"You see, during that year Japan had one of the longest winters in history, and needless to say the patients minds ran away with the idea. While the staff was a little reluctant, we knew we would have to use the long winer to introduce the new patients or else risk another outburst, which would be more dangerous now that we had more patients. And somehow, the new batch was even stranger than the last. The first woman, we've named her Letty Whiterock, was found in the mountains, wearing heavy snow clothes. We believe she got stranded in the mountains whilst hiking, and she was insane by the time she was rescued. However, nobody was reported as going missing in the mountains at the time, and she doesn't match up with any missing person's reports. If you ask her, she'll tell you she a Yuki-onna. A snow spirit. She's obviously crazy, poor thing, but I should mention that everything always feels distinctly?colder when she's around. It's quite funny in a morbid way actually, little Cirno has declared Letty her eternal rival because she claims to be able to control the cold too. Letty is kind enough to play along with her. Or perhaps she believes her?I lost the ability to tell the two apart a long time ago.
Then came Chen. Chen has a mental condition where she never aged mentally, she's entering her teens and she still acts like a young child. She has quite the affection for cats, and we let her keep strays in her room. Normally, we'd say not to that kind of behavior, but she's Miss Yakumo's granddaughter." Hijiri paused for a moment to take a sip of her tea as the other women stared at her.
Miss Yakumo?the owner of the establishment, yes?" Soga asked, as Hijiri responded with a nod. "So she's married?"
"Ah, you're getting ahead of yourself. Yukari doesn't come into the story until later. There's others who need to be introduced first. Alice Margatroid was a teenage girl who was tormented at her school because of her strange passion for doll making. Everyone considered it childish and creepy, and soon Alice found herself an outcast. She endured so much torment, the only escape she had was her doll making. She immersed herself. It became an obsession of hers. She claimed that one of her dolls would come to life and talk to her, telling her to make straw effigies of her classmates and nail them around the school. This would seem harmless at first, but soon afterwords the children who had been depicted on the dolls were all found injured in various classrooms. None died, but they all told the same story. They had seen a small doll walking through the halls after school and followed it into a classroom. What happens then varies, some say dolls with knives swung down and attacked them, some say they found dolls that exploded. The only person capable of doing these things was Alice, the young doll maker, master puppeteer, and math savant. Finally, she was caught, and she was sent here. It turns out she had been sneaking into the school at night and planting dolls packed with gunpowder and dolls she attached knives to all around the school. We allow her to continue making dolls though. I requested this specially, because after all, what's the harm in a few dolls? Although we confiscate the doll that she believed was talking to her, and she now seeks to try and make a living doll.
While she isn't a patient here, it's worth mentioning our resident parrot Lily. She's a young white parrot who we got around the same time as Alice. I'm still not entirely sure why, I believe one of the staff members must have left her here after they quit. Anyways, she's a lazy little thing, but she gets spring fever, the only phrase she knows is 'It's Spring!'. She's rather content to contain herself in one of the spare rooms during most of the year, but she always manages to find her way out in the spring time to announce that spring has arrived. The long winter drove her absolutely crazy.
Soon afterwards, Layla Prismriver died. She wasn't a patient in the hospital, but soon after she died, her sisters fell into a deep depression, they locked themselves into a room with several instruments. It took a week for them to be found, and by the time paramedics had gotten them out they were all near death. They were revived in a hospital, but the trouble wasn't the damage to their bodies, it was the damage to their minds. You see, the sisters had been through all kinds of hardships together and were intertwined like a tree. When the oldest sister Layla died, the roots snapped. The three surviving sisters believed that Layla's ghost had come to them and made them phantoms, giving them the ability to create wonderful music. This is obviously a delusion the girls put upon themselves to try and cope with the death of their sister. But for some reason, after their week of confinement, they all knew how to play several instruments they'd had no training with before perfectly. Lunasa, the oldest, has depression, and plays the violin. Merlin knows how to play the trumpet and is just plain crazy. And Lyrica, who plays the piano, is just?odd.
Finally, our two saddest cases. Yomou Konpaku was just a young girl training to be a gardener when her twin sister died. She was devastated by the loss, and she developed a split personality, one was her, the other was her 'ghost half', an embodiment of her dead sister. Shortly afterwards, she began having constant out of body experiences to help her mind cope with the idea of a ghost half. And indisputably the saddest case in the asylum, Yuyuko Saigouji. Her case is similar to Yomou's, she had a younger sister who was very ill. She had been sick from birth, and the doctors warned her parents that she would most likely die in infancy, but she didn't. Yuyuko loved her sister, the two were practically inseparable. One day, while the two were walking, her sister stopped to rest under a cherry tree. She never got up. Yuyuko was so crushed by grief that her mind coped with it in a rather disturbing way. She believed that her sister had never died. Not like Yomou, who believed that her sister was a phantom, a wordless ghost watching over her, she believed that she was, in fact, her dead sister. She came up with some deluded story about how she had sacrificed herself to seal a cherry tree that consumed souls, and that she was now a phantom, the princess of the Netherworld who could manipulate death. Her parents knew she would have to be committed to an asylum, but every one they went to required shock therapy and medical testings. After all Yuyuko had been through, her parents couldn't bear to see her suffer anymore. They were just about to give up when Miss Yakumo, an old friend of theirs, offered to take her in. So, we put her in a room with Yomou, and the two became fast friends. Yomou believes because of her ghost half she should serve Yuyuko, who is the princess of the netherworld. The two spend their time strolling the garden."
"She believes she can manipulate death? Isn't that kind of a dangerous trait for a mental patient?" Miko interjected.
"Yuyuko wouldn't hurt a fly, the poor girl has been through too much. Anyways, we convinced the others that 'spring had been stolen', and convinced them to search for it, conveniently having them meet the new patients along the way. We convinced everyone that Yomou was stealing spring in order to resurrect a corpse underneath the cherry tree in our garden. Poor little Yuyuko wanted her sister back so bad she unconsciously played along with the idea. The winter actually ended shortly after the girls 'saved it'. Things quieted down after that. Unfortunately, Yuyuko mentioned one day how Miss Yakumo had allowed her to enter Gensokyo. This piqued the patients curiosity, and they became determined to find Yukari. Yukari didn't feel it would be proper if she went herself, but personally, I think she's afraid. She sent her daughter in her stead, Ran Yakumo. Chen's mother. Ran had her daughter committed even though she didn't want her, but she owes Yukari for it. She's actually a very smart woman, she has several degrees in math and science. Everything but psychology. She detests the idea of mental conditions, but she knows that Chen can't live in the real world. She constantly visits Chen in the center, and despite herself, she often ends up playing along with the patients' fantasies. Ran showed up, and that satisfied the girls for a while, but eventually they figured out Ran had just been sent to dupe them. They began demanding to meet the mysterious 'Yukari' once more.
Miss Yukari finally showed up. She's considered the most powerful person in Gensokyo. She is the owner after all. When she tried to explain to them that she created Gensokyo, they took it as something completely different. They thought she was a youkai who manipulated boundaries, because she built the walls that made up Gensokyo. Or as they called it, the border. She told them she sleeps most of the time, so they accept that she won't be around most of the time, but she appears from time to time. She claims she doesn't enjoy indulging the patients. She thinks I haven't noticed how she always brightens up whenever she's here, how much younger and happier she acts. She's as deep in as me."
I'm trying to slowly get more surreal with the patients. We've gone from schizophrenic gardener to doll exploder.
