(Untitled)

[badbadbathhouse]

Oh gracious, I turn a blind eye for just a sexond and the second post fills up! Darlings, sweetpeas, do please forgive my tardiness. I bring you now our third installment of the fantasticousity, and would indeed love to, ah, beg your pardon in being so late about it.

SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI: PERSONA 4 KINK MEME
PART THREE

In this scintillating post

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Interlude 19 [1b] - Naoto

[anonymous]

One of the first tricks she had learned from her grandfather was taking in information without trying to process it, to store a memory of what was written to be called back at a later time. That was what she had been doing, internalizing the words and saving them for later. But her lack of understanding of the German article forced her out of the trance, and she began to scan the other articles on the page with increasing fixation.

"Two Hikers Find Dead Cardinal In Own Backpacks."

"Bank Clocks Run Backwards."

"Raining Baseball Hats in Seoul."

If she had been inclined to think less of Detective Dojima, Naoto would have entertained the thought that the articles were the scavenging of a deranged mind or an elaborate practical joke. But she dealt in logic. She shook her head, continued photographing, continued flipping through. There was time to analyze the why once she had absorbed as much of the what as possible.

Still, when Dojima called ten minutes later to say that he was returning home, Naoto closed the folder and slid it back to its place with a sense of relief.

---

Two hours later, Naoto was sitting at her computer in an old t-shirt, her knees to her chest and her brow furrowed. Had anyone walked in and seen her, she would have looked for all the world like a teenage girl confused by some trivial thing online, but she found herself starting to seriously question the sanity of Souji's uncle.

The newspaper clippings - and she had managed to reconstruct some three-quarters of what was in there, making it highly unlikely that she had missed something of vast relevance - were not limited to Japan. Nor were they confined to America, or even to languages that Naoto could immediately recognize. Nor, for that matter, did they seem to directly relate to the day of Chisato Dojima's death. Half of them seemed to be far older than even Souji himself, dating back to the same cluster of dates in 1991. The whole mess made no sense.

Souji had asked her to look into what had happened to his aunt, and all she could find was a woman that didn't exist. And now she went looking for his uncle's information about her, and that didn't exist either.

Indeed, she was starting to wonder how solid his uncle's sanity was. He had been carrying around an entire folder full of nothing but erratic human interest stories that sounded to be one reliable eyewitness away from the tabloid market. The idea that there was any sort of connection between the nonsense therein and the passing of Chisato Dojima was purely ridiculous.

Still...

Naoto squinted. There was a connection, she knew it. While she gave very little credence to groundless intuition, working as a detective built a certain sense of interconnection, a picture of how tied together everything was. And she had the sense this was just such an occurence, that if she just peered a little bit closer - or if she could step outside of her place a bit more - if she just had the right perspective, everything would fit together perfectly.

The irony, as she sat there thinking and wishing, was that the only person with the necessary perspective to explain everything was Chisato herself.