Chapter Text
April 8th, 2009.
Makoto Yuki, ???
I was never much of a dreamer. One of the side-effects of being a natural night-owl, I suppose. Any dreams I did have, if you could call them that, were when I was younger, and they were often bizarre and unfocused. Green skies, writhing darkness, twisted metal burnt black, and blood-red mist, the sort of thing that resulted in several prescriptions that didn’t work.
That was one of the reasons I ended up being passed around from family member to family member (among many others, I was told), until it eventually became routine. Spend a year or so here, my custody would be given to another family member, spend a year there, repeat, like some divinely mandated cycle.
It was only after a full decade of this, when I ended up in the care of my great uncle, that the wheel ceased turning. As it turned out, the Kirijo Group had given me a full scholarship to their sponsored private school - that included boarding - several years prior as a show of support for the incident that killed my parents, something all my previous relatives had neglected to mention for one reason or another.
Not wanting to burden the kindly old man with raising a second, older orphan in his advancing age, and with a mostly clean bill of mental health, I elected to take their offer and return to what was once my hometown. He could get me out of his hair in good conscience and focus on my younger cousin, while I was out of the way and getting a quality education at Gekkoukan. Everyone wins.
Really though, after the events of last night, my sleep being infiltrated by a blue elevator big enough to fit an entire house should’ve been expected.
“Welcome to the Velvet Room,” the strange, long-nosed man with sunken yet bulging eyes before me said in an almost whimsical affectation, somehow spoken through an unflinching grin of white teeth. His hunched posture was silhouetted against the ornate cage-like wall behind him, occasionally illuminated more harshly by passing floors. “My name is Igor, and I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”
Igor, as he was apparently called, then gestured to the other party in the space; a young woman who looked my own age, dressed in a similar deep blue to the room itself, a leather-bound tome thicker than most phone books I’ve seen resting in her hands. Curiously, her eyes were a piercing, unnatural gold that practically gave off their own light, and her hair, crowned by a cap that reminded me of my cousin, was a brilliant platinum.
“This is Elizabeth. She’s a resident here, like myself.”
“Pleased to meet you,” the woman in question waved with a kindly, energetic smile. Compared to Igor, her appearance and mannerisms were much closer to what registered as ‘normal’ for a human, though the glow in her eyes still gave away that she was… something else.
“This place exists between dream and reality, mind and matter…” Igor continued, not missing a beat. “Only those who have signed the contract can enter such a place”
A cyan light shone from the middle of the velvet-covered table that sat between the impish man and myself, congealing into a small document wallet. I already knew its contents before he opened it with a wave of his hand, having seen it the night prior.
Time never waits.
It delivers all equally to the same end.
I hereby agree to the statement above,
and I chooseth this fate of mine own free will.
Signed, Yuki Makoto.
“From now on, you shall be welcome here as a guest in the Velvet Room,” announced Igor, his long, bony fingers clasping together as he adopted that hunched posture once more. “You are destined to hone your unique ability, and you will require our assistance to do so.”
The way he said ‘unique’ gave me pause. I was far from a unique person, perfectly average in almost every sense of the word, cruising through life like flotsam upon the sea.
“I only ask one thing in return…” asked the pointy-eared man, who I noticed looked and sounded more and more like some Faustian agent by the second. “Abide by your contract, and assume full responsibility for the choices you make.”
It was then that I was reminded that I wasn’t a mere passenger in this exceptionally odd vision, but an active participant, fully lucid and with control over myself. I had questions, many, in fact, but one stood out above all the rest.
“...Is this a dream?”
“Yes, and no,” Igor answered paradoxically. “You are fast asleep within reality as we speak, this visit of yours being merely a dream. However, you will come here of your own accord sooner or later.”
There was another congealing of light, this time closer to my end of the table. Rather than the contract that the child prisoner encouraged me to sigh, it took the form of a key, coloured the same brilliant gold as Elizabeth’s eyes.
“This key here signifies that you are a guest,” the attendant said, taking the reins of the conversation. “Take good care of it, for it is what connects you to this place.”
Then, the key disappeared in the same flash of gold with which it manifested, though something told me it was safe, wherever it was. My eyelids began to grow heavy after that, and as darkness began to settle within the ethereal space, the pair gave one last farewell.
“Until we meet again…”
“Until we meet again…”
April 9th, 2009.
Makoto Yuki, The Velvet Room.
“Ah, so we meet again,” a familiar voice said, bringing me forth from the darkness of unconsciousness.
My second foray into the Velvet Room was on significantly less tranquil terms, the sapphire door practically rising up to meet me as I collapsed from exhaustion the following evening. Despite the circumstances, there was something comforting about finding myself within the room once more, even though I was never one to care about whether I lived or died.
“Oh, so it was Orpheus that heeded your call?” Igor mused, a pleasant warmth and a melody of strings filling my mind as he spoke the mythical lyrist’s name. Then his bulging eyes peered deeper, and I felt a second, far colder presence flare up from within the flame of Orpheus; violent and wrathful, discord made manifest. “I see… How fascinating.”
It was then that I noticed that his cloth-covered table yet again had something on it. A pair of cards; one face up, another face down. The former bore the image of a vagrant followed by a dog, marked with the number ‘zero’ at the bottom, whilst the latter was marked with the symbol of a mask, divided vertically between a ‘light’ and ‘dark’ side.
Igor waved his hand, and the first card lifted itself off of the table, facing towards me. Its image shifted, no-longer now merely a card, but more like a window, revealing the face of Orpheus, itself a copy of my own, staring back at me on the other side.
“He is a power that is known as a Persona,” Igor explained. “Your alter ego made manifest, or your psyche given form. They are the personalities that we project forth into the world beyond ourselves, like a suit of armour or a disguise you put on to confront hardship. Your power is to take that part of yourself, and make it literal.”
“So Orpheus… is me?” I asked, trying to comprehend Igor’s impassioned rambling.
“Indeed,” Orpheus’s voice - which both was and wasn’t my own - reverberated, speaking both through the window of the card and coming forth from the depths of my mind. “I am Thou, and Thou art I.”
“That said,” Igor continued, the card made inanimate and made to join with its face-down partner as they flew above Elizabeth’s opened book with another swish of his spider-like hands. ”Your power, and thus, Orpheus’s power, is still weak at the moment; isolated and stymied.”
The presence of the second card - and the raging being that lay within Orpheus it likely represented - went unsaid.
“As luck would have it, you have the ability to strengthen your power.” Elizabeth began, slamming her tome shut before re-opening it to reveal no less than twenty cards hovering in the same space. “The power of a Persona is the power of one’s soul, and as you overcome hardship and forge bonds with others, your soul will develop and foster the growth of your Persona abilities.”
If I was understanding things correctly, Orpheus was my "other self," a literal projection of my personality fueled by my soul. With the life of ambivalence and drifting from place to place I’d led up to that point, it made sense then that he was weak, because I was weak.
Again, all that did though was draw attention to the thing that lay dormant within me. It possessed monstrous strength, utterly butchering the Shadow that had previously all but ignored Orpheus’s attacks, yet was completely ignored in the conversation. Like before, I didn't question it; there was likely a reason Igor had neglected to broach the matter.
“Now then…” said Igor, pulling me from my thoughts. “Time marches ever onwards in your world, so I shouldn’t keep you here any longer. Next time we meet though, you will come here of your own accord.”
Yet again, the room began to dim, and the weight of exhaustion settled on my eyes. As the space receded into the dark around me, the two occupants of the Velvet Room spoke in unison once more.
“Until then… Farewell.”
“Until then… Farewell.”
The last thing I saw before I awoke was the gold of Elizabeth’s eyes, peering through the darkness.