#genuinely the most thought i'd ever given to a twst x pjo crossover before you asked about it was

[riddlerosehearts]

🐍(signing with a snake for convenience) thank you for the good luck wishes, i finished the exam and it went alright! i saw your earlier post, how are you feeling right now? i myself have a cat too and can only imagine how devastated i would feel if the same thing happened to me, i'm really sorry you're going through this and hope you're still taking care of yourself. if it helps as a distraction, how would you imagine nico (& leo if you wish!) as new students at NRC?

signing with the 🐍 emoji reminds me of jamil, which imo is good because i love jamil haha. so hopefully you like him too. glad your exam went well! i'm feeling a little better now than i was earlier, but still not great, honestly. my family took that cat in as a stray who we have evidence to believe had been abandoned, and we'd given her a matching name with our other cat--our first cat is named daisy, and the one who died was named lily. we knew she'd have to be put down sooner or later but everybody felt so sure that it wouldn't be this soon. i sincerely hope your cat lives a long, healthy life.

as for your question: hmm, well, i'm terrible at explaining my thoughts sometimes. let's see if i can come up with something that makes sense LOL. i'm going to imagine an AU where rather than being isekai'd like yuu, nico is just a character from the twst universe.

so the way i see nico in the current riordanverse canon is that he's made a lot of progress toward healing from his trauma and trying to be happier and more outgoing, like he was when we were first introduced to him in titan's curse. he cares about others and wants to be able to have friends. but he still has a lot of anxiety about putting himself out there, and he still barely understands modern technology (which, i'm unsure how that'd be explained in this scenario, but it's a magic world, anything could've happened. maybe he's a fae or half-fae, or maybe he was stuck in some sort of magical stasis for decades like in PJO.) and has this lingering fear that he doesn't fit in with most people. i also see him as a natural extrovert who mostly became withdrawn as a trauma response.

so i guess if we took nico with his canon personality/development and made him a character in the twst universe, then he'd be incredibly nervous about going to NRC and not knowing how people there will react to him, but he'd also be willing to try his best. and if he got placed into ignihyde, then he'd soon end up feeling frustrated because, okay, sure, he can see why the dark mirror looked at his soul and thought he should be put into this gloomy, lifeless dorm full of quiet serious people who keep to themselves. not too long ago he might've thought that was perfect! but now because most ignihyde students keep to themselves or to their own groups while also hardly leaving their rooms, it makes for a very lonely atmosphere when nico no longer wants to be alone all the time. and when he does try to speak to his dormmates he doesn't really get most of what they try to talk about because they're engineers and tech nerds and he... very much isn't. he also doesn't understand how to operate most of the technology the dorm is filled with and runs on.

i can imagine him wanting to transfer dorms but being terrified of not fitting in any better anywhere else, until he ends up talking with yuu during alchemy class and finding out that they live in a dorm that's haunted by ghosts and otherwise only has a population of two. nico and yuu could relate to each other in a sense because even though yuu has ace and deuce as friends, they still feel lost and out of place in this world. and they think it's pretty cool that nico can control and summon ghosts. they sort of joke that it'd be a lot easier to keep the ghosts in line if they had his magic, and he's like. well what if i moved into your dorm and helped you out. which crowley decides to allow and nico is a lot happier there because even though ramshackle is way smaller than ignihyde, it's also less lonely. he can talk to the ghosts and to yuu and grim. and as he gets more used to being there and a little less afraid of opening up, he could make friends with some of his other classmates. maybe even with some of his old dormmates. if all the canon NRC students are also around in this, then i'm sure he and the shroud brothers could find something to talk about given nico's interest in mythomagic.

nico's development in the later books is also heavily influenced by will, so if we had will in this AU then that might change things a bit. i'm very indecisive just in general and also i don't get will nearly as well as a friend of mine does, so it's possible that he could get accepted into RSA which would separate him from nico, or that he could get into NRC but definitely in a different dorm because he doesn't fit ignihyde at all (will have to ask my friend her opinion on this, actually). in the latter case i think nico would especially look forward to the classes they share, but would vent to will about still not fitting in and would wish that he could transfer dorms to be with him. but crowley would discourage him from trying to transfer because of how difficult the process is and will would encourage him to put himself out there more and try harder to make friends, which could lead to his conversation with yuu and his transfer to ramshackle (it being a different case since it's not, like, an official dorm anymore and nico's magic is well-suited to crowley's own needs). leo or other characters being there at the same time might change things slightly too.

but yeah, either way, i think he'd love chilling with the ghosts in ramshackle and with his canon development where he's starting to become more open and less brooding, he could end up really enjoying being at NRC even if he still struggles sometimes! if we were talking about a version of nico who was still 100% convinced that he could never fit in with anyone and that he needed to be alone all the time, i guess he'd probably just stay in ignihyde and cause yuu a lot of confusion by summoning ghosts from ramshackle into his room to give himself someone to talk to. if he was from the PJO universe and got isekai'd into the twst world then i don't think nico would adjust well to that at all. i have a feeling that as he is right now in canon, he'd consider going to school in some other world a complete waste of time in the first place and would tear twisted wonderland apart trying to find a way home if that happened.

i am going to stop here though because i rambled about this way more than i did before though LOL. i hope this is the kind of answer you were looking for and that it doesn't all seem like. completely OOC and that what i'm trying to say makes sense. i love sharing my opinions but i'm also not very confident in them sometimes. i could try to come up with something for leo if you wanted, but i'd also love to know if you have any thoughts on how he'd be as an NRC student!