The Fool's Gambit

Chapter 2: Hero finds out

Mari woke up on the floor of her and Sunny's bedroom next to Sunny's bed, who was still asleep. She wasn't in the outfit she got after awakening her persona, but instead, she was back to the dress she was wearing on the night of the recital. There were little beams of sunlight piercing through the dark curtains on the window, signifying that it was daytime.

"Did I just get kicked out of his palace?" Mari thought as she quietly got off the floor and stood up.

"Hey Benzaiten, do you have any idea what happened?" Mari asked, wondering if her persona had any idea of what just happened, but all she got was silence, "Benzaiten?"

With the fact that her persona had become unresponsive, she had begun to wonder if it was all a dream, but once she checked to see if she still had cat ears, it was all but confirmed to have not been a dream, "Maybe I can only hear her in the Metaverse," Mari pondered out loud, keeping her voice quiet so she would wake her little brother up.

Mari moves the curtain on the window that faced the backyard so she could look out of it, and her mood is saddened when she sees that her favorite tree was gone, but she understood why they would cut it down, "Oh shit, they think I hung myself! How am I going to explain this to anybody?" Mari realized that she couldn't explain exactly why she was walking around like she wasn't hung from a tree.

Then Mari remembered that alongside being able to turn her limbs into cat ones, she could just turn into an actual cat.

"Okay so turning my arms and legs back to normal just required me to think about them being normal, so it should work the same way if I just imagine myself as a cat!" Mari theorized before she put it to work and thought about turning into a cat. Next thing she knew, Mari was now walking on all fours, way smaller, and had found the perfect way to leave the house undetected.

Mari transformed back into a human and unlocked one of the windows of their bedroom before opening it, climbing onto the window sill before she noticed that Hero was staring at her from the other side of his window, "Crap," Mari said before transforming into a cat and bounding off of the window sill, landing with a cat's grace and bolting off as far as her cat legs could carry her.

Mari was really hoping Hero would just chalk it up to a weird dream he had or a hallucination where she was alive and had cat ears and a tail and could also turn into a cat. She did feel bad for running away from her boyfriend like that, especially since he thinks Mari killed herself, "Hero was probably on his way to healing, and seeing you probably set him back who knows how much," A voice in Mari's head said, although it wasn't Benzaiten this time, it was just her guilty conscience.

She skidded to a halt before she turned back around, her guilty conscience taking over and compelling her to fix things with Hero. She stopped running once she got to the front lawn of the Rodriguez Household, where their dog Hector played outside. Mari mentally sighed, knowing what she must do to get Hero's attention.

--------------------

Hero stood frozen at his window, and was having a panic attack after he saw his supposedly dead girlfriend, "Was that Mari? It looked like Mari. Why did she have cat ears and a tail? Could she always turn into a cat? Dios mío, have I finally gone insane?" Hero contemplated his sanity.

He continued to silently lose his mind until he heard Hector barking at something, and since he didn't want to trouble his parents more than he already was by letting Hector bark at someone and getting another complaint from a neighbor or worse someone calling the police, he decided to leave his room for the first time in months and see what Hector was barking at.

When he looked out the window, he saw Hector barking at a familiar-looking cat who was sitting on the fence, completely disinterested in Hector. She turned her head towards him when she noticed that he was looking at her through the window.