Wrong Stop

The train sped along its route, the timetable finally back on track after so many accidents. Tsuneo barely noticed the slight sway of the car as it rounded a curve, and just savored the feeling of not being on a packed, rush hour train for once. He could actually breath and not have to worry about accidentally stepping on someone’s foot. Maybe he should try to get home early more often.
Today had been one of the rare days where everything seemed to be going smoothly. He had finished his preparation work earlier than he had expected and there had been a club he needed to keep an eye on. No students had crept up to him during the day asking if he could maybe help them with studying a litte, or asking him if they could stop by his office after school because they had something they really wanted to talk to him either. Nothing had been there to delay him at all. No, for the first time in a long time he was actually heading home early. He had thought about calling home to tell them, but decided that the surprise on their faces would be worth it. Maybe I’ll stop and grab a treat first, he thought idly as he adjusted his grip on the handle. There’s that bakery that….
The only warning something was off was a flicker from the overhead lights in the train. Then the were out, plunging him into complete darkness as his stomach gave an unpleasant flip. It was like someone had suddenly dropped him onto a roller coaster, and he was falling, only he could feelhis feet on the floor. His free hand failed out and slammed into one of the poles he had been stand next to send a shockwave of pain up his arm. He still grabbed it on reflex, mind flashing to the recent train crash, and how much he didn’t want to die from something like that.
Suddenly Hephaestus, silent for years by the point, was in his mind again. This isn’t a crash, you’re in danger, idiot!
He wanted to ask his Persona what that was supposed to be, but the lights flicker on again, bathing the area in an eerie red glow and he stumbled a little as the crashing he had been bracing for didn’t come. Emergency lights, he thought, as he let out a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding. He was still standing, the train was still upright, so apparently whatever was wrong wasn’t as serious as he though...
He looked up.
Thing in front of him. Black, shadowy thing that looked almost like a ghostly copy of a person, hovering right on the seat where he could have sworn a girl was sitting moments before.
He yelled in shock and lurched backwards. The back of his head slammed into the pole he had been holding, hard enough he saw stars for a moment. He shook his head to clear it as he stumbled away from the pole. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw more black and realized there was another shadow-figure right next to him. He swore and jumped away. Only to nearly collide with another one behind him. Out of instinct he scrambled away from that one and turned around so his back to a the wall of the car. He realize, with a dawning sense of horror, that they were all around him, surrounding him, the red lights giving them an almost hellish appearance. His Persona exploded into existence in the confined area of the car on reflex, the mental twist required to summon it as much a part of him as breathing.
Hephaestus was really to small for the inside of a train car, and pushed some of the shadow people away as he manifested, sending them stumbling away. Tsuneo braced himself for the attack he knew was coming….and there was nothing.
Several long moments ticked by before he dropped out of the guarded position he had been in and took a long look around. The shadow people that Hephaestus had shoved had simple found new positions, and were now...ignoring him. Or, he realized, it was more like they didn’t even realize he was there. They just sat where they were, staring blankly ahead.
I don’t think they’re hostile, Hephaestus said to him, and if his Persona wasn’t sensing anything….
He dismissed it and straightened up, mind working frantically. Even if these...things weren’t hostile, they were still here and the people that been in the train with weren’t. Either he had had a complete mental snap - and Hephaestus’ snort at that thought told him how likely that was - or he had ended up somewhere he really didn’t think he was supposed to be.
Now that he wasn’t waiting to be jumped he realized that it wasn’t just the red lighting making everything look off. The train itself looked different - darker, dirtier, far more worn down than the one he had stepped onto at the station. Even the tunnel outside the subway windows seemed to be wrong in some subtle way.
This clearly was not the train he was supposed to be on.
He just had no idea how the hell he could have gotten here.
“What the fuck happened?” he couldn’t help muttering out loud. “How would…”
The train gave a lurch then, and there was a shriek of the brakes as it slowed, then finally stopped. All the doors along his side hissed open, and Tsuneo stared at them for a moment. Clearly it wanted him to leave, but was heading out into...wherever this was really wise?
On the other hand, his only other choice was staying on a demon train full of shadow people while it took him who-knew-where. He glanced at the shadow beings, shuddered, then darted towards one of the doors. Wherever this train was going, he was pretty damn sure he didn’t want to go there. He stumbled onto a tiny loading platform that looked as wrong as the train had felt.
As soon as he was steady he whirled around to see if he was being followed out by something, and his heart nearly stopped.
There was no sign of the train that had brought him here.
It wasn’t as if it had pulled away either. There was nowhere it could have gone, and he would have heard it even if had. It had just vanished, leaving him alone in a subway that looked like it had been pulled from someone’s nightmare.
A shiver went up his spine. It was like all those urban legends you heard passed around in high school about the friend of a friend who swore their second cousin’s classmate had gotten on a cursed train or bus and then was never seen again. He was used to strange shit, but this was more messed up than usually. It had happened in a the middle of a crowded train!
Still, he though as he let out a breath, panicking isn’t going to help. Figure out what you can do. Find a way out. You’ve done it before and with plenty of things people had called ‘urban legends’ too.
That he had never done it alone before was something he decided he wouldn’t think about right now.
He glanced around the loading platform. First thing he needed to do was get his bearings. There were a few rickety orange plastic chairs that looked like they had been left outside for years, and posters so faded that you couldn’t read anything that was on them.
There was also a weird, stringy red and black growth crawling up the pillars and walls around the platform. He prodded it with a toe, and shuddered a little when it gave a little like flesh. He really didn’t feel like saying here, but he couldn’t see an exit, and the tunnel that the train would have come out of was blocked off with a large grate. He glanced back at it, then shrugged.
If he couldn’t go back the way he had come, then he supposed the only thing he could do was go forward. Staying here waiting for to see if another demon train showed up really didn’t seem like a good idea anyway.
He jumped down on the tracks, a strange musty wind ruffling his hair, and blowing debris at him. Even the tracks themselves looked odd, the ties broken and uneven, with a strange metallic sheen over them. Some of the shapes of the ones he walked past almost reminded him of splintered bones.
He tried his hardest to ignore that. There were worse things about this eerie place after all. Like how unending wind that seemed to be everywhere yet blow from nowhere. It smelled dry and dusty, like it had come from an old decrepit house. That there was an occasional hint of a sharp metallic smell that seemed to coat the back of his throat and reminded him a bit of dried blood was concerning. What made it even worse was that he kept swearing he could hear something in the wind. Faint voices that reminded him of hearing someone talking in another room, but seemed to vanaish when he actually foucxed on them for longer than a moment. It kept making the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and look back even though he didn’t think anything was there.
“You need to focus,” he muttered to himself as he rounded a long corner, and stopped. There was a branching path. He was beginning to wish that he had something to draw a map with because if he got lost here.
He took a step back to get a better look at it.
There was a deep guttural sound from behind him.
He was already mentally cursing himself for an idiot as he turned around fast to find a massive dark thing towering behind him, made up of black ooze and far too many screaming white masks for comfort. The largest mask of all just stared at him almost impassilvy as the thing took a step towards him.
BigBigBig. He jumped back, trying to put some distance between him and it, since this was not the kind of thing that he wanted to take on head-on without backup. As he landed, the back of his heel caught on one of the rail ties. He barely had time to let lose a mental fuck, before he fell back and landed hard on his ass.
At least, a small part of him noted there was no one else around to notice he was stupid enough to be ambushed by something this big, and the undignified tumble. He just hope he could survive long enough to be embarrassed about it later.
The huge enemy froze, shook, and then seemed to collapse in on itself, leaving Tsuneo confused only for half a second before it reformed into three separate enemies. He had seen this before, though never anything that had looked like that.
Two half-snake women and a completely creepy humanoid with a sharp-toothed maw that reached all the way down it’s torso. Okay fine, he could…
One of the snake women gestured towards him. His only warning was a slight pop, and he rolled to the side. Flames slammed into the space he had just been as he scrambled to his feet, only to lean back alarmingly to avoid the slash the jaw-creature aimed at him. He felt it’s talons whistle by mere centimeters from his face. Then it dodged out of the way, and he saw the second snake woman already aiming at him. He barely got up his arms in time to protect his face before the fire slammed into him.
He felt the heat, and it singed his clothes but he still let out a breath of relief that it was only fire again.
He had never had a problem with fire.
And the group had paused to see if he was still standing. Bad idea.
Guess it’s my turn now.
“Hephaestus!” he yelled. His Persona materialized in front of him, rushing right at the snake-lady standing on the left. It’s hammerstrike slammed into her stomach, sending her flying into the wall. She hit with a crack, and dissolved into shadows as she fell away from the surface. “Sorry,” he told the remaining two, “but I have no intention of dying here.”
He gestured, and Hephaestus slammed it’s hammer into the grown. A pillar of flames erupted from the ground under the jaw-thing, making it sheik loudly before it dissolved entirely. He turned towards the final opponents.
“Wait!” She shrieked and clasped her hands together, her voice bearing that discordant, echoing quality that all demons seem to get when they were desperate, “please, I don’t want to die!” He stared at her .“You can talk,” he said in surprise. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard demons speak to him, but it had just been so many years since any of them had bothered. Most of them seemed to have devolved into the shadow things that Kiyoshi and his friends had been fighting; brutes that didn’t seem to know how to communicate at all, or have the brains to think of doing so.
“Duh,” This demon said and rolled her eyes at him. Hephaestus shifted behind him and she cringed, “I mean uh, of course sir,” she said quickly and attempted to bat her eyes at him. “So, um, can you just let me go? Please? I promise not to bother you again!”
He considered for a moment. It wasn’t like he had anything personal against this demon, and they had occasionally asked for information from them before, back in the day. You just couldn’t pressure them for too much, or they got testy and wouldn’t answer at all.
“If you tell me what this place is, you can go,” he decided at last. Maybe figured out where exactly he was would give him a clue how he had gotten here in the first place, and how to get out.
The demon perked up, “Oh, that’s all? That’s easy,” she gave him a little bow, “you're in…. Momentos.” She slunk backwards and seemed to merge back into the shadows of this place, disappearing entirely. He stared at the stop she had been for a long moment, then let out a long sigh.
“Momentos, huh?” he said as he stared around the place. He reached up to the back of his neck. “Just what the hell is a Momentos? And how the hell did I get here?” And more importantly, how am I supposed to get out?