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[lakebrat]

Hello. You've reached Goro Akechi, known as Frog. Please leave a message.

[Beep.]

[[ooc: WARNING that threads with willowandoak may contain unmarked NSFW. Tread lightly. Blame Sunflowren.]]

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nsfw

[willowandoak]

"Yeah? Should I get the lube?"

Listen. Will that thing stab through his intestines and kill him slowly? Yes. Is he gonna back down? Absolutely the fuck not.

nsfw

[lakebrat]

"After dinner. You're going to need some pushback in there."

Rather than wait for Ren's response, he brings out a carafe, and starts the kettle for coffee—wicked grin firmly in place.

nsfw

[willowandoak]

...Goro's probably bluffing.

"Can't wait." He plops down at the counter, mourning his future ass. "I already ate, but I can always have seconds. Did you know you can make a sandwich out of sausages?"

nsfw

[lakebrat]

"Oof," says Goro, weighing out coffee. "Topical."

nsfw

[willowandoak]

Ren snorts a laugh. "Yeah. You put a few in a row, drizzle 'em with sauce, and then swallow them down."

nsfw

[lakebrat]

"Isn't that the wrong way around?" Sojiro, he thinks, would nail him to the wall if he heard them having this conversation at the counter.

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[willowandoak]

He tilts his head. "Depends, I guess. I can see it both ways."

He leans forward. "I'm serious, though. I thought it'd suck, but it was actually good."

[lakebrat]

All right, all right. He taps the filter to level it all out. "So not like a hot dog, you mean? A sandwich with a row of sausages?"

[willowandoak]

"Yeah. Like, bread. Thin little pieces of unsweet bread, with sausages cut in half, and butter and red sauce."

[lakebrat]

"Red sauce? You mean ketchup?" That would make sense, since it's basically a hot dog. "Was it good?"

[willowandoak]

"Yeah." He sounds so baffled that it almost comes out frustrated. "It sounds so weird, but it was great, actually. I wanna make one."

It didn't exactly look hard. Fry some sausages and you're pretty much done.

[lakebrat]

"I wonder if they'd be good on the menu." They'd be novel, at any rate, and their clientele is starved of novelty.

"So he used English bread and sausages? Where did he get it?"

[willowandoak]

"He just got it from a store. There's a new little hallway off the Velvet Room with a door to turn of the century Oxford in it. Which I guess is where his Persona thing happened."

[lakebrat]

"Really." Goro pauses over the coffee, eyes shining. "You mean we can go to England now."

Turn of the century England, if anything, sounds even cooler. And, if Ren has heard of Oxford, Goro definitely has. "What was it like? Don't say old."

[willowandoak]

Ren, who had been about to say old, closes his mouth and wrinkles his nose at Goro. "Everything was in English, and some of the streets were made out of rocks. But mostly it was just like a town, I guess? If the town was in England, and if no one used a cell phone and all the technology was bigger and kind of shit. I didn't see any of the school, we got spat out around his flat."

He doesn't know you can't get through the Oxford door without Sam, so he doesn't know to correct Goro on that part.

[lakebrat]

Which is a bit of a shame, because Goro is getting excited. "Cobbled streets! I'd love to see Oxford. The school there is one of the oldest in the world."

Abruptly, the kettle whistles. He jumps, distracted, and grabs it for the bloom pour. "Did you say he goes to school there?"

[willowandoak]

"Yeah, he studies English lit. He got all excited when he saw me with Shakespeare. Oh, and he said your petit fours were better than his grandma's. And the curry blew his mind."

He doesn't quite realize it, but his delivery of Sam's compliments carries a strange undercurrent of desperation. Though he's not thinking about it consciously, the logic goes like this: If he keeps bringing home nice words and news about cool happenings, Goro will stick around forever, and then Ren will never be left behind as a walking ruin. The plan is perfect, if he can say so.

[lakebrat]

Ren's distress penetrates his excitement with long, cold fingers. He looks up, over the carafe, as the stream of steaming water pauses.

"Better than his grandma's. Well, that's quite a compliment." Better not to make a big deal of it, too. There will be another way to draw Ren close again. "What did you make of him, in general? It's weird that we've had two English speakers arrive, all of a sudden."

[willowandoak]

He makes a brief face at the mention of the Other Guy, but it clears quickly enough.

"At least Satyr is one of us, just weird. Sam is some totally new guy from his own freaky Persona event." He stops to consider the question for a second. "I dunno. He's dumb as hell, but he was smart too. Privileged guy with a good life, except for the evil god thing. Out of his depth with the murder shit.

"He was chill, though. Fun, once he stopped taking everything I said so seriously. Just, like. When he wasn't dropping insight you wish he didn't have or naming every explosive known to man, it was all, 'What's wrong with adults?' 'I can't sell cognitive world loot, someone will arrest me.' 'I need my team lead here, how will I know what to do?' He needs people to look out for him."

[lakebrat]

Naming every explosive known to man? Goro double-takes over the coffee. "Explosives? Sounds like you two will get on like a house on fire."

But he's smiling. "So... he's like Ryuji? But academic."

[willowandoak]

He nearly gives a flippant response, but then he thinks about it. "Yeah, kinda. If Sakamoto grew up with money and nothing bad happened to him until he went to college. And if he was good at school."

And if he was dating Goro. But Ren keeps that one to himself.

[lakebrat]

It's hard to imagine Ryuji detached from his puppydog heart. Without the hard road up that made him so much more than a thoughtless idiot, even if it took Goro some time to appreciate him.

"You said he was insightful," he wonders aloud. He knows better than to think there are no good rich people; he knows Haru. But it was Haru's suffering that made her like them. "Is he useful, do you think? Or more of a liability without his leader?"

[willowandoak]

"Liability isn't how I'd put it," he says slowly. He rests his arms on the counter, avoiding the... thing. "Maybe in a real urgent situation. If he has a minute to wrap his head around something, I think he'd do okay."

[lakebrat]

"I suppose that's all we can ask." He lowers the kettle again, begins another pour, resisting the urge to come around the counter. "You didn't hear anything about his Persona, anything like that?"

[willowandoak]

He shakes his head. "We talked about cognitive stuff, but it was mostly about evil gods and shit. He had some kind of fae thing, he panicked when I mentioned Lotus."