[Audio]

[neverfeltthatway]

Hello, everyone. I... I have the list of those who have vanished. [For once, Armin doesn't use his image when making a broadcast, and he's definitely shorter and more terse than normal. It's definitely unusual, for him - but anyone who knows him well enough to notice might figure out why as soon as he starts reading off the names.]

Ivan. Levi. Joscelin. Yua. S-sansa. Adachi. Neeshka. Hitsugaya. Sera - umm, the unfriendly one. And Xaldin.


[Locked to former Illuminated]

I heard some of what happened during the walkabout. If you don't mind, I'd like to hear more about it from each of you in person. When you're feeling up for it.

Comments

[leftbehindagain]

Before. Right at the end of March. Why?

[senpaidol]

~I come bearing messages from~...well, Naoto-kun and Souji-senpai's future, not yours, I guess. There was...kind of another incident during Golden Week, which is when we met those Shadow Operatives guys.

Uh...do you think it'll break anything if I talk about that? I can't play guitar so I'm not sure how I'd fix a time paradox...

[leftbehindagain]

I think I already have some idea from the time Adachi-san ended up in a dungeon, so you probably won't screw things up any more than they already are. I mean, if five Wild Cards from Inaba wasn't enough to do it...

Oh, speaking of timelines. Dojima-san's not from far enough along to know who the culprit was. I think he's going to figure it out on his own, eventually, but he did ask me not to tell him. Pretty sure Hanamura doesn't know either.

[senpaidol]

What? Oh...that's awful, though. Getting shoved off to this other thing before we solved the case? Especially Yosuke-senpai and...

...er...

...Dojima-san? I must have spaced out when Naoto-kun said he was here. That's kinda awkward.

[leftbehindagain]

Yeah, apparently a TV fell on him. [Yes, Rise, that means exactly what you think it means.]

Well, they at least know who it wasn't, and from what I've gathered you guys cut that a lot closer than we did.

[senpaidol]

Eheh...yyyyyeah, that wasn't a fun night.

[Thank god Souji had spoken up then, because she sure wasn't able to get a word in over the yelling.]

[leftbehindagain]

It probably helped in our case that I knew for sure Sis hadn't left the house with a delivery guy.

[There's no judging in Naoki's tone; it'd be an easy mistake to make, based on the available information, and it seems like everyone who tried asking him either got shut down hard or... well, had Adachi do it. And Adachi-san's timeline was just weird all around.]

[senpaidol]

Yeah, that's true! Like how having Yukiko-senpai around let her confirm who was with Yamano-san before she was thrown in.

I'm always glad when us non-detectives can contribute.

[leftbehindagain]

Every now and then we manage to come up with something good.

Adachi-san meant to sit everyone down and compare timelines sometime, but we never quite got around to it. I know his was pretty weird compared to most of them, though.

[senpaidol]

Uh...yeah. It'd kinda have to be.

Private

[leftbehindagain]

[At this point, Naoki takes the conversation private - even with Adachi-san gone, he doesn't deserve to have this all over the public network.]

I'm sure you can imagine how long it took him to get his act together about leading the charge. There were close to double the number of victims - the killer was using the kidnappings as a smokescreen to toss someone else in while the rescue party was busy - I ended up dead, Sis was his second... like I said. Weird all around.

Private

[senpaidol]

He barely had his act together as "the culprit", so yeah. Good to see that he kept that up when he wasn't an entitled crazy man, I guess? Um, except for the people who ended up dead. Sorry.

Private

[leftbehindagain]

It's not like it was actually me. Still, I nearly punched him when I first met him, but he wasn't that bad a guy.

[And Rise can probably guess what it takes for Naoki to say that about any Adachi.]

Private

[senpaidol]

[She's pretty impressed, but this probably isn't a great subject to keep pushing on.]

I guess it just goes to show how strange this place is.

Hey, speaking of strange, do you want to hear about my Golden Week? It wasn't really a big murder mystery, but a lot of weird stuff happened and we saved the world again.

Private

[leftbehindagain]

...Oh, why not. Maybe it'll give us some idea of what to look forward to.

[senpaidol]

Well okay. I uh...missed most of the first day since I got kidnapped, but the basic idea of the first part is that a new weird thing showed up on the Midnight Channel the night Souji-senpai got back into town, "advertising" some kind of fighting competition supposedly run by Teddie.

I'd gotten kidnapped by the person behind the broadcast, so I got to sorta see what was going on. A girl named Labrys had gotten thrown into the TV by a new culprit, and he grabbed me too since Himiko would have kinda broken his whole plan, which was for everyone who investigated to split up and be forced to fight each other by Labrys's Shadow. Fortunately no one got seriously hurt, and everyone eventually rescued me and Labrys-chan.

We also ran into those Shadow Operatives guys I mentioned before...they were looking for Labrys because it turns out she was a really confused robot who'd originally been built to fight Shadows by a company in Iwatodai, and...

...uh, you still following, Konishi-kun? It gets a lot weirder after this part...

[leftbehindagain]

...ah. Ikutsuki and the dark side of the Kirijo Group strike again, I take it? Minako-san's told me some of what she went through. Including about Aigis.

[Robot gets tossed in the TV and generates a Shadow? Must be Thursday.]

[senpaidol]

Oh good. If you've heard of Ikutsuki and Aigis-san, you'll probably understand what was going on more than I did.

So the next day, I was on the train back into Inaba when the whole town got covered in red fog that shut everything off. Some kinda combination between our fog and a time thing that the Shadow Operatives dealt with, I think? Anyway, a weird lady kinda sorta annoyed me into doing something weird with Himiko and apparently she can use combat skills if I'm alone. Anyway, I beat up some people and wound up rescuing Fuuka-san and Yukari-san - kinda my senpai in support stuff and the new Pink Argus, She's...on reserve or something. I...well, okay, I'm getting off track here...

Anyway, the culprit of this stuff turned the school into a weird dungeon and made fake Shadows for everyone to fight. They were kinda lame knockoffs of the real ones, but that was All According To Plan or something. The magic explanations kinda went over my head. The point is, after a lot of fighting and walking around we found out that the bad guys were a god who'd been impersonating Teddie as the "tournament" MC, a Kirijo Group experiment who apparently wanted revenge on the Shadow Operatives, and for some reason they also broke Adachi out of prison? I'm not sure what his job was other than messing with us. Anyway, the god was Hi-no-Kagutsuchi, who apparently just didn't get his mother's memo that we won? His speech sounded a lot like hers, anyway, all "gonna destroy the world and it's somehow humanity's fault". I was kinda tired.

Anyway, the good news there is that the bad guys all basically backstabbed each other - Adachi didn't want to destroy the world anymore, and Sho, the ex-lab test guy, got possessed by Kagutsuchi when Kagutsuchi couldn't possess Labrys-chan like he was planning. Then Senpai and Labrys-chan beat up Kagutsuchi and everything went pretty much back to normal again except now we're friends with like a dozen other Persona-users and there's robots and girls who are way better at support Personas than I am but that's okay because I learned a lot from her.

Uh, think that covers it. Man, I should have mailed Fuuka-san before the festival.

[leftbehindagain]

The Dark Hour. They were trying to stop it, according to Minako-san. [Aaaaand Rise might've heard about Ikutsuki's ideas on that front, so he doesn't feel the need to go into it.] Did any of them... ever mention who was leading their group during their first tangle with Shadows? I think so far, everyone else who's turned up from Iwatodai is familiar with a guy as team leader.

Man, that whole thing sounds like a mess. Good job with the surprise combat skills. One thing, though - where'd you get the idea you're bad at support Persona stuff?

[senpaidol]

I don't recall them mentioning a name, but it did sound like a guy from how they were talking. If Minako-san is anything like their old leader or Souji-senpai, I'd like to meet her, though.

And...well, I'm not bad at it, I just met someone who was way beyond me with it. You know the first thing she ever did that I saw was counter-hijack a robot inside the TV World from outside the TV World?

[leftbehindagain]

[That's too bad, but Minako-san will probably appreciate hearing how her friends are doing either way. He'll have to tell her later, if Rise doesn't bump into her first.] She's pretty great.

...Okay, that is impressive, I'll give you that. But how much of that might've been electronics work? Unless something's really different between our timelines, that's never been in your wheelhouse. Naoto's, sure, but not yours.

The other thing to consider is that their original case was one giant tower, and ours was several smaller dungeons. Of course she's going to have a bigger range. You don't need a big range. You need to understand people.

[senpaidol]

Hmhm, you seem pretty impressed with Minako-san~

...and like you're trying to cheerlead me. Thanks, Konishi-kun, but it's really not a problem. I've just got to push what I can do with Himiko the same way I've been pushing what I can do with Risette lately.

[leftbehindagain]

Stop it, Rise. [He really should have realised she'd pick up on that. He doesn't bother denying it, though - that'd only confirm it all the more for her.]

It's true, though. We wouldn't have been able to finish without you. ...None of us would have, actually - I think you were even Adachi-san's support person in his timeline.

[senpaidol]

Alright, alright.

[For now, anyway. No need to piss him off when she was just getting to know him.]

And...huh, really? I'm some kind of constant? I figured Naoto-kun would be everyone's Professional Detective, but other than that I figured most things would change if the Team Leader did.

[She does not exclude Adachi from this observation, and that's on purpose.]

[leftbehindagain]

[Good. Not that he expects Rise to drop the topic permanently, but at least he has some breathing room for now.]

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the details of how things panned out vary from one to another. The funny thing is that Naoto's basically recognisable to all of us - I mean, Kanji and I are used to her with an extra five months or so to get used to having friends, but still.