Chapter Text
"Ahahahahaha," came the cry of jubilation from the balcony. "Well done, phantom thieves. You've breached my penultimate defence!"
The gang was crowded into a room that looked eerily like a distribution warehouse. Shelves lined the walls covered in beige packages and envelopes, cast unsorted haphazardly about the place. Above them, on an elevated platform too high for them to reach, was their opponent: Shadow Giles, the sinister American businessman who was their current target. He clapped his hands together, his black tie jostling slightly as he did so. Joker raised a gloved finger at their antagonist.
"Enough games! Come down here so we can settle this already--" he shouted, before he was interrupted by a raised arm.
"Oh, come now, Joker, how uncharacteristically boring of you," was the drawling reply. "It would be such a shame to just skip to the end; especially since you've come up to the final hurdle!" The phantom gang, sensing an ambush, moved into a defensive formation, but instead, their opponent snapped his fingers, disappearing in a puff of smoke. As he did so, however, a wall underneath the platform disappeared into the floor, revealing an equally impenetrable wall of hard, corrugated wooden boxes. As the team went to investigate, Morgana felt the hairs on his back stand on end.
"This is it," he insisted in a low voice. "I can sense the Treasure just behind this wall. We just have to get past these crates!"
Getting past the crates proved to be an insurmountable challenge, however; no combination of fire magic or physical skills were sufficient to cause them to give even the smallest amount. Ten minutes later, the helplessness began to set in.
"Damn," mumbled Yusuke, his shoulders giving out. "If only we still had those detestable statues that turned us into rats, then we could just crawl through the gaps under those pallets."
As the artist said the word "pallets", Joker found he was having the beginnings of an idea. A look of recognition glinted across his eyes, and he turned back to look at his team, newly invigorated in contrast to the blanket of ennui that had fallen like a pallor over the usually upbeat criminal gang. "Guys," he began, breathlessly, "does anyone here have a forklift license?"
A beat. Then, on a dime, every pair of eyes turned to Makoto, who it had been mutually if silently agreed was the only reliable one. Unfortunately, all she could do was shrug her shoulders and shake her head. "No," she mumbled apologetically, "it, um, never really occurred to me that I might need one." A sigh of disappointment, but there was nothing to be done. Joker nodded with determination, before finally turning to the group and calling a retreat.
---
It had been a rough day. Not because the palace had proven to be much of a challenge - the shadows were actually on the far tamer side to those found in the minds of some of their previous targets - but because it had just been so lame. Most of their opponents had had interesting flaws that informed the topography of their cognitive spaces, or at the very least had neat characteristics that made the infiltration process a more puzzling, fulfilling challenge. In this case, though, their investigation had seemingly done nought but to demonstrate that Giles, the sinister American businessman, was actually just a bad person whose entire personality was being a bad person.
This wasn't to say their assault was unjustified; he had been paying his workers squat and ignoring their horrific working conditions while diverting the vast majority of the company's profits to a tax haven on the Cayman Islands, making sure that neither the people who created his wealth nor the public services which relied upon it would see a penny of what they were truly owed. He needed to see the errors of his ways. Its just he was so... so...
"Boring," Ryuji observed, a listless quality to his voice. "This has got to be the most boring infiltration we've done so far. Can't we hit someone else?"
"Now now, Ryuji," replied Yusuke, causing Ryuji to look away, chastened, "while yes, it's true this assault lacks the aesthetic qualities of some of our earlier targets, it is of no lesser import that Giles, sinister American businessman be stopped." He turned to their leader, and Joker nodded his head in agreement. "And we have a bigger problem than Skull being bored," Yusuke continued. "How are we supposed to tackle that wall of crates? No amount of force could compel it to give way." Everyone looked at their feet for a moment, except for their leader, who appeared to know exactly what to do.
"You appear to know exactly what to do, leader," the artist said, as Joker snapped back to reality. The others looked at him expectantly, as he opened his mouth to speak.
"Well," he began, "I think it's clear that the only way to shift those crates is to move them using that forklift we saw in the previous chamber."
"Yeah," Ann intervened, "but we already established earlier that none of us have a forklift license."
"We can't use a forklift without a license, dude," Ryuji agreed. Everyone murmured their assent - operating a forklift without a license was illegal. The Phantom Thieves would not stoop to that level.
"Agreed," Joker continued, "we can't." He looked at his comrades, waiting for the shoe to drop. For a moment, nobody spoke. Then, like a light switch being flipped on, their eyes widened. Ryuji was first.
"For real?! Dude, you can't be serious," he intoned as solemnly as possible. "How hard is it to--"
"What other choice do we have?" Joker asked. "If we can't move those boxes, the Treasure will always remain just out of our reach. We need a forklift license, so I'm going to get one." Ryuji could merely stare, bemused, but Joker's face had taken on that expression it took on when he had already made a decision, and once he was there, there was no going back. He just sighed. The others seemed to have reached the same conclusion, and were now reorienting their questions in terms of "what are the practicalities of Joker getting a forklift license" instead of "how do we convince Joker that getting a forklift license is a stupid idea". Already though, Joker was scanning through his phone, the internet spitting up millions of results for 'get forklift license', including one, conveniently, within a thirty minute walk of the Cafe Leblanc. He held his phone out to the others for scrutiny.
"Hmm," Haru mumbled to herself. "I know that place. It's a warehouse that the company use sometimes. I didn't know they also offered forklift training." She was lost in thought; perhaps contemplating getting a forklift license of her own.
"Well," Makoto sighed, finally. "I know I can't stop you. How much is it?" This was a question Joker hadn't contemplated. Money wasn't really an object for them, at least not since they raided the palace of Hubert Money, the inventor of money, but it was still worth knowing. He didn't want Sojiro to get too suspicious about quite how much he was spending. A quick scroll down on the website revealed the price tag-- seventy thousand yen!? To drive a forklift?! "Yikes." She scratched the back of her neck. "Well... duty calls, I suppose."
So the Phantom Thieves were in agreement. There was a training slot open tomorrow, so they bit the bullet and dropped seventy grand from Sojiro's credit card - Futaba would replenish the fund after they'd sold all of the fancy gold bullion they'd stolen from Shadow Giles up to this point and hope he wouldn't notice the odd, warehouse-related transaction. They agreed that, until Joker had obtained a forklift license, there wasn't much more to do, so they spent the rest of the meeting screwing around before going their separate ways in the evening.
That night, as Joker lay awake, Morgana lying asleep on the windowsill, he fidgeted. Aside from the Morgana-bus, he'd never driven a vehicle before, and certainly not in real life. A cold front of nerves swept over him; what if he couldn't manage it? What if he just didn't have it in him to operate a forklift? What would his team think of him if he failed them? He tried to quell the increased heart-rate in his chest, only for it to increase apace as his brain hyperfixated on all of the ways this new venture could possibly go wrong. What if he ran over Morgana and crushed his little cat body beneath the forklift's massive wheels? What if his palms, sweaty from fear, slipped off the levers and sent the vehicle crashing into a wall? What if--
"I think you're overreacting," Makoto replied. At the peak of his nervousness, he decided to call the one person in the team who, not to put too fine a point on it, was reliable.
"Yeah, but what if though," was all Joker could manage. She was probably right, to be fair, but equally, what if, though?
"That's not... that's nothing. What you just said is nothing."
"I mean... you're probably right, but you don't understand. The thought of seeing Morgana all flattened by a forklift is like--" One of Morgana's eyes, up until this point heavy-lidded in sleep, flashed open in a start. Joker looked apologetically in his direction as he continued. "It's like... I would feel awful, forever."
"I'd also be dead," Morgana offered, sarcastically. Joker shut him up by scratching behind one of his ears.
"Joker," Makoto intoned, seriously, apparently exhausted of patience. "You're not going to crush Morgana to death. They don't let cats into warehouses anyway, there's hygiene laws about that sort of thing. Now it's 2am, please go to sleep." With a low beep, the line was disconnected - but the dread in Joker's heart was still very real.
There was nothing to be done; too much rode on the outcome, and they had only a few days left before their deadline. Joker, the leader of the Phantom Thieves, would have to learn how to operate a forklift.