(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 [2] - Ryotaro

[anonymous]

1991

Ryotaro Dojima stared at the young woman across from him incredulously. He was only twenty-two, and a mere beat cop at that, but he knew when someone wasn't telling the truth. The woman's light brown hair was straggly and unkempt, and despite what seemed to be her best efforts, her eyes darted around nervously. Her story about being from Tokyo was holding less and less water.

"Your name again, please?" he asked, casting his eyes down at the incident report form and clicking open a pen.

The woman hesitated for a moment, but it was enough for Dojima to notice. "Satou. Satou Chisato." She fiddled with her hands and bit her lip.

"Tell me again what happened, Miss Satou."

"I... I came here for a job interview. From Tokyo - there's no jobs there, too many people."

Dojima clicked his pen restlessly and made a "go on" motion with his hands.

"I got off the train at Yasoinaba, and a man came out of nowhere, and grabbed my purse. The strap broke, see?" She pulled aside the collar of her shirt to show an angry red welt.

Dojima raised an eyebrow. This "Chisato" was filthy and bone-thin. Her collarbones stuck out, and her hair was a rat's nest. A runaway, he thought. She looked seventeen at most, and the pressures of high school were all too demanding. He had an idea that perhaps it had gotten to be too much, and she had bolted to Inaba, where no one would know her. Either that, or she was a perp. But why a criminal would come to a police station, tear-stained and begging for help, was beyond him.

"You look as if there was an altercation."

"Well, yes. He- he knocked me over. I fell into the dirt."

You fell in the dirt more than once, Dojima thought. You slept there. He lifted up the phone, preparing to call his superior, maybe ask him to check a few recent missing persons reports.

His finger hovered over the "PAGE" button when he felt light fingers brush his hand. Bold woman, he thought. No woman he'd ever known would have enough sense to do that to a strange man, let alone a police officer. He looked up and saw, underneath that dirt-caked, flyaway hair, the most radiant smile he had ever seen. A realization cracked through Dojima's head at that moment. She may not be from Tokyo, hell, she may not even be from Japan, but she looks like she has the sun inside her.

Dojima wanted to get closer to that warmth. He put the phone down slowly.

"I'm going to do some research, ma'am. See if we can get a lineup" (this was a lie, as Chisato had described the "robber" in the vaguest, most general terms) "and then see if we can't find this purse-snatcher." Dojima flashed his best smile back at the woman, knowing it was a pathetic farce compared to her glowing countenance. "Do you have a place to stay?"

When the woman shook her head, the young policeman answered, "I'll see if we can put you in the drunk tank for a few nights. It's not too comfortable, but, uh..." He trailed off at that smile. Her face was nearly shimmering at this point.

"That will be fine. Thank you, Officer Dojima."

---

After seeing the newcomer to the cleanest cell in the basement, Dojima yanked open his desk. He had to take care to act as naturally as possible; since he was so low on the totem pole at work, he shared a cubicle with three other men. Rustling through his files, he finally found a plain, unused manila folder. Using a red Sharpie, he wrote "SATOU CHISATO" in bold, jagged hiragana - he'd never even asked what the kanji for her name was.

It was time to do some research.

---

Over the next week, Dojima scoured missing persons reports and newspaper articles. There was no mention of a Satou Chisato gone missing anywhere in Japan. This did not surprise the young officer; for one, not all missing people are reported as such. And, secondly, Dojima had a nagging feeling that Satou Chisato was an assumed name. Nevertheless, he took any missing persons registry or wanted notices he could find of anyone even remotely resembling Chisato and plunked them into the folder, alongside the names and numbers of all the Satou Chisatos he could find in local phone books. He had researched these people in the database, but none of them were even close to Chisato's profile. He kept the numbers anyway.