[This... was going just about as well as he could've thought it would, actually. Ryuji's shoulders slump downward, seeing the frustration in Hajime's features build up to a fever pitch. This was a bad place to be in, for both of them.]
H-hey, calm down for a sec! I know it doesn't make any goddamn sense and I'm doin' a really shitty job of explaining. But it's not all that crazy, right? There are goddamn ghosts on this station, people get trapped in walls, weird signals gettin' sent to our devices.
[And he does... feel bad, particularly at the thought of crushing Hajime's view of him, because he knows he's doing it right now. That if he thought Ryuji was just absolutely some dumbass dork who dropped in from a different version of Tokyo--- well, that's still true--- but the circumstances around it were all based in the supernatural to begin with.]
I guess it's kinda dumb starting at the end and working your way backwards, so maybe I can start from the beginning? [Would that be worse? He looks on at Hajime, worried for him. For his sake, actually. He would never want to hurt him, and that's one of the reasons he was avoiding this conversation to begin with.]
Me and my friends are Phantom Thieves. Ren and I discovered a world that exists outside of the bounds of reality... where peoples' thoughts and desires take material form. People that are particularly messed up have really strong uh... cognitions... of themselves, and what we've done over the last 8 months was basically... going in there and stopping them from being shitty people.
And in order to do that, you have to steal what's corrupting them to begin with. If you steal their desires away from them, they go back to who they were to begin with, and confess everything that they've done. But if you go in and destroy a piece of what's guarding that desire, they become mentally unstable and shut down. That's what happened to Haru's dad. Akechi was being forced into doing it as part of a larger plot against us.
[That's as good as he can explain the situation, but it still feels like it's not exactly hitting home something more important--- and his gaze rises up to Hajime.]
I'm sorry. I wanted to tell you the moment we became friends. But the last time I talked about this stuff out in the open... I put all of us in danger. And I can't do that to them again. [And then, adding on-] And I don't wanna do that to Akechi, either... now that we're all here and he's getting a second chance at being normal. It's... man, it's complicated.
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H-hey, calm down for a sec! I know it doesn't make any goddamn sense and I'm doin' a really shitty job of explaining. But it's not all that crazy, right? There are goddamn ghosts on this station, people get trapped in walls, weird signals gettin' sent to our devices.
[And he does... feel bad, particularly at the thought of crushing Hajime's view of him, because he knows he's doing it right now. That if he thought Ryuji was just absolutely some dumbass dork who dropped in from a different version of Tokyo--- well, that's still true--- but the circumstances around it were all based in the supernatural to begin with.]
I guess it's kinda dumb starting at the end and working your way backwards, so maybe I can start from the beginning? [Would that be worse? He looks on at Hajime, worried for him. For his sake, actually. He would never want to hurt him, and that's one of the reasons he was avoiding this conversation to begin with.]
Me and my friends are Phantom Thieves. Ren and I discovered a world that exists outside of the bounds of reality... where peoples' thoughts and desires take material form. People that are particularly messed up have really strong uh... cognitions... of themselves, and what we've done over the last 8 months was basically... going in there and stopping them from being shitty people.
And in order to do that, you have to steal what's corrupting them to begin with. If you steal their desires away from them, they go back to who they were to begin with, and confess everything that they've done. But if you go in and destroy a piece of what's guarding that desire, they become mentally unstable and shut down. That's what happened to Haru's dad. Akechi was being forced into doing it as part of a larger plot against us.
[That's as good as he can explain the situation, but it still feels like it's not exactly hitting home something more important--- and his gaze rises up to Hajime.]
I'm sorry. I wanted to tell you the moment we became friends. But the last time I talked about this stuff out in the open... I put all of us in danger. And I can't do that to them again. [And then, adding on-] And I don't wanna do that to Akechi, either... now that we're all here and he's getting a second chance at being normal. It's... man, it's complicated.