>You are Yukari Yakumo. Your day has been awful and there is no sign of it improving.
>You are the youkai that stands at the threshold, old as civilization and a witness much of human and youkai history. Indeed, you have been a significant force during much of the latter. Your deeds are many: You have name charted the stars for youkai-kind, you have lead an invasion that shook both heaven and earth, even if it had ostensibly failed to conquer the moon. You have dwelt on the edge of human society, sometimes reaching out to influence it in small ways. However, there was a point when you realized that you had to make a decision, whether you wished to exert your power over all, dominate them, and rule openly (or fall in the attempt), or take a more relaxed role and live as you pleased. You chose the latter with little hesitation. You have watched both humans and youkai throughout history, as youkai took early control over the unseen parts of the world and were slowly driven further and further back as humanity grew in power, technology, and arrogance.
>Eventually, it became necessary to find a new place for the youkai to live, and you took an active role in helping to forge that place with the aid of the Hakurei bloodline and The Dragon itself. Now you watch over that land, serving as both a quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) guardian and observer of its ultimate fate. Already, it has challenged some of your wildest expectations, for both the land itself and its inhabitants...
>More mundanely, you dwell with your shikigami and dearest companion Ran, as well as her subordinate shikigami Chen in a modest fashion, enjoying each day as it comes. Despite your rather fearsome status, which you cultivated as carefully as you care to, you have some friends among others as well. As well, you have a number of rivals; well, something like rivals; that you covertly keep an eye on. However, for the most part, you are content to merely flummox them from time to time, when you pay them any mind, you didn?t get as far as you have by letting things stress you unnecessarily. Your true duty is to maintain the integrity of the barrier that separates Gensokyo from the rest of the world, and make certain that nothing untoward gets in. You?ve had mixed success with this, when you are fully honest with yourself...
>You spent a lovely day yesterday, conversing with Yuyuko, playing with Maribel, plotting a mahjong tournament, and frolicking with Ran. Then it all went downhill when you awoke and found yourself naked in an unfamiliar cavern, bereft of all your possesses, most notably the tools you use to hone and refine your abilities, save your bedsheet. Having little other option, you wrapped yourself in the bedsheet and taken to exploring. You discovered over things; an immense yawning chasm that terminates into darkness, strange roots that give you a bad feeling and physically harm you to touch, chambers of glass, a place filled with half-finished sculptures, and a place where the borders were about to collapse into themselves. Most notably, you've found that the borders here are very odd, rather akin to a pile of trash than proper borders, and ever swirling and difficult to properly prise for gaps. With some effort, you found one of your tools, which had been somehow split into intangible lights.
>Eventually, you found a gap to take you away from there, but you weren't able to hold it open long enough and fell between the borders, where you were displeased to note they were just as crude as they were elsewhere. Eventually finding your way out, you came to a seemingly-endless field of fluffy frond-like plants, eternally waving in the breeze. Above, the sky gave way to absolute nothingness, not even emptiness could exist in such a place. Finding the borders to be the same here as elsewhere, you wandered the fields, finding more of those horrible roots and eventually weaving a hat out of fronds to test how well they weave. You found a fold in the borders here, and followed it to find several gaps, after using is to strengthen the borders here a little. One gap leaves back to the caverns you awoke in, and another scattered and unusable. While going to investigate a third, you found a silver door in the middle of the plains while opened to a black emptiness that was home to a crystal mass large enough to rival a palace. Exploring it, and accidentally destroying it, you found a pool of fresh water, and a most interesting piece of what you've identified to be a raw building block of existence.
>Helping yourself to both, you made your way out and followed your way to another gap, which lead you back to Gensokyo! Or so it seemed, at least. You quickly found the food didn't nourish you, nor did it seem you could bring objects or people through it. Sadly, the latter realization occurred after you tried to lead Reimu and Ran through it, which lead to them vanishing entirely. With a heavy heart, you reentered the abyss and pressed on to another gap. Through it, you found a forest full of alien trees and devoid of any kind of anymore life. Exploring it, you soon discovered a strange gap within a pillar, and a border filled with sourceless music. Extracting and testing the former, you found it bought you to a tiny shrine in the middle of the forest, and shrunk you to a few inches in height. This affair was unprecedented, but thankfully reversible. The shrine was largely empty, and particularly lacking in sanctity, save for a strange sigil found in a tunnel leading from the basement. You found it held some notable power, but was incomplete. Then you noticed that it seemed to follow you, always moving while out of sight, but otherwise harmless. After a little experimentation, you found that the base of the shrine wasn't connected to the ground, and more experimenting revealed a chamber that was not aligned with the structure. Making creative use of a branch, you managed to get down to the chamber, finding a gap that took you to the top of a mountain. There, you found more music without a source, this one you were able to take with you. You have fused it with the other sourceless music to make a strange non-duet of the two.
>Tired and hungry, mentally exhausted and finding it increasingly difficult to keep your composure, you made you way back to what seemed to be Gensokyo and rested. Waking to find yourself cold and hungrier still, you were able to warm yourself with a blanket, but had no luck in filling your stomach. You then spent a fair deal of time trying to determine whether or not that Gensokyo was real, engaging in unpredictable behaviors and visiting a helpful Yuyuko. In the end, you were reasonably convinced and moved on. Returning to the caverns where this all began, you checked a hitherto unexplored gap. This one took you to a vast outside world city that seemed to be ruined by war, built upon buildings in the ground, with upside down ones in the sky. You quickly found there were many mirrors within this city, and that they all seemed to connect to a mirrored maze elsewhere. Exploring this maze partially, you found yourself at wildly disparate parts of the ruined city, and then managed to find your tape measure hidden within one of the mirrors.
>Leaving the ruined city behind, you then followed the gap in the caverns that failed you the first time, and ended up at a series of floating islands within a multicolored sky, connected by bridges of light. Exploring them, you soon found signs that someone else had passed through, the first true signs of life you've seen since entering this strange abyss. Following these tracks, you eventually scaled a mountain and found a gap that had been crudely opened, and nearly ruined by the process. Carefully stabilizing it again, you followed this person into yet another new place; a barren rocky plain with alien stars above, and a moon impaled upon a blue world. You quickly found a firelight and followed it upon you came upon the sleeping form of Maribel, as disheveled and starved as you. Now you need to find her some water, before thirst and weakness harm her seriously. As well, you have found she is beginning to lose her humanity.
>The two of you began to travel together, exploring the barren world, and finding several new gaps and interesting sites. One such gap you were unable to open. Another was strangely corrupt and would be unwise to open at the moment. The last one lead to a strange world of color, where everything seemed to break down into fields and splashes of color, including yourself and Maribel. Failing to make much headway in this place, you returned to the barren land and explored some more, eventually finding a face in the mountains. When you gapped closer to it, however, you could not find int, instead discovering a valley filled with crystal lines and a strange dais. Fiddling with them, you soon managed to create a sort of misty tower, and from it withdraw your magnifying glass. Other experiments found that the there seems to be water above the stars there, which allowed you and Maribel to slake your thirst, doing wonders for her. Bolstered, you returned to the world of color, and managed to find how to manipulate some of the colors, and eventually returned to the forest of alien trees. There, you confirmed the sigil from before is part of your missing wrench, though you have no leads on another part. Further exploration lead to another gap, which proved to be difficult to untangle from the broken borders. Stepping through it, you find it has caused you and Maribel to grow about twice as large as many of the trees here.
>Making the best of the situation, you decide to go exploring with your enhanced ability to cover ground, and soon found many interesting things, including a hole in one of the mountains that ultimately lead to finding your wrench, a source of food in the form of some highly spicy fruit, and another gap that resulted in you and Maribel becoming miles tall and physically breaking into the place with the floating islands. Rearranging them for your convenience, you created a link between there and forest, expediting your travels. You then returned to your proper size by passing through the gaps again and explored a temple whose islands was previously inaccessible due to the extreme instability of its borders. Inside, you found a gap in the center, disembodied music on the roof, and the tail edge of the immense gap that had greatly enhanced your size previously from which you were able to investigate distant islands and find another gap.
>Claiming the music, you returned to the forest to integrate it with the rest, then take the entire mass with you. From there, you went back to the islands to the distant gap you had uncovered and found that the island was infested with roots. The gap there lead to the root-filled abyss again, and to your vise grips, stuck among them. You turned your magnifying glass on the roots hoping to find the best way to sever them, and found that they seemed to be a mostly conceptual entity of memory, faith, destructive impulse, and desire. You were able to free your vise grips, though some of the roots still clung to them, and you quickly left, returning to the temple island.
>You have taken refuge from the wind behind a pillar, having hurt your hand in the initial effort to reclaim and clean off your vise grips. Maribel has just pointed out a hand pattern among the globs of fallen ichor.
> "Oh?"
> Pause and take a look at the ichor.
>Pausing to take a look, you note that the ichor does seem to stretch out into small five-branched patterns, which seem to stretch out toward the other root fragments As well, you note that the clumps look almost like fingertips and palm pads.
>_
