Persona: A Less-Than Cinematic Tale (Starring Hikari of PQ2)

All Hikari wanted to do, when she got back to her room, was sleep. She'd just spent an afternoon wandering through a world filled with monsters, encountered a ghost and a broken robot, and awoken to powers she'd never realized could exist. An hourglass had tried to set a cinema on fire, only to be pulverized and melt into a vanishing black goo. To say she was tired would be an understatement the likes of which Kusoka had never seen before.

Still... she couldn't just collapse. Not yet. As much as she was weighed down by the newfound presence of Gullveig, it also pulled her forward.

She was curious. And besides, surfing the internet from her phone wasn't exactly energy-intensive.

The first thing she did was look for robot parts. As expected, she found nothing that could potentially correspond to parts on the robot that had been thrown into the wall. It was generally agreed upon that robots that advanced simply didn't exist.

It was sort of confusing, but then, Hikari supposed that it had, according to Shinjiro, been a dream world. Of course things would pop up that probably didn't exist elsewhere. Like that hourglass. She doubted she'd see something like that anywhere else.

...Actually, if anything, the design of that robot reminded her more of the sci-fi film she'd written. Not that she really remembered how she'd filmed it... and this robot still looked different from the one that was in that movie.

...It was probably just a coincidence.

Her avenue of robotics research exhausted for now, Hikari wondered if maybe it would be better to look up other things. For example, if Shinjiro Aragaki had ever been a real person, there was probably at least some online evidence of such.

...One way to find out.

Fortunately, her cursory scan over her apparent new friend had revealed the very necessary information of how his name was written, so she probably didn't have to worry too much about looking up the wrong person. Maybe.

...Just to be safe, she refined the terms of her internet search a little.

---

...And then she fell asleep while the page was loading, and her phone had died by the time she woke up. So now she wasn't going to have access to her phone today.

Still, Hikari wasn't about to let that get to her. It was the first day of classes, and she was genuinely excited. All she had to do was make it through the first part of the morning.

...Presumably, it would be better to actually do something until that point. Maybe she'd...


[ ] Finally get around to meeting other people around the dorms.

[ ] Visit Cafe Chagall with another student.
-[ ] Shiyuri Kosono.

[ ] Finally get around to giving the campus a proper exploration.

Hikari exited her room, leaving her phone behind to charge. Hopefully, she wouldn't need it for anything that day, there probably wouldn't be time to go back for it later. Other people were starting to wake up, to open their doors, to leave in a hunt for a breakfast that hadn't just been shoved in the microwave and told to become something vaguely nutritious.

Some of these people greeted others in the halls, friends that had been made over the past few days. Hikari... didn't have anyone like that, at least outside of a mysterious place under the school itself.

...Maybe it was time to fix that.

Just across the hall, the door to the stairwell opened, and a boy with messy orange hair stumbled out of it, adjusting and readjusting his checkered scarf so that it wouldn't get caught in the door behind him. The way he was dressed was more suited for winter than the middle of spring, complete with a pair of dark gloves.

The boy blinked at Hikari. "Sorry, was- was I in your way?"

She shook her head. "N-no, it's fine." She was getting used to the sounds of people climbing up and down the stairs just across the hallway from her. It could be loud, sometimes, but no more so than the person in the room next door, who seemed to like watching livestreams on full volume at three in the morning.

"O-oh, good. Well, it's nice to meet you. I'm Tsukane Akabori." Listening to him speak, his voice sounded sort of familiar.

"...I'm... Hikari. It's... nice to meet you, too." Those last words came out in a rush, and at a higher pitch than she'd been meaning to. "...S-sorry, it's just..."

"You don't get out much, either?" Tsukane suggested. She quickly nodded, glad she didn't have to say anything about it herself. "I guess that makes two of us. Or..." He glanced at the stairwell door. "Maybe three?"

There was a grumble, and a black-haired boy pushed his way past the two of them without stopping to greet them. "...Guess not. Sorry about my roommate, I think he got up on the wrong side of the bed... or he's just always like that..."

"That's your roommate?" Hikari blinked after the figure continuing to push his way through the crowd. Seeing such different personalities as that... she was glad she'd made the decision to live on her own.

"Kazamu Kota. I think his family used to be rich or something, before any of us were born, but... things happened. I'm... not actually sure what, it feels wrong to just look it up..."

Hikari would have offered to look it up for him, but she didn't have access to her phone at the moment. "Do you... not get along with him?"

Tsukane shook his head. "I'm not sure why I'd have to, really... I mean, we don't share any classes, and I've lived with..." He yawned. "...Lived with worse..." It looked like he was still half asleep.


[ ] "Are you still... feeling tired?"

[ ] "So, um... what classes do you have?"

[ ] "..."