That Contraband Feeling Theme: Black Market by Ryota Kozuka (Shin Megami Tensei IV OST)
There’s a store where a man in a sketch comedy Mephistopheles costume sells you all of the bad stuff.
Guns. Swords. Bombs. Unregulated street drugs.
The drugs are super-fun. Not to actually ingest-look at the ingredients label. It’s hysterical. It doesn’t list any ingredients whatsoever-never does-but it might be a stat block for a monster encounter. Or a ranty monologue about something that was topical twenty-five years ago. Or even a poignant meditation on the transience of satiety after eating a bag of roast beef’n’cheddar sandwiches. Yeah, all the drugs are labelled like that.
Actually . . . it’s not as cool as it used to be.
It used to be you would stop in to get strapped for a proper block-by-block street war. You fought for the glory, for the exhilaration, for the sake of fighting. Nowadays, most of the action centers around local school board elections. All the old time miscreants grew up, squeezed out brats, got old, got lame, got obsessed with all this dead ender local politics crap. They even conscript their own kids as child soldiers. Total atrocity. It sucks, now. It really does.
The Original Guy hasn’t been around for awhile. He got old. I think he still owns the place, but if you look at his social media stuff you can see he’s been to the hospital recently, though he posted he was doing fine. Seems like a retirement track.
The New Guy-who looks super young-wears the Mephistopheles get-up, but it’s not as good. He’s too nice. He’s all business. The Original Guy put on a show. Really tried to corrupt you. He actually used to do this nightclub thing in the back, but that got out of hand. The New Guy says he wants to open a snack bar or a coffee shop in the back. It’s not the same.
I stop in on the regular, though, out of habit. You can still get a whiff of that original atmosphere. I might even bottle some, try to sell it online.
