[OTA]

[icanhearscreams]

Stop talking stop talking stop talking stop talking it's like the screaming it's not real it can't be real it has to be fake. Just another hallucination.

Stop it, stop it, stop it! It's not real! It's not... just stop...

Comments

[seestheworld]

Those too.

Do you know what Evokers are meant to evoke? Besides Personas, I mean.

[fridgeninja]

No one's ever mentioned anything else to me. Although, they do look alarming...

[seestheworld]

They're supposed to. Someone decided that terror was an essential component of summoning. The idea is that you're confronting your own fear of death every time you do.

And the Evokers are probably the least of it. I'm going to guess you're not aware of the experiments they did with artificial Persona users?

[fridgeninja]

Persona-summoning robots? I met one briefly, but she didn't say anything about experiments.

Nobody mentioned that side of Evokers, either.

[seestheworld]

No, not robots. Humans who had their Personas artificially awakened. They wanted to investigate Tartarus and the Dark Hour but didn't want to wait for natural Persona users to randomly show up, so they rounded up a bunch of street kids and forced their Personas out.

There were three survivors. And even they had drastically reduced life expectancies because the regular treatments they needed to keep their Personas from turning on them and killing them - or worse - were also lethal.

[fridgeninja]

That's terrible.

What I knew about before really only scratched the surface of what it was like for all of you, then.

[seestheworld]

The Kirijo Group now is a very different animal from what it was then. But the repercussions of what happened then were pretty bad.

There were almost definitely experiments involved in the creation of the robot Persona users, but I don't know what they were. And given what I do know about, I'm not sure I really want to, because that was Then.

[fridgeninja]

I met a robot Persona user once, in Liminal Space. She was around for part of the Grid, too... and I might have known her from when I was "on hold," or from before Moebius. I'm not sure.

[seestheworld]

Really? Huh. I know Aigis was here briefly when Liminal Space broke after Stabiae and Belljar Two, but I didn't see her on the Grid at all.

[And Aigis would have come to find her, unless she was from a Minato timeline, and possibly even then. So what's going on here?]

What did she look like?

[fridgeninja]

Her hair was about the same color as mine, and she had eyes pretty much the same color as yours.

[seestheworld]

Not Aigis, then... Aigis was - is - blonde. And she was pretty sure she was the last, too.

[fridgeninja]

Maybe she was from the past. Or a different timeline?

[seestheworld]

Or Aigis isn't aware she's still alive. We were at Tsukishima when she woke up, and I doubt that was their only... storage facility, for lack of a better phrase.

[fruitknife]

Might be Labrys. Risette's met her, but she didn't wake up again until after our time. [So barring Liminal Space shenanigans, Minako's unlikely to ever meet her.

Not that Shinji's gonna spell that out on the network. She'd come kick his ass.]

From what Risette said, I think the researchers managed to give Labrys PTSD and not actually give a fuck that they'd done it. But knowing what they did to their human test subjects, why would they've been any nicer to the robots?

[seestheworld]

I'm sorry I missed her.

[She could have told Aigis about her when she was here, assuming Aigis hadn't known already. Too late now.]

I was going to say they might have been even worse, but I don't think they saw any of their "test subjects" as anything but raw material.

[With the possible exception of Mitsuru, and even she'd been put through hell.]

[fruitknife]

Going with 'they were almost definitely even worse.' At least with humans you know they already have a soul. [Well. Most of them.]

Wouldn't be surprised if they got all baffled when 'give a robot a personality' worked and that personality fucking hated them for it.

[seestheworld]

Yeah, but I'm not sure how much they actually cared that they did.

[Maybe some individual scientists might have, but as a whole? Probably not.]

Probably.

[fruitknife]

They didn't. September wasn't the first time I met Chidori. [Nor was October the first time he met Takaya, but why talk about his pasty ass if they don't have to.]

But there's still a possible level of... something there that isn't when you start with a hunk of metal and plastic. Hell, they probably thought they were giving the kids something better than what they had.