Chapter Text
Awareness Level: Zero
There was a red and black tunnel.
(She didn’t wonder how she knew what red and black were - she remembered her elementary school lessons).
Electricity crackled behind her, as Clio called forth the power she had been granted, sending it at the Shadows in front of her.
(She didn’t wonder about or remember how she’d gotten there, though. Or how she knew what Shadows were. She just - knew).
The Shadows screamed.
Meanwhile, the second the battle ended she vanished back into the depths of Nagisa’s mind, without complaint.
(After all, she had just been… born? Dredged? Summoned? Distilled?)
She didn’t mind it.
(How did you describe in a single word what Igor and Merope had done? How they’d helped Nagisa Kamisiro plunge directly into the Sea of Souls then fished up him, before stitching together a hodgepodge of a thousand mismatching concepts and impressions of Motoha Arai into something that resembled a human?)
The Phantom Idols were making Nagisa feel - kind of off-put.
Moto summoned a blast of electricity that made his skin tingle from twenty feet away (it was weird, seeing his classmate - well, a cognitive copy of his classmate - fighting monsters in a parallel dimension. …maybe he should find a new way to put it, though.)
(After all, he had started fighting monsters in a parallel dimension at the behest of a talking owl that turned into a hooded ghost. Then, he’d gotten a vision of an ex-baseball professional pushing a mother and her baby down the stairs, been told the police wouldn’t do anything until it was too late because they - and everyone else - were getting the will to do anything sucked out of them. So, unless he wanted to let the Subway Slammer continue his mild rampage that was going unchecked because it was so mild, and causing far more damage than it seemed because it was going unchecked… he would have to reenter said parallel dimension, to steal a Treasure from a psychological fortress that looked like a baseball stadium).
So, do what I always thought people who discover magic is real in books should have done. Take things at face value, stop saying things like “how is this possible”, and hope that one day I don’t wake up in an asylum-
Then, Moto, Puppet, Mont, and Key turned to him, and he stopped dead at how…
…okay, no putting a pin on it.
It was scary how lifeless they looked.
They moved. They talked. They definitely fought, maybe even better than he did even with just one - Persona - Two - each, compared to his three.
He - well, he was trying, but - it was strange. Seeing their faces filled with emotion one moment when he talked to them.
When otherwise, they were just… whenever they did, there was energy in it, but - the only way he could think of to describe it was that there was no energy in it.
As Lufel might put it, there was no desire in it.
Or in them.
It…
…he’d looked in mirrors before.
Comparing the Motoha Arai he knew… to the person he was fighting with…
It was like looking in a mirror.
The person in it only moved when you did.