04-16-2018, 09:27 PM
There was something unnerving about looking up from the roof of a low-rise apartment building only to see the underside of another city over your head. Akira pondered that while flipping a familiar white mask over in his hands, staring at Tier 4 in lieu of the normal clouds he'd look at in a situation like this. Coruscant... it was strange. It was order and chaos all at once, a delicate dance between the lower fringe elements and the downright Orwellian upper tiers. Gangs and soldiers and police twirling along like figures on clockwork platforms, moving in circles and never really going anywhere, all while the people with real agency tiptoed between all three of them or nudged the motions of the gears to their benefit. Primes weren't quite a law unto themselves, but they had a lot more agency than the Secondaries that lived here. Even with that hint of real chaos, nothing actually managed to change. Days and weeks blurred together, and nothing ever really changed. The city moved like a machine, powered by the sins that Yaldabaoth had exploited to enslave Tokyo; the gluttony and lust of the drivers for guidance, the envy of the masses for propulsion, and those same masses' sloth to keep them tame. Coruscant was just as rotten as Tokyo, just with a different coat of paint over the surface of the rot.
Akira had learned quite a few lessons about how people thought in his time leading the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, but there was one he was remembering very keenly right now. To find the cause of a phenomenon, ask who benefits from it. In this case, it wasn't hard to point out that group; the Empire's Primes, especially the higher echelons of command like Palpatine and Dredd. To a lesser extent, the population of Tiers 1 and 2 benefited from keeping people on Tiers 5 through 7 downtrodden and disorganized, but not enough that they were all complicit in the situation on the lower levels; they wouldn't speak out against the system, but they also wouldn't stand steadfast against any threats like those directly responsible for the rampant blight on the lower Tiers would. The status quo kept them at a high quality of life, but it didn't actually gain anything from Tiers 5 through 7 being the way they were. As best as Akira could tell, they were like they were because the Empire benefited from having a seedy, blight-ridden underbelly to subtly force undesirables into.
Akira exerted a slight pressure on the white mask, cracking it down the middle to a disappointing lack of effect. The mask was, thanks to Omnilium, made of the same dream-stuff it always was, but breaking it utterly failed to bring forth his Persona. There was no blue hell-fire, no sense of power, no feeling of rightness like the act of breaking this simple white and black domino mask had always brought him. He'd always keenly felt his glorious purpose when he did this, the Vow that tied him and his Shadow together, and lent the latter the form of the Persona Arsene Lupin, Master Thief. There was no Vow here, though, no purpose and no Arsene, no Shadow at all. That, more than anything, scared Akira. Arsene was the source of his power, but it was more than that. Arsene was him. He was Akira Kurusu's Shadow, the half of his soul that he'd hidden from for 15 years before embracing it in that dungeon inside Kamoshida's mind. I am thou, thou art I, that had been the beginning of that Vow, and it had been absolutely true. That half of his very soul could be stripped away at Omni's whim... it made him afraid, yes, but more than that, it made him angry. He and Arsene, or rather Satanael, had killed Yaldabaoth for daring to impose its will on Tokyo, and then Omni has the audacity to part them? Binding fear and anger together was a simple resolution, the kind of knot-cutting declaration of intent that had made Joker such a bold Phantom Thief.
He'd just have to reach Omni and ask his questions in person, wouldn't he? There had to be a way to reach him, some path somewhere, but Akira was still painfully aware of just how small of a fish he was. Any path to the god of this universe would be fraught with at the very least as much danger as traversing Mementos had been, and that meant Akira needed a few things to accomplish that lofty goal. First and foremost among those things, he needed Arsene back, and to get that, he needed Omnilium. If you can gather enough Omnilium you can do anything, apparently, and Akira had yet to see anything that disproved that statement, so it followed that to re-connect to the Sea of Souls and start drawing on his Persona again, Akira just needed more Omnilium. The easy way to get more would be to sign on with the Empire, play into the system and use it for his own gain, but...
Show the strength of thy will to ascertain all on thine own, though thou be chained to Hell itself.
He couldn't go against his vow. The easy way would be a sacrifice of his own principle, his own justice, and that was literally not something Akira Kurusu was capable of doing. Sooner water would flow up a waterfall and pigs acquire pilot licenses than that; breaking that Vow was just a Thing Akira Would Not Do. Still, Coruscant was the only verse with this kind of verticality, and rooftops were a thief's best friend. Coruscant was definitely the best place for him to set up a home base, definitely the place he would have the most advantages, but he couldn't strike out independently. He needed a crew of allies, other people to support him. Confidants and comrades, other Phantom Thieves.
Or maybe, instead of a Phantom Thief, the Joker needed to become something else here. A Rebel. Joining a Rebellion had to be the right kind of interesting to earn Omnilium, and was far more in line with the Joker's character than swearing himself to the Empire. The only problem, then, was finding the Rebels. For obvious reasons, they couldn't just put up advertisements, not in an Orwellian dystopia... but the Dataverse was outside those regulations if you weren't accessing it from a Coruscant terminal, and a camera, tripod, and laptop with video editing software were ridiculously easy to come by when you could just summon them. "Let's see about making a video.
Akira had learned quite a few lessons about how people thought in his time leading the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, but there was one he was remembering very keenly right now. To find the cause of a phenomenon, ask who benefits from it. In this case, it wasn't hard to point out that group; the Empire's Primes, especially the higher echelons of command like Palpatine and Dredd. To a lesser extent, the population of Tiers 1 and 2 benefited from keeping people on Tiers 5 through 7 downtrodden and disorganized, but not enough that they were all complicit in the situation on the lower levels; they wouldn't speak out against the system, but they also wouldn't stand steadfast against any threats like those directly responsible for the rampant blight on the lower Tiers would. The status quo kept them at a high quality of life, but it didn't actually gain anything from Tiers 5 through 7 being the way they were. As best as Akira could tell, they were like they were because the Empire benefited from having a seedy, blight-ridden underbelly to subtly force undesirables into.
Akira exerted a slight pressure on the white mask, cracking it down the middle to a disappointing lack of effect. The mask was, thanks to Omnilium, made of the same dream-stuff it always was, but breaking it utterly failed to bring forth his Persona. There was no blue hell-fire, no sense of power, no feeling of rightness like the act of breaking this simple white and black domino mask had always brought him. He'd always keenly felt his glorious purpose when he did this, the Vow that tied him and his Shadow together, and lent the latter the form of the Persona Arsene Lupin, Master Thief. There was no Vow here, though, no purpose and no Arsene, no Shadow at all. That, more than anything, scared Akira. Arsene was the source of his power, but it was more than that. Arsene was him. He was Akira Kurusu's Shadow, the half of his soul that he'd hidden from for 15 years before embracing it in that dungeon inside Kamoshida's mind. I am thou, thou art I, that had been the beginning of that Vow, and it had been absolutely true. That half of his very soul could be stripped away at Omni's whim... it made him afraid, yes, but more than that, it made him angry. He and Arsene, or rather Satanael, had killed Yaldabaoth for daring to impose its will on Tokyo, and then Omni has the audacity to part them? Binding fear and anger together was a simple resolution, the kind of knot-cutting declaration of intent that had made Joker such a bold Phantom Thief.
He'd just have to reach Omni and ask his questions in person, wouldn't he? There had to be a way to reach him, some path somewhere, but Akira was still painfully aware of just how small of a fish he was. Any path to the god of this universe would be fraught with at the very least as much danger as traversing Mementos had been, and that meant Akira needed a few things to accomplish that lofty goal. First and foremost among those things, he needed Arsene back, and to get that, he needed Omnilium. If you can gather enough Omnilium you can do anything, apparently, and Akira had yet to see anything that disproved that statement, so it followed that to re-connect to the Sea of Souls and start drawing on his Persona again, Akira just needed more Omnilium. The easy way to get more would be to sign on with the Empire, play into the system and use it for his own gain, but...
Show the strength of thy will to ascertain all on thine own, though thou be chained to Hell itself.
He couldn't go against his vow. The easy way would be a sacrifice of his own principle, his own justice, and that was literally not something Akira Kurusu was capable of doing. Sooner water would flow up a waterfall and pigs acquire pilot licenses than that; breaking that Vow was just a Thing Akira Would Not Do. Still, Coruscant was the only verse with this kind of verticality, and rooftops were a thief's best friend. Coruscant was definitely the best place for him to set up a home base, definitely the place he would have the most advantages, but he couldn't strike out independently. He needed a crew of allies, other people to support him. Confidants and comrades, other Phantom Thieves.
Or maybe, instead of a Phantom Thief, the Joker needed to become something else here. A Rebel. Joining a Rebellion had to be the right kind of interesting to earn Omnilium, and was far more in line with the Joker's character than swearing himself to the Empire. The only problem, then, was finding the Rebels. For obvious reasons, they couldn't just put up advertisements, not in an Orwellian dystopia... but the Dataverse was outside those regulations if you weren't accessing it from a Coruscant terminal, and a camera, tripod, and laptop with video editing software were ridiculously easy to come by when you could just summon them. "Let's see about making a video.