>>141497 A fair point, I'll throw up Part Two of the last update before I check it out though.
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Part Two
Flight is a skill any in Gensokyo can gain, simply the next step from learning to run. Most do, but never use it fully. Fairies are aggressive - or simply stupid - and a flying human provokes a reaction much like a disturbed hornets nest. Especially during an incident.
So what happens is that the residents who don't possess the casual power to swat a swarm out of the skies instead glide across the ground in a very elongated lope, feet only lightly touching the ground to aid control. This allows almost the speed of true flight, without drawing nearly as much attention. The side effect is that the roads in Gensokyo are often overgrown and impassable to wagons, residents simply gliding over all obstacles - including cliffs, streams, pit traps...
For the confident, the wide river made for an excellent road.
There were few fishing boats and no flying traffic on the river, so I picked up speed quickly and unobtrusively.
I don't much like using power carelessly and I prefer not to have an audience when I do.
My feet only a fingers-breadth above the surface, they draw ripples behind me as I went. The water was the colour of clay, with waves that picked up slices of the unnatural blue sky. The wind against my face had that subtle humidity that spoke of dawn, or at least, the dawn that should be.
If it had just been that the sun had risen early, then it would have burnt away, but the skylight was a distant and lifeless radiance that only gave the illusion of a washed-out summer day. It could be much later in the day, it would be hard to keep track of how long I had before Keine and Hijiri finished their spell.
Energy flared below me.
I swerved and put on more speed. The spray of bullets that broke the surface missed by a comfortable margin, azure bars of light that flopped back into the water like a jumping fish. A river-fairy shouldn't have that kind of power.
I couldn't see anything beneath the water, but the lightshow drew attention from the banks. It was amazing how fast these encounters developed, no matter how fast I moved, wave after wave of fairies would mob me at every turn.
I'm no good at danmaku. I
cheat.
You look at something, you either recognise it or not.
If you don't then you automatically form assumptions and comparisons with things you do.
Either way you act according to whatever response it invokes.
How often does anybody stop to question this?
If people didn't trust their instincts then they'd never get anything done.
A sudden drop provokes an instant halt, fire makes us recoil.
Those are the things that grab our attention, from our instinctive recognition of their importance.
But an archer aiming at a target, pays no heed to the colour of his bowstring. A fisherman on the river cares little for distant mountain peaks when the line goes taught.
What we recognise as unimportant is ignored. This happens at all levels of the mind.
A swarm of barely sentient fairies, reflexively blasting at first hint of a stranger, looking for things like "fun" or "excitement". When their target suddenly registers as even less worthy of attention than the dust in the air what do they do? They don't stop to think about it - they can't.
The swarms that burst out of the trees and from under the water paused briefly in the air, they might have been looking for me - perhaps their dim minds feebly scrabbled against my deception. Unlikely.
But either way, without a more attractive human target they collapsed into a brawl of danmaku that could last for days - fairies reincarnate instantly and full of energy, rarely hesitating to jump back into the fray.
I moved on. A glance over my shoulder revealed powerful - if crude - sprays of danmaku that lit up the waters in a thousand clashing shades of colour. It was a certainty that they were feeling the energizing effects of the sky far more keenly than I.
But even the strongest fairy, is still just a fairy.
I flew on and nearly slammed into a wall of ice.
Focusing on my escape, I wasn't paying attention.
Magical flight cares very little for the laws of motion, however. I halted instantly, barely a foot before I would have met the densely ridged and faintly sparkling blue ice. A few moments to comport myself and levitate over the obstacle, tattered dignity in place.
I had left the trees some time ago, behind me were grasslands - ignored in my flight, overshadowed by the Lake transformed.
Looking at the vast and open landscape, it seemed that the azure sky reached down to touch the water. As many times as I had thought this in the past, all lies against this one true sight.
The clear Lake drew the sky-light in, adding that radiance to its own shimmer. Here and there, more pillars of blue-white ice dotted the Lake, increasing in density and size as the water deepened, such that they completely obscured the islands from sight.
With the near-perfect symmetry of sky and still water, the ice seemed to hang suspended and illusive, more an aggregation of the blue light than anything truly solid. It had the quality of a dream, something that had to be awoken from. A slow texture revealed itself - the lake water did reflect and trap the sky-light-magic, but there was a deeper glow beneath that.
Power seeping into Gensokyo, from the sky and from the deep waters. The boundaries of this world. There was this
pull from the Lake. The blue, blue water. I could
drown myself in that power.
A coin - irregularly shaped, proud patrician face crudely stamped in gold.
Into the water, breaking the subtle spell and surface tension with an impact far beyond its weight.
My hand outstretched, my slow realisation of the unconscious defence of my mind.
Why did my subconscious mind have to choose the most valuable coin in my pocket? The aura of age, the history that it possessed as the first coin minted by a long-dead empire. Gone. Just like that.
I wiped away the sweat of terror that beaded my face and turned from the distant ice pillars that surrounded the islands, looking back to the Forest. The sky seemed now to rudely thrust itself to my senses. So I looked down, to where the river met the lake. My hands were still shaking.
The change of muddy water to the sky-blue water happened quickly, streamers roiling and being dissolved. The edge of the blue water that met it, the ripples, seemed oddly angular. As though the water had been replaced by a smoothly flowing crystal, which could not quite form the curves required, no matter how finely faceted it's surface.
I felt myself calm. Nothing could be a threat that couldn't flow like water. I wouldn't feel that urge to drown if I looked back at the Lake, I didn't know what it was, but I saw through it all the same.
I looked back, no suicidal impulse took me. I'd heard rumours of a madness that took outsiders, they generally have no resistance to magical compulsion. The Lake was as charged as the sky, nearly enough to take my senses and have me follow those unfortunates. Still, perhaps it was best to limit my exposure till I had a better handle on it.
[] To my left, a strange scar across the shore led into the strange waters from the forest, steam softly rising.
[] To my right, an old jetty that was once a bridge to the islands. Things caught by the currents are often caught in turn by the pilings.
[] Looking past these things I saw a sign of greater fortune: Write In
-For example, things lost by the poor victims of That Lake are possibly suitable. I'm sure some interesting things went into the water with their bloated corpses.
-Or whatever craziness. If it won't fit I won't choose it, which I think is reasonable.
-Pick a direction as well, this stuff is just further along the shore.
![17575723da99878a8f73b14c98f1bf0a[1]](/th/arch/thumb/130640146598s.png)
