2026-08-21: A Forest of Broken Glass
- Log: 2026-08-21 A Forest of Broken Glass
- Cast: Yanagi Nagisa, Pernelle, Saika Kikuchi, Tsumugi Kujaku, Kikuno Kisaragi
- Where: Shimokitazawa - Peacock Silk
- OOC Date: August 22, 2026
- IC Date: December 29, 2012
- Summary: Kikuno Kisaragi, former Apathy Syndrome and Homunculus victim, comes by to Peacock Silk to... thank... them, for saving her life long ago, and offering to help with anything they need as... repayment. Maybe they take this at face value and maybe they don't, but Yanagi has a brilliant idea about how this can help all of them.
(|======================= Shimokitazawa - Peacock Silk =======================|)
-================================================ Tokyo/Shimokitazawa Ward ====-
Peacock Silk roosts in a restored three-story Taisho building; the front is clad
with shiny copper in verdant green, interrupted by a slim front of brick,
suggesting the building grew together. A little lacuna brings one past Peacock
Silk's windows and into a suddenly-quiet enclosure - surrounded by traditional
burnt-cedar siding, with a flower bed, stone benches, trash and recycling (a
minor miracle in Tokyo) and a vending machine holding truly eccentric drinks,
served cold.
Peacock Silk proper takes up most of the street level of the building. The
entrance is not on the street, but a bit out of the way -- there is a door, now
barred and false, with a tiny placard (too small to be seen from any distance)
stating 'That Way' with a helpful arrow. The shop's entrance has double doors,
guarded by a wrought-iron gate featuring an Art-Nouveau outline of a peacock
with tail in full spread, standing atop a banner reading PEACOCK and SILK to the
left and right.
The store's interior is starkly modern: light wood flooring and white walls,
interrupted with the shop's goods, artisanal tools mounted behind the counter,
and - where a vast space of white makes an irresistible canvas - large pieces of
black-and-white art, rotating periodically. The register and checkout is on your
right as you come in, along with a small display of old-fashioned scales and
assaying tools, doubtless for show. To the entrance's left is a ramped platform
with stout wooden perches, several of different heights. The store's mascot, a
real live peacock, often perches here, peering in judgment on customers and
surveying his domain. (The bird accepts snacks.)
The back of the shop is ruled by a long counter, loosely split into thirds - one
space for glittering jewelry on busts and in glass cases and on twinkling
stands. Another for leather goods, white and black and brown and red; purses and
belts, chokers and bracelets galore. Towards the back, more complete outfits,
with several mannequins bearing signature pieces or unique offerings, often in
dramatic poses. The staff maneuver them now and then; sometimes when a customer
isn't looking.
Towards the far end of the shop, several changing booths have been formed from
interior dividers, holding the basics -- some room to maneuver, somewhere to
hang up clothes, and several mirrors to check yourself. Stepping right outside
of the changing voice is dazzling -- many of the store's modern track lightings
are skewed just so, producing a spotlight effect, like stepping out on stage.
Alone in the world. The perfect visual baptism to celebrate a new individual.
<Pose Tracker> Yanagi Nagisa has posed.
Yanagi is great at ideas.
Yanagi is less great at planning.
This is a side effect of having known for most of her life that she's going to die young. It's hard to do good long-term planning when you don't expect to be around for it. It's even harder if you've decided to embrace joie de vivre and live in the moment while you still can.
So, once she leaves Shinichi Nagisa's Atelier and returns home with her friends to Peacock Silk, she turns to them, smiles, and says:
"I'm going to have to do this alone!"
They already know why. She told them when she left the cafe that she entered with Shinichi's Homunculus that he agreed to meet her in the Atelier, but only if she was alone. After getting Pernelle to let her in, she spent a good amount of time inside before finally leaving.
It was morning when they all originally set out for Aoyama-Itchome. It's early afternoon now that they've returned. Yanagi takes the time to gather up some things and pack; she's decided that she ought to stay at a hotel for a while so she doesn't simply lead the Homunculus right back here by accident, and certainly money is no object.
"I know it will be inconvenient for you all, but I spent a lot of time scanning the Atelier. I'll be sure to leave all the important details before I go so you're still prepared," she says as she boards the mini-elevator. As it descends, and the others presumably circle the stairs around her, she continues, "The Homunculus is short-sighted, violent, and inobservant, but it's also paranoid. To get what we desire, we'll have to do a little trickery."
Ding. She smiles ruefully at the others as the doors slide open. "...And you know I'm not very good at that."
At least she'll need Pernelle to come by and visit for the help with getting into the Atelier, since Shinichi's Eye and Thread haven't yet been discovered. That aside, from here, someone who might be at Peacock Silk's main doors (which are on the side of the building) will be able to see them all--and they'll be able to see any visitor who might be peering in.
<Pose Tracker> Pernelle has posed.
Pernelle was torn. A bird of desires split in twain! A war within, writhing and wrecked! He tried his utmost to wear a straight face, but his overwhelmed emotions had him vibrating in place. Occasionally, his long neck retracted, and he squashed his head to his body, like a coiled spring trying not to blurt out with all his anxieties.
But he was a good peacock: no squawking, no screaming, no giving away the game, even as he escorted Yanagi to the Atelier and resisted the urge to follow deeper.
Now that she has emerged from her solo venture, he is looking quite a bit more normal, for Pernelle definitions of normal. Like he was never fretting at all!
"I do so love a good spot of trickery," Pernelle enthuses in his relief before he hops down the stairs. At the base of it, he puffs up, feathers ruffled to make him look larger. "For every effort you exude, I must endeavor exponentially!" He clears his throat. "Thus, we shall surely be in almost the same number of pieces by the time your game reaches its dramatic conclusion."
... But what if there was a visitor peering in?
Then Pernelle would stop, suddenly. "Ah, my apologies. I have my own responsibilities to attend to.
His head turns abruptly to the entrance, pupils shrinking, as he charges the door in an avian waddle-run, spreads his wings, S Q U A W K S:
"WELCOME, valued customer, to the arena of your grand reawakening!"
<Pose Tracker> Saika Kikuchi has posed.
Planning is one of them skills it does take some practice to learn.
If anything, Saika's had to do it too, though she *is* pretty good at keeping a schedule.
Descending the stairs surrounding the elevator, Saika drums her fingers on the bannister, keeping pace. "I like the way you put it, real elegant of you. Short sighted, violent, inabsorbent - excuse me, inobservant - but - BUT!" She raises an index finger. "To be fair, also paranoid."
"You gotta be careful with exponents," Saika tells Pernelle. "I got a logic puzzle you'll like if you're ever bored."
An observer through the window would see a very stylish Saika. Style-ish, anyway. Her hair is work in its usual two-toned-and-bleached-to-the-grave style: a Breton-striped long-sleeved tee is on the torso, artfully distressed near the abdomen and untucked. Over it a stitch-work leather vest, primarily made of black and what you could think of as 'standard level brown' but with a number of more subtle shades and one really eye-searing magenta strip at the left shoulder. (It also has something like five generous pockets.)
Below the hip is a four-part pleated skirt frankensteined - so to speak - together from at least three school uniform dresses. A blue-white plaid, a black-red-pink plaid, a plain black, and a houndstooth, all approximately the same size.
Fortunately she is wearing black leggings and boots under that, because it was already starting to become adversarial in terms of the density of patterns.
Her head turns when Pernelle zeroes in on a Presence. She does not try to butt in. It would be stupid to try and upstage Pernelle in his most solemn duty.
<Pose Tracker> Tsumugi Kujaku has posed.
In those moments as Yanagi more-or-less vamped out her plan and the others waited comfortably in the wings, Tsumugi Kujaku spends it largely slumped-back against a door, reading a book with placidity aplomb, as Pernelle tries desperately not to vibrate himself into spontaneous nuclear fission.
They don't look up from their reading as Pernelle struggles. And yet, as they turn one crisp page to the next, they offer to the morning air a simple thought:
"Kee-ow. Kee-ow."
Let it not be said that Tsumugi Kujaku is not willing to give voice to their beleaguered companions when they cannot.
Vivid green eyes only look up once, peering at Yanagi from the edge of their glasses and book alike as she is whisked away into the heart of her brother's Atelier.
"..."
A second passes in silence.
And then they turn to the next page of their tome, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
~ + ~
"None of us do this for the convenience of it."
click! click! click!
The sound of heels descending stairs fills Peacock Silk as its proprietor circles their serpentine way down to the main floor. Dressed today in something (relatively) simple and sleek, their shirt is a white poet's, sleeves properly puffed and front tie left scandalously untied; between it, their black slacks and high (silver-)heeled boots strapped rigorously with buckles and silver clasps, and the black, tailed waistcoat they wear, trimmed in vibrantly purple fur, they seem to straddle a strange line between grace and punk, a fact simply exacerbated by the simple, eloquent circular-lensed glasses they wear to complement their minimalist make up today.
"He's your brother," observes Tsumugi calmly as they breech that final step with a singular CLACK. "You should do with him what you want."
Which should be a positive, empowering observation, if it weren't for the implications in the lack of concern behind the tone that Tsumugi would be fine with literally anything Yanagi wanted to do with her brother, even possibly just leave him to be devoured wholesale by the cognitive parasite festering away inside of him.
But maybe that's positive, too, just not for some people.
After all, Tsumugi doesn't know Shinichi. Do they? He just has something they want, now. No. They're just interested in one thing, now:
"Will you be able to do it?"
A question that may or may not be interrupted by an unexpected arrival, heralded by Pernelle's mightiest S Q U A W K.
If such is the case, Tsumugi turns their head, and tilts it to the side.
"Kee-ow?"
and so it goes
<Pose Tracker> Kikuno Kisaragi has posed.
This is when the door jingles and then slowly swings open. A customer, surely, has graced the Peacock Silk this day.
...
The girl who stands there is not precisely possessing, compared to the attire of the staff within the shop. She's dressed positively monochrome: a white turtleneck sweater. A long black skirt, over black socks and black, boring, slip-on shoes. A black scarf hangs loosely over her shoulders, and under one arm she carries a black parasol. Standing all of five foot one inches in height, she's also not precisely stunning as far as her looks are concerned. Black hair, done into twin braids. Round glasses on a round face. Blue eyes that look like she's searching for a problem before it even arises. The only flash of color in the whole affair is the thin red ties on the ends of her braids. She looks the part of the sad, dumpy teenager verging on awkward adulthood.
But when she strides into the shop, there is purpose in her step.
Coming to a stop before Perenelle, she sizes the bird up.
"...Reawakening?"
Just in case, after all, there was any question about whether she can hear him.
"No, I've already awoken, thank you," she says, in the tone of voice that suggests she's perhaps not entirely pleased about that turn of events.
She lifts her gaze, sweeping it across the lot of them, her attention resting on each of them in turn.
"Kikuno Kisaragi," she says then, lowering her parasol against the floor with a soft tap. "That's my name," she adds then.
"You saved me once, didn't you? All of you..."
Is it mild irritation that ghosts her expression? Something's on her mind, but she shakes her head.
"You're Homunculus hunters. I suppose I should thank you."
Kikuno pauses, then says instead,
"And you must know there's another one of them around. I've felt him through my Persona. A student at Shujin High, if I'm not mistaken. Shinichi Nagisa."
That girl at Shujin had been quite helpful with filling in the little gaps.
<Pose Tracker> Yanagi Nagisa has posed.
Pernelle always worries and cares so much about Yanagi, and it's very sweet. She really adores him for that! He will definitely not be sad at all when she inevitably still dies young, if at least in early adulthood.
Yanagi has really not thought that through. Pernelle probably has not either.
"I know you will!" she chirps (as opposed to squawks) at Pernelle. "Take care of them for me, won't you?" She turns to Saika. "And you take care of Pernelle for me!" (As if Saika isn't always the one taking care of Pernelle...)
Saika's input on how she describes the Homunculus gets a giggle. "Thank you~! I'm just saying the truth, but I'm glad you enjoyed how I said it."
Tsumugi reminds them all that they're not doing this for the convenience of it. Yanagi faces them and gives them a muted smile. "True. There's quite a lot of inconvenience involved, isn't there?" she muses quietly.
That smile fades into a distant sort of look at doing what she wants with Shinichi, though. At the end of all of this, what does she want with him...?
That's a question to ponder further. However, she knows she does want to do away with that repulsive Homunculus. Thus, when Tsumugi asks their next question, there's no hesitation, and that distance is replaced by steely determination.
"I will."
Pernelle charges the door to bellow his welcomes. Yanagi blinks over her shoulder at him, then up at the one striding through the door.
"Hm?" She taps a finger to her cheek and tilts her head. "Hmmm..." There isn't recognition in her lead grey eyes when Kikuno gives her name; that only comes when she reminds everyone how she knows them. "Oh!" Yanagi brightens. "Yes, I remember you now! The one with the forest of broken glass! Very striking, that Atelier. Hello, Kikuno!"
She circles slowly with the support of her cane to greet her. Before she can continue, though, Kikuno tells Peacock Silk something they already know--or perhaps is assuming they already know. Yanagi pauses to consider her... and her Resonance.
The two of them are quite alike... "Another Navigator?" she murmurs, holding her chin.
<Pose Tracker> Pernelle has posed.
Each kee-ow sees the peacock pressure cooker release an iota of tension, elegant neck uncoiling just slightly. Pernelle does not explode -- not today -- and perhaps Tsumugi is who everyone has to thank for that.
And then, all is well! Inevitable what? No, no. All is well!!
"They will receive my watchfulest eye!" he promises Yanagi. "That is my left one, for the record."
Both eyes squint on Saika's addition to the manner of the Homunculus' nature. "Hm, absorbency has yet to be observed. But I fear that Giselle can neither confirm nor deny this aspect until the grand conclusion."
Pernelle begins to tippytap on his clawed feet at the promise of a puzzle. "Oh! Oh! I am the most bored a bird has even been! Do tell!"
This is, of course, a lie. Pernelle has never once claimed to be, or appeared to be, in a state of boredom. The neighbors suffer for his creative avoidance of such a condition.
He's squawking now. So is Tsumugi, if quietly, but Pernelle looks to them with a proud and noble nod. "Just so."
But Kikuno Kisaragi addresses Pernelle's word choice directly, and he hops excitedly from one foot to the other with a few excited flaps of his wings, such that the light hits his feathers and makes him glimmer in iridescence. "So you have! So you have! Welcome, welcome, to the waking world!"
Pernelle stops on one foot, oddly balanced and head turned toward the side as Kikuno cuts right to the point. Slowly, his other foot finds the ground as he rights himself.
"What precision! What pluck!"
Yanagi brings her own observation: a navigator.
Pernelle outstretches both wings.
"What providence!"
<Pose Tracker> Saika Kikuchi has posed.
"Style over substance," Saika answers Yanagi at her thanks-for-the-shoutout. She says it with a smile.
"You save these kinds'v questions up for just the moment, don'tcha?" Saika says to Tsumugi, just after the majestic SKREEEONK escapes Pernelle's paleozoic-grade throat.
Saika rests a hand on her hip, her fingertips tapping a steady rhythm there. It's on her right side. She watches as Kikuno comes in and squares up against the mighty bird. She's passed that vibe check, and Saika's shoulders relax slightly. Her eyes follow the parasol.
"You're welcome," Saika says, with a small smile. Then -- a Homunculus -- the small smile becomes a medium smile! (Saika is not yet showing her teeth. We save that for repeat customers and aspiring burglars.)
She walks out, trailing behind Yanagi. It gives her an opportunity to walk in a way that makes her look like a cool femme fatale (as Saika imagines) and instead mostly seems like she's being vaguely hostile. Were it a film, this is when Saika would pop her gum. Her skirt shifts in a way that might trick the eye into seeing a moire stillness in that moving slice of one's light-cone.
And Yanagi... finds a common spirit. Saika's eyebrows lift, and she tells Pernelle, "That's right, if we have two of 'em we can make them bid against each other. I'm fuckin' around," Saika adds, with a wave of her left hand before folding her arms and cocking her hips to the other direction.
"He's right about the pluck," Saika murmurs, "but now I'm wondering a couple more things... Do you go to Shujin yourself, Kisaragi?" (It is notable here that there weren't even implicit honorifics. Saika just slapped that name down like a block of tofu.) "Where's it at again?"
"School days are powerful sources of heartwarmin' memories that'll last a lifetime and shit like that," Saika asides to Tsumugi. "So that's a pretty good place to start if we want to find the Eye." She says this conversationally rather than with delight to match Pernelle's. Like she's suggesting a different lunch plan, but isn't ignited with passion for it.
Maybe that's just adulthood for you. (pernelle is in no sense an adult, other than the ones in which he is)
<Pose Tracker> Tsumugi Kujaku has posed.
You save these kinds'v questions up for just the moment, don'tcha?
Tsumugi Kujaku, having been asked this just as they channel the majesty of the peacock in solidarity, can only respond thusly:
"Mee-aw."
Which is, of course, a more affirmation kind of peacock sound, despite being dangerously adjacent to cat onomatopoeia.
In the aftermath? Their deadpan-curious squawk is met with a drab-looking girl draped in monochrome and decorated with what can only generously be described as a splash of color. Behind their own rounded glasses, sharp green eyes considers Kikuno for a few quiet seconds, Tsumugi's hand in their pocket and their head still tilt.
"Oh," they exhale emotionlessly. "It's you."
Do they recognize her? Just from that, from looking at her? Certainly they don't seem the type to really prioritize memories of the people they've all 'helped' so far. Ask them who Taro Nakata is, and Tsumugi would just blithely shrug.
And yet...
Either way, those three words are all they have to offer before Kikuno starts in on her introductions. None of that seems to catch their attention, though; it's what she says to Pernelle that truly draws their curiosity.
No, I've already awoken, thank you.
Not the words. No. The way the words are said.
Like someone who would just like to roll over and go back to sleep.
"..."
Green eyes stare at her intently for a few handful of seconds longer before Tsumugi pivots, back turning with the sharp -KLK!- of heels that sees them moving towards the (decorative, not actual) entrance of Peacock Silk and slumping against a window pane, gaze drifting to stare out into the winter skies beyond.
They fall into their comfortable quiet after that, apparently content to let Yanagi, Pernelle and Saika do the conversational heavy lifting. One might wonder if they're even paying attention to the conversation at certain points; they certainly wouldn't be in the wrong to be harboring doubts.
Which is why it's almost disarming how they so casually dispel any uncertainty as Kikuno talks about them being Homunculus hunters with a simple, sudden,
"No. We're Peacock Silk."
... an answer that could be almost infuriatingly pedantic and obtuse and yet is given as if the distinction means an entire world of difference.
They, of course, don't elucidate what that difference might be; they fall silent a moment thereafter, temple bumped against winter-chilled glass. Indeed, the most they say for a while is a dubious, "Isn't that a line from one of your manga?" to Saika as she talks about the HEARTWARMING MEMORIES OF OUR YOUTH! (or shit like that).
No -- they're a silent figure in the backdrop, looking a world away, up until this point:
I've felt him through my Persona.
Whereupon that hooded-eye gaze gradually drifts back towards Kikuno once more. Curiously.
"... hm."
No words are spared at the moment. But there's thoughts percolating there. Thoughts that Yanagi gives voice to, and Pernelle echoes interest in.
Another Navigator.
What providence.
<Pose Tracker> Kikuno Kisaragi has posed.
Oh, it's you.
"It's me," she answers Tsumugi, fixing them with a level gaze, for who else would she be but herself? Despite everything.
Welcome. Welcome, to the waking world.
Her expression grows rather more pinched, as if she's just eaten something rather sour and has opted to swallow it rather than spit it out. "Must you go on like that?" she wonders, eyeing him as he cavorts in his merriment. She, apparently giving up already, sighs.
Apparently, he must.
They're not the Homunculus hunters. They're Peacock Silk.
The look on Kikuno's face is positively bitchy.
"My mistake," she says, icy.
Her reply to Yanagi is similarly chilly. "Hello." It's hardly warm: clipped would be more accurate, like this girl is a coinpurse fit to snap herself open and closed as she pleases and nothing more.
Kikuno looks at Yanagi. She looks at her for a long moment, her expression hovering there somewhere between perturbed and curious.
But she shakes her head. "I barely remember any of it, up until the end. A glass forest, was it?" Her expression grows minutely more pinched. That's right, she does remember the heart of her atelier, of a copse surrounded by the cracked and broken glass of a shattered forest. She remembers that part, she remembers the death of the thing that tried to steal her life.
And she remembers what came after, of course.
Does she go to Shujin?
"No. I am a third year at Sevens," she explains. "I felt something strange while near some Shujin students and decided to investigate. That's when I was able to find him," she explains to Saika, barely batting an eye at the lack of honorifics. "Aoyama-Itchome, if you must know. That's where Shujin is." Sevens, she doesn't supply, is in Sumaru.
How nice, that might make her a classmate with the Detective Prince, depending on her homeroom. They probably get along swimmingly.
The fact that Kikuno is actually repeating her third year is something that they might have to find out for themselves later. They may already recall from the particulars of Kikuno's case that she had Apathy Syndrome prior to possession, and was likely unconscious when her Homunculus stole her body... until apparently, she'd woken up somewhere along the way.
Welcome to the waking world, indeed, for a girl who had spent about a year in a comatose state.
"He has some classmates who know him. They might be good people to talk to," she supplies. "There was one girl I spoke to, a Kanae Fuyuki. She had noticed the change as well."
She'd called out Shinichi's situation for what it was. She, too, has a Persona, a fact that Kikuno had noted upon meeting her.
"But I wonder... if a boy like that has connections at school at all."
She certainly hadn't.
"A..." Kikuno pauses. She purses her lips, thinking the phrase over. "A 'Navigator'. I... suppose if our talents are alike, that's what my Persona is," she says, airily. "All that I know is that my Beatrice grants me special powers." Ones that others don't possess, if she's been any judge to date.
How fortuitous, indeed. Just as one Navigator seeks to leave their fold, here comes another, just into the heart of their darkest of hours.
"Let me help you," she says then, the words a blunt instrument. "It took forever to find you, you know. But I suppose I owe you my life."
Such that it is.
<Pose Tracker> Yanagi Nagisa has posed.
"Hmmm... What does that make your right eye?" Yanagi wonders to Pernelle, who is otherwise willing to take him at his word that the left one is the watchfulest.
It is providence, though, that just as one Navigator is about to set off on her own-ish, another one literally walks right into the boutique. Yanagi tilts her head over at Saika, but she clarifies that she's joking about the bid, and Yanagi laughs.
However, when Saika jokes again, this time more directly at Kikuno's expense, her brows furrow in confusion. "No, it's the University Hospital in Shibuya, Saika. I know we haven't confirmed it yet, but don't you remember us talking about it?"
That's a freebie for Kikuno, unintentionally given.
Also a freebie, of sorts: how Tsumugi cuts in from how they seem to be otherwise ignoring the conversation to make that most important of clarifications. Yanagi may have told Shinichi's Homunculus that there are Homunculus hunters out there, and that is technically true since Kanae is a Hunter and she is hunting that Homunculus, but Peacock Silk is far more than that. Yanagi smiles fondly over at them and what they choose to make distinctions on.
(For her part, Yanagi wears an ice blue velvet dress that sparkles with silver woven between the threads. A matching silver semi-circlet crowns her head, with beads of white crystal, serene aquamarine, and bloody garnet on the side clips that hold her long, wavy hair out of her delicately made-up face. Garnet likewise studs her ears and throat, while crystal and aquamarine dangle at her wrists. White leather ankle boots adorn her feet, stabilizing them along with the polished walking cane she uses. She was wearing a fur-lined, hooded red cloak, but took it off and left it upstairs earlier.)
However, Kikuno is less amused, both by Tsumugi and by Pernelle. Yanagi considers her. "My, what a pill you are," she observes without rancor. That probably doesn't help any.
Still, when Kikuno confirms what her Atelier was (perhaps still is), she nods. Kikuno's additional information on where Shujin Academy is gets her an amused smile, though Yanagi doesn't explain what's so funny. (The freebie from earlier no doubt gave it away anyway.)
Instead, she replies, "You're stronger at sensing things than at fighting, yes?" It's a rhetorical question; Yanagi can already tell from her Resonance. "That's what a Navigator is."
At last, Kikuno makes a blunt offer they all can't refuse and wouldn't want to anyway. Yanagi beams at her friends. "How convenient! Does this work for you all?"
<Pose Tracker> Pernelle has posed.
"Mee-aw!" Pernelle repeats, as if by reflex, but in a most appropriate peacockish, squawkish manner. While to those awakened, Pernelle has a voice, and one he loves to speak with, sometimes he is simply -- and strikingly, he would like to add -- a peacock.
"Oh, wisdom!" Pernelle cries of Saika's discussion of Eyes and memories and school. Tsumugi has their own commentary, to which Pernelle amends: "Manga wisdom! Perhaps I should partake of such tomes?"
As for his right eye, Pernelle's response is without hesitation: "The judgementiest. Observe."
He whips his head around to peer at Kikuno from profile, training his right eye upon her in the way only an animal with eyes on the side of his head can.
"I must!" Pernelle declares of Kikuno's rhetorical question. Unless it was not, then she has her answer, plainly and enthusiastically.
"Hm, yes, I do suppose the entrance can be a bit tricky." That's not what Kikuno meant when she said they were difficult to find...!
Pernelle begins advancing on Kikuno, his head raising and lowering on his long neck, then finding a center elevation where it remains perfectly while the rest of him wiggles and gyrates about. Then he backs up, then he advances again. And so on, and so forth, in this bizarre, birdly manner.
When whatever this doing is done, he rises, smoothing out his feathers with a brief preen.
"She is like a knife through a shoji door. I like her," he finally decides, but he voices no objection nor confirmation. That is not his role.
<Pose Tracker> Saika Kikuchi has posed.
At the correction of their conception, Saika nods once in concurrence.
She sees that look on Kikuno's face.
*now* Saika is smiling in a way that shows her teeth.
"Yeah," she says. "It was a real shame. A lot of the fruit looked better than it does in real life... I still have a hard time shoppin' for grapes."
"My bad," Saika chirps at the correction on school assumptions. It's not like she goes to school, unless you count the library. Her eyes narrow slightly at the district name: there aren't *that* many schools in a given neighborhood. Blaze it into your soul.
Though at Yanagi's correction, her eyebrows lift and she shrugs her shoulders, in a look of 'you got me.' "I'll tell you what messed me up later." (Which will just be a matter of fact 'I was leading her on,' probably digressing into discussion of scenes in mystery/detective TV shows Saika has sometimes put on late at night.)
Saika's head then turns at the offer. "Ohh?" Back to Yanagi: "It *is* awful convenient, and sometimes you shouldn't second guess yourself." She clicks her tongue then: "So! Kisaragi, you want something to drink?" Ah, the hospitality arrives at last! "You can tell us about your experience dealing with Humors and Shadows and such, so we can figure out how this is gonna go."
Which, perhaps, *implies* immediate acceptance but didn't actually *say* it. After the offer, though, BEFORE Saika nips off to be the perfect little hospital house-punk, she looks at Tsumugi, though her eyes cut back towards Pernelle as he speaks his judgment.
("I didn't forget the manga thing," Saika adds, more quietly, directed towards Pernelle. This abrupt, possibly conditioned mollifying statement probably has a history behind it. A history that may involve hearing damage.)
<Pose Tracker> Tsumugi Kujaku has posed.
My mistake, says Kikuno, with a voice that could freeze a river.
"Yes," answers Tsumugi, with a voice that could keep flowing beneath the ice.
Their attention seems elsewhere, in some distant place just out of reach. But they are listening. And, from the peripheries of their vision, they are seeing. The minute ways Kikuno reacts to Pernelle's enthusiastic welcome in particular, layered beneath the ways she curdles at his (unstoppable, of course, he is Pernelle) enthusiasm in general. The way she closes herself off and says as little as possible in a way distantly familiar.
The way her grimace adds on to itself the second she recalls her Atelier.
The girl with Apathy Syndrome, who found a way back.
The girl who woke up when she was in the deepest possible slumber.
"... You know."
Of course they're paying attention.
It's just as sudden, those two words that cut in, regardless of where the ongoing conversation might be (it is, for the record, pivoting towards Shinichi, and Kikuno's equally abrupt offer). Their gaze is still affixed on the world beyond the glass as they speak; their attention, however, is unmistakably for Kikuno.
"An Atelier is a reflection of the owner. The things that matter most. The things they want to be, and do. The connections binding them."
thmp! goes the side of their head as it bumps on a clear, unbroken pane of glass.
"A forest of broken glass, blooming around a corpse. You had one of the most interesting ones I've seen."
The world snaps back into focus around them. They're talking about Kikuno. About the possibility that she take Yanagi's place in this exceedingly dangerous mission that could easily cost her life -- something she suggested, before any of them could even pitch it. Interesting. It's interesting, isn't it?
She gives a reason, and to most, it'd be a reasonable reason. 'I owe you my life.' But not for Tsumugi. In most circumstances, they'd be happy to point out that no one actual owes anyone anything just for something that happened incidentally. Do they owe her, for her circumstances supplying something crucial to all their plans? It's a silly idea, to them.
And yet...
"Okay," they say, instead of any of that. "You can join us. If you help us retrieve what we want, we'll consider the debt paid."
There are reasons, of course, why they don't bother to dismiss the idea of a debt. Perhaps most salient though is simply this:
She offered. Why wouldn't they take an advantage when they see it?
"But... before that. Before the drinks. Answer something for me first."
-CLICK!-
go those heels as Tsumugi slides like molasses off that sill edge. They walk forward, past Saika and her hospitality, past Yanagi and her charmingly blithe bluntness, past Pernelle and the sheer power of his judgmental right eye ("They call that 'chuuni'" they had idly observed at the moment of) -- until all that impressive height of them looms near Kikuno, those bright green eyes now staring directly, intently, into blue counterpoints.
"Why?"
Why offer something so dangerous? She already answered, didn't she? They let that single word linger for a second, as if to let Kikuno's imagination fill in whatever possible blanks there might be, before they clarify, simply, curiously:
"Why were you looking for us?"
<Pose Tracker> Kikuno Kisaragi has posed.
Pernelle turns his most judgementiest eye upon Kikuno, who... stares at him right back. There is the faintest of twitches by her own right eye. How, then, might someone like her measure up to Pernelle?
Given the flat look she's giving him when he speaks of the shop entrance, perhaps she'd rather not really know.
Kikuno's gaze flicks over at Yanagi. The University Hospital in Shibuya, is it...
She says nothing, her gaze sweeping over Yanagi as if it were her outfit she were reviewing and not her words.
Kikuno frowns when she makes that assessment of her. "So I have been told," she tells her primly. It doesn't help, but it may be possible to get the impression that she's just like this with... everyone.
This, after all, is her own transformation, to let out what she once held back. But she is able to be diplomatic. Indeed, she's positively diplomatic right now! Just ask Kanae, with whom she had been far, far more unpleasant.
Here, after all, she has to make a 'good' impression.
Yes, really, even when she meets Saika's teeth-baring grin with an expression of mild disgust of her own. Kikuno is a charming creature.
Her gaze slides then towards Tsumugi, as if to give this attempt at diplomacy a real run for its money.
"Is that so," she says. It's not a question. "I fail to see what I have in common with a forest of broken glass."
Like she can't already see it. Like she doesn't know what she's laid to rest at the bottom of her soul. Even before she'd woken up, then woken up, then woken up, there's part of her that already knew how this was going to go.
There's a reason why the Kikuno she's become is as manifestly unpleasant as a sliver of glass in one's foot.
She's better at sensing things and supporting people from afar than fighting, Yanagi probes further. "Correct," Kikuno answers, another click-shut of the coinpurse personality. When it comes to fighting, she's better of not doing that. Outside Beatrice's talents and other... abilities, that is.
"Hmph," she huffs, when Pernelle compares her to a knife through a shoji door. But it could be worse, it could be a hot knife through a shoji door. Then there'd be a fire, for sure...
"Water is fine. Tea, if you have any," she says, and there's something to the way she says it that suggests she'd be expecting the good tea, and not crap. "As for my experience..." She shakes her head. "With Shadows? Barely, outside some forays into Mementos and the Dark Hour. It's not easy to find someone else's Atelier. So I've had to make do, I suppose. As for the rest..." Kikuno waves her hand. "Only what I've been able to find online. It's been a pain."
Finding them, by implication, has only be moreso.
There's just one question for her, one question punctuated by the click of those heels and Tsumugi's descent from the sill. Why was she looking for them?
"Why wouldn't I? You're the ones who saved me." Whether she wanted to be saved or not.
For a time, there in the cocoon months ago, she had thought it was fine to sink into oblivion and let the thing that wanted her body and life to have them. Maybe it would make a better go of it than she had -- it could hardly do worse.
Now and then, she wishes she had let go. It might have been better in the long run.
Her gaze turns heavy-lidded. "Besides... I don't want to see someone else get eaten by one of those things." She purses her lips, regarding Tsumugi. "There. Is that enough reason for you? Or shall I dig deeper?"
<Pose Tracker> Yanagi Nagisa has posed.
The judgementiest. "Oh my!" Yanagi gasps, hand splayed over her mouth. She leans in to peer keenly when Pernelle eyeballs Kikuno with that judgementiest of right eyes. "You're right!! So judgementy!"
(Are these people for real? Yes. Yes, they are.)
Pernelle likes Kikuno's pill nature, though, and Yanagi giggles at him. "She is like that," she fully agrees.
Saika shrugs when corrected. "Oh? All right," she replies, suspecting nothing. It's fine that she hear about it later. (Later, when explained, Yanagi will say, "Ohhhh." Maybe she will feel a touch of embarrassment for not realizing at the time, before moving on.)
But: "You're so right," she says decisively about not second-guessing good luck. This is cemented when Tsumugi agrees to accept Kikuno's debt.
However, rather than join Kikuno, Saika and the others for refreshments, Yanagi leans carefully down, supported by her cane, to grab the handle of her wheely suitcase. Once she's upright again, she doesn't go immediately for the door; the -CLICK!- of Tsumugi's heels draw her eyes, and she regards them curiously before looking at Kikuno for her answer.
One of those answers is that she's been told she's a pill. Yanagi sparkles. "Oh good, so you already know!"
She is being 100% sincere. A lack of self-awareness is painful for everyone around the one who lacks it.
Of course, then Kikuno tries to claim that she doesn't know what she has in common with a forest of broken glass. "Oh. So you don't already know," Yanagi says, openly disappointed.
For the rest of the answers she gives Tsumugi, though, Yanagi falls silent. She furrows her eyebrows at the reasons she lists. She looks at Tsumugi, Saika, and Pernelle in turn; then she shrugs.
"Well then, I'll leave it to Kikuno to guide you all. From the start," she adds in clarification. In other words... "We'll compare notes afterwards!"
...she's not leaving them the information she gathered after all.
It'll be more realistic that way, right? And this way, Kikuno can get some solid experience in Shinichi's Atelier with Peacock Silk's back-up, and Peacock Silk can can get the full measure of just what Kikuno can do as a Persona User.
And if Kikuno dies in the process, oh well.
With that, Yanagi leaves one last warm smile for her friends, then tap-tap-taps out the door Kikuno had just entered. Once outside, she'll call a taxi and wait on the bench.
<Pose Tracker> Pernelle has posed.
Pernelle resumes preening himself, his once attentive (watfulest and judgementiest) eyes no longer peering into the conversation, as if he is no longer a part of it. Occasionally, his train feathers rustle in delightful, subtle percussion.
Toothy smiles. Broken glass. Debts.
"How magnanimous!" Pernelle declares as Tsumugi determines Kikuno's help sufficient payment. "Or, hm. No, perhaps the price is proper and balanced under the circumstances." He eyes Kikuno in his musing. "We will see, we will see..."
He follows Yanagi all the way to the door to see her out, looking up at her with bright, big eyes and giving a nod in silence that serves as a good luck, as acknowledgment that she does not need it, and as farewell all.
To his credit, the vibrating only begins after Yanagi has fully left before he springs back open and pops up beside Kikuno.
"Now! What was all this about tea? I have a sparkling stash just for the occasion!"
Pernelle is going to put glitter in Kikuno's tea.
Welcome to Peacock Silk.
<Pose Tracker> Tsumugi Kujaku has posed.
I fail to see what I have in common with a forest of broken glass.
"Is that so?"
they ask.
It is, absolutely, a question.
And yet, despite casually questioning her truthfulness - or perhaps, questioning her own awareness of herself - Tsumugi seems utterly nonchalant about bringing her aboard. A matter of convenience, maybe. In fact, out of everything they could ask to probe into things, to be certain she's on the level, Tsumugi has only one -- and one only, seemingly, tangential to the matter at immediate hand:
Why look for them?
Isn't it obvious? The first answer is something anyone could have assumed. 'You saved me.' Who wouldn't want to find the people who saved their life?
And yet Tsumugi is still silent in the wake of it, one hand in their pocket, looking down at Kikuno almost expectantly, in a way that makes it infuriatingly hard to say what they're actually expecting. It's a feeling that only deepens with the way the cant of their head sends thick black bangs tumbling over one eye, making the other seem all the more intense for the obfuscation of its opposite number.
That silence, that feeling, is Kikuno's sole company until her gaze lids, until more reasons find her. This answer, too, is a familiar enough refrain - one that Yuuki, in fact, had offered them not that long ago when they inquired about her motives. Reasonable. Practical. Virtuous, even.
Is that enough reason for them? Shall she dig deeper?
"..."
Quiet lingers, as Tsumugi maintains that eye contact. It's only when Yanagi looks their way that Peacock Silk's co-founder turns their attention elsewhere, towards their exiting Navigator as she offers her thoughts in the form of a shrug. And with that--
"Why ask me?"
Tsumugi comfortably turns, other hand finding its way to the only unfilled pocket of their pants as they follow after Saika.
"You're the only one who can decide how deeply you really want to dig."
It's not really an answer to whether it's 'enough' for Tsumugi. Maybe the fact that they don't pry any further is answer enough, there. Maybe the important parts are the unspoken things like that.
Or like how they both, intentionally or not, agreed there was deeper she could dig.
Regardless...
"Ciao. Have fun, Sa-ya."
Kikuno is in their care now just as much as they are in hers.
Kikuno Kisaragi has temporarily joined the Peacock Silk party!
She gains KEY ITEM: Glitterbomb Chai!