Chapter Text
[x] Come clean about what you’re out here for. No time to BS.
-[x] Stand up for Ran Yakumo's authority, unless she already does so herself.
“Now hold on,” I say more incensed than usual. Everyone around me pauses in surprise at the tone I took.
“What is it, human?” Iizunamaru concedes the floor to me with a commanding tone.
“Where the hell do you get off?” I ask with all possible acid in me. “Stopping us is one thing, but not even taking Ran’s word for what we’re doing is outright insulting.”
The tengu shows a lapse in appropriate response. Perfect.
“First name?” she instead focuses on. Not perfect.
I muster further rage boiling in me to bellow, “Pay attention to what others are saying! We are passing through for business with the Moriya shrine.”
The blue tengu remains stalwart and replies, “Not through here, you aren’t. It is in my authority to bring you in–“
“Authority?!” I interrupt. “If you aren’t going to take Ran’s authority seriously then I don’t give a damn!”
“Tanner!” Ran shouts. “That is enough.”
I look over to her. She seems angry, but there’s some other kind of emotions mixed in. None of the tengu surrounding us are taking action yet. They’re not sure what’s happening.
Iizunamaru laughs, in what you might even call a guffaw,“You know what? Tell us what your business is, then, you child.”
“Studying misfortune,” I answer before Ran can speak up again.
A few of the tengu in the trees start to look uneasy.
Iizunamaru seems unimpressed and says, “What even is that lie..?”
Before she continues to chastise my answer, she pauses and squints at me. Her eyes catch my lower abdomen. I’ve been holding the dream catcher I bought over the bottom talisman this whole time, but it seem she understands what it means for it to be blacked out like a piece of charcoal.
She looks back up to my eye level, but now it feels like she’s looking at a maniac.
“What the hell could cause that?” she asks with open concern.
“A misfortune god,” I answer in full honesty. “Kagiyama is in trouble and we are out here to help her.”
Mokou knocks my arm from my flank and quietly asks, “Hey, is it a good idea to tell them?”
“If it’s a chance for them to screw off then it’s worthwhile,” I murmur back.
“This changes things,” Iizunamaru announces. She’s still stone-faced, but a hint of uncertainty strikes her. She points to a few members in the trees and commands, “Bring them to station F while I bring this news to the board, we need to decide what to do.”
“Oh the hell you are,” I say before my mind processes the words. “We’re here to solve this, so just stand aside.”
A tengu uses their blade to bar the space ahead of me. Ran is standing next to me with a hand to their blade before I even notice any motion.
Iizunamaru sighs, “Put that one down if you have to.”
Even in my frustration with them, the tengu still end up escorting us to some kind of holding cells. We’re taken down the mountain instead of to the tengu village, so maybe that’s a small positive? Hard to say.
The cells themselves aren’t horrible, I’d say. Wood walls and bamboo bars are probably more of a suggestion to the residents of Gensokyo, but I don’t think much could hold in the people that they’d want in cells in the first place. The space itself is the same layout as a prison in the outside world, but there is enough space for an extra table to go. Hopefully we aren’t expected to be here for long, since the toilet is of course in the open.
For whatever reason, they decided to separate Mokou and I into one cell with Ran in the next one over. Ran hasn’t said anything since earlier, and she remains notably silent now. Mokou takes the whole thing in stride, inspecting the quarters at her leisure.
“Oh, sweet! Somebody left some steel utensils. I needed to replace my mug at home,” she gleefully states when picking apart some leftover amenities on the top bunk. Okay, maybe she’s taking this too leisurely.
She settles down on the top bunk, inspecting the steel cup for damage. I set my stuff (which I was surprisingly allowed to keep) down and take the bottom bunk. I need to just… relax for a moment. It’s already been some day, and we’ve still got more to go regardless of how long it takes to get out of these cells.
“So now what?” I ask at the bunk above me.
“No, no, you’re what,” Mokou pops her head out from the overhang to say, hair hanging down like a curtain. I didn’t realize it before, but her white hair is probably just as long as she is tall. “What came over you earlier? That was pretty intense compared to how Keine told me you act.”
“I don’t know,” I grumble. “Something just switched on and I wanted to snap.”
“Yeah, well, it’s pretty stupid and ballsy to pick a fight with tengu like that. A couple of ‘em looked ready to jump you,” Mokou remarks.
“They didn’t, though. They probably understood that they were being asses.”
“What makes you say that? I thought everyone acted like that with the fox,” Mokou ponders.
I think on that for a moment, and conclude, “Not that openly, they don’t. Pissed me the hell off.”
“I do not require help, Regis. That was very out of line for you,” Ran reprimands from the room over.
Mokou’s head swivels on the overhang toward Ran’s room and turns back to whisper to me, “She probably appreciated that but doesn’t want to say so.”
“I asked for no such help,” Ran refutes.
“Right, right. Back to the present, then.” I brush off. I call to the other cell with a bit more volume, “Do you feel weird as well, Ran?”
“Oh?” Mokou mutters.
“Weird how?” Ran asks back.
“Like that right there,” I point out. “You’ve been talking a bit different since earlier. There’s no surety in your words. We got jumped multiple times over by tengu and then you didn’t take the lead in the conversations, they just kinda did their own thing.”
“My current conditions are…” Ran trails off. She must have noticed by now that she’s using more personal pronouns than usual.
“What are you on about, Tanner? The misfortune give you some kinda sickness?” Mokou asks.
“No, not sick. We’re afflicted to be stupid or something. I haven’t thought straight since earlier today. Like there’s a fuzz in my brain that I can’t work around. It’s so minor that I didn’t even notice it for a while,” I explain to Mokou.
“Hmm,” she hums. She uprights on her bunk, the mass of hair dragging after her, then hops back down with the mug and offers it to me, saying, “Here hold this.”
Mokou walks up to the bars and does some exaggerated stretches and cracks, preparing to do something.
“Well if you’re that bad off,” Mokou states while grabbing the prison bars.
Nothing seems to happen for the few few moments, but then I notice a quiet droning. It takes me some time to place the exact sound, but as it gets louder it’s easy to tell that Mokou is producing some sort of crackling sound in her hands. It’s too consistent for it to be the bars breaking by force, though. I get up and hover over her shoulder to get a better view.
A lot of warmth is coming from the bars themselves. They’re even blackening around the edges of her hands. She’s somehow heating points on the bars to weaken their structural integrity, but it’s so concentrated that they aren’t catching fire despite the bars being bamboo. As outright fascinating as it is, there is something else that pops into my head while watching.
Isn’t she human like me? Is it possible to hold those bars while they’re hot enough to combust?
I can’t help but feel concerned about this. Highly concerned.
“Hey, Mokou?” I squeak out.
“Yeah?” she asks casually over her shoulder while moving onto another pair of bars. The first set is left in a state that is so burnt the charcoal parts might have wrapped back around to solidifying. The sheer heat coming from them feels like it could start a fire on its own at any time.
“Ah, well… how are you doing that?”
“What do you mean?” she asks back, continuing to torch her way through the barrier. “You’ve seen enough magic by now to not be surprised by fire, right?”
“Sure,” I agree, “but holding onto the thing you’re heating until it breaks. Is that normal?”
She looks over her shoulder some more at me, before swiveling back to her hands to consider my point. “I… guess not..?” she uncertainly answers.
We awkwardly sit around while Mokou moves to a third rung of the bars and once again turns her hands into miniature blast furnaces. My voice of concern doesn’t come out over wondering if it would be rude to ask someone why they’re so relaxed about self immolation.
She finishes up the last rung and bounces to her feet. I duck out of the way as she moves to the back of the cell before working into a sprint straight into the bars. As silly as it looks for this small girl tackle into wooden cell bars, she manages to dive cleanly through, even slamming into the wall across afterward. The impact knocks a breath out of her, but she seems unphased otherwise. A scattering of black and green litter her white shirt and hair. She brushes herself off while I’m grabbing my, well, I guess our, stuff.
As I lurch through the bars cautious of any sharp point that might have been left behind from fracturing, I notice something odd about Mokou. Even though she wiped off the green of many glassy bamboo chips, the soot remains on her, if not more than before.
“Wait, Mokou, seriously,” I address her more directly.
“What now?” she asks brashly. I take her shrug as an opportunity to snag an upturned hand. She lightly gasps in surprise but doesn’t swat me away.
Obviously her hands would be blackened from contact with the wood, even if nothing happened to the skin, but this goes beyond that. The grooves where the white of skin should pronounce above the char doesn’t show. Instead it’s rough and scorched all the way across in a deep black.
I rub a thumb across without thinking, eliciting a breathy, “Ah!” from Mokou.
“sh*t, sorry!” I react in surprise. Then my brain catches up some more, and I point out, “Wait, you feel pain in this still?”
“Yes, jerkoff. Don’t touch it ‘cause it looks weird!”
“Wait, but if you’re burned down to straight up raw nerves how the hell do you expect that to heal?” I question out of genuine worry.
“Just forget about it for now, we need to get moving already,” Mokou deflects the conversation, jerking her hand from mine.
“C’mon you dumb fox, let’s get a move on!” she beckons Ran as she passes to the cell block door.
I look inside the cell to see Ran in a meditative position facing away from the bars. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her this idle. Mokou’s already out of the building so it’s only us.
“You good, Ran?” I ask.
Ran lumbers back to full height. She’s slowed down for some reason, like her movements aren’t ramped up… A computer coming out of sleep mode?
“This situation could have gone better,” she states.
“Yeah no sh*t?” I jest. Maybe rudely.
“The tengu will not have the upper hand in the next conversation. I will not allow it,” she intones.
“Not to burst your resolve,” I comment, “but aren’t you weaker right now? How many tengu are you able to take at once?”
Ran decides to not amuse the question and instead raises a hand from her coupled sleeves, gently waving it in front of her. A swathe of paper dolls come from around the corner of the cell, a few even trickle in from the window. The gathering of paper swarms in rings around her, which she then commands one ring to split off and pass through the bars ahead of her. I back up a few steps out of the way.
The dolls retreat back into her clothes as she approaches the cell bars. With a light push she displaces a perfect circle of the confining wall and steps out. Without another word, she walks out of the jail. Cell block. Whatever you’d call this place.
I ignore my being ignored and double check that I’ve grabbed everything from my cell before walking out. Outside, I see Mokou sits under some shade nearby a water spit she found while Ran is awaiting on the flank of the door for me. Mokou beckons me over immediately, but instead of conversing she only digs into my backpack for that steel mug and fills it by the spicket.
“Oi,” I taut the ashen woman in her whimsy.
“Oh, don’t gimme that,” Mokou retaliates between a chug. “I haven’t had a cup in weeks. Drink straight from the spicket, see how it feels.”
She slaps the top of the watering hole, to which I simply reject the offer without a word. A groan is given, though.
“And how are we going to get around the tengu this time?” I ask to try and get Mokou back on topic. Maybe also see if Ran came up with an idea.
Mokou rubs her chin for a second and explains, “Well, if you’re both carrying something bad, then the tengu put us down here ‘cause they’re terrified to get close. They were doing the same to you that you did to Hina. They just weren’t prepared to trap us in there past some wood walls and an implied ‘please go away.’”
“Yeah it did cross my mind that there weren’t any guards. Wait, did you plan for that when breaking out?” I ask.
“Nope, I was ready to nail one of those bastards in the jaw when stepping out. I’m honestly disappointed they’re not here,” Mokou jeers with a lax smile.
“So how does that help us get back up the mountain?” I continue to press.
“We’re untouchables for the tengu. They wouldn’t want the extra variables that are emergent from our very presence,” Ran pieces together.
That’s not the part I’m focused on in that conclusion, though. My curiosity bubbles up even now and I comment, “You were quick to figure all that out, Mokou.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a lot of experience under my belt,” she passes off explaining.
We start our way back up the mountain. For now there’s nothing happening. The tengu must have been alerted to us passing by, but are staying the hell away. Better for us, so you won’t hear me complaining.
For better or worse, the tengu know about the situation now, so they might be trying to figure out how much that makes it their problem, too. I can only hope that means they’re gonna be trapped in a meeting room endlessly debating until the whole thing blows over. God knows I’m used to seeing that happen.
For us, though, we need to figure out how we are going to tackle the Moriya shrine. I remember it was one of the two gods we’re looking for, but if it’ll be as easy as walking in and asking for her is yet to be seen.
[x] Walk in and look for her.
[x] Walk in and ask someone else to find her.
[x] Just ask the god that’s always around there for help.
Yeah, tell them birds what for! Anyway, I hope you’ll forgive me for being a bit more generous with poor grammar, incorrect linguistics, and even breaking my own conventions for these scenes. It’s kind of fun to make my smarty pants characters a little dumbed down for comedic intent.
