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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.]]

Comments

[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."

[lakebrat]

Huh. He takes his eyes off the pour, glancing up at Ren; the water continues to move in perfect circles.

"That's interesting. From what I can tell, most people sadly underestimate poor Lotus."

[willowandoak]

"I'm pretty sure Lotus doesn't care." He rests his weight more comfortably against the counter. "But yeah, it was wild. His god thing was, like, the size of the whole country. And they had to shrink it little by little so they could finally kill it and stop it from eating everyone. He said its name was. Uhh."

Fuck. "Us... badden. Maybe."

[lakebrat]

The stream of water almost wavers out of the filter, before he gets it back under control, staring at Ren. The whole country.

"Us badden?" he tries, in English. Then he attempts to put it into Japanese, for Ren. "Seriously?"

It tried to eat the whole country. Somehow, Goro thinks he should be more shocked than he is. "It clearly didn't win, at least."

[willowandoak]

"It always loses, until it doesn't." And then the rest of them won't be around to comment on it. "I think I said the name wrong. I can ask him to text me it, if you wanna know."

[lakebrat]

"Do. It seems like something we want for background. We know about all the others we ... know about." Finishing up the final pour, he brings out two cups and saucers.

"I wonder how many there have been. And the world still standing. Or if it wasn't, if it was repeatedly changed, somehow—could we even tell?"

[willowandoak]

He unlocks his phone and sends Sam a quick series of texts.

"Does it matter? The world we have is, like—it's not that it's not fucked up. But it it's not broken like Maruki or Yaldabaoth want it to be. So it can't have been that bad, if it happened. Or maybe it fixed itself."

He doesn't want to believe any of the alternatives.

[lakebrat]

Goro brushes the edge of one of the saucers with his fingertip, as if checking for dust. He doesn't need to tell Ren what their world is like; Ren knows it better than he does. He's heard rumours that Yaldabaoth is already to blame for the indifference of society, for its shallowness and cruelty, but Goro knows he can't be responsible for it all. After all, where was he when Goro was a child, when the whole world crushed his mother, while the Inaba and Odaiba events were taking place? Where was he when any of them were children?

"Yeah," he agrees, taking up the carafe so it doesn't seem too much like he isn't looking at Ren. "I guess all our luck had to go somewhere, right?"

[willowandoak]

"Yeah. It could always be worse. We could always have a Maruki world."

Having gotten the fae god's name from Sam, he replies in turn and turns his phone to show it to Goro—just in time for Sam's text to appear. I really should say hello to him. Check out this paragon of yours.

Oops.

[lakebrat]

The corners of Goro's mouth jerk up. Paragon. Really. "Sounds like my reputation precedes me."