Was meant to be interpreted as him grabbing an emergency axe at the hospital when demons started attacking. The developers just couldn't find a way to code the scene in OR spontaneously add equipment to a non-protagonist character and did what they did instead hoping the players wouldn't notice until after the battle.
I was playing the original Persona for the first time while waiting for Persona 5 Royal's western release. The below theory/hair-brained idea is my attempt to justify elements of the original Persona that are seemingly inconsistent with Persona 3 onward.
Why is it that the Ideal Maki, Mai, Aki, and Pandora can coexist, despite the later games establishing the idea of there being only one inner self? Mai states that she and Aki were originally one being before being split a month before the game, with Aki's behavior heavily implying Kandori's involvement. It's established in a later scene that the real Maki has been hooked-up to the Deva system several times in the past before the events seen in-game. It's possible that the Deva system's first few uses unexpectedly split Maki's true shadow into three pieces, creating the Ideal Maki, Pandora, and a third entity. This third entity split further into Mai and Aki due to further experiments.
