herewardbound | IC Inbox for VRDR

"This is Phoenix. If you have this number, you're smart enough to know how to leave a message."

[All right, that's quicker than he anticipated. But that strikes him as a good sign.]

You're sharp. I suppose I should have expected that. What do you say we meet in person? At a place of your choosing, perhaps? After all, if we'll be fighting together tonight, we should at least say hello.

In person sounds good. Sushi?

Damn. Yes, please. Wherever you think is best.

[Wherever Phoenix proposes, Goro will arrive shortly after him, doing a great job of not staring like a tourist at what certainly is a giant bird.]

Really, it was the only sushi place he knew well. Inexpensive, but not bad. Sae had taken him here, a few times, as a treat.

To his credit, perhaps, he didn't seem all that bothered by the staring. "Trust me, I was more surprised than you were. Goro Akechi, right? Goro Akechi, nice to finally put a name to the face."

He offers his hand—just a hand sticking up out of a mossy green overshirt, no glove or anything. Shit, Phoenix is tall. "Yes, indeed. Pleased to meet you, Goro Akechi-san. I've heard so much about you."

The place is new to him. He's seen it back home, of course, but eating out has largely been out of his price range. "Shall we go in? I suppose I should have done this from the off, but I didn't want to. You know."

Seem idly curious. Which he did an astounding job of all the same.

"No, it's totally fine." He took the offered hand, shaking. "I get it. There's a morbid fascination with seeing how all these different iterations of the same story turned out, and I'm the one who took a hard left at the fork."

Maybe conveyor belt sushi wasn't the best... but it was nostalgic.

It's like being ten years old, shaking hands with an adult. Goro grips firmly, with a bit of a grin, resisting the urge to ask how Phoenix manages ceilings. "Less of a hard left than a quantum leap, by the sound of it. I've read the board."

That Phoenix chose to go to hell. He'll leave an opening, but won't pry. Holding the door, he steps inside; conveyor belt sushi is still pricey, and though since Morgana showed up (and started paying) he's eaten more of it, he still views it as a treat.

How Phoenix navigated doors, apparently, was 'duck'. "You don't know the half of it. If I had a hundred yen for every time I've been dragged off to another weird-ass spiritual and/or cognitive realm... I'd have enough for a day pass on the Subway. That isn't a lot, but the fact it's happened more than once is enough."

He took a seat.

The height difference is less pronounced when they're sitting—though not the beak. Goro starts fiddling with the soy sauce and disposable chopsticks, watching the familiar coloured trays swoosh past on the conveyor. "Not your first rodeo, then?"

More than one of these cognitive spaces? He'd like to hear about that.

"You could say that. If you've read the board, you know the basics, probably. Died, got resurrected for dumb fuckin reasons, died again. Woke up in a place not unlike this one, with the many worlds connected shit and the shared dream world crap. Went to Hell, though that one was, admittedly, my choice. It was that or death again, so."

He shrugged, and snagged a plate for himself.

Goro takes a plate too, one of the expensive ones with the pink border. It's ikura, salmon roe. He drops a teabag into a cup and makes some tea from the hot water spigot, before he begins.

"How'd you die? Actually, we're back to the howlingly personal, aren't we? I could tell you about my criminal record instead, if you like." He doesn't have a criminal record; he's too clever. Or at least, so he always thought.

Edited Date: 2024-05-03 04:06 am (UTC)

"Take a wild guess, but it rhymes with 'neato'." Gingerly, he selected a piece of his tekkamaki.

Mmh. Fish good. "Son of a bitch knew what I was planning the entire time, and he had countermeasures in his Palace just in case. Namely, a cognition of me..." He sighed. "And I never missed a target, right?"

He stiffens in his seat, his ikura instantly forgotten. "Shido killed you?"

you wont let the guy who was going to murder you leave to get assassinated at a safe distance man. Ren, who's so certain he has no future that he's built a Palace around that conviction to protect it.

"That's right. I worked for him for stupid reasons, tried to stop the Phantoms from changing his heart, lost, had second thoughts- and for that, his Palace killed me."

He stared off into space, for several seconds. "That's why I picked Phoenix. I cheated death. Not once, not twice, but three times. It's a miracle I'm here to have this conversation, and I do mean a miracle. Blind luck. I'm not betting on that kind of luck happening again. So, no matter who's under his thumb, no matter where that womanizing tapeworm's dug himself in- no more. Not one other person. Least of all Ren Amamiya."

The name wraps itself around him. Incredulous, he examines Phoenix's face, seeking every morsel of truth in the dark feathers, the savage beak, the hair so like his own, his mother's hair. The conveyor belt moves past them in plastic silence.

For all you know, there are five other Rens here with Palaces, mutters an inner voice, the one that stole and screamed and wanted to kill, the one that would have had its arms broken before it turned to others. But Goro's an old master, now, at knowing how and when to listen to that voice.

"How did you know? Not just because Akechis and Amamiyas go together, I take it."

"Just a hunch. An observation of trends." He seized a nigiri as it passed, contemplating for a moment. "As many people named 'Goro Akechi' lurk around here, a lot of 'other me' ended up working for Shido. The exceptions have involved someone else taking his place, or being trapped along with him in the same situation. Like Haru Okumura. Or Futaba. Or Sumire Yoshizawa."

He drummed his fingers on the table, frowning. "But I encounter a Ren Amamiya who's in that situation, wears a black mask, has many of the same issues with anger and violence that I have, and it makes me wonder how the deck's been shuffled, there? Who's in what I would perceive as 'Ren's' spot? And then you come into the picture. There weren't that many people involved in that operation. Myself, Raven, Falcon, and Crow, all with the same name, if not the same face. Futaba Akechi, whose brother is here and accounted for, and Renée, whose Goro Akechi is accounted for by way of being me. Ren's the only outlier, and he's alone. So when you came in mentioning being new and asking questions about the operation like you knew what happened. It was a guess. A pretty well-educated guess, but a guess just the same."

So that's Rose's story. He files it away; it's still not his business, until something makes it so. Nodding, he replies, "Perhaps I should have remembered what small communities are like. Then again, if I had, we wouldn't be having this pleasant conversation."

He picks his ikura back up in his chopsticks. Countless little orange spheres, all thinking they're unique in the world, if they think at all. "You say you're prepared to help. I don't mind telling you, I've been to the Palace. It's big, and it's intense. More than anything I've seen."

He frowned, but nodded. "I am. I have conditions, but I do have the Wild Card, and I've been beating my head against the brick wall that is Tartarus in an effort to make this shit work better with some success. What's the strongest Shadow you've seen in the Palace, if you've been? Lesser ones, obviously, not whatever his Distortion's feeding on."

"We got into the main building, enough to see Shadows below. Took on the first one we encountered. Before we even went in, I could tell it was overwhelmingly strong. It broke into a party of three—the central one was an Alilat, flanked by two Uriel. Sound familiar?"

Ice attacks on the one hand, swords and Megidolaon on the other. It had been tight. But Futaba had said she could get him through it, and she had.

There's no way he can lead a party that way, though. Not even close.

"No. Sounds like they're above my pay grade, but... with a team, I'm betting we could do it."

He purses his lips, hating the words even as he speaks them. "I'm betting we'd be a liability. I'm not talking about ordinarily strong Shadows. I'm used to those. These were like...."

And he shakes his head. Like standing on the beach, not with a ten-metre tsunami coming that you could pray to outrun to high ground, but fifty metres, a hundred metres, a thousand. Like looking up at the cloud across the sun, only to have a meteor be the last thing you ever see.

Yet Futaba did get him through it. "Alilat is a red obelisk, inscribed with the figure of a woman. A pre-Islamic goddess. She used ice attacks. Uriel is an archangel. He used mostly physical attacks, but also a Megidolaon at one point. I'd have been dead if not for Futaba."

He reaches for his tea. "In short, I need to get a lot stronger, and I need to do it fast. Crap, I sound like a shonen protagonist."

Edited Date: 2024-05-03 07:35 am (UTC)

He snorted. "I don't know how to tell you this, but as a Wild Card you're literally powered by friendship. You are a shounen protagonist. But... you're probably right. Dammit. I'm so fucking sick of being two steps behind the curve. Every time I feel like I've made progress, here comes a new fucking problem, winding up to kick me right in the fucking dick-"

Inhale. Exhale. "It's frustrating, is all I'm saying."

"I know the feeling." Reaching for another cup and teabag, he sets it under Phoenix's hot water tap and presses the button with a wrinkle of his nose. Shonen protagonist this... ugh, it's not like he hasn't thought it before.

"If we're going to talk about shonen protagonists, what about the power creep? I don't know if this is something you originally experienced, but every Palace I've seen—Kamoshida's, Kaneshiro's, Madarame's, Futaba's—has initially been almost more than we could handle. Almost. As if they tailor themselves to us to keep us out. As if we never truly made progress.

"Perhaps Ren's Palace tailored itself to Futaba's ability, and not to mine." Or perhaps it was down to something else entirely.

"Yet more support for my increasingly-plausible Theory of Narrative Contrivance." He sighed. "Which seems to work for everygoddamnbody except me. Can't help but wonder what I'm doing wrong, that I always feel like I'm outclassed and unprepared..."

"Narrative contrivance?" He leans in a little, thinking about cognition, and the public mood. "Is this to do with your musical episodes?"

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