Shattered Justice (A Persona Quest)

One thing you've figured out, in your time as a Persona User, is that if a given strategy works, you really have no reason to abandon it. Another Frost Link cuts into the FOE, and the next few attacks after yours manage to trigger its remaining power.

"I'll never get used to how that works..." Yukari-san sighs. You remind yourself that she hasn't seen Links before tonight, and hasn't had much chance to internalize their existence yet.

"I wouldn't say never just yet," Fuuka-san points it out for you. "Ken-kun only just learned how to use them!"

Well. Technically speaking, you learned how to use them earlier 'this month,' at about the same time as your Persona changed. But this isn't the time for semantics, and you aren't even sure how that happened, really, any more than you know why Psi first appeared as part of your skillset. Or how Nemi could ever have had that power and you didn't.

There's really a lot about your abilities that you don't know, if you let yourself think about it too much. You think you'd rather not think about it too much.

No, what you're focused on is how quickly you can place new Links on this opponent. You've never had the chance to experiment with this before- all the Shadows you'd tried it on died before the end of the first Link!

The answer? Probably more than you would have been able to if the FOE wasn't weak to ice. That's about as conclusive as you can get when there's just so many of you.

You're all glad to see it eventually fall. And not just because it removes the massive disorientation that Hanamura-san had to deal with ever since it shot him.

---

In the next room, you all encounter a table with several steaming cups of tea on top.

"...Huh." Narukami-san inspects them decently closely. "...Tea party, anyone?"

Mitsuru-san seems skeptical. "Should we really be consuming anything that we find here?" You wonder how much she's thinking back to the shrinking potion.

"Well, it smells normal."

"Let me test it," Aigis-san volunteers, and then sips at one of the cups before anyone can tell her not to. "...It appears to be a perfectly normal cup of green tea. Around this table, there seem to be several other kinds of tea."

"...Well, that's all I needed to hear." Makoto-san takes a seat at the table before even Narukami-san can. Like peas in a pod, those two are.

Admittedly, you do still have your doubts about the tea, but if Aigis-san says it's safe... maybe you could take a sip?


[ ] Join in the tea party.

[ ] ...You aren't particularly thirsty right now.

You aren't sure how many kinds of tea are at the table. You don't even know how to identify tea to begin with. The closest you've ever come to it is your one experiment with coffee, which ended with you no longer allowed to touch the machine.

Still, it seems to be good to drink, and after the fight earlier, you think it'd be nice to relax for a bit. So you pick a chair at random, as well as the cup in front of it.

It tastes... all right, you think. Whatever it is, you don't think it'd ever become your drink of choice, but it's a perfectly fine drink to match the atmosphere of all of the pink around you.
By which we mean that there's probably been more sugar added to it than's strictly recommended.
"...We should have something to eat, too," Rei decides, before producing a mountain of donuts from out of nowhere. "Who wants donuts?"

You glance at her. "What kind do you have?"

"Well, there's plain, chocolate, cinnamon, green tea, miso, turkey, salmon, pumpkin, and cheese!" Some of those flavors make more sense than others. You can identify some of them from a distance- the cheese ones seem to have melted cheddar on top of them. Which you're pretty sure isn't how cheese pastries usually work, but apparently that's what she has.
Honestly, though, if there's another flavor you want, you could ask her, and you'd probably get it.
"Um... I'll take a plain one." You're admittedly tempted by the cinnamon, but all things considered, it might be better to play it safe here.

Rei blinks at you. "You know, you're sort of strange, Ken-chan."

"You're strange yourself, Rei-san." Case in point, she's just bitten into a cheddar donut. She seems to enjoy the flavor, but with how much she clearly loves food of all stripes, that's really not saying much. Still, she's given you the donut you've asked for, so you suppose that you really can't complain.

"Me? Strange? What do you mean?" She sounds genuinely curious, and you realize that you don't really have an answer for her.

Fortunately, Shinjiro-san's there to save you. "Well, you do eat just about anything. That sort of stuff's... probably an acquired taste." You don't have to look at him to know that he's staring directly at the fish-flavored donut that's found its way into Morgana's paws. "...Well. For regular people."

"You think Rei isn't ordinary?" Zen asks.

"Don't think it's possible she could be, with how long you've been here." And that's... a really good point. Zen and Rei have been here for so long, they don't even remember how long it's been. And it's enough to make you worry about being stuck here yourself. "I wouldn't exactly call you a normal person either, you know."
Yeah, but that one has a reason for it.
Zen glances down at his cup of tea, and the donut that Rei shoved into his hands. "I am still not sure what you mean by a 'normal person' to begin with. None of you are..." He trails off, as though searching for the right word.

"I guess a normal person would be someone without powers," Makoto-san says. "But I don't think any of them could end up here. I mean... we shouldn't have ended up here. ...Most of us. I might've still..." Right. He's the one that can normally access the Velvet Room.



[ ] Say it's a good thing that you all ended up here.
-[ ] Why?

[ ] ...This is probably as good a time as any to ask how Narukami-san's group got here- if another Velvet Room fell on the one that's already there, you think you'd notice!

[ ] Wonder what it'd be like if Makoto-san ended up here on his own.

"Actually, speaking of... us being here..." Is there a better way to put it? There has to be, right? "Narukami-san, how did you all get here?" It can't have been the same way you all did. Otherwise, there'd either be two Velvet Rooms, or the one that's currently there would be a crater.

"I'm not sure there's much to say," He tells you. "We were at our school Culture Festival. Then Margaret showed up and asked me to visit her fortunetelling booth. And it turned out to be the Velvet Room here."
Honestly, that's a lot more subtle than I expected.
"...I can't decide if that's stranger than what happened with us," Makoto-san says. "There was a bell, everyone ended up in my Velvet Room, and then..." He mimes a dramatic airplane- or, in this case, elevator- crash. You can almost hear sound effects. It's weird.

"His Velvet Room's an elevator," You add, though you aren't sure why you feel the need to add it. Maybe it's because of something Lavenza told you once. Most of your knowledge about the Velvet Room comes from her.

"So it's like if the limo crashed." Narukami-san nods, going along with everything you say.

Satonaka-san blinks. "Limo? What limo?"

"The Velvet Room." None of his friends seem to understand what that means. He doesn't appear to be in any hurry to clarify.

You're starting to think, at this point, that maybe Narukami-san likes messing with people.
At this point, I'm positive that's just a Wild Card thing.
"So you all just walked on in here?" Yukari-san sounds skeptical, and it's hard to blame her. "Just like that?"

(Well, it was set up in our school.) Rise-san points out. (And this place is almost an exact copy. So it's more surprising that this place exists than how we could get here in the first place.) You suppose that, with what you know about Shadows, that makes as much sense as anything else.

Yes, you know that doesn't actually add up to very much sense. But if you kept worrying about that, you'd never get anything done.

---

The next couple of rooms are fairly simple, if a bit long-winded due to everyone agreeing that, for the most part, it would be best not to touch the magic draining spikes.

And then you reach a big room, and Hanamura-san's next words perfectly sum up everyone's feelings on the matter. "Really!?"

Two FOEs stand in the room, bows at the ready, and while you think you did well in defeating the last one you came across, that was mostly due to numbers and getting a surprise attack, and you feel much less secure about taking on two of them at a time.

And odds are, you'd have to take on both of them at a time. Even if they're always facing the same direction, once you get one's attention, that's just an invitation for their lines of sight to eventually overlap. Stealth is key here.

...Or, alternatively, getting out of this room as quickly as humanly possible.


[ ] You'll take the long-winded path around the room.

[ ] You'll take the more straightforward path nearby.

[ ] Even if there's spikes there, just making a straight run for it should work just fine.