2026-01-27: No Promise of Safety
- Log: No Promise of Safety
- Cast: Rin Sasaki, Ayame Watanabe
- Where: Aoba REI Hotel, Aoba Ward, Sumaru City
- OOC Date: January 29, 2026
- IC Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2012 (Afternoon)
- Summary: Ayame presents Rin with a choice she didn't know she had -- but there's no avoiding the risk involved.
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
>can we talk?
This is the text Ayame abruptly received earlier today, from a number that has otherwise been inactive since she put it in her phone -- when she traded contact information with a Rin Sasaki, who was bolting from a thing that was most assuredly not human, but wore the face of Rin's husband all the same. The address and room number that was provided in the following texts has brought Ayame to a room on the second-highest floor of the Aoba REI Hotel.
It takes several moments after Ayame first knocks on the room door before Rin opens the door, and she is...not looking her best. Bare-faced, her eyes are bleary and somewhat bloodshot, her breath smells strongly of alcohol and nicotine, and she is wearing a simple pair of sweatpants and a man's t-shirt that is far too large for her, with the words 'KEIO UNIVERSITY' printed on the front.
"Oh, um. Watanabe-san," she starts, blinking a few times. Embarrassment is written plainly written in her face, to be seen in this state. "It's -- already four?" It is. "Sorry, I, um..." She's looking for an excuse. There isn't one. "Sorry," she repeats again with a wan smile.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
Ayame answered the text in short order--not immediately, but soon. She can make time for someone in Rin's situation. ...And she would be surprised if that situation magically fixed itself while she wasn't looking, in fact. But she made her way over at the time they agreed on when Ayame responded, and...
Knock knock. Ayame is more dressed, wearing a blue top and jeans, with flats. She notices the smell of alcohol immediately but doesn't comment on it for the moment.
"Hello!" Ayame reports warmly, and then nods. "It is."
She shakes her head. "It's all right," she says.
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
Rin does not feel that it is all right, and desperately wishes she could find an excuse to ask Ayame to come back in another hour. There isn't one, of course, or at least not one that wouldn't be terribly, transparently rude after the other woman took time out of her day (again) for a complete stranger. So Rin simply steps aside to allow Ayame inside in the small hotel room, then locks and chains the door behind her.
The inside of the room is small, although still more spacious than what Rin could have had for the same price in Tokyo proper; enough space for a working desk and a small table in additional to the other essentials. The desk is taken up by a laptop and multiple stacks of questionably-organized paper. The table is completely covered with takeout cartons and empty and half-empty bottles of sundry alcohol. A lit cigarette is still burning in a mostly-full ashtray, which Rin puts out as she passes by.
"Please -- ignore the mess," she asks, still embarrassed. There's a chair at desk and another at the table that Ayame can take. Rin herself takes a seat on the floor, leaning heavily against the wall with a slow exhale. She is perhaps not drunk, but it's likely she's been nursing a steady state of modest inebriation most of the day. "Last time -- you talked about the supernatural," she says simply, bluntly opening that part of the conversation.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
Ayame is good at being polite, but she wears her emotions on her sleeves sometimes; she notices the state of Rin's dress, and she notices the state of the room. She can't really deny either; they show on her face. She walks in, and looks for a place to sit down when Rin lets her in. Eventually, she'll find the chair at the table, and sit down in that once Rin's taken her spot on the floor.
She does her best not to wrinkle her nose at the smoke, but she has something else to focus on in short order anyway. "Yes," Ayame confirms once she's taken a seat. "The supernatural."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
"OK," Rin responds quietly after a moment to collect her thoughts. She intended to have her notebook she's been keeping track of all this to hand, but she also intended to have the room cleaned up and not look like a miserable slob. How is it four already?!
The one silver lining to her current state is that she's just a little bit too tipsy to second-guess herself as much when talking about these matters. Or maybe it's the effect of having now seen a 'Persona' summoned and active for long enough that her mind can't trick her into thinking that it was a simple illusion or trick of the light or magician's act. The sense of energy that was in the room...
"Thus far I've -- aside from the Homunculus," which she spoke of herself a little last time, when Ayame insisted on knowing what was wrong with the man that Rin was fleeing from. "I've heard of Personas, Shadows, rumors that become reality, and..." She blinks blearily. The downside to her current state, and without her notes to hand, is that some of it has blurred together a little. "Oh. The Dark Hour," she adds after a moment of thought. With the dramatic description she was given of it, it seems strange to blank on that one.
Rin cycles a slow breath, because she is entirely ready to hear that there is actually even so much more of the supernatural that there isn't any overlap. "Does that sound -- at all like the things you know about?"
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
There's a lot of things that don't quite match up when plans meet reality. Ayame at least hasn't commented on any of the mess... But maybe that's worse, since she's too polite to say anything. But...
"Personas, Shadows, rumors, and the Dark Hour," Ayame confirms. "Yes."
"Yes, all of those are things I'm familiar with. I have a 'Persona' myself," she confirms. "That's why I can sense things like the Homunculus so well, and experience the Dark Hour when it happens." Pause. "You haven't felt the Dark Hour, have you? ...Most people don't; they just go from midnight to twelve-o'-one like normal."
"Depending on where you go there's also demons, which are--creatures of myth and legend that sort of... mill about in certain supernatural spaces, I've found. They're quite dangerous, but unlike most Shadows, you can talk to them."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
Rin breathes a little sigh of relief when Ayame confirms that she's familiar. Even if there's enough out there for people with multiple years of experience to not know all of it, it's at least some small comfort to her inebriated mind that it's beginning to sound like maybe some of the basics are consistent...
"The gods aren't around, too, are they?" Rin asks abruptly, without entirely meaning to. No one's mentioned them yet, but if the supernatural exists, that suddenly seems like something very important to know -- even if she lacks the qualities to experience much of what else has been presented to her. "I, um. I'm probably in more trouble if they are..." she continues with a wan smile. Religion has never meant much to her, but that calculus changes if divine beings literally exist along with the monsters.
"No," is her response to Ayame's question about encountering the Dark Hour directly. "Just -- been asking a lot of questions." But there's something rattling around. A warning if she ever did experience the Dark Hour that she's trying to remember. "Oh, ah," she begins. "Uchida-san at the KDA mentioned that during the Dark Hour, the Homunuculus can exit their coffin and attack? That she had to run from it..." Now Rin is a little uncertain, in part because she doesn't know if she's simply repeating something Ayame already knows, but Tamaki spoke of it as if it was a surprise.
But there's another question that's been weighing on her mind, even if she's already been told once that there's no known safe method of Awakening. "You said before you were able to help your husband when he was targeted by the...Joker Killer," she remembers that name after a moment, her face a little downcast. "Was that also because you have a Persona?"
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
"I mean, I haven't seen any show their faces," Ayame says of the gods. "But some Personas and demons look like them." A pause, and a smile. "Well, I've seen no angels insisting on punishing the guilty, so I think you'll be OK."
But Ayame hears--no. Just questions. Hmmm. "Oh, that's..." Exit their coffin and attack? "Ah. Then I'll definitely want to avoid that," she says, "Particularly alone."
"...Yes," Ayame confirms. "That's correct."
"Without my Persona, there was really nothing I could do but leave it to everyone else..."
"But with it, I could fight the Joker Killer directly. I still didn't exactly win," she admits. "Certainly I wouldn't have alone. But I could do something, at least."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
'Without my Persona, there was really nothing I could do but leave it to everyone else...'
"That is also what I have been told for--" Rin begins quietly, pauses, clasping her hands tightly in her lap to try and prevent the nascent trembling from starting. Because, for her, all the bits and pieces of the supernatural come back down to the one thing. "Regarding the...creature," she spits the word like a curse, a flash of hot anger bubbling up to join the tears that are suddenly threatening to collect at the corner of her eyes, "that is possessing my husband."
She cycles a slow breath, trying to keep herself together this time. "That there's nothing more I can do, beyond identifying the memento that serves as a -- key, I suppose, and taking it to a 'lonely place' that was important to my husband to activate it. But beyond that, I am...we are both at the mercy of strangers," she finishes, speaking both of herself and her husband that is the one afflicted.
"And I hate it," she adds, the feeling of helpless frustration creeping into her voice. There's a long pause. "How -- how did you come to possess a 'Persona', Watanabe-san?" she asks, as if hopeful that there's some answer for her that she hasn't heard yet.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
Ayame listens; she understands that frustration very well, actually. "...I see."
She looks sympathetic, at least; Ayame folds her hands on her knee, sees that anger, and...
"It's terrible," she agrees. "But I just... well, when I was in danger, my Persona arose. I'm not sure how else to describe it."
She considers. "It's a risk," she says. "I can't guarantee we could protect you. But would you like to come along, when we go for... well, when we do what it is that we need to do?"
"It's not the same as being able to act for yourself... But I'd feel better that than just sitting at home waiting."
"It's up to you. I'll argue it to the others, if you do."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
A risk. The words weigh heavily on Rin's mind, bringing back also the words of the Rumormonger -- that knew of no 'safe' way to Awaken.
"I don't --" she starts, when Ayame asks if she would like to come along, but that they can't guarantee her protection. Her eyes widen, her face goes pale (more pale), and she shrinks into herself a little. "I-I don't know." It's as if the anger and frustration of a few moments ago have suddenly been sucked completely out of her, replaced by a sudden wave of visceral fear. It isn't just the descriptions of danger that she has been given, but the crawling, sickening sensation she experienced that first night she fled her home, as if Ayame's offer has somehow brought it to the forefront of her senses again.
That terrifying feeling of being hunted.
"J-just..." Trembling. It's so easy to make bold declarations when the prospect isn't actually real, isn't it? Like a small dog barking from behind a closed fence, suddenly retreating when the gate is opened. "Just come along to some sort of -- mindscape filled with monsters and hope for the best?" Rin finally looks up and into Ayame's eyes, as if trying to read her intentions.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
Ayame sees it; Rin knows enough to know that it very much isn't safe. That feeling...
Ayame nods. "...In short, yes," she annswers. Ayame is entirely sincere, to look at her; her eyes are steady, her expression calm. "To be honest, I don't think it's a /good/ idea," she admits. "It would be dangerous for you, and we'd have to protect you, which means more danger for us, too."
"But..."
"You have the right to be involved," she says simply. "That's all there is to it in my mind. I'd prefer to keep you safe, but if you want to be directly involved, I'll support you."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
A small, shaky, nervous laugh at the back of Rin's throat. "To be -- entirely honest," she begins. She can't stop shaking now. "I, um. I'd maybe hoped you might know of a -- I don't know..." Because, of course, she doesn't know. Everything she has learned thus far has only revealed the breadth of her ignorance of the world. "The secret initiation ritual or...something," she finishes, a little lamely.
She's felt the pressure and energy when a Persona was summoned into the room, watched as its tendrils reached meters away to physically procure an object and return it to the summoner. And of course been told more than once, including just now, about how necessary that power is to fight and be protected against supernatural dangers.
"Who is 'we'?" Rin asks, abruptly, still looking Ayame in the eyes. The idea that it would make it more dangerous for the other people involved also weighs on her mind -- it's weighed on her to have to ask for aid at all, ever since she was told that even those with power encountered mortal peril, fighting the other Homunculus -- but in this very moment, how much of that is her own fear speaking?
"Maybe. Maybe. Just..." There is something about the idea that keeps her fixated on it, rather than dismissing it out of hand. As Ayame put it, the idea of doing something rather than sitting around. "I would have hoped to do something useful, and not a detriment..." She smiles weakly and finally looks away again.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
"Unfortunately..." Ayame can't think of one. She's never connected the silly games she played as a child with having a Persona now. But, well...
"I have some... friends, who deal with these matters together. I don't know how may of them you'd have met by now. We have a private detective, a police detective, a reporter, and a couple of ordinary people like me, among others."
But...
"Unfortunately," Ayame says, "I don't know enough about Homunculi to know what would be useful. Maybe someone who knows your husband--the real him--would be very helpful to have with us. But... I'm not sure."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
Despite everything, Rin can't help but to notice how Ayame has implicitly offered her own aid, and potentially the aid of her allies, without even so much as a direct request for it -- despite the danger that is inherently involved.
She pauses and lets out a long breath. "That's not...the first time a similar idea has been raised to me," she says in regards to the potential usefulness of someone that knows her husband.
She curls a hand tightly. "But we..." Ayame can see as Rin tries to form the words once, twice, three times. And each time it's as if they're stolen from her before she can form them aloud. There's a tension in her eyes that goes beyond the fear that she's been grappling with. "Maybe even then I would be -- more of a harm than a help," she finally admits, without detailing why she might think that.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
Ayame wants to help. That was true when they met before, and it's true now. ...But it's not just because she's 'nice', or because it's 'good'. She's been helped before, in such things, when she couldn't do anything herself. To pay that forward is... important to her.
But, "Hmm." Not the first time...
But Ayame looks sympathetically at Rin as she says what she does. "It's hard to really know someone else," she says. "Even someone you're very close to... isn't it?"
"I couldn't say if you do," she says. "I don't know you or your situation. ...But..."
"I'm certain you know him better than I do," Ayame settles on. "Or any of the rest of us."
"And maybe better than you think, too. Maybe."
She sighs. "...I thought my husband was having an affair, not too long ago," she offers. "For all that I know him so well, I still worried there was something going on I couldn't understand. But it turned out to be something completely different."
"...So you never really know, until you know."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
"That is...also an idea that has been raised to me," Rin says quietly on the subject of an affair. "By a close friend, not by someone engaged in the supernatural," she clarifies after. "And it would fit, and I -- I was worried, before, when I had only been told that there hadn't been a successful intervention for someone possessed by a Homunculus," she continues, the words suddenly coming out in a tumble. "That I might need to know for...legal ammunition." Pause. "In the event I was left legally tied to a monster wearing my husband's face."
Because, of course, divorce in Japan without a mutual agreement is not an easy matter -- and she already knew the creature would not give her one.
"But I don't care. I don't care if he was. Maybe he should have, maybe he should have found someone that isn't br--" Her eyes go wide and she stops herself short before she finishes that sentence. There's a pause before she finishes. "I just want him to be alive and that -- that thing to be dead," she finishes, once again speaking the word like a curse, a quiet hatred bleeding through.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
Ayame nods. "That... makes sense," she says, but there's a but'. The 'but' is that it's awful!! "Right."
Ayame listens, and says, "Then we'll do our best for you," Ayame says. "Whatever it is you decide on the other matter... I want to help. I can't stand by and let you suffer. And let your husband suffer, for that matter. ...No, I won't," she settles on instead. "...Assuming you're all right with that."
<Pose Tracker> Rin Sasaki has posed.
"Yes; yes, of course," Rin responds quickly when Ayame mentions if she's all right with it. She cycles several slow breaths, tries to dial back into the practical and focus on the details that were already relayed to her. Not nearly enough time has passed for her to be entirely sober. "As it was told to me, the...Homunculus inside the mindscape -- the 'Atelier' -- is even more dangerous than outside it, during the Dark Hour. That the last Homunculus required a number of -- Awakened, to combat successfully."
"I intend to take the key -- the 'Thread' -- to Uchida-san at the Kuzunoha Detective Agency soon." And of course, this is all entirely strange and bizarre to her, but it's an entirely welcome distraction from the previous thread of conversation. "As I understand it, it is required to enter the Atelier, which is done from an...internet cafe? They said something about 'being alone together,' but..." But she is still inebriated and doesn't have her notes in front of her.
"Thank you, Watanabe-san," Rin finally says. "For your help. And I will...let you know, on the other matter." Because she can't think about it more right now. It's simply too much.
<Pose Tracker> Ayame Watanabe has posed.
Ayame's not going to press farther into Rin's business than she has to, certainly not unwanted--but she can tell this is a complex matter, even before the interloping Homuculus comes into play. "Hmmm, all right," Ayame says--then she brightens. "Oh, good. Then... I'll stay in contact." It's strange, bizarre, but Ayame seems to take these parts in stride. "Very well."
Ayame smiles, though it's not a happy kind of smile. "You're welcome," she says. "...Yes. I'll be waiting for your message." She stands up--making to go.