Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]

If Ami were to actually manifest a Chara, then her Overgrowth stat will drop. Which I think answers the earlier question on how charas factor into mental stability here.

To be honest, with that integrity rating, at her age? It's only a matter of time.

By the way, Hikaru's character sheet will be showing up shortly along with Hikaru and Ami, as Ami knows him well enough to pass that bar. His Overgrowth/Integrity ratings are 5/1. Well, it could be worse.
It could be 5/0.

:V
 
I thought it was a counter of how many Overgrowth "successes" you got for way too long lol
the part of the user's mind that's dedicated to pushing their will on reality—by means other than muscles and limbs.
And you can deliberately train this huh (though Integrity first is probably a good idea)

Lastly, it can be used in conjunction with Investigation in cognitive spaces.
Hm...... aren't we in a Cognitive Space right now? Wonder if I should modify my write-in further to fit that in..

[X] "Amu, stop. Let's think this through. Back home."
-[X] Try and bring the Fox with us. If this place is created by Yui, this probably belongs to her, and might help with her dependency on Kana.
-[X] Either assist in investigating with Lightsmithing, or drown out the Fog using Lightsmithing if Utau think its necessary to assist Amu's Integrity.
-[X] In either case, take a photo of the Fox and use Ragged Crossroads on the photo.
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure what it means to say Amu "is" a Shadow, really. How is that different from just being a regular person?
It means she's metaphysically... 'tagged wrong'.

For Amu as a person? It doesn't mean much at all. She's still the same girl she's always been, even if her mind is in some sense 'upside down'. The part that was 'supposed' to be suppressed has had its shutters torn off, the rest of her has learned to stop doing that—in part because her actual persona was alternately torn to pieces and simply missing—and her shadow-self learned to do things shadows simply aren't meant to do, because she had no alternative.

Neural networks want to work, that's one of the most annoying lessons of machine learning: even if you get everything wrong, even if you literally load the network upside down, chances are your code will produce the right results anyway. It just won't do it as well as it could have. Humans aren't neural networks in this sense, but mostly that just means we're bigger, and can handle larger divergences...

Amu's fine, really.

But to entities that are keyed to work off the baseline, default design for human minds, she's often going to be somewhere between confusing and aggravating.
 
It means she's metaphysically... 'tagged wrong'.

For Amu as a person? It doesn't mean much at all. She's still the same girl she's always been, even if her mind is in some sense 'upside down'. The part that was 'supposed' to be suppressed has had its shutters torn off, the rest of her has learned to stop doing that—in part because her actual persona was alternately torn to pieces and simply missing—and her shadow-self learned to do things shadows simply aren't meant to do, because she had no alternative.

Neural networks want to work, that's one of the most annoying lessons of machine learning: even if you get everything wrong, even if you literally load the network upside down, chances are your code will produce the right results anyway. It just won't do it as well as it could have. Humans aren't neural networks in this sense, but mostly that just means we're bigger, and can handle larger divergences...

Amu's fine, really.

But to entities that are keyed to work off the baseline, default design for human minds, she's often going to be somewhere between confusing and aggravating.
So... she's basically adapted around developmental brain damage, except magic brain damage instead of the regular kind.
 
For Amu as a person? It doesn't mean much at all. She's still the same girl she's always been, even if her mind is in some sense 'upside down'. The part that was 'supposed' to be suppressed has had its shutters torn off, the rest of her has learned to stop doing that—in part because her actual persona was alternately torn to pieces and simply missing—and her shadow-self learned to do things shadows simply aren't meant to do, because she had no alternative.
Hmm

And the same thing happened to Ami, I take it? Judging by her golden eyes, that is? But it's not just part of being a Chara user, because Utau doesn't have this trait.

Would this have been part of the Bane, if we'd chosen to give the Hinamori family a dark secret? This sounds like the kind of thing that could have been a dark secret, if someone had been doing it on purpose.
 
Last edited:
in part because her actual persona was alternately torn to pieces and simply missing
(......)
where can we hire a Mind Control/Biokinesis specialist? (oh, wait, we are said specialist) :V

Jokes (?) aside:
Psionics, from what Amu's parents overheard, can recover from any level of stress that doesn't cause mental damage of the "You've forgotten the existence of your parents, the word 'green' and/or how to walk" variety.
- Exactly what is it for? We've seen the surface effect, Ran and Su and Iru and all the other charas, but all we actually know is what's happened because the chara system exists; we know what it causes, we don't know what it prevents. What would have happened if it didn't?
- Was Amu meant to be involved, or is that more of an accident? Yes, Tsukasa already knew years in advance that she'd show up, but he's a precog; it doesn't mean she was part of the original plan.
- What was Tsukasa, the world-class precog, trying to stop from happening that justified letting the children of his best friends grow up the way Utau and Ikuto did? He doesn't seem to be a bad person, quite the opposite.
Mayhaps this is part of the answer to these questions?
 
Would this have been part of the Bane, if we'd chosen to give the Hinamori family a dark secret? This sounds like the kind of thing that could have been a dark secret, if someone had been doing it on purpose.
I had several ideas in mind. One of them was "The Hinamori family used to be a magus family; your parents or grandparents escaped that world."

In which case it very well could have been, yes.
 
The part that was 'supposed' to be suppressed has had its shutters torn off, the rest of her has learned to stop doing that—in part because her actual persona was alternately torn to pieces and simply missing—and her shadow-self learned to do things shadows simply aren't meant to do, because she had no alternative.
Speaking as someone who had never even heard of Shugo Chara before reading this Quest, can I ask what this is based on in SC canon, assuming of course that it's based on something from that series that's been translated to SMT terms?
 
Speaking as someone who had never even heard of Shugo Chara before reading this Quest, can I ask what this is based on in SC canon, assuming of course that it's based on something from that series that's been translated to SMT terms?
Charas, like you may have guessed, are made from personas... or the seed that would become them.

Any more than that would be telling.
 
I'm not sure what it means to say Amu "is" a Shadow, really. How is that different from just being a regular person?
In practical terms, we just saw a whole bunch of the effects. Her eyes glow bright yellow and other Shadows like her.

Shadows can also merge with other shadows to become more powerful, though what this would do to the mental stability of one apparently depends who is absorbing what. Persona 4 Arena had the main villain want to eat the Shadow Selves of the Persona users to become more powerful, only to apparently realize in Ultimax that it would be a bad idea because their Shadows were too powerful and would destabilize him if he actually did it.

This one is a lesser Shadow and very broken, so it's probably not going to subsume Amu's entire personality - but exactly what the effects would be is unknown. And it might encourage Amu to do it more and more, which I'm not sure should be encouraged (do it too much and at some point she'll be more other Shadows by cognitive mass than her own).
 
Charas, like you may have guessed, are made from personas... or the seed that would become them.
in part because her actual persona was alternately torn to pieces and simply missing

Glancing at Dia hard here hm. When did Amu get her first Chara(s) again?
(Also, are Evokers needed to get Personas in this quest, if that's not OOC info? I don't recall how Persona getting normally works lol.)
 
Glancing at Dia hard here hm. When did Amu get her first Chara(s) again?
(Also, are Evokers needed to get Personas in this quest, if that's not OOC info? I don't recall how Persona getting normally works lol.)
In Shugo Chara canon, Amu just woke up with 3 Chara Eggs one morning in her bed. She was 10 or 11 at the time and in her 4th year of elementary school. Dia came a little bit later, after she spent some time fighting Easter.

IIRC Utau and Ikuto got theirs only after their father disappeared. So probably when they were older than Amu.

Though I will also point out that, according to Persona 4, people who are too young don't have Shadow Selves (the exemplar in P4 being Nanako Dojima, who was 6-7 years old). So if Ami is also a "naked Shadow Self", something in this quest must have been adjusted between Persona canon and Shugo Chara canon - Ami here is also only 7 years old and should be too young to have a Shadow. Personas, too, come from Shadow Selves and canonically, the youngest Persona user(s) were 8 years old (Mitsuru Kirijo).

If things went according to Persona 4 canon, I'd guess that Amu "losing her Persona" would have had to have happened in between the ages of 8 to 10, assuming her birthing Charas was the equivalent of manifesting a Persona again. Shouldn't even be possible for Amu to have even had a Shadow Self or any Personas to lose prior to that age.

But since Ami apparently does at age 7, I guess it's possible in this quest that Amu somehow had a Shadow Self earlier than that.
 
Last edited:
Though I will also point out that, according to Persona 4, people who are too young don't have Shadow Selves (the exemplar in P4 being Nanako Dojima, who was 6-7 years old). So if Ami is also a "naked Shadow Self", something in this quest must have been adjusted between Persona canon and Shugo Chara canon - Ami here is also only 7 years old. Should be too young to have a Shadow. Personas comes from Shadow Selves and canonically, the youngest Persona user(s) were 8 years old (Mitsuru Kirijo).
Well, if we're going by Jungian psychology, everyone has a Shadow; it's the parts of yourself you keep inside, underneath the mask you show to the rest of the world. Everyone has those parts.

I don't remember if it was ever explicitly confirmed that Nanako had no Shadow Self at all, and frankly I'd be shocked if we had anything more than the main cast speculating about it. The situation she was in was also fundamentally different than the other victims, because Namatame jumped in with her, and a lot of their collective dungeon was a result of his influence. So I wouldn't say Nanako's Shadow not appearing in P4 proves that children can't have Shadow Selves.

Especially since Heart's Eggs are (at least according to the wiki) something only possessed by children, and since those are where Charas come from... well, the whole system doesn't work if kids can't have Personas, which means they need to have Shadows.
 
I don't remember if it was ever explicitly confirmed that Nanako had no Shadow Self at all, and frankly I'd be shocked if we had anything more than the main cast speculating about it.
That information came from Teddie, who as a living Shadow himself ought to know if it is true.

The exact line comes from the P4 anime, after they rescue Nanako from the TV world, Teddie tells the Investigation Team while waiting outside the ICU: "Because Nanako was still so very little, her other self didn't appear like it did for everybody else."

Up to you to decide whether he was "just speculating" or making a flat statement of fact. Up to the QM to decide whether or not that statement still holds true for this quest (all signs point to "no" so far).
My first guess regarding why Amyus Persona got torn up was because a person isn't meant to have that many Charas, but then Utau and co say hi?
My first guess was that it was something to do with Overgrowth. Something along the lines of how having too big and fat a cognitive face breaks any standard-sized mask, making you need a custom-sized one to fit (Charas).

Ikuto was the first psionic, which says that this "Overgrowth" phenomenon is a relatively recent thing amongst anybody of any age. So my guess is that he and Utau didn't actually "Overgrow" until they were over the age of 10 and already had well-developed natural Personas. And then getting Charas stopped Overgrowth from breaking them.

But now you have kids below 8 like Ami and apparently Micchan "Overgrowing" at a young age and it causes them to not be able to form Personas properly and they are solely reliant on Charas to keep from becoming completely psychotic, which Ami is apparently on the way to because she's also too young to have a Chara yet.
 
Last edited:
"Didn't appeear" is a much weaker statement than "doesn't exist".
You guys can make up your own mind about the semantics of the statement, I'm not going to bother quibbling over how "strong" you think it sounds or whether you think it was Teddie speculating as opposed to making a statement, or whether he might be talking nonsense and his information unreliable even if it was (which is another argument I've seen brought up about it). I don't really care, it's not really relevant.

The only thing that really matters here is whether such a rule is applicable to the world in this quest.

Ami's yellow-eyed Shadow Self has definitely appeared, that girl is 7. Micchan has yellow eyes in her mugshot, she's also 7. Yui may or may not be the same age, may have been younger when they started doing experiments on her.

Current evidence suggests "no", meaning that Amu might have "lost her Persona" before the age of 7 as well.
 
Especially since Heart's Eggs are (at least according to the wiki) something only possessed by children, and since those are where Charas come from... well, the whole system doesn't work if kids can't have Personas, which means they need to have Shadows.
All children have a Heart's Egg in Shugo Chara, though saying only children can have them isn't precisely 100% true.

When Suu fixed Nikaidou's Hearts' Egg, she told him that he could still meet his Chara again in the future, even with him being a grown man. And then at the end of the manga, both the Tadase from the future and Dia mentioned that Hearts' Eggs don't completely, permanently disappear. Kiseki apparently still exists for the adult Tadase in some form according to him and Dia tells Amu that Hearts' Eggs can be "born again, many, many times" even when they seem to be gone, which mirrors what Suu told Nikaidou.

So all children possess them and apparently usually "fade" when children grow up, but can reappear anytime if someone triggers the right conditions. Though, the only person we've actually seen do that on-screen is Amu herself at the end of the series, bringing back Ran, Miki and Su by diving into the Road of Stars (or when Suu fixed Nikaidou's egg, but that only lasted very temporarily).

How exactly that maps in this crossover quest is a good question.

We have a number of hints to how it works:
  1. The Chara System is artificial in this quest. The QM indicates Tsukasa, Tadase's father and Aruto were involved in its creation. It's been indicated the system was set up to deal with Overgrowth, the main symptom of which is psionic powers. The first exhibitor of such was Ikuto Tsukiyomi.
  2. Overgrowth does not stop you having a Persona. We know this, because Scavengers are apparently Persona-using Psionics given they require Persona Suppressants.
  3. Hotsuin knew what Shadows are, but didn't know anything about Charas. That strongly indicates Hearts' Eggs are not precisely the same thing as Shadows (otherwise he would know about Charas).
  4. Saaya having her Heart's Egg messed around with by Nikaidou and Lulu resulted in her being unable to birth a Chara.
  5. Amu's Charas double as her Personas.
So we know psionics can be either Persona-users or Chara-users, but what we don't have clear confirmation on is whether a Chara-user can also be a Persona-user, or whether the two are mutually exclusive.

If they are mutually exclusive, it is possible that Hearts' Eggs are just transmogrified Shadows and Charas are just butchered/mutated Personas. But if they are not mutually exclusive - if someone can have both a Persona and a Chara at a same time - that indicates a Heart's Egg has a greater degree of separation from a person's Shadow Self than that.

Meaning someone might not need to have a Shadow, in order to have a Heart's Egg.

EDIT: I guess what the question can really be boiled down to, ultimately, is: "Exactly how artificial are Hearts' Eggs in this quest?"



ADDED TO AVOID TRIPLE-POSTING:

In all fairness, that's happened several times in her unwritten backstory. As you can see by this point, it isn't normally fatal.

Even if your mind isn't fully integrated, it still isn't likely to harm other parts of itself. Not that schizophrenia is all that great either, but for kids her age it's almost standard.
"Mhm." Ami's eyes were drooping. "He was really nice. He liked my rabbit."

'Rabbit?' Apparently there were things going on with Ami in her sleep. Her stuffed toy—Amu glanced down to check—was a seal.
....Wait.

Shit.

How many times has Ami already absorbed Shadows while Dreamwalking?

Was one of them Rei?
 
Last edited:
Back
Top