synopsychic | we interrupt your regularly scheduled Babish rip-off for this important announcement

...do you and Hajime know much about the Tarot?

I think maybe we should talk in person at his restaurant.

Hajime knows some! Mostly focuses on normal deck of playing cards, fifty-two and a Joker!

Yes! Come to restaurant, get ramen, is good ramen!

Well. Sara can't say no to that - though rather than arriving with food, as she's known to do, she comes bearing a deck of cards.

Hers has 77 cards, and a Fool.

"Hey, Ryo," Sara says. "Is Hajime around too? We all need to talk."

Edited 2019-01-13 06:53 (UTC)

And the deck Ryo is most familiar with is literally just the suit of Hearts of a traditional deck, plus one Joker that does things like fight Tower and make everyone ramen afterwards and is not actually a card. "Yeah," Ryo says, "he's here!"

Hajime hadn't been paying attention to the network. If he had, maybe he'd have stopped Ryo before things got to this point. He sticks his head out from the back room where he's got the dishwasher and stores extra dishes. "What's going on?"

Sara, once she makes sure the shop is otherwise empty, jerks a thumb at Ryo.

She mutters, “Maybe tell your Companion how not to say ‘Hajime didn’t kill Tower, but here’s a bunch of good reasons why he might want to.’ Over the Network. When I didn’t even accuse anyone specific.”

Normally she’d be much more chill and much less flat, but between the Dungeon and going mad with the revelation she’s out of fucks to give.

Hajime slowly turns to look at Ryo, who scuttles from side to side on the counter. "But he doesn't know if he killed Tower or not," Ryo protests, "went too berserk to remember! Plausible deniability! And everyone here nice anyway!"

Hajime now looks as though he's got a headache. "Ryo. We talked about secrets, remember?"

"Didn't go out and say anything! Was hypothetical!" He pauses. "Did I use that word right? But not name anyone!"

“Ryo, that’s a confession,” Sara says, her voice raising despite herself.

“I’m not going to sell you out, Hajime - I’ve seen what happens to people the Arcana want to punish, and I wouldn’t wanna put going through that even secondhand from a Dungeon on anyone - but first off, maybe shut up the bug, and second, we need to talk about what a dead Tower actually means.”

This may be the angriest anyone who wasn’t Hebe has seen any given Sara.

"I can handle myself, but thanks." Hajime resists the urge to say he's flattered she thinks he pulled that off by himself, but Ryo's dug the conversational hole too deep, and unlike some bugs, he's not about to implicate anyone else.

At this point, he's scooped the little mantis up. "No more talking about that, alright? Not even in hypotheticals. It's a secret, I told you. The kind of thing you shouldn't talk about even if Kenzaki were to walk in here. There's a reason I wasn't saying anything any time anyone talked about it."

Ryo, though he's cheerfully innocent, is not quite stupid enough not to pick up on the anger here. His antenna are drooping now. "Okay."

“I’m guessing you don’t know much about Tarot.”

Not so much guessing as certain. But you know. (She’s also absolutely sure he couldn’t do it alone, but doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know his accomplices. Can’t accidentally reveal what y’all don’t know.)

“I learned as much as I could when I got here. I figured it was gonna come up. And, Hajime. What do you think the Tower means? Meant. Your own words.”

Hajime shrugs. "I've picked up bits and pieces here and there." That's a no. (Shh let his ego have this shhh...)

That question gets a hard grimace. "Destruction. People getting hurt. I asked Tower if he'd be fine with an apocalypse. He said yes." There's a long pause. "And I won't be used for that again."

"My brother," Sara says quietly, "once told me something about the word apocalypse. He said that it didn't mean destruction. It meant revelations, like The Book Of Revelations. It got associated with destruction because sometimes you need a disaster to open your eyes."

She lays the Tower card on the table in front of him: a picture of a lightning bolt from God toppling a tower.

"Followup question. Why do you think that Lovers is such an asshole?" she says. It's not a rhetorical question, though she needs to share her suspicions. She's genuinely curious.

Edited 2019-01-13 20:36 (UTC)

Hajime absentmindedly reaches over to rub at his right bicep, where his faded Mark of a roach and a mantis getting thrown from a lightning-struck tower still remains. "And in my experience, an apocalypse just means that everyone dies while cockroach monsters tear up the planet. Nothing revelatory about that."

He looks kind of like he's expecting to get caught in some kind of trick question here. "...aren't they all kind of assholes with the whole bringing us here thing?"

"Yeah that'd... color that. I'm sorry, Hajime," she says, and means it. "I didn't know."

Sara laughs, but only once, a bark of relief. "More of an asshole than say Fool or ROSE or Empress or Chariot or Strength, then," she says, placing a card with the image of the angel Psyche bringing a man and a woman together in an Edenic meetcute.

"Like, seriously. Lovers represents relationships, from friendship to family to romance and everything in between. So why when we met her is she focused on creepy shipping and soap opera drama above the other stuff that's supposed to be her?"

Again, serious, honest and curious, but rhetorical as well.

"Thanks." He sighs. "It was...stopped. But only by a man who gave far too much to do it." Ryo reaches out and pats him on the cheek, but for once, the mantis stays quiet.

He still seems to think he's going to get caught in some kind of trick question. "...emotions and relationships are difficult?" He's trying, here.

"It's weird that she's doing worse than a coinflip when what she represents IS relationships," Sara says.

Sara sighs, and puts another card - an image of the Devil chaining together a man, a woman, and a treasure chest in a hellish punishment. The pose and composition is almost exactly the same as the Lovers card.

"...I think they're missing the parts of them linked to the dead Arcana."

Try that thought on for size, see where it takes you.

Hajime stares at the card for a long moment. "...just so you're aware, I'm really more used to things represented by cards where you want to take as many of them out of commission as possible. Like that's the goal." He almost misses the other Undead. At least he understood them, even if he wanted to seal all of them. "And I don't...I don't see why taking the one that wrecks things out of the equation would hurt."

"Tower isn't about wrecking things," Sara says, flatly. "Wrecking things is his hobby. His job is burning your hand when you stick it in a fire. If he's fine with an apocalypse, it's only because nothing makes you learn faster than a spectacular disaster."

Sara sighs, pressing her thumbs into the gap between her nose and her forehead.

"...without Temperance, the Arcana have no sense of balance. Without Hierophant, no sense of morals. Without Fortune, they had no luck. Without Star, they have no hope."

"And I really hope not having Tower doesn't mean they'll have no sense of the consequences of their actions."

Hajime frowns. "You could argue they already didn't have a sense of consequence when they brought in a bunch of people like us to do all of this for them and they didn't think some of us might react poorly, and violently so."

"Which they started doing right after their sense of balance got murdered by Cthulhu, right?"

Sara pinches the bridge of her nose again. "...I'm not saying that you're wrong, that they're innocent, that they shouldn't have asked instead of taken. I'm saying that there's a good reason for them to want their family back."

"I want a World where Ruin leads to Revelation and Revolution as much as I want one where Hope is real."

"It's not like we can change anything now, anyway," Hajime says, "and I...just haven't had the same experiences with Ruin to even think such a thing has the possibility to exist." There's a pause. "But I'm not planning on going out with the intent to kill again, if that's what you're worried about."

"Believe me, I understand that there are monsters out there that need to be slain, and I get it. I get that he's as much the end of things as what comes after the end, and I've lived through an apocalypse." Sara said. "And... I really hope I'm wrong."

She meets his eyes. "No one deserves Moebius or worse for trying to shake the bars of their cell. I'm not telling anyone.

I promise."

Edited 2019-01-20 03:01 (UTC)

"I think we all do." Hajime's not sure Tower's death is going to be this level disaster, but it's too late now. Best they can do is hope things work out somehow.

And not having this blasted everywhere any more than Ryo already had is good, too. "I appreciate that. Ryo does, too." Because speaking for the mantis is just a smart move right now. "If anyone asks, I guess we were just in here swapping recipes."

Sara laughs. “Poutine is next in line for the Snackin’ thoughtcast, but want to be next after for plausibility?”

Sara looks up, humming in false thoughtfulness. “That way we were swapping recipes.”

"That'll work." Hajime nods. "My recipe for takoyaki's pretty kickass."

"Won contests with it!" Ryo adds. "Is very plausible swap!"

we interrupt your regularly scheduled Babish rip-off for this important announcement

Into action because oh my god.

At least Ryo is happy to share food

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