Half a Moon: 14 Days of Celebrating Women

Title: The Nature of Justice

Yuzu and Midori had very different ideas of what constituted a good system of law and order. The discussion had begun with an agreement - that neither of them could trust anyone else with the decision. Keisuke's idea of 'justice' was summoning the Judge of the Underworld down to immolate anyone who did the slightest thing wrong. By contrast, Kaido seemed determined to plunge the whole world into anarchy. As for Amane and Naoya, they seemed just as bad at either extreme, except there was something dispassionately inhuman about how they behaved, as if their rather esoteric goals in life didn't even take humans into account. Atsuro had always seemed a little shifty, their leader was still undecided and could be worryingly malleable at times, Honda somehow fundamentally terrified them and Black Frost was, well, Black Frost. Like Naoya, they got the impression that he had a very strong sense of justice, just one that didn't involve humans in any way. They'd told Mari about the plan, reasoning that she was a very sensible older woman, but she'd just smiled and said she had a mission of her own, then a responsibility to keep Kaido from going completely off the rails. That left Yuzu and Midori. The first of them wanted to uphold law in the name of the existing authorities, at least until they could recover from the shock of the crisis and organise themselves properly. This, Yuzu reasoned, would be the fastest way to get things back to normal without letting Shibuya fall into chaos or setting themselves up as some kind of dictators. Midori disagreed, saying that the world wasn't the same place any more, that this was precisely the kind of situation when exceptional individuals like themselves - and they all had to agree that they were exceptionally powerful demon summoners - had to step in and save the world. (After all, she pointed out, the world has turned into some kind of climactic point in an RPG in every other way and it obviously wanted them to be the protagonists.) It wasn't like they were unable to grasp the basic points of maintaining order and protecting the weak. The argument lasted all night until Keisuke overheard them, got angry and accidentally summoned Yama and burned the bus shelter down. Again.