[ ONE ] Arrival

[bufus]

Who; Mitsuru + You
What;Arrival and wandering around the city+narrow escape from tonberries
Where;The residential buildings, market, the cemetery
When; 23rd and throughout the week
Warnings; Will update if any come up.


A. 23rd Residential Buildings

The young woman hasn't had a chance yet to replace her school uniform. There's a slight bit of awkwardness in her mannerisms about that, made most apparent by the way she seems to keep her arms wrapped around herself. Almost as if she thinks she can disappear into herself by doing that. Of course nothing is quite that simple. In the back of her mind she keeps telling herself that there's no need for awkwardness. After all, back home on a Saturday juts like this she'd be traveling through a sea of other students in their uniforms. This isn't home though and she can't help but feel like the uniform just makes her stand out.

There's not too much she can do about that particular fact at the moment though and her mind wanders quickly to the vastness of the situation at hand. Nothing about this place is similar to anything she's ever seen before. She holds the red key as she looks up at the buildings trimmed with their different colors.

"Green, Blue, Gray and," she looks down at hers, "Red. What does it mean? Why are we being categorized like this?"

B. 24th Market District

The market was like absolutely nothing Mitsuru had ever seen before and there was no denying that it was overwhelming. There were things Mitsuru needed though and so she'd made a list and headed out. The list was something she was clinging to as she walked through the open-air market with an icy expression that revealed nothing of her inner thoughts about the place. At least she was quite good at hiding her emotions, which hopefully meant that she wouldn't need to worry about embarrassing herself too much here.

In order to further avoid the potential for embarrassment she also seemed to be doing her best to avoid people in general. All of her attention seemed focused on her list and the various stalls and buildings. Nothing about this place seemed to make sense and she would even go so far as to say it looked like nobody actually planned the layout. Honestly, that in itself was a little frustrating. Frankly, it was just poor design. That wasn't something she needed to get distracted by though. She needed to be focusing on the list and trying to get out of here as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, the ever important list slipped from her hand and went flying off away from her.

"Come back here right now," she commanded. Because certainly commanding a piece of paper would work.

C. 24th Just Outside the Cemetery just as it's getting dark

Artemisia had noticed something just as the sun was starting to set. From the brief whisper that came into her mind she couldn't quite figure out what she was sensing. The most logical thing to do here would be to contact Shinjiro and have some sort of backup before she attempted anything. However, she wasn't really thrilled with the idea of getting Shinjiro involved in something dangerous immediately after their mutual arrival here. It was selfish of her, deep down she truly did know that, but everyone could be selfish sometimes. She justified going forward alone as something she needed to do. She'd been the one to sense it and it would make more sense for her to put herself in danger than to let someone else do it for her.

Wasn't it amazing how someone could justify something in their own head?

It was easy enough to locate the hooded figure as it rounded a corner. All she could catch a glimpse of at the moment was it's heavy brown robe from the back. From a distance it looked to be a fairly decent size, perhaps around four feet in height? She couldn't quite tell, which only compelled her to try to get closer to it. She continued after it, using Artemisia to keep track of it every time it sped up around a corner. Eventually it stopped attempting to flee just outside what appeared to be a cemetery. It wasn't somewhere she'd been yet, though it wasn't as though she was too familiar with anything here as of yet.

When the creature turned around she steeled itself against it's hollow eyes. It reminded her considerably of a shadow and yet she knew that wasn't what it was. A terror began to prick at the back of her mind and instinctively she reached for the Evoker on her belt. She brought the gun to her head and pressed (making quite a sight for anyone to stumble upon).

"I command thee," she shouted with an authoritarian voice. With an explosion the Persona appeared hovering slightly above her.The creature began to shuffle closer to her, closing the gap to where it was almost close enough to touch. With a flourish of her own rapier she pointed Artemesia forward to attack as she quickly maneuvered backwards. A flurry of ice like daggers formed in from of Persona and then cascaded into the green skinned creature in front of her. It stumbled back allowing for more distance between the two of them. The terror that had only been prickling at her mind had started to push down the closer it got.

To make matters worse she was fairly certain she was sensing another somewhere nearby. This was not a battle that she should be taking, though a part of her did want to stay to finish it off. She stole a glance back and noticed that it was slowly getting back up on it's feet and heading her way. She needed to make a choice. Flee or stay.

In the end she chose something in between. Her goal now was to gather intel. Unfortunately, her Persona was a bit more geared towards combat than support, which meant her scanning took longer than Yamagishi would have. This ended up leaving her slightly vulnerable to the growing sense of dread and anguish that the creature seemed to dredge up the closer it got. Perhaps flee would have been the better choice.

Comments

[monochromatically]

“Thanks. It was really helpful, so I hope you get to too!” He chirped, thinking that was a good thing to hope for her. Especially if she felt awkward and unsure of how to talk to other people, because you kind of needed to in this world to learn important stuff or get things. “I even got a job carrying letters and stuff to people, so that helped too.” Because he actually had to talk to the people, he delivered things to sometimes.

… The old ladies who thought he was adorable were still awkward, though. He was sure one of these days they were actually gonna pinch his cheek.

Mono tilted his head. It wasn’t hard to tell that she seemed pretty sad about her friends too… “I hope you get to find your friends again too.” He responded with a serious nod. If he was going to find Six someday… Maybe Mitsuru could find her friends too.

The child listened carefully, nodding when it seemed important to confirm that she was right. “Ohhh…” He finally spoke, nodding thoughtfully as he adjusted his hat. “That sounds a lot like the same thing. I guess I get what you mean, then!” If the Fall could mean an end to the world, and the calamity was what they called this world being destroyed? Then that seemed pretty similar, just with different words. “Kinda sucks that you don’t know much about it, like we don’t know stuff about what happened here, either. There’s a lot of not knowing stuff in this place.” He added with a small frown, there were too many questions in this world and not enough adults that knew answers.

“I guess we just gotta hope we’re good teachers and that they’ll learn quick. Especially with all the bad stuff that happens around here.” He said thoughtfully, even if they only learned by example and got brave slowly…

[bufus]

"Thank you." It was a bit embarrassing to be receiving encouragement like this from someone who would most certainly be considered an underclassman. She should certainly be the one offering him encouragement, not the other way around. "That's quite impressive that you were able to find employment here." Though she couldn't help but wonder how necessary that was. Did they not have protocols in place to take care of someone as young as him?

"I've found him here, which means I'll just have to make the best of this situation." Because there was no chance of her finding him back in her own world. It was hard to face that fact, but it was also oddly nice to be given the chance to see him again. After all, there were quite a lot of things left unsaid between all the original members of her little group.

"Unfortunately, the only person that did know the details made a cowardly exit to escape consequences for his actions." Which was completely unfair. That man was certainly at the top of a sadly growing list of people who deserved to pay for the pain they'd caused. "It's unfortunate the situation is somewhat similar here with the lack of knowledge." But she felt as though it wasn't entirely surprising.

"What is the worst of these bad things that have happened?"

[monochromatically]

“Yeah? My boss, Tommy, he even got a promotion last month! All just doing stuff I’m used to doing, anyway. So even if I’m mostly good at running around and knowing ways to avoid crows, I guess I found a way to make that useful here.” He was pretty proud of himself, honestly. The fact that it was only very recently that the Orphanage appeared and so children were mostly in charge of managing themselves, had never really struck him as odd since that was just… pretty normal in his world now.

“There’s lots of other stuff people can find to do, though. I know a lady who owns a flower shop, and a friend who’s a tailor, and someone who owns the hunter lodge and runs a restaurant out of it. Oh! I guess there’s an investigation place too. I know a couple people that work at it too. I don’t go there much, though.” Because there was a tall weird guy who worked there and it reminded him of the bad person in his world… Still, he moved on quickly. “So I bet you could find something too, if you wanna.”

Mono perked up to hear that. Wasn’t that kind of good news then? “That’s great! I hope you guys get to talk a lot and do stuff while you’re both here.” And… It made the boy wonder if it was possible his friend Six might appear too… That would be pretty great, and if Mitsuru had been separated from her friend, but he was here too now? Stranger things happened, it seemed.

“Oh… That’s not fair at all. No one is around to really deal with stuff that happened in my world either, so I know that’s kinda frustrating.” He responded with a serious frown. And it was part of why this world was pretty frustrating, too. “The monsters are pretty bad sometimes, like the bigger ones that appear. Like there was a demon bear before I got here, and these big ol crab men when I did get here! And a monster plant…”

He hummed a little, considering what might be the worst. Oddly enough, the child didn’t think the monsters were the worst. “Then there were the rains that were made of crystals that held people’s memories. Those really sucked, and I hated them the most. Got caught in it while I was running messages and saw a bunch of people’s memories I shouldnt’a seen and it made me really mad since I couldn’t help my friends since that stuff already happened to them.”

[bufus]

"That's very resourceful of you." The praise wasn't empty either, she definitely meant it. "Is your boss also someone from another....world?" That was still quite a strange concept to her, that there were just completely different worlds out there. "Did he create the business?" Was that something she should really be interested in here? Probably not, but she couldn't help it.

"That's all rather interesting. How does money work in this place precisely? Are there regulations involved in setting up a business?" Surely there had to be something of that nature, otherwise how would it be regulated? "I'll certainly have to look into investigating all of these locations." And she most definitely would.

She shifted from one foot to the other a bit awkwardly. "Thank you. So do I." She supposed, even if much of what they had to discuss weren't exactly happy topics. Still, it definitely was impossible to deny that it was nice that he was here.

"I'm sorry that's relatable to you." A part of her wanted to comment on the fact that life often wasn't fair, but she didn't want to bring him down anymore than he might have been. She nodded without any expression on her face as he explained some of the things that had appeared. "I see. That seems like something of a variety of creatures." They sounded a bit similar to the various forms that the big shadows at taken. A small frown slipped onto her face as he described the crystals.

"Crystals that hold memories that anyone could see? I can see why you'd hate that the most." She would too. "That's only happened once though?" Hopefully it wasn't something that would happen again. While she'd gotten a bit better about sharing information, she still wasn't too keen on the idea of people seeing into her past.

[monochromatically]

“Yeah, he’s from a world totally different from this one or mine!” Mono responded with a nod to confirm her question. “He made the business himself, and he lets a lot of us kids that can’t make money easy to get stuff we need ourselves. He takes care of the big heavy stuff or delivering stuff that’s needed even quicker than I can carry stuff.” Since Tommy was super fast, as Mono liked to put it. That said, her last questions were things he wasn’t sure how to answer. “I dunno what you mean, exactly? You need money to buy stuff around the city like food and clothes and other things. And I kinda don’t know what you gotta do to start a business, only that people’ve done it. One of them might, or maybe that Raimon guy that runs that funny shop might be able to tell you better than I could?”

Mono shrugged a little. It was kind of sad that they both had to deal with things like that… But she didn’t need to apologize. It wasn’t like she could do anything about it in his world. The kid moved on rather quickly to focus on this world for the time being. “Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of different stuff. Like the usual stuff too, there’s different stuff in the sewers too, so they say you gotta be careful if you go down there.”

He shook his head slightly, at least seeming relieved to confirm the situation with the crystals. “Yeah, it’s only happened the once? I hope it was just a random weird thing, and that it doesn’t happen again. I dunno why it happened, either. I either didn’t hear or no one figured out how it happened.”

[bufus]

"I see. Well, that's quite impressive," or at least it sounded as though it might be something at least slightly impressive. At the very least it was interesting to know people from other worlds had put so much effort into this one. "Thank you for answering my questions, I apologize if I've been too inquisitive. I'll look into inquiring with this Raimon." Another thing to look into, though it seemed best if she just let her questions die there. It was obvious that he wasn't completely certain how to answer these particular questions and they weren't that important.

"I'll keep that in mind, thank you for the warning." It seemed a bit disgraceful to her that the sewers were allowed to remain in a state of being unsafe, but there didn't seem to be a particular point in calling attention to that anymore than she already had.

"That's concerning that no reasoning was found behind it." Though...fitting for the rest of her life. Her expression dropped for a moment at the thought and she had to remind herself to not think on that. "Thank you again for your assistance and for answering my questions." She dipped her head in a quick bow. "I'm certain we both have other things to attend to, though."

[monochromatically]

Mono was glad that he could have been helpful at all, even if he didn’t know everything. At least he was pretty sure the other people he mentioned would be able to give her the rest of the answers that he couldn’t! But she was right. They both had stuff to get back to. He had letters to deliver, after all, and he had probably lost track of time with this little break. He was sure no one would mind too much, but it was best to be on the safe side. “Yeah, I gotta get back to delivering stuff to people. But I’m glad I could help!”

He tipped his little postman hat, like he’d seen some adults do before, and waved. “I’ll see you around! Careful not to let the wind take your list again!” And with that, the boy was hurrying off.