madimpossibledreamer

The song wasn’t actually due to the lotus. I was listening to the song separately and then went ‘wait there are parallels to Asura/Taisha in this storyline my heart ow’, after which I cranked this out at a point I definitely should have been sleeping.  And named the series.  Also some steins;gate parallels.
Contains the tradition of graduating high school seniors giving the second-to-top button of their gakuran (school uniform) to the one closest to their heart.
~Dreamer~
PS: posted "early" because tomorrow's going to be a pain.
 

We know Jun’s majorly into the zodiac.
They remember Philemon but don’t remember too much about Nyarlie or anything Lovecraftian.  Tatsuya meanwhile, has been reading to learn about the enemy, though largely nothing of that kind has been spotted in a long time.
Also this is absolutely going to be posted out of order.
It broke once while I was trying to post it.  IDK.  Retyped everything and it should work.

The falling through time is probably all a hallucination, but it’s interesting, anyway.  And then they’re standing in a circular room, with a checkerboard on the floor and giant columns that reach into space.  They’re greeted by a man with a butterfly mask; the face looks a little familiar, but Tatsuya can’t place it.

“Welcome to the gulf between consciousness and unconsciousness…My name is Philemon.  Have you forgotten?”

They’ve been here before?  And met him?  Maybe that’s why he’s familiar, but still, he’s fairly sure he’s never been here, or seen…

Hands around his throat, choking.  His neck is still sore.  A voice whispering that he can’t die, not like this, not yet.

Not before he’s ready to kill.

“The power you hold is called Persona.  It is the power to summon the selves within you, the gods and demons that you harbor.  The self suffused with divine love, the self capable of demonic cruelty…People live by wearing different masks.  Your current self is only one of these innumerable masks.  Your Persona is also among your countless selves.”

That sounds…right.  A part of him.  He’s not sure what all of it means, but for right now…

Vulcanus.

But this entity doesn’t have just helpful words.  He has a warning of something big, something that they’re going to have to fight.  Why?  Of course, they’re the ones with power, but…  “From time out of mind, beyond oblivion…”  And there’s something about “rumors are reality”, but he’s not sure what that means, either.  If there’s something big going on, though, they’re likely to find out sooner or later.

There’s something useful in all the words, though.  These “chains of fate” Philemon mentions sound remarkably like what the principal had been talking about earlier, which means that he’s probably involved.