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One of Kasumi’s favorite parts of being on the podium at a gymnastics competition is the moment when the medal is looped around her neck. It has a weight to it, the metal pendant a cool presence on her chest even through the layer of her leotard. The judge always shares a private proud smile with her as they rest their hands on her shoulders— and more than just a silent smile, the crowd cheers for her in the stands. Her parents have even brought a homemade banner to hang over the railing this time. From Kasumi’s elevated position on the first place podium, the world feels like it’s tailor-made just for her. She can only imagine how incredible it must feel to win at the Olympics when she already feels so much elation placing first at a bi-yearly competition in Odaiba.
Then again, this isn’t just another competition. Over the judge’s shoulder, Sumire makes eye contact with her special guest. Ren’s telltale smirk sends a thrill down her spine that makes the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention. At ease, soldier.
She tries to suppress the excitement and listen to the judges’ remaining remarks, but nothing seems to stick except Ren, Ren, Ren, thoughts of him spinning through her head giddily. He’s the perfect guy— her very own prince charming! Of course, that train of thought spirals out of control until everything else fades away except the idea of her and Ren dancing the night away in some beautiful ballroom, or church, or—
“Um, Yoshizawa-senpai?” A skittish voice pulls abruptly off the whimsical fairy tale train and back into real life, where Kasumi stands outside the gymnasium in her casual clothes, waiting for Ren to find her so they can take off. Even her parents have left already, she vaguely recollects from a conversation about five minutes ago; they’d been chattering about being proud of her for overcoming something or other, but Kasumi had simply tuned it out, too lost in fairyland to pay attention.
“Yoshizawa-senpai, are you listening?” The voice’s source waves a hand in front of Kasumi’s face. It’s a mousy girl from Kasumi’s gym, a year or so younger than her and not quite first place material. They’ve definitely spoken before, probably several times… but the name to match the face eludes her.
Kasumi straightens up. “Oh, yes of course! Sorry, I um… I saw a bird. Behind you.”
The girl tucks a piece of hair behind her ear and rambles on unfettered. “Oh, okay… Well, as I was saying-”
Is it Hanako? Eri? Naomi?
“-I wanted to congratulate you on your win! I think it’s just-”
Kana, maybe? Or Mitsuki? Yes, yes, it definitely started with an M… Was it Mio?
“-incredible that you can move on after something so-”
Misaki? Mizuki? Moe? Moriko? Minari? Manami? Mika? Mami?
“-terrible, and-”
MOMOKA!
“Thanks so much for your kindness, Momoka-chan!” Kasumi smiles cheerfully at the shorter girl. “I really appreciate it! It means so much to know that you’re supporting me.”
“Oh!” She blushes and perks up, “A f-first name basis? Well, um… Kasumi-chan , I’m really impressed that you can keep going like this after what happened. I mean, I know if my sister-”
The younger girl is interrupted by an authoritative hand clamping down on her shoulder. “That’s enough, Satou.” Coach Hiraguchi says, without an inch of room for argument.
Satou, apparently, whips her head up like a startled deer. “Oh, Coach Hiraguchi! But Kasumi-chan and I were-”
“I said that’s enough. Come on, the two of us are going inside. Enough bothering your Senpai. I’m sure Kasumi is tired after all her hard work today.” Coach Hiraguchi’s glare at her younger student is like a laser that could melt through a bank vault door, and her grip on Satou’s shoulder is similarly intense. The coach has always been stern, but this anger is unlike anything Kasumi remembers ever having seen from her. Before they leave, Coach Hiraguchi simply nods once at Kasumi with an indecipherable look in her eyes. “Good job, kid. I’m proud of you.”
“...Thank you, Coach.” Kasumi barely has time to finish her sentence before Coach Hiraguchi stiffly steers Satou back through the doors of the gymnasium, walking straight past a figure leaning calmly against a doorway.
Ren smirks at her, one eyebrow cocked in amusement. “ Wow. Momoka-chan, huh? ”
“Oh, shush!” She stutters out. Kasumi can feel the red hot blush rising to her cheeks and just knows how un-cute and awfully tomato-like she looks. “That was so embarrassing!”
He chuckles and steps off the doorway toward her. “I could practically hear you thinking from over here. One more second and you might have overheated like a computer.”
Kasumi crosses her arms as they start walking down the stairs to the sidewalk. “In my defense, um…” She trails off, buying time to think of an excuse. Any excuse.
…Nothing.
“Well, think of it this way— you’ve got a new friend now!” Ren takes her playful shove as though he’s been hit by a truck, miming falling off his balance dramatically. When he does, his bag scrambles and lets out a panicked meow that Ren seems to brush off. “Hey, don’t push me! I’m just an innocent bystander, you know.”
“And if Coach Hiraguchi hadn’t interrupted, you would have just kept standing there and let me keep floundering!”
At the mention of the interruption, Ren’s face seems to fall somewhat. “Yeah, uh… what was that about anyway? Everything okay?”
Kasumi fans her red hot face with her hand— despite the cloudy October weather, the embarrassment has her steaming. “Oh, I don’t know… Maybe Satou really was just trying to get to know me.”
He pauses at first to toy with the fringe of his bangs before continuing. It’s a common habit she’s noticed in him, one that Kasumi finds nothing short of absolutely adorable. “Makes sense to me. Who wouldn’t want to be your friend after seeing that performance? I’m counting my lucky stars over here. Seriously though, you were great.”
“Thank you, Ren!” Somehow, even more warmth rises to her face. All of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like embarrassment is ruling her blush as much— it’s more of a content satisfaction at his praise and the weight of the medal in her bag. “I feel lucky to be your friend, too.”
He scoffs humbly, rearranging the squirming bag slung over his shoulder. No doubt his poorly hidden cat is trying to get comfortable. It brings a smile to Kasumi’s face, although it’s quickly erased by how Ren awkwardly looks down at his shuffling feet.
“No really, Ren, I mean it! You’re a great guy and a treasured friend. I don’t know how everyone at school doesn’t see that.” She rests a gentle hand on his arm.
Ren peeks up at her through the tangled fringe of his messy hair, and where she expects to find a humble, insecure gaze, Kasumi’s brown eyes instead meet a steely, unflinching stare. His silver eyes seem to pierce through his glasses to bore into her. She tries not to startle but it’s too offputting, this feeling of being not just watched but seen , really seen, really rawly seen in a way that makes her skin prickle and something in the back of her brain push up against her eyes in a discomforting pressure. It feels like Ren is looking straight into her, and it’s all she can do to keep from forcibly pushing him out. So she looks away. And that ‘away,’ the bricks beneath her feet, is much better, much safer.
“Right back at you,” Ren mumbles, and his voice is loud and clear even despite the low volume.
“Um,” She mutters, just to fill the space in the air where conversation probably should be but has been replaced by an uncomfortable silence. This is not something she had wanted to talk about. Now that they’ve stopped walking (when did they stop walking?), she becomes aware of where her hapless feet have been carrying them— the stadium under construction, something soon to be tall and foreboding, but for now just looks like a skeleton of a dream someone had last March. “I-”
“I’m sorry,” Ren interrupts her, shoving his hands back in his pockets. “That was uncalled for, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Kasumi says carefully, folding her skirt to sit on a nearby bench. “I’m the one that brought it up. I guess, um… neither of us have been having much luck with friendship at Shujin, huh? Although well, you do have Sakamoto-senpai, Takamaki-senpai, Nijima-senpai, and Okumura-senpai— oh, and I can’t forget Mishima-senpai— and I don’t want to minimize them at all, of course, and I… Well. I have you, don’t I, Senpai?”
He’s not making eye contact with her now, but that doesn’t mean he can’t see her flimsy cardboard smile. Still, he shoots one right back at her. “‘Senpai,’ hm? That’s a rare one. You don’t usually call me that. I prefer Ren, you know, it feels more like we’re equals.”
“We are equals.” It sure doesn’t feel like it sometimes goes unsaid, but not unheard.
“I noticed that you usually eat alone at school.” And isn’t that just perfect, that the guy she likes not only clearly isn’t interested in her, but also notices how no one but him wants to spend time with her? He sounds sympathetic, but at the end of the day sympathy is really nothing more than pity raining down on her from above.
Kasumi can’t stand to look at him, not now when her fists are balled and trembling in her lap. She stands from their spot at the bench and walks forward until her hands wire themselves in the chain link fence surrounding the construction site.
“...Senpai, do you ever feel like something is missing?”
Ren speaks up from his place on the bench behind her. Under his voice, she can faintly hear the sound of his bag zipper pushing itself open from the inside. “What do you mean?”
She doesn’t know what she means. As she tilts her head forward to rest against the cold metal fence, all she can think is that this is too much, it’s all too much too fast. Kasumi can’t even remember what they were just talking about. She can barely remember where she is— “You know, this stadium— it was supposed to be a lab, at first, but then the research team got defunded and the project was scrapped. I come here sometimes, when I’m feeling down.”
Her cold hands are starting to sting from the biting of the wire that digs into her skin. Still, she doesn’t unlace her fingers. This feels more real than anything else she’s felt in the past six months. “I come here as um, an anchor, sort of? Dr. Maruki told me that it’s supposed to make me feel better, like it solidifies my relationship to the world or something. But I don’t feel all that solidified. I just feel really lonely, Ren, and I don’t know why .”
Quietly, from her bag: “Beginning navigation.”
“...Kasumi? Is everything okay?” Ren sounds gentle, patient. A cat meows in concern next to him, and that sound, every sound, seems to tick down like a timer to some colossal shift.
He’s an angel for listening to her nonsense and so she turns to tell him as much, hair whipping in the wind behind her, but the turn seems to go on forever and the world melts into itself like a great big spinning top. She’s stuck turning head over shoulder, heel over heel, each rotation an echo of the previous one— the mind within her mind invites itself in and with it, reality moves an inch to the left.
Kasumi thinks neatly, I am going to vomit. And so it is reality.
rap, rap, rap
Kasumi’s first moment of awareness in this new place is brought into being by a trio of sounds shooting through her skull like an arrow.
She comes to herself kneeling at the foot of a short flight of pristine white stairs at the front of a massive entrance hall with tall glass ceilings and golden wires tying the room together in graceful sweeps and slides. The place Kasumi finds herself in is so blindingly white that she might have thought it was heaven if it weren’t for the terrible headache knocking on the inside of her skull. Past all the existential confusion and eyestrain, she faintly feels a tug of guilt that she’s ruined the sleek marble floors with a puddle of puke, but most of her brain power is directed toward clutching at her head and wondering how she got here.
“Owwwww,” She groans, tugging herself laboriously to her feet. “Where am I? Hello? IS ANYONE THERE?”
A clean ding! sounds from the top of the stairs, where Kasumi sees the top of an elevator light up as if to signal an arrival. The stairs, as few as they are, might as well be a sheer cliffside in her addled state. But with no other leads to follow, Kasumi wobbles her way up the steps in spite of the pulsing headache encouraging her to curl up in a fetal position on the floor.
“Ow, ow, ow,” She whispers to herself like a mantra with each step until she stands victorious at the top— and is instantly struck down again.
rap, rap, rap
The deafening sounds punch through her again, heralding a new wave of red hot pain that hits her in a critical strike. Crying out in pain, Kasumi stumbles forward on unsteady feet and beneath her hears a sickening crunch like shattered porcelain.
She trembles and stables herself before looking down to see a pair of rectangular black eyeglasses crushed to pieces on the floor under her foot. Both legs have snapped clean off, one lens popped out mercifully and snapped in half, the other lens having been cracked in the center like a spiderweb radiating out to the frame. Against herself, Kasumi collapses back down to her knees and chokes out a ragged sob.
“ No! ” Her shaky hands reach out as though with a mind of their own and scoop the remains of the glasses into her curled palms, tiny pieces of broken glass and all. It doesn’t make any logical sense— this is trash, it shouldn’t mean anything to her, and yet Kasumi finds herself clutching the glasses like something precious and irreplaceable. Confused, unbidden tears drip down her cheeks and splash onto the cracked lens. “No, no, no, this isn’t– this isn’t right! I don’t understand! What’s going on?!”
What she sees next couldn’t possibly be real and yet Kasumi’s eyes register it clear as day. As though summoned by her cries, a spindly midnight blue thing unravels from nothing and wavers on pointed legs in the chill air before her. It’s humanoid but just barely— something uncannily alien peeks through its thin, featureless silhouette. The creature towers over her from her place on the floor, its length consisting mostly of four willowy limbs connected by a torso that points upward with a long, sweeping neck to the faceless head. Where the face should be is nothing more than swirling white lines and two glowing dots haphazardly placed as if to suggest eyes.
“...Heresy,” A raspy, booming voice echoes throughout the hall. It takes Kasumi a moment to realize that the voice had come from the creature despite its lack of a mouth. “You dare to spurn our lord’s mercy…! ”
The creature lets out an inhuman roar and with it, the faux humanoid form seems to come untethered— it bursts at the seams in a great gust of wind to reveal something almost insectoid yet at the same time robotic, its yellow arms adorned with scalpels in place of hands. Kasumi isn’t sure if it was the wind that blew her back or some fear propelling her away, but she ends up falling onto her hands facing away from the floating monster. Her gaze is blissfully directed to the floor, far away from all the chaos. Out of sight, out of mind, out of sight, out of mind— Kasumi fights for sanity but instead of awakening from this awful dream, the world only seems to get stranger with every panicked heave of breath.
A pair of footsteps run up and stop just a few feet in front of her. One has fluffy white paws like a cat standing on two legs, while the other wears odd black pointed shoes. She cranes her head up shakily, vision blurry from tears, to see the two figures in their full glory, eclipsed as they are by the bright sterile light shining on their backs.
“Are you alright, Yoshizawa?” The shorter of the pair speaks with a high, emotive voice.
It’s another strange creature, this one stout and stubby. Her cat guess hadn’t been far off— the thing is clearly catlike, and yet oddly cartoonish. The figure next to it is taller and seems genuinely human; a man in a black coat and domino mask, with… curly black hair…
The man offers her a hand to get up. “Are you hurt?”
Kasumi whips her eyes back down to the ground. Maybe if she looks away, the recognition will stop racing through her head and this man will suddenly become a different person, an unfamiliar stranger. “No way,” She whispers with eyes squeezed tight. “There’s just no way… Ren? ”
“I– yes, it’s me,” Ren says with his eyebrows screwed up, a look Kasumi might label as concern if she were in her right mind and not distracted by the monster still floating behind her. As it is now, his expression just melts into the same piercing strangeness as everything else going on. “Come on, you have to get up– it’s going to strike any minute.”
The booming voice echoes again like Ren’s comment had reminded it of its own existence. “Accept your reality… Our lordship laments the foolishness birthed from your pain.”
Kasumi is raised to her feet with the help of Ren’s hand around her shoulders and the… cat thing supporting her legs. Once she’s sufficiently balanced and upright, the cat crosses its arms and harrumphs . The noise faintly reminds her of one of her aunt’s cats and how it would huff every time it flopped exasperatedly onto the ground to beg for attention.
“What is that thing even talking about?” The cat mutters and rolls its eyes before pulling out a sabre.
Kasumi backs herself further into Ren’s arms in a panic. “ What? Oh my god, it has a sword!”
Before she can focus any more on the apparently armed cat creature, something smashes its way out of her head again, again, again, heralding the return of the horrible tapping that claws through her.
rap, rap, rap
A hoarse scream wrenches itself out of Kasumi’s choked throat and she collapses into herself, burying her fingers in her hair and tugging like it’ll pull all the pain straight out of her head. She stumbles forward out of Ren’s arms in an instant, tugged forward into the open by her own distracted imbalance. Through her migraine vision, the insectoid monster narrows as if to a pillar towering over her. In fact, everything seems to stretch upward. It’s like her vision is being pulled upward like a rubber band, tighter and tighter and tighter until it— snaps. Kasumi bounds back to herself so quickly that her ears pop. But despite that, she can still hear the voices echoing around her as clear as if they were in the very same room.
“I heard the school moved her exam period so it wouldn’t interrupt a gymnastics meet or something. Ugh, talk about special treatment! It’s so unfair. I hate her!”
“I wouldn’t be so upset about it, but she clearly thinks she’s better than everyone else! All she does is look down on other people just because she’s supposedly talented. What a bitch.”
“I knew from the moment I saw her that she’d be stuck up. It’s no wonder she has no friends— who would concern themselves with a girl like that?”
“I bet even the teachers can’t stand her. The school admitted her on a scholarship, but is she really that good in the first place? I’d love to see her knocked down a peg.”
She remembers this conversation. Azumaya-san, Yoshinori-san, and Misaki-kun— she’d overheard them through the classroom door as they gossipped during cleaning duty just last week. She’d been hurt. She’d been furious. She had tried to brush it off and left for practice without her good luck charm, discarded on her desk.
Kasumi barely even registers her stance changing over the rushing in her ears. Her posture straightens. Her fists clench tight. Whatever this place is, it’s toying with her, trying to hold her down but she doesn’t care; something is welling up inside her, red hot and churning.
“... Shut up.” She spits out through gritted teeth. “You think you can get to me? I’ve heard this all before and I don’t care! It stings in the moment, sure, and maybe I wish things were different, but I won’t let you use this against me! It’s not my fault if these people want to judge me for working hard. That’s their problem. They’ve made up a picture of me in their mind, and they can damn well keep it! I don’t care what they think! All these people who don’t even know me don’t get to decide who I am— I do! It doesn’t matter what anyone says about me… I know what I want and I’m going to make it a reality!”
rap.
rap.
rap.
Deep inside, the pressure bursts.
I have been knocking for quite a while, you know. The clock has yet struck this midnight dreary. Poet, won’t you open the door?
Somewhere, Ren calls her name. She can’t hear him over the sound of her own screaming, distant and breathing down her neck.
As you insist: what sorrow has been lost shan’t now be sought. Leave your loneliness unbroken— thy past visitor shall remain nameless here forevermore.
Her hands dust over something willowy hanging over her face and claw into it, clenching the fabric between her fingers.
Prophet art we, thing of evil. Prophet still, if bird or devil: I am thou, thou art I.
Kasumi has never felt more pain.
Let us make a pact, and if ye follow, this, thy solemn reward: from out the shadow of thy false self, ye shall be lifted— Nevermore!
She has never felt more alive.
“Come to me! CORBEAU! ” She screams, and in one fluid motion rips the veil away from her face, scattering soft white lace to the wind that blows in powerful gusts through the room.
Ren and the cat charge forward on either side of her, the three of them standing as a united front before the monster.
He smirks at her in the brief moment before they turn their attention fully toward it. “Nice cravat.”
“What?” Kasumi’s left hand flies to her collar to find layers of ruffles that certainly hadn’t been there before. It’s only with that movement that she realizes that her right hand is suddenly occupied by gripping a sharp scythe practically the same height as her. “How–”
The cat yowls, “Hey you two, pay attention! It’s about to charge!”
Sure enough, the monster has its pincers raised and sharpened enough to shine intimidatingly under the harsh white light. It should really be much scarier than it is; in general, Kasumi knows she’s unreasonably calm for the insanity of the situation. She just can’t bring herself to feel any more panic, not with the warm support she suddenly feels against her back like a strong protective force. Despite the danger, Kasumi is entirely confident in her own safety— or rather, in her own power to keep herself safe.
She raises her scythe instinctually and swings down sharply through the air not in a direct physical attack against the monster, but in a command for the power she feels to flow through her. Kouha, a patient voice suggests in her mind. Dozens of black feathers spear forward from behind her, lighting the monster up in a blaze of brilliant luminescence and knocking it to the ground.
“Let’s get it!” Ren calls, and so she follows. The three of them attack the monster together in swift harmony until it collapses and crumbles into ash on the wind.
Finally, this world is calm and quiet around Kasumi instead of mentally and physically battering her. It’s almost beautiful like this, but with a faint eeriness that isn’t unfamiliar. She brushes the thought off and turns around to see Corbeau hovering a few feet above the ground. Once again, she should probably be disconcerted by the sight of a giant black raven with glowing yellow eyes, but the fear never quite reaches her.
Corbeau shakes his head as if to show off his magnificent midnight black plumage, feathers shining iridescent under the light. He’s perched delicately on a modern-looking featureless white marble bust with the top of the head shattered straight off. Tucked next to his tailfeathers is a massive copper doorknob the size of one of his legs
Hello, Poet.
Kasumi smiles. “...Hi.”
Ren’s hand settles gently on her shoulder. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, just… tired,” ‘Just tired’ is an understatement; Kasumi feels exhaustion pressing down on her now that the invigorating motion of battle has passed. “Ren, what’s going on? And… what on earth are you wearing?”
“Ha!” He barks out a laugh that echoes in the great open hall. “I’ll explain the situation once we get out of here. And as for the outfit— you might want to take a look at yourself before you say anything about me.”
She follows his gesture, an open hand thrown to point somewhere over her shoulder, and turns on a heel to see a supporting column made from a reflective material undistorted enough to catch a view of herself clearly. The sight she sees in the mirror makes Kasumi gasp and raise a hand to her face, where miraculously gloved fingers grasp mesh and lace.
It’s certainly not the outfit she had put on this morning. Her usually red bow is now periwinkle and holds in place the white veil that descends to cover her entire face, yet somehow doesn’t disturb her vision in the slightest. She wears a white ruffled shirt with a satin cravat tucked into a charcoal gray waistcoat and matching trousers. Kasumi’s sensible loafers have even been replaced by knee high white boots with a tall wedge heel and periwinkle ribbon laces. The entire outfit is decked out with lace, ruffles, and ribbons. It looks opulent, pretty, and confusingly familiar— she could swear she’s never seen these clothes in her life, not to mention that she doesn’t remember ever changing into them.
“How…?”
“Looking good, Yoshizawa!” The cat grins. His statement is met with a nod of agreement from Ren that sends butterflies frenzying in her stomach.
“Come on, we should get out of here before any more shadows show up. You need some rest, too. Manifesting a Persona really takes a lot out of you.” Ren turns and starts walking toward the exit with a dramatic swish of his coat. The cat outlandishly skitters after him on stubby paws.
In the moment Kasumi moves to take a step forward, she feels a sharp tug of hesitation in her gut like a rope tied around her waist pulling her back toward the elevator. There’s something missing here, she can feel it… but she can’t stay here, not when her body is screaming at her to rest and she still needs an explanation for all this weirdness. A quick look back over her shoulder reassures that no, there’s nothing there but a pile of ash and a pair of broken glasses.
It’s nothing, Kasumi thinks as she turns to follow Ren, nothing at all.