Chapter Text
"Hang on, why does my character have a motorcycle in this very obviously Medieval European setting?" asked Makoto, looking at the character sheet Futaba had handed her. She'd been pleasantly surprised when she and Ren had been invited into Futaba's D&D group she ran for Ann, Ryuji, and Morgana, and was further pleased when Futaba offered to make pre-gens for them both, what with them being new to the game. They'd wanted to join up when the group got started, but then there'd been the whole thing with Eiko and her asshole boyfriend, and inconveniently all of the times they ended up having to get involved overlapped with Futaba's session dates. It was remarkably unlikely, but Ren was used to the universe attempting to fuck him over at this point.
"Do you really want to be a character who doesn't get to ride a motorcycle?" asked Ren, who'd been going over his character sheet. Makoto hadn't explicitly expressed her appreciation for motorcycles, but the amount of times she'd infodumped to Ren about Showa-era Kamen Rider series (along with her Persona being a motorcycle with a face painted on the front) had been enough to raise his suspicions.
"Exactly! Thank you, Ren. I'm glad somebody understands my vision," said Futaba. Technically, she didn't want them to understand her real vision for this particular campaign, but she felt that the details she'd added in to appeal to Ren and Makoto were nice enough that they shouldn't go completely unnoticed. "Anyway, you didn't complain about your ability to shoot fire out of your hands."
"Sorcerers aren't completely out of place in this kind of story. Although now you come to mention it, I'm not sure where my character would have picked this up living on a farm," noted Makoto. Actually, there was a lot about this backstory she needed to go over with Futaba, but it was probably better to start with the nitpicking and work her way up to the awkward stuff.
Futaba threw her hands in the air, shrugging awkwardly. "Alright, I kind of needed to balance you two against Ann, Morgana, and Ryuji's characters, and we didn't have any spellcasters."
"Is that the reason why I'm the same character class as Morgana?" asked Ren, who had been very suspicious of this entire thing from the start, but didn't really know what he was actually suspicious. As far as he was aware, there weren't many ulterior motives Futaba could have with getting him and Makoto to play a board game with her and some of the other Thieves.
"We're the Phantom Thieves, Ren. We're all rogues," said Futaba, as though it were obvious and this wasn't just an oversight she'd made while getting overexcited about her diabolical plan. "Besides, you're different subclasses. You're a Swashbuckler - so charisma based - and Morgana's a Mastermind - which is Intelligence based. Completely different."
"Why am I the charisma one, then? You know full well I'm not charismatic," said Ren, with the nonchalance of somebody who was very used to fulfilling people's low expectations.
"Hey! Don't say that about my friend!" said Makoto, with the typical flavour of authority in her tone usually reserved for telling people not to run in the hallway, rather than comforting a friend.
"Makoto, I appreciate you trying to cheer me up, but I've got all the social skills of a Portugese Man-O-War trying to promote their one-man Depressive/Suicidal Black Metal project."
"Only because you've spent the last several months in an environment where everyone instinctually avoids you because they're convinced you're a serial killing Yakuza enforcer!" argued Makoto, ignoring the fact that she had no idea what the second half of that sentence meant.
"Maybe, but I could have handled it more... gracefully! I wasn't very..."
Futaba briefly tuned out of their conversation, content to let it play out for a bit. These sorts of arguments seemed to happen a lot between Ren and Makoto. One could say that you'd have to be a complete idiot not to notice that they liked each other from these arguments alone, but Ren and Makoto were actually quite academically successful and still couldn't figure it out. Actually, maybe they were two different levels of smart.
"Ren, I lo- I mean, you're great, but I wish you'd just accept that you're charming sometimes. If you can't accept it in general, you can at least do sometimes, can't you?" Makoto really didn't like losing these arguments, although she also didn't like that she had to keep having them. As far as she was concerned, Ren Amamiya was one of the most legitimately charming people she'd met in person, and one of the few who was actually as nice as they acted.
Which could mean nothing.
"Alright, fine. Once again, your highness, you've swayed me. Sometimes, I'll concede I can be charismatic," groaned Ren. He wasn't convinced, but with arguments like this he preferred to let her win. Makoto was usually right in most other regards, but he was fine to let her be wrong if it meant she'd be happy.
Which could also mean nothing.
An awkward pause ensued, as Ren and Makoto occupied themselves rubbing the backs of their necks and avoiding eye contact.
Eventually, Futaba decided the awkward pause had run its course, and coughed awkwardly. "Alright, then. If Mum and Dad don't have any more questions-"
"I do actually have something else I'd like to ask, actually," said Ren, ignoring Futaba's last remark, glancing at the backstory on his character sheet and occasionally at Makoto when (he thought) nobody was looking.
"What's up?" asked Futaba, innocently.
Ren swallowed. Better to just get it out there and let the dice fall where they may. (Or was that cards? Doesn't matter. Wait, does it? Moving on.)
"Do we absolutely have to play characters in a romantic relationship?"
"I'm sorry, can you just explain this plan to me again?" asked Ann, who had understood the elements of the plan perfectly well, but had rather more difficulty believing that anybody could seriously consider it at all.
"Right, so. Ren and Makoto like each other," began Futaba.
"Alright."
"They don't know that they like each other, for probably stupid reasons."
"Yeah, we all know that part."
"So," continued Futaba, "we're trying to get them together..."
"With you so far."
"By having them play characters in a D&D campaign that are in a relationship!" finished Futaba, who was perhaps more proud of this plan than she should have been.
"Nope, you've lost me." Ann was absolutely all for getting Ren and Makoto to just admit that they liked each other already and go hold hands intensely or whatever it is people with as many boundaries as Ren and Makoto did in relationships, but she was more thinking along the lines of having them watch a scary movie so they could press into each other when they were scared or something like that. The confusing part wasn't any of the individual elements of the plan, so much as it was the idea that somebody would come up with such a plan in the first place. It was the kind of plan that worked on paper, and absolutely nowhere else. Except maybe word processing software.
As has been almost certainly made clear by this point, the Phantom Thieves had long since figured out that
"Why are you telling me this, anyway?"
"Because I needed to co-ordinate this with someone, Morgana's in contact with Ren too much, and Ryuji almost certainly would have given the game away immediately."
"Really? What do you need me to do, exactly?"
An awkward pause ensued. Futaba and Ann watched a spider crawl its way down one of the walls as they both waited for Futaba to come up with an answer.
Ann raised an eyebrow and tilted her head. "You just wanted to somebody you could gloat about this to, didn't you."
"I'm allowed to gloat! I'm super smart! I'm entitled to a good gloat every now and again!"
Ann folded her arms. "To recap, Futaba," she groaned, "I'm the only member of the Phantom Thieves who's been in a relationship at all, let alone a long time one. Except Haru, but I'm pretty confident the whole Sugimura situation counted. You've spent most of the last two years locked in your room, I'm trying to ignore what's going on with Morgana, and Ryuji and Yusuke are teenage boys. As the closest we have to an expect regarding the whole relationship thing, I don't think this is a good idea."
"Ann," protested Futaba. "Do you really think I would have jumped into this plan without doing some proper research?" Ann began to open her mouth until Futaba glared at her. "Of course not! I've been grinding up my knowledge stat for what must have been hours now in preparation."
"Alright then," said Ann warily. "What kind of research have you been doing?"
"Well, there's this website called ArchiveOfOurOwn, otherwise known as Ao3..."
"What's the big deal? You've pretended to be in a relationship before!" said Futaba.
"Yes, but we weren't telling a story then. Besides, all we had to do that time was sit next to each other and occasionally compliment each other's appearances," protested Ren, with a weary look in his eyes as he remembered the unbearable pain of being in the same building as Tsukasa - actually, what was his surname? Did they ever ask? Well, he was a twat, so it didn't matter, but it was going to bug Ren for the rest of the day now.
"I don't know, Ren," said Makoto, blushing slightly and absent-mindedly playing with her hair. "Maybe that part could have-"
"Oh, I'm absolutely not having this argument again," said Ren, immediately swiveling around to look Makoto in the eyes. "Makoto Nijima, you are bea- you look very nice, and anybody who can't see that is a fool." Ren stuttered out yet more compliments in a slightly stilted way with a weird rhythm that's very difficult to convey through text.
"I hope you're not calling me a fool, Amamiya-Kun," teased Makoto, who was feeling a bit better now that Ren was off on one of his weird compliment stuttering things. After everything he'd put up with since coming to Shujin and having his record leaked, he tended only to compliment people when he seriously meant it - which still wasn't that often, but was definitely more than he did in April.
"You're not a fool, Makoto. You already can't see your face because of where your eyes are, so you're off on a technicality already. Unless you have a mirror or somethi- you've got really great hair. No, really it is, and - Hang on." Ren looked at Futaba and tilted his head at a weird angle. "I don't remember telling you that." Suddenly realising this, Makoto also tilted her head at a near identical angle to Ren. Futaba grinned sheepishly as she tried to come up with a credible defence. Admitedly, it was hard not to grin watching Ren and Makoto sync up like that. Morgana, who was pretending to be napping in the corner of the room, suddenly became very interested in the paintwork next to him.
"You know I've been surveiling all of the Phantom Thieves since I joined, right?" said Futaba, far too casually after a pause that was far too long, particularly since this was one of the few things they had done that she hadn't been monitoring.
"We really need to have a talk about you doing that, young lady," said Makoto, who was probably less concerned about this behaviour than most parents or surrogate parent figures, or indeed group parent types would be.
"We can talk about my totally not concerning behaviour another time," said Futaba dismissively. Ren and Makoto immediately shot a look at each other that somehow very clearly meant We absolutely need to talk about this very concerning behaviour very very soon. Researchers are still divided on whether this was some form of telepathy, or if they were just very good at reading each other. "Can we go over the backstory now, or-"
"Why do our characters have our names instead of fictional ones?" interjected Ren.
"Because it's your first time doing this kind of thing, I assume, and I thought this would help you with the rolelaying aspect of it," said Futaba, brushing it off. Actually, she'd just written their names on the sheets in pencil so she could remember which pre-gen was for which person, but honestly this might enhance her definitely brilliant plan. She'd better text Ann, Ryuji, and Morgana and let them know not to bother coming up with character names.
There was a brief pause.
"Alright. Do you two have any further questions?" asked Futaba impatiently.
"No, I think I'm good," said Ren, looking over to Makoto. Makoto nodded, slightly worried about the specifics of this backstory, and how she'd have to keep pretending to be romatically involved with Ren.
"Thank you. Now then.
"Makoto was raised on a small farm. Her favourite pastimes were riding her motorcycle..."