shakenit | Info/cliff notes

-Sumire is from a New Game Plus fic, except the NG+ doesn't apply to her. At her canon point, she doesn't even know about it yet (that infodump is coming soon). In the first timeline, she did not survive her inner demons and was also dead before the school year began.

-Because the Phantom Thieves were on the lookout for any variations in the pattern thus far and it's vanilla-to-Royal NG+, Futaba looked up the Yoshizawa family as soon as Akira realised her presence was significant, so they've known the whole time what's up. The whole group (including Shiho and Atsuko, aka Newspaper Club Member) has made overtures of friendship at various points, and Akechi knows her in passing; he's the only one who also met Kasumi.

-Related: The PTs also know something is Up with Maruki. Sumire knows this because she's pondering an offer to properly join the PTs, and Akira said a benefit and drawback is that Maruki is their next target.

-Her canon point is October 3rd. She's not quite two weeks out from the conclusion of her Palace, which she had to be brought into to properly resolve things. She had a confrontation with her own Shadow, managed to accept what it had to say, and then had to drive her cognition of Maruki out of her head, awakening her Persona in the process. It's not Cendrillon - it's Elphaba (this is only tangentially because of certain recent theatrical releases). Still the same Bless/physical attack build, but she's weak to water, and I suspect she's also particularly vulnerable to the sort of status ailments that generate Psy technicals.

-10/3 went a little differently! Her response to the 'get first place or we're revoking your scholarship' meeting was 'fine, do it, you get the joy of calling Dad and explaining that my best efforts while I'm mourning my sister aren't good enough.' She's angry more than upset, and did not run off to Odaiba to sulk.

-Much like Futaba, her Palace being gone doesn't mean she's out of the mental-health woods yet. Her baseline is still 'very depressed,' and she's making an active choice to keep living (her Futaba calls it the Survive To The Next Day Challenge). On the bright side, she finally replaced her phone.

-Kasumi is not her twin in this 'verse; she wasn't quite a full year older. In an American school system she would've been in a different grade, but Japan's cutoff dates put them in the same year, which did not help with Sumire's resentment issues. (Sumire was also using her own phone all through the actualised phase, convinced it was a memorial to her dead sister.)

-She has seen a bit of what's under Akechi's Detective Prince mask and wants to know more. His Palace advice - 'if you do resent your sister, who cares?' - was the most helpful thing anyone told her in that moment.

-PT outfit: Leotard and bolero jacket, either black or very, very dark green; thigh-high boots, more obvious shade of dark green with a faint snakeskin pattern; hair pinned up in a bun (the pins have tiny emeralds on them).

-Daily getup is back to her glasses, but instead of just leaving her hair down, she's likely as not to braid it and tie off the braid with Kasumi's ribbon. She doesn't do the high ponytail at all.