~Hakurei Shrine~ > Patchouli's Scarlet Library
Weekly Writing Challenge Thread 2 - The Morning After (Deadline December 31st)
Esifex:
--- Quote from: ShiRou Takayama on August 26, 2012, 09:24:04 AM ---Right, so after a thorough and rigorous judging process we have decided that Esi's entry is sadly lacking in dolphin cameos. Sorry, Esi. :<
--- End quote ---
AND I WAS SO SURE I WAS GONNA GET IT THIS TIME, DAMMIT
This prompt looks like fun, despite the absolutely terrifying picture.
Raikaria:
This sounds like one where I can take part in again :V
I gotta decide who to use first. And the Genre. A humorous story of a fairy being smart? A heartwarming tale of a kind Yuuka? Mind-bending Reisen rampages?
Of course what I'm gonna do won't be any of these.
LogosOfJ:
Edit as of 09/09/2012 20:35 BST: Added everything beyond "Of all law..."
Next time, I should ask if the deadline is noon or midnight.
What??? But.. But... There's still 8 minutes left on the pacific seaboard![s/]
--- Quote from: ShiRou Takayama on August 11, 2012, 05:45:57 PM ---Deadline: 12:00 BST, 25th August
--- End quote ---
Oops
(Technically, this might fit for the antithesis contest as well. Fanon was not quite clear about the star of this piece, but most gods associated with purification are considered at least neutral.)
Imitated: Lovecraft (idea drawn from this short: Nyarlathotep
Ending is also an Orwell quote reference
Ha. Ha.. Ha...
I am the last, and so I must speak... Yet how can I speak? How shall I make audible... How shall I bind that brilliance?
The beginning eludes me, as it shall elude many others; the disturbances began many months ago, but the speed at which they spread suggests an influence, buried, vast and ancient as the ocean, that, like the tides, appears to us only at times of relative strength. The spiritually-inclined such as myself were the first amoung humans to notice, though the ill-temper of Youkai foreshadowed our unrest an entire month advance. The fey and various other specimins of spirits showed hightened sensitivity to slights, both from the village and amoung themselves, and were more inclined to fighting, despite a general legarthy that characterized all other behaviors.
Travelling monks and exorcists driven by faith rather than the crass promise of coin were the first to note this fell trend. Some close friends amoung them chose to travel together more often, as to ward off the apprehension of bodily harm, huddling close as if before a blast of winter. Sectarian debate became more frequent and heated, instigated by the more sensitive. Friendships, first across faiths and then between schools, became strained and then crumbled amidst multiplying suspicions and small cruelties. Those of the native faiths held that the earth itself whimpered with fear; though I did not agree with such characterization of the land, I accepted without question the sentiment. I personally half-suspected, half-wished that the unease was no more than an affliction amoung holy persons, one that would leave the hardy souls of the common folk relatively unmolested.
Alas, my wishes went unrealized. I first noticed changes in the marketplace near my place of residence. Merchants of all walks of life agreed to a strict curfew, barring their doors at sunset. The once-lively square was muted, as buyers and sellers declined to haggle. A nervous, rather than ravenous, energy seemed to pervade all transactions. The air was thick with a sense of impending revelation, as if the magnitude of the incoming horror was great enough to demand that the world itself herald its arrival.
It was at that time of potential tumult and trepidation that that god arrived; at that time, no-one guessed its nature. We took its form, a priestess in the prime of its youth, to be but a mouthpiece. It travelled with ease at the head of an ever-growing entourage, stopping by every place of residence, from market to hermitage, first to preach, then to offer up spectacles that increased its fame even further.
The feats of this god involved copious amounts of paper and water. The first was conjured in vast quantities before and after demonstrations; the second was either painstakingly carried from nearby pumps in cups of paper or demanded from captive audiences. Both religion and deity spoke much of the nature of stories and divinity, but not once did the god speak of its own history or of its own place in the heavens. Men, from beggars to statesmen, advised each other to witness this god, and no-one who watched came out unchanged. Youths with more zeal than wisdom chose to throw themselves at the feet of this god of radiance regardless of their previous convictions; older persons would offer fealty in less obvious matters. Small shrines sprung up overnight, each dedicated in a way that honored no named god. White robes became more common outside of funerals. Less and less commerece occured during the night; persons treated daytime with the wariness shown to jealous lovers, as if afraid of angering the sun through undue enjoyment of the night sky.
A month after the introduction of this god, it had enough of a following to send heralds across this land. They were singular in many senses of the word; discrete and disinclined to company. Brilliant in mind and spirit, they were like stars to the sun of their god, and they similarly traversed the land umpreturbed by weather, assault, or terrain. Like their god, they spoke of stories and their structures and powers. However, the rest of their words and actions varied wildy; the only common theme was a largely succesful push to discredit current gods. A friend related to me how one demonstrated the construction of a device that predicted rain through variations in the weight of the air; after some insinuations, the herald convinced the villagers to test the power of a local rain god. A good number of villagers soon renounced this diety after witnessing its inability to prevent dry seasons. An acquaintance in a richer area reported to me how another such herald challenged a god of lightning: in the middle of a stormy autumn, the herald built a shed on a holy mountain. The god insisted that the herald leave. The herald refused, and outfitted the house with a pattern of iron on the next day. The god summoned a storm that lasted for three days and three nights, striking a total of 30 times, yet the herald emerged on the fourth day, hungry but otherwise no worse for wear.
My order was visited by a strange herald: a young girl in tattered clothes who carried a large, purple gourd and walked without fear in unhallowed places. She arrived unannounced, demanding to see our god. When told that our god was by definition uncontactable and ineffable, she laughed with menacing glee and asserted that our centuries of servitude were built on a mistake born either in the ravings of madmen or ancient rites of subjugation. She spoke of how she did not believe in gods, of how she instead elected to observe and acknowledge instead. One acolyte then declared his undying belief in the supreme power of our god, and all the acolytes as well as a smattering of priests loudly agreed. She then challenged them to jump off of a nearby sheer cliff as proof of that belief; no-one agreed. She left as suddenly as she came, declaring that her god would come later to force our acknowledgement before leaping off of the cliff and walking away.
We passed our days in a haze after that; it seemed as if it was just the next morning when that god, that horrible, inconcevibaly vast radiance, Hakurei arrived. It did not need to announce itself; we were compelled to wait for it. For us stubborn priests of the old faiths, it prepared for us a demonstration of great brilliance, that made our eyes water in but moments. Having noticed glints of metal and shuffling followers, I had the prescence of mind to denouce the light as a trick of mirrors, whereupon Hakurei dimmed, revealing a glowing woman in ceremonial garb, a vessel at odds with its deep laughter. We screamed that we were not afraid, but were driven out all the same by an apprehension of looming danger, with some even choosing the cliff over the indeterminate doom so clearly promised by that smiling visage.
I ran for what seemed to be an eternity, until the ground beneath me cracked like a dry riverbed. The entirety of the once-bustling farmland was parched, and a reddish sun of abnormal size dominated the sky. The monastery's mountain was still present, but I could not locate any of the complex's towers. I walked further until I was forced to my knees by a combination of exhaustion and some overwhelming force. My upturned face could only stare at the sun, that odd light that seared my eyes through my eyelids. I waited and waited for night, but the light did not wane throughout my attempts at meditation and then fitful sleep that lasted long enough for my fingernails to grow to three times the widths of my smallest finger. It was in that half-awake, heat-struck delirium that I was once again forced to behold that god, surrounded by those silent mirror-bearers, who looked towards it with reverence even as it regularly sundered mirror and holder with equal indifference, and cheered when it plucked the morning star (and evening star, for the two were one and the same) from the sky and ate it. Only then did I realize the full horror of Hakurei and its promised land. Plants and chattel would not survive, for they could not adore it; those that thought themselves free of it would not survive, as the god was the only possible source of sustenance; not even its heralds would survive; as they were too brilliant themselves, too close to peers to remain undevoured.
The only survivors would be those mirror bearers, those dull, insubstantial beings that only existed to allow Hakurei to bask in its own glory, those wretches to whom even the meanest power is infinitely beyond reach. And in the center of this benighted corpus Hakurei shall lie, forever smiling that faint smile, speaking of the story of its creation:
Of all law, only I shall remain.
Yukari Yakumo was vaguely discomforted, as she was for most of her life. As usual, the neccessity of her current name irked her, like a badly-made shoe. The additional unease was due to her most recent discovery.
The preserved letter was the chance fruit of a mountain walk; sheer chance delivered to her the confirmation of suspicions far darker than her most pessimistic estimates. For one, there were at least two surviving gods, one native and one invasive, that could elude, no, defy description, even by direct witnesses. Simply by existing, undescribable and unnameable objects distort the essential basis of most magic and ritual. Of many other dangers, these gods can enfoce oaths but cannot be bound by any form of contract against their will. Moreover, news of the old intruder, Hakurei was particularly worrying in its implied ability to spontaneously redirect or create reverance. She recalled the various crusades and purges, noting Hakurei's aptitude at producing murderous zeal, and shuddered.
Shudder was all that she did, though. The risk of total anihilation hung over all Youkai since the other ineffable god, now the God of Gensokyo, first declared the name of this land, and claimed power over its Borders. A being as weak as Yakumo, who must, like a human, scrape out a living through the exploitation of any lapse in the general stinginess of nature, cannot yet do anything.
Unlike her peers, Yukari was not one with nature; in that regard, even fairies were held in higher favor; they could at least fill their stomachs with the rich soil, while mightier beings dined on increasingly dangerous wildlife and the occasional human. The strongest of all made no distinction and snapped up all of the above easily.
Yukari ate human food, used human bookkeeping, and was outclassed by notable humans in spiritual power.
Her studies (with human magicians) progressed at an unsatisfactory rate; she could not wait to become mighty, as every day of weakness was inevitably a day lost. She slept only enough to function, and crammed her morning hours with the treatises of every school of sorcery accesible to those of human-like power. Afternoons were more of the same, with the occasional break, that was inevitably directed towards attempting to master her one power.
Yukari remembered, vaguely, her birth, that place populated by eyes and hands and maws, that emptiness that somehow was substantial enough to push her, to extrude her into the world, from a crack in a wooden post that appeared normal to all later investigation. When she was young, only 10 or so years, Yukari entertained the notion of being able to command that space, to use it to devour and terrify others. Now, in her second decade, she realizes the overreach of her fantasy; her power so far is only over small openings in physical matter, and an imprecice power at that, one easily overridden by the spiritual might of even acolytes of more powerful gods.
What Yukari enjoyed, however, was experimentation. She would find some phenomena and record its interactions, hypothesize, and test. Light behaved interestingly with apetures of proper dimensions, and various ailments and injuries can be induced through judicious opening and closing of gaps. On a less practical note, she enjoyed testing constructions, from trusses to odd mechanisms. Experimentation gave Yukari a faint sense of control, as well as a small but real increase in the ability to control her environment, that malestrom of gods and demons and peoples and nagure that threatened to swallow her.
Her love of observation grew to include a love of quantification, of measurement and calculation. Yet she hated herself for her growing need for them, as she did not need them to know that she did not have the time to wait, that every moment wondering was a moment not spent avoiding anihilation.
Still, she continued her hobby, and, on some indeterminate day, it proved invaluable.
Then again.
Then again.
And, from that day on, there was never enough time in a day. There were so many more things to do, so many new avenues to uncover, some of which will lead to power.
And thus Yukari labored in her days of weakness.
She was fortunate that her discovery did not come later.
Rumia, the Guarding Dark, wished to again spread her gifts among humanity, but was hesitant, as her influence, despite the best intentions of giver and recipient, tended to produce either tyrants or madmen. She decided first to spread her power amoungst her wards, so that none were made more or less mighty than another by her fiat. She then invited them to stand proudly and aspire at her side, not realizing that she had planted the seeds of her doom.
Raikaria:
"Say, Kyouko, can you check up on the graveyard? The visitors haven't mentioned the karakasa attempting to surprise them recently." Byakuren asks the Yamabiko, who, as always, happily does as the temple head says.
Unsurprisingly, the karakasa is still in the graveyard. However, instead of her usual cheerful greeting and attempt to surprise Kyouko, as she does everyone, the karakasa just floats there, depressed.
"Is something wrong Kogasa?" the Yamabiko asks. While most of the inhabitants of the Myouren Temple simply put up with Kogasa's presence, Kyouko sees her as a friend, as they both greet people loudly and heartily, albeit, with different purposes.
"I've given up surprising people." the umbrella mumbles.
"What?"
"Every time I try and surprise someone it doesn't work out. Worse still, I get beaten up usually." Kogasa says sadly.
"So... you're just gonna give up?" Kyouko asks.
"Yes. What's the point if no-one is ever surprised and it only gets me beat up? It's got to the point that the mikos beat me up for asking for help."
Kogasa starts to float off, leaving Kyouko both worried and, ironically, surprised, having never seen Kogasa like this. The yamabiko decides to follow the karakasa, although staying out of her vision, and staying quiet.
She follows the karakasa out of the graveyard, as she starts to float towards the Scarlet Devil Mansion and the Misty Lake, a place she often flies about to surprise fairies and the sleeping gatekeeper. The simple minded fairies fly around the depressed umbrella, but are surprised when she doesn't react at all to them urging her to play. After all, when a fairy swarm do this, usually they end up being blasted, or the victim plays with them to shut them up.
Kyouko notices this, but doesn't say anything.
Kogasa keeps floating onwards, seemingly without a particular aim, heading towards the human village. Oftentimes she would follow a visitor to the temple home to surprise them, only to fail and be beaten up by Keine. However, she just flies right over, and, when Keine sees her and flies up after her, she stops, noticing Kogasa is making no attempt to enter the village as usual.
"That's surprising." Keine murmurers as Kyouko flies past.
The Yamabiko notices this, and decides maybe she can use this to help her friend, using her reflection of sound to send Keine's voice to Kogasa. Usually, on the rare occasion Kogasa hears these words, she reacts gleefully. This time, she just floats onwards, slowly and sadly, no reaction at all, except muttering "Don't pity me.".
Music can be heard, and Kyouko recalls the source. The melodies of the Primsriver Sisters, who can manipulate emotion with their music. Kyouko flies towards the source of the sound, and, as expected, sees the Sisters practicing.
"My friend is depressed and flying without aim. Can you do anything to pick up her spirits?" Kyouko asks.
The three sisters look at each other, before Lunasa replies: "None of us three can make feelings of happiness or euphoria specifically. We can trick her into feeling happy with Lyrica's Illusionary notes, or Merlin's maniac notes can risk it. I'd just make her sadder."
"Well, do you know what is in that direction? You three are probably the most well-traveled in Gensokyo." Kyouko asks the three poltergeists.
"In that direction is the Sanzu River, or, at least, Gensokyo's part of it. There is little but death there." Lunasa says.
"Well, we have to try then." Kyouko says, paniced. While she is not sure if a karakasa could actually die, being essentially an immaterial object, she didn't want to find out.
The sisters look at each other and nod, with Merlin and Lyrica taking the lead with their music, and Lunasa sitting back, knowing she would make things worse if she was involved. Kyouko uses her power to ensure the sound reaches the drifting karakasa, but she does not react. If anything, her pace towards the Sanzu River picks up.
"Well, you tried, thanks for that." Kyouko says, before bowing to the three sisters and flying off, ahead of Kogasa, and onwards until she reaches the riverbank.
There is little but a few flowers at the shore of the Sanzu, however, there are two other things. A boat, and, near it, a red-haired woman asleep.
"Wake up! You have to help! My friend is coming here and she's depressed and this place apparently has little but death and I don't want her to die!" Kyouko shouts, panicking.
The sleeping woman wakes up, opening one eye.
"You come here not to seek death, but to help someone?" she asks. "You are aware that you are talking to a Shinigami? Are you sure your friend is not coming to commit suicide? Depressed souls are often attracted here, if they know it or not, to die."
"She's just depressed because she is a karakasa that cannot surprise people." Kyouko says, getting more worried by the second.
"That sounds like a suicide, but being a karakasa... ah, who cares." the Shinigami says.
At this point the karakasa drifts by. The Shinigami looks at her with both eyes.
"Ah, it is not her time. I guess fate has brought her here for another purpose. However, be it her time or not, if she continues and attempts to cross the river she will certainly die."
"Well, you gotta help me then!" Kyouko says, before calling Kogasa over.
"Kogasa, have you ever seen this person before?"
"No...." the karakasa says.
"Well, then she can't take pity on you like you said Keine did. Go on, try and... you know what." Kyouko says, pleading to her freind.
"Boo." she says.
The Shinigami does not react.
"See. No-one is surprised by me. Now she's probably gonna beat me up too." Kogasa says, looking on the verge of tears.
This gets the redhead to react.
"Wait, people beat you up for trying to surprise them? That in itself is surprising! How could people be so cruel to beat up a cute karakasa that wants to play?"
"Yeah... they're mean." Kogasa says, before sniffing, "Wait... you're surprised?"
"Who wouldn't be about that cruelty?"
"Sadists. Shrine Maidens. Witches." Kogasa says.
"Shrine Maidens?! Now that is surprising, ain't they supposed to be kind? You know what, I'll tell my boss about this. Yep. She'll be surprised too, I can bet, surprised enough to pay them a visit." the shinigami says.
"You mean it? She'll really be surprised?" Kogasa says, looking a little happier.
"Oh yes. And the meanies will be susprised to see my boss too. They'll be even more surprised when they hear her mention you too. Think about how much surprise your actions will have given them!"
"You ain't lying... are you?" the karakasa asks, with puppy-dog eyes.
"If I was lyin' my boss would be here now lecturing me about lyin'."
"See Kogasa, you can surprise people! Keine wasn't taking pity on you either. That swarm of fairies were surprised too!" Kyouko says.
"I... can surprise people?" Kogasa asks.
"Yeah... even if you didn't mean to do so this time, you surprised a lot of people!"
Kogasa smiles again. "I wanna go home now... do you know the way? Those old people will wanna visit the graves and I can hide behind them and jump out and go BOO!"
---
Make the happy cheerful Kogasa that's always attempting to surprise people but failing a depressed umbrella that's given up, but ironically surprising people by not surprising them. I think that counts as an antithesis, even if the story focuses more on Kyouko attempting to help her.
Esifex:
Awwww, poor Kogasa ;-;
danbo warning, be wary of nsfw ads
Although I like how you used her friendship with Kyouko, that was the cutest part.