|
>>
|
No. 153527
So I fell asleep halfway through and ended up finishing it in the morning. That's life for you.
[x] Gather your team, Mr Investigator
[x] Stick around - Eirin's headed here.
Part Two
There is no doubt. This is interesting. Very interesting. Even if you were not a key figure in this matter in the first place, you would have become involved anyway due to rampant curiosity if nothing else. And whatever it is has decided to involve you personally by bringing about your arrival.
And that’s the main thing that doesn’t make any bloody sense. If you are assuming some kind of concrete unified goal behind whatever is causing this, it is a goal that you are very much opposed to. How can you not be? This may not be your land and it certainly isn’t your home. In fact, the entirety of Gensokyo defies everything you thought you knew about metaphysical constructive principles, which you admit isn’t always actually as much as you like to think. It’s a completely impossible place by the microscopic level and is far too familiar in a warped and weird sense on the macroscopic scale. A similar system shouldn’t rise out of such a different basis for everything!
But that said, you would oppose this out of principle alone, no matter where it was happening. And you like Gensokyo. Kind of. You like some of the inhabitants anyway and you suppose the place itself isn’t too bad, provided you learn to live with its creepy dead matter. Daiyousei is a credit to her people, rising above her unfortunate heritage to be a somewhat reasonable person. Komachi is certainly someone you would certainly not mind talking to again, Shikieiki’s knowing glances be damned. And you will talk to her again, since you figure that Eiki is simply far too nice for her job to let Komachi go. And the Yama herself is a perfectly decent person who is probably unlikely to ever trust you too much again but still. Oh and Keine seems nice and knowledgeable enough, you suppose. Might have made a better impression if you had met her when she was sane though.
Overwrought paragraphs aside, while you haven’t exactly been setting down roots or anything, you’ve come to like some people here. There are things here that are worth protecting, preferably by someone other than you but you can at least help.
So why would this phenomena bring you here, considering your now established desire to oppose everything else it brings? And why make it easier for you by fucking with languages somehow?
None of this makes as much sense as you would like to.
Regardless of this, you should probably do something about the lake. It’s just plain dangerous to walk near it now. Until it can be fixed, something should be put up to stop hapless wanderers from mistaking it for regular water. If only you could call up a monster from its hazardous depths and command it to stand guard. But you don’t have that Charm so…no.
Maybe you could just use signposts?
This train of thought is interrupted by the sound of footsteps. Keine looks up from her work as two figures approach through the mist. A tall grey-haired woman in a chequered red and black (or is it dark blue?) dress walks into view, holding a small black leather bag and walking with a sharp businesslike pace.
A few paces behind her is a purple haired girl, her most obvious features being the large pairs of rabbit ears growing out of her head. One of the rabbit people that Daiyousei mentioned yesterday? She did mention that they lived in a bamboo forest after all. She’s holding a bag similar to that of the woman in front of her but much larger, the rabbit girl’s back bent from carrying it.
You wonder if rabbit people were an artificially engineered race, like the various crafted slavefolk or beastmen. But why would you intentionally create a species of rabbitmen? What possible advantage could blending the two give?
Considering that Gensokyo hardly works on familiar rules though, they could just be a regular species. For all you know they congealed out of the darkness between bamboo trees and reproduce through budding.
Keine gets to her feet, backing away from Meiling.
“Ah Eirin! I’ve managed to stabilise her but she needs medical attention.”
Eirin halts next to the fallen gatekeeper, the girl behind her dropping the larger bag with an audible wheeze.
“Ah, you’re that cow-girl of Mokou’s. I was wondering who they’d have before a real doctor got here.”
Keine locks gazes with the woman in the ludicrous dress.
“I have a name, Eirin’
“I’m sure you do. And while I’m sure you can make a fine stopgap treatment, did you think of how eating the history of her problem is going to affect my treatment? How am I supposed to work when I can’t even see it to diagnose it?”
Keine sucks in her breath, almost visibly biting back on her pride. Her tone of voice shifts to being saccharine-sweet.
“I guess I’ll just withdraw that right away, than shall I? I’m sure the great Sage Eirin will be able to deal with the immediate repercussions of all that painful history hitting the patient at once.”
“Yes. I can. There’s no need to assume that everyone must fall to your particular standard of…competence.”
Keine sucks in a breath, almost visibly biting back on her pride as she does so. At the same time, something swift and ephemereal flickers between her and the injured redhead. The gatekeeper snaps awake immediately, arching her back and screaming inhumanly loudly. Eirin extends her hand over Meiling’s face, causing her pupils to suddenly dilate. Her scream dies down to nothing as she falls unconscious again.
Eirin puts the suspicious smelling rag back into her bag.
“Reisen.”
The bunny girl snaps to attention, opening the bag and passing along a metal tool of some kind to the doctor. It looks very…pointy.
Keine sidles back over to you on the sidelines closer to the lake. You would normally assume that you had gone mostly unobserved by the newcomer duo but while that might be true of Reisen, the doctor had definitely seen you.
Not that there was anything wrong with that, you weren’t really trying to hide. But this Eirin carries herself with a complete confidence that you find uneasy. It doesn’t feel like overconfidence, filled with nothing but bluster, bravado and an inflated self-opinion. It was more the confidence of someone who supremely knows their own objective intelligence and power. Someone who knows her own limits exactly and also knows that they are set damn high.
You recognise it easily since after all, it’s nearly the same kind of confidence you try to carry within yourself at all times.
And as a rule, you’d rather not draw too much attention from someone like that unless you’d already planned for it. Especially due to your own, ahem, similiarities to the real problem here.
“So…cow girl?”
Keine makes a humph noise while crossing her arms.
“Don’t ask right now. Not in the mood.”
“Duly noted.”
Keine looks out towards the lake, pausing as if about to say something. You move quicker than her, drawing your hand across her mouth. You move in close, speaking in only the lightest of whispers.
“I would not talk about anything related to crippled birds while Eirin is listening in to us.”
She pauses and nods slowly.
“What about Remilia and Sakuya then?”
You blink.
“Is that the name of the mistress of the mansion? Then I figure that they’ve been watching from somewhere for quite some time now. Just be thankful that the mist is so very thick this morning.”
Leaving Keine to her own problems, you start pacing. This wasn’t going to be something you could do alone. And you don’t need people just to help you either. While the lake might be relatively undiscovered so far, it is unlikely to remain so. Give another few hours and this lake will probably be swarming with curious people. Just wait, everyone and their yeddim will be down here to gawk and to poke their nose in.
Mass scrutiny does not agree with you, particularly in light of the flying village…incident. And it would not do for some curious fool to find out that a very close approximation of what is in the lake is also literally pumping through your veins right now. That would be awkward and hard to explain.
So having a small group of friendly people would also act as a buffer between yourself and the world when necessary. But who?
Keine is the most obvious choice, being neck-deep in the business already. Aside from you, she’s no doubt the most knowledgeable about this particular matter. So knowledgeable in fact, that she has to be on your side, simply because you’d need to keep an eye on her.
Daiyousei would probably be willing. Considering that this lake is her home, all you have to do is find her. Or if she’s capable of putting two and two together, she might even find you.
Shikieiki would be really helpful and is probably unavoidable anyway since she’s already curious about these happenings. She could probably bring along all kinds of inconveniences with her though in the form of her morality. She’d probably even want you to stop lying to people! And then where would you be? Lying to people is basically all you do!
But having access to Shikieiki around would mean having access to Komachi around, which would not be bad at all. Provided that she had the spare time to do this though which is by no means a certain thing. You still don’t know what her ultimate fate was either and while you’re relatively sure it turned out harmlessly, you never know. And in which case, you and Eiki were going to have words the next time she showed up.
You would lecture the hell out of her.
You hear a splashing sound. It sounds like something in the lake itself. Well that’s ominous. What could still be out there in the lake?
At the same time though, you hear Eirin’s voice.
“We’re done here. Reisen, take the bag back and don’t drop that sample jar.”
You can hear Keine as well, who’s already moved back to the gates.
“You got it out so quickly? I didn’t think-”
“That’s why I’m a Sage and you’re just a schoolteacher.”
“Eugh I don’t even know why I bother.”
Out of the corner of your eye, you see Reisen approaching your part of the lake, a large glass vial in her hands. Seemingly without seeing you, she kneels by the shore and dips it in, filling it with ‘water’.
It lasts a few seconds before it starts melting through the glass, causing her to drop it in alarm. It falls into the lake with a quiet hiss. Reisen looks around guiltily back in Eirin’s general direction before surreptitiously pulling out another glass container, this one made of an odd smoked glass you don’t recognise.
You hear another splash coming from somewhere in the lake.
[ ] Check out what’s in the middle of the lake post haste. The others probably won’t notice. Maybe.
[ ] Talk to Reisen, maybe lend her a hand in her task. She could be a useful source of information.
[ ] Go back to Eirin and Keine. Introduce yourself properly.
[ ] See if you can figure out where Remilia and Sakuya are. Though they’ll probably show up real soon to thank Eirin anyway.
[ ] Write In.
|