>>164741 RESULTS [X]
Tell your mother what you plan. She’ll get a
sending off to the Hakurei, and she might be able to get in touch with others: Miss Youmu and Aunt Chen are merely two of the many power players you can think of. And truthfully, you’d be glad to fight alongside your mother. Others might be better magicians, but Hong Meiling is the greatest kung fu master ever to walk Gensokyo. It might take a few minutes, but the added force is well worth the wait.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“There’s something in the hills that tried to hurt Nami. I’m going to find it – and then I’m going to kill it,” you declare, your expression fierce.
“To hunt a monster is a worthy quest,” your mother says, expression not wavering in the slightest. “And just what makes you think you’re going alone?”
You glance up at Nami, then back to her, and then realize just how trusting she is of you. “You don’t want to hear the details first?” you say, incredulous. “Forget that, you’re not going to tell me to wait?”
“First of all, I trust your judgment. More importantly, my daughter’s battles are my battles,” she says, crossing her arms. “I don’t need to know anything else.”
“Mom,” you say flatly. “You’re
stupid.”
“Stupidly in love with the greatest daughter in the world!” she says with a wink, and your heart melts as she grabs you in a quick but heartfelt hug, forcing Nami off of your head in an abrupt tumble. You’re proud that you only sob once.
After you disentangle yourself, you turn towards Nami where she hovers by your side, waiting for you to finish. Carefully, you weave several glamours of nondetection over her – just her. “I want you to fly to your old home,” you say. “Try and track down where that thing went. If you run into trouble – if you
think you
might run into trouble – you pop yourself and come back here
immediately, do you understand?”
She gives you a frantic nod that only you can see, although she’s clearly not enthused about the idea of a round two. A second later she’s off, rocketing towards Youkai Mountain.
Your scout sent, you turn and start jogging towards the cottage yourself your mother and familar moving alongside you like bodyguards. “
Sendings,” you pant as you slam through the front door, nimbly leaping over rugs, gardening tools, and furniture alike until you skid into the main room. “The Hakurei maiden should know what’s going on, at the very least.”
“That bad, huh?” Your mother nods, digging out the sending stones from underneath a pile of old magazines on the bookshelf.
“Miss Youmu and Aunt Chen, too, if we can get them. Not Missus Kamishirasawa, though – she’s not at the top of her form right now.”
“… this is very serious,” she says grimly.
“Deadly.” You think back to that feeling of corruption, of something twisted trying to take root in Nami’s very soul – and by extension, yours. “It might have killed me – or worse.”
“By the Dragon, I’m glad it didn’t,” she swears, reaching out to tousle your hair. “Should we raise Mami as well?”
“Of course,” you say, and then she thrusts the device into your hands. You stare at them for a second. “Uh, aren’t you – ”
“Your war, your call,” she says sternly.
“You think they’ll actually listen to me?” you say, unsure.
“You’re more important than me, Recky,” she admits. “Don’t try and be modest – your potential is astronomical.”
You try and argue back. “I’m not that – ”
“You’re painfully shortsighted if you honestly think you’re not special. Dragon,” she sighs, “you take lessons from me
and Mami and consider it to be
fun. Both of us spent our youths trying to teach ourselves – we were already adults by the time we found what might be called proper schooling. You, on the other hand, have grown up underneath us since you were born, and we expect you to go much farther as a result.” She smiles. “They’ll listen to you, Recette. All you have to do is call.”
Swallowing, you turn your head to the floor and nod, trying to condense the call into twenty-five words, counting and recounting as you try and squeeze as much as information as you can into the limit.
You clear your throat, then with a tap and a thought of the shrine’s own set of similar stones, you say, “Urgent. Unknown entity corrupting land, fairies on Youkai Mountain. Extremely dangerous. Creating hunting party, require reinforcements. Respond immediately at Scarlet Mansion. Hong and Recette Meiling.”
“Good message,” your mother says reassuringly.
“It was too terse,” you chuckle nervously, putting the stones down on the center table, pushing aside books and empty flowerpots to make space. Of course it was;
sendings always are. Twenty-five words is never enough. Quickly, you repeat the message twice more, once for your aunt who’ll find Youmu herself, and once for your teacher.
Seconds pass as you shuffle nervously in front of the stones. “We should be getting ready while we wait for a response,” your mother coughs.
“What is there to prepare?” you ask, curiously. “We have ourselves. What other weapons do we need?”
“An old lizard like me has some relics in stock from her younger days,” she says, looking slightly prideful.
“What, that box of knick-knacks in the shed?” you ask curiously. The items range from ribbons to alarm clocks to things you can’t even begin to identify – oversized crystals, a meat cleaver rusted into floral patterns, and a living, apparently nonmagical vine that defies everything you know about biology. “I wasn’t aware any of them did anything useful.”
“No, those are just sentimental baubles,” she admits. “I keep the good stuff underneath the floorboards.”
“We don’t have a cellar,” you say, confused.
“No, we don’t,” she agrees. “And oh,” she says with a sudden gleam in her eye. “Get your dress.”
“Mom?” you say, incredulous. You stuffed that billowing pink ruffled monstrosity of a Christmas present into your closet without even bothering to open the box – you’d have burned it if it had come from any other person.
“Just do it, Recky,” she says with a wink.
“Oh, okay,” you stammer slightly. Trepidation creeps up your neck, the kind you get when you suspect you’ve just been completely and utterly outwitted.
Spinning quickly through the doorframe into the back hallway of the cottage, you nimbly hop over the boxes of assorted home supplies next to the door of your room. Shoving aside an ill-placed coat rack, you throw open your closet and fling aside a dozen shirts and pairs of pants, uncovering the brightly colored box where you’d hidden it, both out of embarrassment and sentimentality.
With a deep breath, you scan it with your senses one last time before you open it, confirming that yes, it does in fact contain a dress. It’s just as disgustingly impractical as the last time you looked at it – how can anyone move around with a hemline low to the point of dragging on the ground? Not about to miss the incoming
sendings of response, you take the whole box into your arms and leap back out of your room to run back into the main room.
You find your mother crawling on the floor, fingers across the boards in search of – something, you’re not quite sure what. “Mom?”
She doesn’t answer you immediately, though, instead choosing to lift an arm in a wave – no, her movements are too precise for that. You wince as her hand plunges in a hard chop, her fingertips slashing straight through one of the floorboards and into the crawlspace underneath, leaving her wrist-deep into the foundation underneath. So exact was her strike that you can see that the repair will be limited to just that one plank – nothing a
fabricate from one of the Travelers can’t fix in seconds, although you suspect that your mother will have you doing it by hand later to “build character”. Honestly, the hole in the house’s enchantments will be far easier to fix.
“Just a second, Recky,” she says, her focus entirely on the hole. Her fingers and palm still aligned, she makes several scraping motions, peeling apart the layers of packed earth and crumbled mortar like a shovel. “It should be – right – here – aha!”
With several hand-over-hand pulls, she unearths a long red staff, the ends tipped with gold. “Oh, hellooooooooo, have I missed you!” she sings, practically crooning as she hugs it shamelessly in front of you.
“Mom!” you bark out, not sure whether to be amused or embarrassed as she starts rubbing her cheek against its surface.
“But it’s been years since I’ve seen him,” she pouts, looking for all the world like a child with a favorite toy. “Mistress Remilia said I couldn’t leave him laying around, because some fairy might walk try to fly off with him. Fat chance – they couldn’t even lift it if a hundred of them came.”
You scan it with your senses. It’s just a metal rod; while it’s not a metal you’ve ever seen before, it doesn’t seem that special, barring the fact that it’s impossibly heavy. Actually, now that you think about it, it’s heavy enough to crash straight through the timbers of the floor should she so much as lay it flat on its side – okay, maybe there
is something special about it. “It’s not like anyone messes with the things you keep in the shed, either, so what’s so important about this in particular?”
“He was my faithful companion for most of my delinquent youth,” she sighs nostalgically. “For that matter, he was what started the whole ‘delinquent’ part of that. Did you know I used to work at a desk all day?” she laughs.
“You?” you repeat in disbelief.
“All I did was push papers all day long. The red stamp of rejection, the black stamp of approval, a pen to sign my name – those were my tools. I was born into the position, raised from the cradle to become nothing but Heaven’s finest bureaucrat.”
You keep quiet, holding your question about ‘Heaven’ until there’s time. You can’t dawdle too long here, after all – you’ve a hunt to begin. “Somehow, I just hated it from the very start, but I never knew why. Then one day, I just got fed up with it all, and left my post – which, by the way, is the equivalent of bloody murder up there. Of all things, I bump into a huge work crew; they were dragging this old thing out of storage to turn him back into a support pillar for the oceans, since his owner didn’t need him anymore – he turned into a Buddha, you see. The owner, not, er, him,” she indicates with a small wave of the staff.
“Uh, yeah, I see,” you say confusedly, “but that’s not nearly big enough to be a – ”
“Oh, he was much bigger at the time. Wider than this cottage all around, and tall enough to scrape the clouds. Apparently he weighed about ten thousand
jin – ”
That’s a unit you’ve never heard before. “
How heavy?”
But she’s on a roll right now, and won’t be stopped for anything. “ – but when I tried to join the rubbernecking crowds to try and lose my boss, he just started
glowing. The next thing I knew he was shrinking, falling off the rollers and generally making chaos as workers ran everywhere. I just kinda stood there in shock as the crowd fled before its path – and then he bumped into my foot. I did the only logical thing, of course – I picked him up.”
“No one got mad at you?”
“They did. Oh, how they did. I must have been jumped on by at least a hundred confused guards, and I’m not talking the kind that sit around and run alarms at the first site of trouble. No, they were all valorous generals, renowned heroes and master sages, called specifically to protect it during the move.”
“… and they just let you have it?”
“
Him,” she corrects you. “And no, they didn’t. But he had other plans than being turned into a support pillar again, and I had other plans than reviewing budgets for little roadside shrines for the rest of my life. Together, the two of us fought our way down to the earth itself, and thus began our misadventures!” She poses, holding ‘him’ up high in triumph.
Your curiosity gets the better of you. “Then how’d you end up as a gardener here?”
She only shrugs. “That’s another story. Maybe later. For now, though…” she says with a glare towards the stones, “… why has no one responded yet?”
“You didn’t get the response while I was getting this?” you ask frantically, waving the offending box.
“Nothing,” your mother says, her voice betraying her concern as you pull out one of the chairs from under the table, dropping the box onto its seat. “Not a word from any of them.”
“… maybe they’ve already found the monsters themselves?” you say hopefully. It’s possible – and such a prompt response from them might not be completely unexpected from them if the threat is as great as you think it is – as you
know it is.
“That would be for the best, yes, but let’s not assume that our work has already been done for us,” she cautions you.
You nod in response. “Of course – I have no intention of – ”
Much regret, unable. Both of you jump up as the stones send back a response.
Travelers, tengu quarreling. Conflict escalating. Swords drawn, spellcard rules ignored. “Of all the times for things to boil over, it has to be now?” your mother hisses from behind clenched teeth. “But this – maybe this incident, if they hear about it, can get them to take their focus off of each other – ”
Hakurei absent, location unknown. Taoists, Buddhists occupied. Suggest mobilizing immediately. Mamizou Futatsuiwa. “They’ll listen,” you repeat ironically, and you wish you hadn’t said that as your mother swears and punches the table. It’s fortunate that the thing is crafted from sturdy oak, but you hear wood crack despite that fact. “Is there anyone else? Aunt Chen, Miss Youmu? Why aren’t they responding either?”
“If Reimu is out,” your mother says, thinking aloud, “then chances are Lady Yukari’s in on this too.”
“… and if she needs Reimu for something, she’ll have taken Aunt Chen with her as well. And Miss Youmu and Chen are inseparable these days, so – that’s her as well,” you realize. “Then who can we ask? Missus Kamishirasawa?” She’s the last person you can think of.
“If even the Taoists and Buddhists are occupied, then the only way to get Keine to leave her village right now would be as a corpse,” your mother says grimly, reminding you why you had been reluctant to ask her in the first place.
“… I know this is asking a lot, but – Miss Scarlet? Miss Izayoi? Miss Knowledge? Even Miss Koakuma could help.” You refrain from adding the younger Scarlet to the list. You’re not
that suicidal; although she’s quite a nice girl and hardly about to go on a random wrecking spree like she apparently used to, you’ve had the experience of seeing her “take the safeties off” once, which was one more time than you needed to see it to know that asking her to fight would be a horrible, horrible idea.
“You know just as I do that they’re in Makai right now,” she says, shaking her head. “And you were the one telling me we can’t get a
sending through the planar border they’ve got.”
“You could go fetch them, I thought. Maybe?” you say in small voice.
“And by the time I come back with our friends, this entire incident will have either ended, or escalated to something awful,” she says, agreeing with what you already know. “No, Recky, we’re truly alone for this one.”
“We won’t be alone,” you say in rebuttal. “We have each other.”
She smiles a bit, and you feel yourself flush beet-red. “Yeah, I guess we do.”
Just then, you feel Nami touch your mind. Glad to focus on something else for a second, you hold a hand to hold off any further conversation as you focus on the images your shikigami is sending you.
… shadowy figures, flitting between the trees. A little larger than fairies, but there are enough similarities in proportions and silhouettes to make you swallow hard in painful realization that many were not nearly as lucky as Nami. Strangely, they seem to give off just a little light of their own despite being so darkly colored; perhaps it’s a callback to what they were before that force corrupted them.
But none of them seem to notice her. Instead, they’re focused on something else, all searching for something, but clearly gravitating towards a single direction. As they start collapsing into a wedge, she spots what they’re focused on: a clear trail recently left by something fleeing in obvious haste. Here and there are dark, wet splotches, almost certainly blood.
Something – or someone, as the scrap of bloodstained, homespun cotton on the branch gives away. Your own eyes widen: you recognize its spotted green-on-white pattern. That hideous color combination is the common uniform at the village crèche – it makes the residents unmistakable, as no adult or home-raised child would be caught dead wearing the same pattern.
In other words, those fairies are searching for a child – or children. There could be more than one; in fact, there are probably several of them, as the playmates tend to roam in groups. But why in the Hells are they this far out on Youkai Mountain, in unpatrolled lands? Some kind of dare gone wrong?
But there’s no time to dwell on that. There’s a crashing, crunching sound approaching, and as one the fairies start turning away, suddenly fearful of their current route. A wave of pure black darkness, not the paradoxical luminescent kind of the former fairies, rolls out of the trees towards them. The creatures take to the air, but not fast enough, as the absurd speed of the shadow becomes apparent. Each is engulfed in turn, and then the rolling shadow is upon her before she can even think to –
–
pop, and then she’s reforming over your head. “She’s back!” your mother points out unnecessarily, more to break the long silence than out of any real need.
The moment your shikigami finishes respawning, she flits in front of your face, arms waving frantically, her own features wide with terror. “Yes, Nami, yes, yes, I know it was scary.”
“What’d she see?” your mother demands, and you fill her in as fast as possible as Nami hugs herself around your arm, absolutely refusing to let go.
“Children from the crèche!” she exclaims in horror. “What possessed them to wander so far out?”
“I have no idea,” you admit, “but we have to move now. Nami can guide us to that trail again.”
Your mother shakes her head, rolling her staff from hand to hand in nervousness. “But that darkness – I’ve heard of a youkai that travels in an orb of darkness. Read about it in the paper once. It ate those fairy things, didn’t it? Should we worry about finding more of them?”
“Worse. You told me why you pick the beetles in the garden off the flowers into a bucket of soapy water by hand, instead of poisoning them.”
She winces. “Because if they eat the poison, and then the birds eat them…”
“The bird is the one to die. Except this time, it’s not poison, and it won’t kill it.” You swallow. “It’s worse.”
“… but at least it was travelling opposite to the trail the children left,” she points out. “If we go the same way as the fairies did, then we shouldn’t run into it.”
“But that came from the same direction as the children,” you realize. “What’s to say it hasn’t already eaten them, and just picked off the fairies for dessert? In that case, the only thing left to do is hunt it down before it spreads the corruption even further.”
“But that’s giving up on the children early,” your mother growls, and you have to admit that that’s an unpleasant idea to stomach.
“Even then, we can’t ignore the original attack. Those fairies didn’t come out of thin air – something made them that way, and we didn’t see it.”
“Dragon, but we need to know more!” your mother curses. “Recky, have you learned to scry yet? Mami says she sometimes pokes around here just to see how the garden’s going without coming in person. Has she taught you anything about that?”
You shake your head. “She said she was saving that for later. Said I might be tempted to start sticking my nose places it doesn’t belong.”
Your mother looks to the fairy on your arm. “Nami, can I ask you to – ”
Both you and your shikigami shake your heads no before she can even finish. “That was a close enough call last time. I’m not about to send her out again – she was lucky.” You’re probably being paranoid, but you’d like to think it justified in this situation.
“Then we need to head out ourselves, now. But where?”
She looks at you expectantly. Uncomfortable with the trust she’s putting in your decision, you think of all the intel you have at hand…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CHOOSE YOUR DIRECTION OF PURSUIT
[ ]
Follow the trail of the children forwards. That rolling ball of darkness was terrifyingly fast, and you’re pretty sure those corrupted fairies met a nasty if unseen end. There’s no reason to confront it immediately. You’ve got to focus on saving lives before anything else, so the first course of action to take would be to follow the same trail they were and find the children – if you can find them at all, that is.
[ ]
Follow the trail of the children backwards. The speed of that darkness youkai tells of an experienced, deadly hunter. And there was a lot of blood on the trail – it would have smelled it and found the children long before the fairies did. Exterminating that youkai before it gets too far will help contain the corruption before it goes far, and you can roll to the source after that – if you survive.
[ ]
Ignore the trail, and find the source. Those fairies can’t have been the only ones corrupted. And they weren’t doing any obvious action to spread the infection – surely something is still continuing the corruption elsewhere. If you stop to save lives or exterminate youkai first, something irreversible might happen – if it hasn’t already.
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I hope you enjoyed your half of a Meiling origins story as headcanon by this writefag.
You want to hear the rest of it?
Then get her through this alive. 
