Sneak Attack

Minako Arisato really did think of herself as a patient girl. Prided herself on it, really. She very much preferred to be the calm, happy, aloof social butterfly most of her schoolmates knew her as. Sure, sometime a bit of brutal honesty or maybe just a bit of manipulation was necessary to push her friends in the right direction every now and then. But for the most part she just had a love for listening, getting to know people, getting to watch them grow and overcome their personal demons. Sharing in the joys and pains of life with and slightly narcissistically through her friendships was Minako's secret for coping. To say life had been unkind to her was putting it mildly. Both parents dead, ten years of foster homes and bouncing between schools. On top of that, she was haunted every night by a ghostly landscape out of a bad gothic horror movie, filled with coffins and crawling monsters and a pale green moon that was far larger than it should have been. Time had given her more answers and more power, exposed her to allies and given her a purpose. But every connection she made was something more she could lose, and so she fought all the harder to climb the nightmare tower and solve the mystery of the Dark Hour. And she had lost some things. They all had. Really, fate had burdened them more than any of them could possibly deserve, and Minako's self-imposed efforts to carry those burdens for her team were frankly exhausting her.

But they had made progress. Just recently Yukari Takeba had overcome her own jealousies and reached out to Mitsuru Kirijo to help her cope with a recent betrayal and the **** of her father. Minako felt a weird sort of pride in that event- to be blunt, Yukari had her own set of dead daddy issues she'd been conquering. Strange how the thing that had driven her away from the group early on was what had compelled her to reach out to her senpai now. Of course, Minako suspected there was more to that story than one stubborn girl finally reaching out to another. Its not that Minako disapproved of them clearing the air by taking a breath together. No, no she very much appreciated the view either way. Minako just suspected...okay, really really hoped, that there was an ulterior motive or two hiding in that invitation.

After all, magical compulsions or not, Yukari hadn't exactly put up a fight when taking that shower in front of him.

Minako paused. Him? Shower? She'd been with Junpei at the love hotel that night. And yet there it was, seared into her brain as vividly and intensely as the image of Junpei had been.

Minako growled softly to herself as she clutched her small bath towel and trudged forward through the endless steam. The ground beneath her feet felt like the rocky bottom of the bath, and the water that sloshed at her knees felt the same temperature as before. But the steam should not be so thick, and in any case they should have found an exit or a wall or a changing room some time ago. But as worrying and embarrassing as it might be to be stalking around some mystery bath in a towel, the real horror of the situation was dawning on her inch by inch. It felt like piecing together an intense dream. She remember this place...or a place like it. In fact, to her growing embarrassment she was starting to understand that she remembered TWO places like it, except half those experiences didn't belong to her! And while she lacked an evoker to confirm it, she was now quite certain she could feel the proximity of her other selves waiting in her mind, looking out through her eyes....her other self was awake and alive within her. This was a place where she could call on her Persona, like the Dark Hour.

This was a Labyrinth. She was growing more certain of it by the minute. And that sense of deja vu in itself was a disturbing mystery. None of them were supposed to remember the Cinema Labyrinth. And she was DEFINITELY not supposed to remember the Festival Labyrinth! Just what was going on? AND WHY WERE THEY ALL NAKED?

It was in the middle of these thoughts that a sudden, intense burst of pain thwacked her firmly in the ass. Someone out there in the mist had thrown some kind of projectile at her! As she spun around, two more deadly projectiles...were those bathhouse buckets...gave Yukari and Mitsuru a sound spank on the ass in turn! Someone was attacking them!

Not far from SEES position, the Investigation Team was raining hell on the vague forms of people moving through the mist. The group entered the Labyrinth without so much as a towel to guard their modesty. And thus they did the only reasonable thing an embarrassed, naked girl could do when a pervert (apparently) has a way of retaliating from a lightning strike by obscuring everything in fog ("how original" Marie was muttering). They dug in and fortified their position. Now the enemy was sighted, and the girls were now following standard operational protocols for being seen naked. The bucket bombardment was underway...