stopped abruptly. “Sure, I’m just glad to have someone to talk to out after all these years.”

“Did you help with the development of the evokers?”

“I did!” He replied proudly. “Though, they weren’t quite what I’d call my crowning achieve.”

“What was?”

“Oh…” he stroked his beard again. “We had several lines of research to address the use of personas; suppressants, inducers, the evokers, and several waves of combat-ready, persona-capable automatons.” He leaned down and used a hand to shield his mouth like he was telling a secret. “That last one was my personal favorite.”

Joker stroked his own chin for a moment now, trying to place the new information in the story he had. Then it hit him.

“Mr. Ikutski, can I ask you another question?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Everyone else I’ve met here, they’ve all been dead.” He looked at the man. “Does that mean you too?”

Ikutski’s smile faltered, then returned, now slightly somber. “I’m afraid that’s correct.” He looked up ahead again. “But I think that’s where we’ll have to leave this off. It looks like we’re at your stop.”
Sure enough, the tunnel ended before Joker even realized it was happening. They were back in the halls of weird architecture, and the base of a staircase. “But don’t worry too much, I’m fairly sure we’ll have another chance to talk while you’re here.” Ikutski held out a hand to shake, and Joker took it, for once feeling encouraged by one of his meetings.

“It was good to meet you.”

“You as well.”

With that, Joker started on the staircase. He only got a few steps up when something else occurred to him. “Hey, those persona-bots, what did they lo-” when he turned around, the hallway was empty, and the tunnel was nowhere in sight. “Fair enough,” he said with a sigh and kept on up the stairs.

Chapter Text

Chapter 11

How long had he been here?  It was the question that Joker had been avoiding for a while.  But now that he was on the stairs, there wasn’t much else to think about.  It had simultaneously felt like hours and months; he didn’t like either of those answers.  Time still passed in the Metaverse, which meant the others couldn’t wait for him forever.  But there was no way they were going to leave without him.  How long until they went looking for him again?

Ryuji and Ann would’ve demanded they do it immediately.  Morgana wouldn’t say it out loud, but he’d probably be on their side.  Makoto and Yusuke would trust him for a while, but they’d get worried too, eventually.  If they went back in, he had no way of knowing if the Reaper was still out there, looking for them.  He’d heard the chains in here with him before, but that could mean anything.  Or nothing.  At any rate, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do right now other than keep moving forward.

“Please be alright,” he muttered to himself.

The staircase was oddly empty again this time.  No voices floating in, no scenes appearing off in the distance. He'd been right before, it was worse without Elizabeth.  Well, at least he wasn't entirely alone; he glanced at the evoker.

With a little bit of time, he tried to collect everything he had learned so far.  The Kirijo Group had done something with the shadows, collected them together.  Something went wrong with their experiment and the dark hour was created, along with Tartarus.  Years later, Mitsuru started putting together a team to try and get rid of it.  It was even possible that the Metaverse, Mementos, the Palaces, all of it, came from them as well.  Just like Joker and his team, they’d had persona users working against them as well.  Takaya was one of them, and this guy Jin was another.

But even with the similarities, everything about what they were doing felt so much different.  The Phantom Thieves were dispensing justice, fighting abusive adults and freeing the people they tortured.  But SEES, they were fighting for their lives, and who knew what else.

When he reached the next floor, Joker sat down against a wall for a bit to rest.  He looked at his feet for a few moments, vaguely wondering what he would say to Sojiro if he showed up without his shoes.  The old guy had warmed up to him in the past few months, but there was no telling if he was on his own for a new pair or not.  Maybe Ryuji had some extras he could borrow.  If he ever got out of here, anyway.

“Hi.” The voice came suddenly from right beside him.  Joker flinched and snapped his gaze to Pharos.  The boy simply smiled at him.  “How are you?”

“You really have to stop sneaking up on me.”

“I trust that you’ve learned a bit more since we last spoke?”

“Yeah,” Joker nodded.  “Twelve big shadows in all.  Once you kill them, Tartarus disappears.”

“One would hope,” Pharos replied in a way that clearly meant something.  “But then, the end of the world is a very complicated thing.”  Joker gave him a look but remained silent.  “It’s never one thing or person that causes it.  More often, it comes because many people wish for it.”  He looked at Joker with an ominous expression.  “But… doesn’t that seem like a strange thing to wish for?”

“No one wants that.”  The words came out of Joker’s mouth, in Joker’s voice, and yet somehow, it didn’t really feel like he was the one saying it. 

“Are you certain?”  The more the boy talked, the more Joker became aware of a prickle of dread that spread from the back of his neck, all throughout his body.  “What about those who hope for an end to their suffering, who wish to find peace?”

The words hit Joker harder than he thought they would.  They brought him right back to April.  Right back to what probably started the Phantom Thieves.  His fists clenched and he stood up.  “That’s not peace.”  With that, he started walking.  He didn’t even look back, but something told him Pharos was gone.

The new floor was just the same as the last one, more murals of impossible architecture.  There were still no more shadows yet, making the walk a pretty quiet affair.  Every once in a while, he’d catch a glimpse of Arisato’s group running across a hallway or around a corner.  Every time he saw them, there was a change in the make-up.  By now the forms and color of each SEES member was pretty familiar.  Seeing them was almost comforting.  Minato Arisato, Yukari Takeba, Junpei Iori, Akihiko Sanada, Fuuka Yamagishi, and Mitsuru Kirijo; he even caught sight of the persona-using dog with them.  That made seven members to SEES, not counting Ikutski.

“More than we’ve got,” Joker mused.  But then, given what they were up against, it made sense to have as many people as possible.  All kids his age.  All apparently trying to stop the end of the world.  “The end of the world.”  He kept going back to the “ruin” that Igor talked about.  Up until now, he hadn’t give it much thought; it seemed like everything they kept getting into was just happenstance.  But… were they heading toward something that big too?  He hoped not, but he wasn’t about to dismiss the idea.

“Get out of my way.”  The blunt words pulled Joker out of his thoughts and back into the present.  He looked to the left where they had come from.  The source was a girl in a white, doll-like dress, glaring at him.  She was sitting on a concrete lump, holding a large sketchbook.

He stood there for a moment, not sure what to do.  Was she talking to him?  She was sure looking at him.  But that-

“I can’t see. …Move.”

The second order galvanized Joker into stepping out of her way.  “Uhh… Sorry,” he said sheepishly, moving past the girl’s line of sight.  Once he was out of the way, she resumed drawing, glancing between her paper and… what was she drawing? 

Joker turned around to see what he’d been blocking.  It was a window… or a mirror… or something.  On the wall was a pane of glass from floor to ceiling.  Behind it was a plaza that Joker didn’t recognize.  It was outdoors and sunny.  A duplicate of the Lolita-dressed girl was behind the pane, sitting in the same position, on an identical concrete lump.  Except on the other side of the glass, it was a concrete rim around a patch of flowers.

In the same vein, Joker’s mirrored position was occupied too.  Except behind the glass, he was Junpei.

“Wait a second.” Back in Junpei’s room.  The sketchbook.  The image on the TV.  A girl in white.  Joker looked back to the girl to make sure only to find she was once again looking pointedly at him.

“What do you want?”

“Uh, nothing,” Joker and Junpei said in unison.  Joker stopped there, but Junpei kept going.  “…My bad.”  After taking a few more steps away, he muttered something that Joker couldn’t hear and walked off.

Following suit, the girl put her pencil away, flipped the sketchbook closed, and stood up.  Then she turned toward Joker and, before he could react, walked right through him.  He spun around to find her still going, totally unaffected by passing through him. 

“Okay, so vision, not ghost.”  Joker followed her.  With a moment to think, Joker confirmed that this was definitely the girl in the TV.  She was important to Junpei.  But who was she exactly?  Everything so far had revolved around SEES in some way.  If she was here, it meant she was important.

The girl didn’t end up walking for long.  She turned a corner a few just a few yards, bringing them to an identical area.  Concrete lump, pane of glass, all exactly the same.  She walked back to her spot and promptly sat back down to resume drawing.

Only a few seconds after, Joker saw Junpei walk into frame.  The girl looked up from her drawing and toward him with a nonplussed expression.  “…You again?”

 “Uh, w-well…” Junpei held up his hands in a surrendering gesture as he stumbled over his words.  He recovered after a few excruciating seconds and put on a smile.  “I mean, I’m surprised you remember me?”

“Same here.”  The girl replied bluntly as she turned back to her drawing.

“Well, you kinda stand out in that dress.”

The girl remained silent.  Joker cringed.

Not recognizing the lost cause, Junpei tried again.  “So… what are you drawing?”

“Nothing.  Why?”

While they talked, Joker walked up to the girl and took a look at her sketchbook.  It was still a rough sketch, but he recognized the post.  It was the first picture of Junpei that he’d seen in the sketch book.

“Uhh, no reason… I was just thinking, it must be nice to have something you’re really into.”

Junpei’s words from before came back.  

I was like, ‘Fighting is my duty.’ But hell, it’s all I’m good for.

When he thought about it, it kind of made sense.  When the majority of your time was spent fighting shadows, it was a struggle to keep your life outside of that in sight.  Joker had friends to socialize, Sojiro, and Mona to remind him to do homework and sleep.  More than that, he got to choose when they went into the Metaverse.  The Dark Hour happened whether they wanted it or not.

“…I’d like to see it when you’re done, okay?”  As Junpei walked away, the girl stood up again and started walking.  Joker followed once more.

This time, the walk went longer.  There was no turn, no new window to look into.  Just the girl in front of him, walking at an even pace.

“Chidori.”  She suddenly said to no one.  “That’s my name.  You asked, right Junpei?”

As she said the words, they began to pass sketchbook pages, littering the floor.  They all had drawings on them, varying in completeness.  All of them were of Junpei.

“I’m, almost done with the picture.  I doubt you’ll understand it, but if you want to see it, then you know where to find me.”  As if responding to the words, the images on the picture changed.  Junpei’s image was nowhere to be seen.  Now all the pages had the twisting architecture and impossible geometry of Tartarus.  Despite knowing that, Joker could also see differences between each drawing.  Different shapes and arrangements.  No two looked quite alike.  Between looking at them and making sure he kept up with Chidori, he was surprised when he heard a small splash and felt the liquid quickly seep between his toes and into his pant leg.

Blood. Warm blood.

A shiver went through Joker’s body, giving him goosebumps and making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.  The puddles dotted the path forward now, seeping red into the pages unlucky enough to be dipped in them.  With significantly more care in his steps, Joker continued following Chidori.

“Hey, Junpei… what do you do to make yourself feel alive?”  Chidori asked the air.

“You know, I never really thought of it before.”  In a blinding display, the walls flashed with light and the entire hallway was replaced with the glass panes.  Beyond them, it was like a hallway was running parallel to either side.  It was still Tartarus behind the glass this time, but Chidori wasn’t walking alone.  Past the glass on the right, Joker could see Junpei walking with her.  Unlike his, their hallway was clean.  No blood, no paper.  “To tell ya the truth, there is one thing that makes me feel alive… When I get to play hero.”

The glass on the left was a different story.

If anything, the version of the hallway on that side was even worse than his.  The floor was drenched in blood, the papers were all torn apart, and there were deep gashes cut into the floor.  To make matters worse, Chidori had companions here too.

Those companions were Takaya and Jin.

Dread formed his Joker’s gut as he listened to Junpei play right into Chidori’s hands.  Given what he’d seen, she might’ve already known everything he was telling her.  “Are you the leader?”  Chidori asked.  “Because it sounds like you’re pretty strong.”

“Y-yeah.  I-I guess you could say that.”

“Junpei, you idiot.” Joker couldn’t keep himself from saying it.  Finally, Chidori turned a corner.  Joker followed suit…

…and nearly fell right off.

Just a few feet past the corner, was a pit, yawning, massive, and far too deep to see the bottom of. There was one raised platform in the very middle if the pit.  Atop the pillar was a circular fountain, like the kind you’d see in a mall.  Blood spouted up from the top and into the basin and spilling over the side. That was the only thing that was coming out either.  Electrical cables ran all the way up the pillar and into the water, with arcs of electricity going off every few seconds.  More hung from the ceiling, leading down into the abyss.  None of them were close enough to reach, and even if they were, electrocution didn’t sound fun.

“Behind you, Junpei.” 

The very second he heard Chidori’s voice, Joker’s hands went to the evoker and sword.  He spun around, ready for a fight, but just as he was pulling them out, a hand wrapped around his neck and jerked him off the ground.  Both items flew from his hands, leaving him entirely helpless.

He immediately recognized the figure holding him.  The last picture he’d seen in Junpei’s room.  The tall woman with the long limbs and the goat skull.  The persona.  Chidori’s persona.

Just like in the picture, he could feel the hostility, the anger, the hatred in it.  Every muscle was tense, her grips on both her knife and his neck were like a vice, and he couldn’t tell if she was just breathing heavily or actually growling.

He tried to pry her fingers off his throat, but it was completely useless.  The persona walked forward with him and held him out over the edge of the pit.

“Thank you, Junpei,” the persona said in a distorted version of Chidori’s voice.  “I had fun today.”

With that, she let go, and Joker fell.

Chapter Text

“If you’re not dead, then get up.”

Shinjiro’s voice cut through the haze of unconsciousness like an axe through… something.  Joker’s mind wasn’t clear enough for similes yet.  He opened his eyes slowly and reluctantly.  Everything hurt from his head to his toes.

Shinjiro was standing over him, looking down with a severe expression.  Or maybe it was a neutral one.

Joker groaned and sat up.  “What the hell happened?”

“You met Medea,” Shinjiro replied matter-o-factly.

“Wh-?”  The memories flooded back before he could even ask the question.  “Chidori’s persona.  She was part of Strega.”  The vision of the tall, gangly form, twitching with barely controlled rage, flashed through his mind.

“Yeah.”  The other boy held out a hand to Joker.  He took it and was tugged back to his feet.  “You’re gonna want this.”  He held out the evoker.

“Thanks.”  Joker took it and looked around the area.  It was massive room with electrical cables running along the floor and up the wall.  “Where are we?”  He couldn’t see a hole where he would’ve fallen from, so there was no telling how far it was.

“Underneath Paulownia Mall.”  Shinjiro looked around too.  “This was where my first full moon operation took place.  A big shadow was tangled up in the wires and causing all sorts of weird electrical crap.”  Joker couldn’t quite identify his tone, it sounded almost nostalgic.

Luckily, the MP3 player had stayed attached to him.  Sure enough, it was lit up with a new track.  9/5: The Hermit.

“Junpei… Junpei’s my friend.”  There was a laugh.  “But he was immature, never shut up about girls, didn’t think ahead, he could be the biggest idiot.  Chidori played him like it was nothing; he could barely wait to run his mouth just to show off.  We were lucky she didn’t bring Takaya and Jin with her or else…”  there was a long sigh.  “We beat the shadow and came back to find Junpei tied up with Chidori holding him hostage.  She tried to use her persona, but Junpei got the evoker out of her hand before she could.  Honestly, after what we saw what it was capable of, I’m glad she didn’t get the chance.” Arisato paused for a moment.  “Everyone was pissed at him, but no one could deny it worked out for the best.  We’d captured a member of Strega, and Junpei… he started changing.”

Joker thought back to the sketchbook in Junpei’s room, all the pictures Chidori had drawn of him.  He didn’t need to be Yusuke to know that drawing picture of someone meant something.  Drawing that many mean a lot.  As the player went silent once more, he returned his attention to Shinjiro.  “You haven’t seen a sword around too, have you?”

He shook his head.  “Just the evoker.” 

“Great.  How about a pair of shoes?”  The blood had dried on his foot and made his pant leg crusty.  Shinjiro just shrugged.  Figured.  “You weren’t with SEES when Arisato joined, right?”

The expression on his face soured just a little at the question.  “No, I wasn’t.  I’d left two years prior.”

“Why?”

Shinjiro didn’t answer, just regarded him coldly.

“Okay,” Joker held up his hands in surrender. “Then why did you come back?”

The boy’s expression softened, turning remorseful.  “Because Aki didn’t give me a choice.”  He motioned for Joker to follow him.  On the far wall of the room, there was an exit.

“I’m don’t buy that” Joker pressed, “you told him to kick rocks before.  What changed?”

The other boy stopped and looked back with a glare.  It was a long, quiet moment; despite the aching body, Joker kept light on his feet, wondering if he’d just picked a fight.  “SEES picked up a kid.”  He answered abruptly and kept walking.  “Ken Amada.”  Tartarus had mentioned a kid named Ken, but it had only been once.  “I left because Castor went out of control and…” Shinji hesitated a moment, then took a deep breath and sighed.  “…and killed his mom.”

Joker felt his skin prickle and his stomach turn.

…any idiot who picks up a gun without knowing how to use it…

“Aki and Mitsuru tried to object, but Ikutski didn’t give a shit.  Once Aki told me, there was no other option.”

As they entered back into Tartarus, they were greeted by new scenery.  The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all of it looked like solid gold.  Ornate pillars stood to either side of them and filigree was etched into the floors.  The decadent architecture was the kind of thing Mona would be drooling at…

“Please be okay,” Joker whispered to himself for the second time since he’d gotten here.

“Got something to say?”  Shinjiro called back.

“I asked where we were going,” Joker lied.

Before Shinji could answer, they heard the telltale gurgle of shadows nearby.  With Orpheus to protect him, Joker wasn’t feeling entirely confident.  Apparently, Shinjiro understood that, because a full-sized battle axe materialized in his hand.  “I’ll keep them off your back, just make sure your evoker’s ready.”

With that, the fighting began once more.  The shadows here were different.  They felt more advanced, the concepts were more concrete.  Instead of birds holding lanterns and books trapped in cages, they were religious idols, lounging royalty, knights and samurais.

They were also much stronger; Orpheus was barely keeping up with them and Joker was forced to keep out of the way.  Shinji and Castor, on the other hand, cleaved through them like it was nothing.  With every skirmish, Joker could see the contrast between user and persona.  Shinji was brutally efficient; each swing of his axe meant a dead shadow.  But Castor was… wild; he charged erratically, crushed shadows under his single hoof.  It wasn’t hard to see how he might’ve gone out of control.

Honestly, the thought of a persona not obeying its user hadn’t occurred to him.  Ever since he met Arsene, they’d been on the same page.  Even if some of his personas had to be negotiated with, once they were on his side, that was it.  But then, he also didn’t need a physical item to summon his personas.  The Kirijo group had made them, maybe the manmade aspect wasn’t perfect.  Maybe to control your persona perfectly, you needed to do it on your own.

“I heard you talking with Strega before,” Joker remarked when there was finally a lull in the fights.

“Don’t get the wrong idea.”  Shinji gave a quick heave and rested the axe on his shoulder.  “I wasn’t their pal.”

“I got that part,” Joker assured him.  “But they were clearly going after SEES.  Why work with them at all?”

Shinji held up two fingers.  “Two reasons.  The first, I didn’t exactly care at the time.  It wasn’t my business who did what to who.  The second, they hooked me up with suppressants.”

Suppressants, for a persona.  Ikutski had mentioned them.  “You wanted to forget.”

When Shinji didn’t respond, Joker turned back to see him staring at Castor.  He had a vice grip on his axe, and his face was twisted into an ugly snarl.  His eyes were a mix of hatred, regret, and anguish.  When Shinji noticed Joker staring, his face quickly returned to its stony mask and Castor faded away.  “Come on.”

“But why did they need them?”  Joker asked.  “You weren’t using your persona.  But they had to be, right?  They were in the dark hour, it wasn’t like they just didn’t deal with shadows, right?”

“I wondered that for a while too.  Never cared enough to ask but… I didn’t need to.”

As if on cue, they turned a corner to find a glass wall, just like the one he’d seen Chidori in.  Sure enough, she was in this one too.  She sat in a bed in a hospital room; the scene was completely devoid color.  She switched regularly between staring blankly at the wall in front of her or drawing in her sketchbook.  Black silhouettes rushed in and out of the scene like they were on fast-forward.

“Was this where you guys put her after you caught her?”  Joker asked, watching the silhouettes come and go.

“Yeah.”  Shinji joined him by the glass.  “She was clearly unstable, so Aki and Mitsuru stuck her in a hospital while they tried to interrogate her.”  He chuckled and point at the glass.  “That’s them, the ones that aren’t running around as much, at the end and the far side of the bed.”

Joker had to take his word for it on who they were, but there are two figures that seemed to be more consistently in the room than the others.

“The others couldn’t tell, but I knew every time they were coming back from the hospital.  Aki would look exhausted, and Mitsuru would look pissed as hell.”  Joker looked over and saw the slightest hint of a smirk on Shinji’s face.

“The interrogation didn’t go well?”

He shook his head.  “They weren’t exactly good at it.  I don’t think they ever actually got anything out of her.”  He paused for a moment, like he was waiting for something.  “Iori on the other hand…” he directed Joker back to the hospital room just as the only other defined figure to enter the scene.  The moment Junpei arrived in, the grayscale they’d been looking at shifted to warm tones and sunshine.  He wasn’t sped up like the others, leading the shadowy humanoids to pass right through him a few times before he sat down in the chair next to the bed.  They couldn’t hear anything, it was clear by Chidori’s face that his presence relaxed her.  Scenes started to fade into one another.  Sometimes, Junpei came and talked, sometimes he brought gifts; sometimes he was there for just a brief moment, sometimes it seemed like hours.

After the time he’d spent in this place surrounded by cryptic, threatening scenes, this felt good to see.  It was like the glimpses he’d gotten of Arisato’s confidants.  Shinji seemed didn’t seem to be that moved by it, but he was staying where he was.  At least until Junpei entered the scene with a notebook.   “That’s my cue,” Shinji said it more to himself than Joker.  He walked forward as Junpei sat down, passing right through the glass as if it wasn’t there.

“What the…” Joker tried to follow him, but hit solid surface instead.

“…Any luck?”  Shinji asked the pair of silhouettes standing by the bed.  One turned its head and gave him a garbled reply that Joker couldn’t understand.  The other shade added something else, just as unintelligible.

“Ugh…!!”  Chidori suddenly gasped.  Her body tightened, her eyes went wide, and she started to clutch at her neck.

Junpei practically jumped out of his seat.  “Chidori!?  Wh-what’s wrong!?”

The girl couldn’t answer, but with a flash of blue light, the reason why became apparent.  The form of Medea materialized, huddled over the bed, arms outstretched, fingers wrapped tightly around Chidori’s throat.  Joker felt a chill run down his spine.  Going wild was one thing, this… he tried hard not to imagine Arsene trying to do the same thing to him.

Without a word, Shinji ran forward and pulled a bottle out of his coat pocket.  He popped the lid off, dumped a pill into his hand, and forced it into Chidori’s open, gasping mouth.  His hand stayed there until she swallowed and, in just a few moments, Medea faded away.

Chidori gasped and took in gulps of air, chest heaving, hands gingerly touching her neck.  Her body trembled and tears freely fell from her eyes.  Joker let go of a breath that he didn’t know he’d been holding.

“Chidori!”  Junpei leaned in close as Shinji took a few steps away.

“Relax… It happens.”  Junpei and the two shades looked at him; he was stone-faced.  “They’re not like us.  They can’t fully control their Personas.”  He lifted his head and looked directly at Joker.  “That’s why they need to take suppressants… to keep their Persona from killing them…”

One of the shades said something to Shinji.

“You’d be surprised what you can learn on the streets.”  He responded then started to walk back out of the scene.  “I’ll give the doc the right pills.  …The rest is up to you.”  With that, he left and re-entered Tartarus.  He walked right past Joker, motioning for him to follow.  “We’re done here.”

“What the hell was that?”  Joker exclaimed, gesturing wildly at what he’d just seen.

“The answer to your question,” Shinji replied bluntly.

“That’s not what I meant!”  Joker was almost yelling now.  “I need to get back to my friends Orpheus turning on me and putting me in a chokehold isn’t an option!”

“He won’t.”

“How do you know?”  Joker pressed. 

Shinji finally stopped and turned back around.  “Strega’s personas were forced out of them, that’s why they needed the suppressants to control them.  You’ve got Orpheus on loan, but he still came out on his own.”  He started to walk away again.  “Now come on.  We’re not far from the stairs.”

Joker took one last look at the scene, just in time for a shade to run out of the scene, clearly meant to be following Shinji, then he did just that himself.

“Could you have done that the whole time?”

“No,” Shinji called back.  “Not until I was there.”

“Was that Akihiko?”  Joker nudged his head back toward the scene where the shade had disappeared.

“The one that ran after me?  Yeah, that was Aki.”

They were quiet for a while after that.  Seeing someone’s persona try to kill them had thrown him off.  Another thought came to Joker’s mind.  It probably wasn’t relevant, but he thought back to Akihiko’s room.  Shinji knew Akihiko, seemed like more than anyone else on their team.  If anyone was going to know, it was him.  “Who was Miki?”

The question brought the other boy to a dead stop.  He was silent for an uncomfortably long time.  “You really know how to pick the worst questions, you know that?”  He kept walking.  “Miki was Akihiko’s younger sister.  The three of us grew up in an orphanage together.”  He paused for a moment, then sighed.  “It burned down.”

“Oh.”  The kid, standing in the fire, door closing before Joker could get to her; Shinji didn’t have to connect the dots for him.

“After that day, me and Aki made a promise.”  He looked back at Joker.  “But I gave up and he didn’t.  And he never let me live it down.”  Joker wanted to press further, but something else caught his attention.  There was a new viewing window across hall to their left.  It was long, spanning all the way down.  Similar to Chidori, he could see Shinji reflected in it.  He was in the alleyway they’d met in surrounded by coffins.  But that wasn’t what had caught Joker’s attention. 

They were being followed. 

Specifically, Shinji in the reflection was being followed.  A kid, looked like an elementary schooler.  He wasn’t even trying to hide his pursuit, or his intent.  A spear, taller than he was, was in his hands.  He was staring directly at the back of Shinji’s head, eyes full of cold determination.  It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on.  Ken Amada, coming for revenge.

“This is your stop.”  Shinji’s voice took him out of his thoughts.  They’d reached the staircase.

Joker stayed where he was, looking at the back of Shinji’s head, then up the stairs, then back to Ken in the reflection.  “You can come with me.  I’d appreciate having the back up.”

Shinji shook his head, still not looking at him.  “There’s something I need to take care of.  It’s something only I can do.”  The words sounded almost rehearsed, like he’d said them before.

“…Like what?”  Joker persisted.  Leaving aside that he still didn’t have a weapon, he was… worried.  He couldn’t put it into concrete terms, but everything about the air Shinji gave off right now was… bad.  His hunched shoulders, his hands in his pockets, his refusal to turn around; Joker knew so much more about him now, but he still felt entirely closed off to the guy.  He had to know Ken was there, but he didn’t look on guard at all.  Like he was expecting it. 

Like he wanted it.

Only now did Joker notice another detail in the reflection.  He’d been so focused on Shinji and Ken that he hadn’t realized someone else, standing right where he was past the glass.  Akihiko.  Both he and Joker were staring at Shinji.  Akihiko’s pained and worried expression mimicked Joker’s own.

“Listen, don’t worry about me.  Just do what you think is right.”  With that, he put his hands in his pockets and kept on walking. 

Ken followed.

Watching him, Joker didn’t know what to do.  There was something… final in the way he walked away.  He wanted to try to help him; every fiber of his being was screaming at him to go after the guy.  But Tartarus gave him a clear message with that viewing window: Akihiko had already left the scene.  Shinji was on his own.  Whatever was going to happen already had.  With that grim acknowledgement, Joker silently wished him luck, and turned to ascend the stairs.

The gunshot rang out on the first step.

“Shinji!”  Joker spun around and sprinted down the hall, following where he’d gone.  Adrenaline made the aches and fatigue all but vanish. The only thing he felt, the fixation that took up his entire mind, was desperation.  He wasn’t even sure it was his desperation that he was feeling, but it was there, it was real, and he needed to find Shinji now.

The longer he ran, the deeper the pit in his stomach grew.  At some point, he wasn’t sure when, the golden walls of Tartarus were traded for the alleyway where he’d first met the guy.  He should’ve been going slower, keeping an eye out for anything sharp or dangerous to his bare feet.  But just as the thought began to cross his mind, he heard the second shot, and he pushed himself harder instead.

Suddenly he was in a school hallway, like the ones he’d seen when he first got here.  There was a set of double doors down the hall, looking like the entrance to a gym or auditorium.  That had to be his destination.  He rounded the corner into the room...

...and stopped.

The room was well lit, windows on either side letting sunlight in.  Chairs were arranged in rows to either side of an aisle down to a stage at the front.

Two rows of flowers were arranged on the stage, like a memorial.

A picture of Shinji was in the middle.

The adrenaline flooded out and Joker felt lightheaded.  He fell to his hands and knees, heaving breaths in and out, unable to form any kind of coherent thought.

He knew Shinji was dead.  He’d died years ago.  He’d known when he met him all of a few hours ago.  It wasn’t like coming to Tartarus was going to bring him back.  It wasn’t like he’d ever thought that in the first place.  He was an abrasive, avoidant dick who made asking simple questions feel like pulling teeth.

So why did this still hurt so bad?  Why was he still crying?

The sound of footsteps came from behind him, then next to him, then in front of him.  They sounded like they stopped at the memorial.  The MP3 player lit up.  10/4: Strength and Fortune.  He weakly put the headphones on.

“Hey.  I know I’m early but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get here next month.  I wanted to make sure I’d didn’t miss it.”  The voice was deeper, a bit rougher, but Joker recognized Akihiko’s voice.  “Ten years.  Hell of a long time.  Ken graduated, from Gekkoukan.  Everyone made sure to get to the ceremony, hand a kind of SEES reunion.  He sprouted up too” he chuckled,” think he grew half a foot since I was last here.  He’s a damn good fighter,” he laughed more, “it’s amazing how much easier it is to use a spear that’s not three times your size, right?”  After the laughter died down, he kept going.  “Koromaru’s doing great too.  The vet says his body’s still acting like its 5 years old and not 15.  Guess that means we’re not losing him any time soon.”  There was a pause in the words, like he was thinking of what to say next.

“Mitsuru’s been busy making sure we stay funded.  We got a call from the head of the Nanjo group the other day, wanting to meet about it.  Supposedly, it’s no strings attached, but that sounds like bullshit.”  There was a pause.  “I know you don’t give a shit about a lot of that… I’ve been doing alright.  I’m still training all the time, keeping my body ready to go...”  Another pause came, but this one felt different.

“I still miss you, man.”  There was a crack in the voice, followed by quiet weeping.  “Even now, even though I’m fighting for something now, I can’t help thinking about what might’ve changed if I’d been fighting for something back then.  Maybe you’d still be here.”  One final pause.

“I know.  No matter how many times I talk about the what ifs and the maybes, it doesn’t matter.  What’s done is done.  It took me a while to figure it out, but I’ve got it figured out now.”

The footsteps started coming back Joker’s way.

“I’m gonna drop by the ramen shop, grab the usual.  I’ll make sure to order some for you too.”  They stopped for a second, just next to Joker.  "Just in can’t get back here in time, happy birthday, Shinji.”

As the footsteps faded away and the player died once again, Joker stood back up, legs still a bit shaky, but holding steady.  He turned around to find he was back in Tartarus, just in front of the staircase.  He was done here.  There was nothing else to do.  With a new weight in his heart, he slowly climbed the stairs.

Chapter Text

The stairs were quiet again, no words floated through the ether.  He got images, but they were limited to Arisato and his confidants.  Nothing new to the story he’d gotten so far.  That left him with just his thoughts, Shinji’s death, Chidori’s own persona attacking her. 

Shinji said Strega’s personas were volatile because they were forced out of them, they hadn’t come about naturally.  He’d also said Orpheus wouldn’t do the same.  But it was still a borrowed persona.  What if it did happen?  What if the borrowed persona he was using turned on him?  What the hell was he going to do then?  By now, the scenes outside the staircase had all faded, meaning he was left with nothing to distract him.  He prayed the next floor came soon.

But then what?

Suddenly, Joker felt heavy.  Like asking the question was the last support beam of a building snapping before it all came down on him.  He sat down on the stairs, trying to get some sort of rest for his bones.  He was exhausted and everything still ached after falling however far Medea dropped him.  He didn’t have his equipment; he didn’t even have shoes.  He was alone.  He still had no idea how far he was from getting out of here.  From finding his team.  He’d been trying to keep it out of his head, or at the very least, turn it into motivation.  But Tartarus wasn’t letting him go.  And it was getting harder; the shadows were stronger here than they were when he first arrived.  Without Shinjiro to back him up, he didn’t know what he was going to do.

“I need my personas, my weapons,” he looked down at his bare feet and sighed.  “My shoes.”  He still didn’t know what he was going to say to Sojiro.

“You look half dead.” Akihiko’s voice startled him.  It sounded like he was right next to him.  “What are you doing here?”

“Good question,” Joker laughed scornfully, shaking his head.

“When Mom died protecting me, no one would believe the real reason for her death…”  Ken’s voice responded.  “To this day it’s still on file as an unexplained accident.  That’s why I wanted to make it clear.  I thought that’s what she would have wanted… maybe then she’d finally be at peace…”

Ken hadn’t had much to say in this story so far but his words now hit Joker in a funny way.  The kid was trying to prove something that every adult told him wasn’t real, that he was wrong about it.  There may not have been any dead parents involved, but if that didn’t sound like what he and the Phantom Thieves were trying to do, nothing did.

“They said he died by some violent crime, right?”  Ken kept talking and Joker lowered his head.  He was talking about Shinji.  “No one knows the truth.  … Just like with mom.”  The sound of the gunshots played in Joker’s head again.  Sure he’d taken potshots at shadows while fighting through the palaces or mementos, but the sound he’d heard… that was different.

“The dead are never coming back.  You have to accept that…”  Akihiko’s words were harsh, especially to a kid that young.  “…if you still have the will to fight, then come back and stand on your own two feet.”

There was silence for a long time after that.

“Shinjiro, I’ll see it through to the end.”  The words held a conviction that was almost odd hearing from a voice that young.

A tiny impact on his head brought him out of his thoughts.  It was quickly followed by one on his shoulder, then his leg, creating a small, dark spot on his pants.  Joker held his palm out to confirm it.  Rain.

In that same moment, it started to pour.  Rain came down like a monsoon from unseen clouds.  Joker hauled himself back to his feet and took off running up the stairs, nearly slipping as it pelted him.  He splashed in the water that cascaded down the steps.  The astral swirls he usually saw outside the staircase were gone; he couldn’t see anything past the sheets of rain.  There was no cover, no shelter, all he could do was run as fast as he could, yelling obscenities all the while.

He didn’t know how long he ran for, but when he finally hit the top of the stairs, his chest was heaving, his legs were numb and shaking, and his clothing was soaked through.  He toppled forward onto the ground, unable to do anything but gasp for air.  Only now did the rain finally thin out and disappear.

After willing his body to move for long enough, Joker managed to crawl to a wall and sit up.  While he waited for his heart to slow down and his legs to stop throbbing, he squeezed out as much water from his clothes as he could.  It didn’t really matter, he was dripping from head to toe, making puddles on the ornate gold floor.

No team, no Shinji, one borrowed persona, no weapon, no shoes, and now he was soaking wet.  And cold.

Joker shivered as he fought his way back to his feet.  Shujin’s uniforms weren’t exactly the warmest already and Tartarus itself wasn’t what he would call balmy.  He had to be almost done, right?  This place was going to let him back into Mementos, right?  It wouldn’t just bring him here to kill him… right?

Each heavy footfall echoed down the hallways; it was the only noise to speak of here, he didn’t even hear any shadows.  He was constantly rubbing his arms to try and warm up, but it didn’t help.  There was no sign of any phantom SEES members here either.  It really was just him.  Him and the constant throbbing in every part in his body.

He had to take his mind off the pain, he knew that.  But normally, he thought of his friends, coffee at LeBlanc, or anything else in his life.  All things he couldn’t get to.  All things that were out of his reach. 

Even as he fought it, he began to drift in and out of conscious thought.  His footsteps slowed, then stopped.  The hallway seemed endless, his legs felt like lead, and his breathing was labored.  He couldn’t bring himself to take another step…

…Something Tartarus, in its ruthlessness, wouldn’t let slide.

The dead silence was shattered by an explosion from down the hallway.  Joker barely had time to throw himself out of the way before a cannon shell flew by him.  He climbed back to his feet, painfully aware of his surroundings again.  For once, the area he was in wasn’t just a hallway, but a massive, open space, dotted by pillars arranged into rows.  He wasn’t even sure when he’d gotten here, but there wasn’t time to worry about it.  Ahead of him, at the other side of the room, were three shadows, manifesting in the form of tanks. 

The evoker came free of its holster and Joker called out Orpheus’s name.  With a blue flare, the persona materialized, flying toward the shadows.  He cut to the right and ducked behind one of the pillars just in time to miss another cannon shot.

Orpheus strummed his massive harp and a wave of fire flowed forward, washing over the tanks.  Joker’s enthusiasm was short lived as the fire cleared, showing the shadows barely even singed.  They returned with a volley of blasts in Joker direction.  He bolted to the next pillar, running purely on adrenaline.  The shockwave still caught him and he was thrown forward, barely managing to scramble back to his feet.

The next few minutes became what was very obviously a losing battle.  Joker sent Orpheus out time and time again, hoping for something to work.  Wave after wave of fire, bashing against them with his harp, while Joker stayed behind pillars, avoiding cannon fire and slowly losing hope that he had a chance.

He was looking all over the room, thoughts racing, trying to put together some kind of plan.  Orpheus wasn’t strong enough, he just wasn’t.  Joker had no other personas to work with, he didn’t have a sword or a gun or backup.  There was no way around it: he couldn’t fight these things.   If he spent any longer clinging to the idea that he could win, it was going to get him killed.  Instead, he was going to get past them.  There was an exit behind them; from where he was in the room, he might have a chance if he booked it hard.

But then what?

The question came back to haunt him.  Joker had no way of knowing what was past that exit.  For all he knew it was just another long hallway that they could spend all the time they wanted pelting with cannon fire.  He’d get blasted into pieces and that would be that.  But he didn’t have a better option.  At this point it was down to “maybe get killed” and “definitely get killed”.

He summoned Orpheus behind the pillar and looked the persona in the eye.   “We both know we’re not gonna win this if we keep going.  I need a distraction, just long enough to get me out of the room.  Can you help me?”  Orpheus remained silent, holding his gaze.  He took out his harp and played a few soft notes.  Joker felt his body lighten and the aches seep away just a bit.  With everything that had happened, he’d never really taken a moment to see what Orpheus was capable of besides the fire.  “Okay, I’m counting on you.”

With that, Joker and Orpheus parted.  The persona charged the shadows and Joker sprinted for the exit.  Whatever spell Orpheus had used on him had been worth it, this was the best Joker had felt since his run in with Medea.  His feet slapped against the gold tiles as he ran.  A quick look back showed him Orpheus almost frantically moving between the three tanks, blowing fire or bashing them with his harp as quickly as he could.

It wasn’t enough.

One of the tanks rammed Orpheus in the back, and another caught him in this side with a swing of its barrel.  The third took the opening and aimed at Joker.  It hit just a few feet behind him.  The explosion singed his back and the shockwave threw him to the ground.  He tumbled on the floor, finally stopping flat on his back.  His ears were ringing, the adrenaline couldn’t hold back the pain any longer, he couldn’t even find the strength to stand up.  This was it.  There was no cover, he was too far away from the way out of the room, and the tanks had their guns trained on him.  The others were never going to find him.  It wasn’t enough.  He wasn’t enough.  This borrowed persona wasn’t enough…

…borrowed…

The word had been going through his head a lot lately.  Orpheus wasn’t his persona; he barely even knew what it could do.  It was borrowed power and borrowed power wasn’t enough. 

But he was a thief.

A Phantom Thief.

What kind of Phantom Thief borrowed things?

The realization echoed in his brain, his mind, down to his very soul.  And a familiar voice from his soul echoed back.

“The man who nearly stole a soul right out of Hades’s lap?  He’ll fit right in.”

Joker’s body began to move, standing up entirely on its own.  Where it’d found the energy to do that, he had no idea.  He couldn’t even feel his feet on the floor anymore.  Everything was entirely numb.  Except his face.

His face, on which he was suddenly aware of something.  A mask.

A dozen or more emotions swirled inside of him as he reached up to grab hold of the mask.  Terror, excitement, wonder, hope, and lust for retribution.  He’d played by Tartarus’s rules plenty.  It was time to start doing things his way.

“Sorry Arisato, but he’s coming with me.”  Joker dug his fingers in where leather fused with skin.  The skin around his eyes burned as he pulled harder and harder.  His breathing got quicker, a vicious grin broke out on his face.  “Welcome to the Phantom Thieves, Orpheus…” there was an excruciating, exhilarating flash of pain and the sound of tearing flesh, “PICARO!”

And then the mask was off.

 “I am thou,

thou art I.

In the sea of thy soul,

I AM REBORN.”

The final line echoed throughout the whole of Tartarus, never fading, never losing strength, seeming to coat every last inch in its gravity.  A pyre of blue flame erupted around and engulfed Joker.  The chill on his skin, the ache in his bones, the weight of his body, and, most importantly, the feeling of Tartarus’s floor on his bare feet, all disappeared.

Whether sensing the danger or simply acting on unknowable instinct, all three tank shadows fired into the inferno.  In response, a new persona raged forth from the blaze, trails of fire streaming from it as it flew to meet them.  Gone were the pale blue and white that had coated Orpheus before, replaced with deep red and black.  A small set of wings and horns now adorned the top of the harp, also colored a rich crimson.  The scarf around his neck had the checkered patterns of Shujin Academy’s uniform, with a matching patch on his chest.  Swinging the harp, Orpheus Picaro knocked aside one of the cannon shells, entirely ignoring the other two as they flew past.  The shock wave of the rounds’ flight parted the fires behind instantly, only to fly through and reveal empty space where Joker had once stood. 

Above the area, among the floating, abstract structures, a figure darted from point to point, surveying the scene below.  His steps found easy purchase, even on the uneven surfaces on the structures.  In one red-gloved hand was the evoker and in the other, a short sword, fashioned after a Greek soldier’s.

Below, Orpheus closed the distance to the middle tank, took his harp in both hands, and brought it down, first right onto and then right through the shadow.  It disintegrated into a cloud of dark smoke.  The figure above smirked.  Two left.

The arm holding the evoker raised up, but rather than at his own head, he aimed it downward toward the shadows.  After wall, Tartarus or not, this was still the metaverse, and this still looked like a gun.  He pulled the trigger three times and the evoker fired with each.  Three bullets, streaming blue light behind them like a comet’s tail flew down and drilled into another of the tanks.  The evoker went back into the holster, and a he took the short sword in both hands.  Joker stood up and made sure he was in the right spot, then jumped off the structure he was on.  Gladius pointed downward, rocketed toward the ground, landing right atop the shadow, driving the blade deep into the metal plating.

With another puff of black smoke, the second tank was down.

Joker and Orpheus both turned to face the final tank.  The persona floated across the ground to stand behind its user.  Joker lifted his hand a pointed a single finger at the tank.  “Take it down!”  Orpheus’s harp came out from behind him once more and, in a move more akin to a rock star on a guitar than a poet on a harp, his fingers flew across the strings.  Twin waves of fire rose up on either side of the shadow and crashed together, engulfing it entirely.  When the flames finally cleared, all that was left was a scorch mark on the ground.

With a smirk on his face and spun on his heels and sauntered away, smugly readjusted his gloves.  “The show’s over.”

At the exit, where the shadows once stood guard, Pharos waited patiently to meet him.