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The evening sun is beginning to set as two figures are walking into the forest. Near the edge of the trees, one looks back to the castle as a faint roar of frustration echoes about the grounds. "…Did you hear that?"

"I'm sure that one of the Merman are mad that their prize dabberblimps were lost." The blonde turns back and smiles at Harry as he follows after her. "They are rather aggrieved when they wander off to lay in the sun, after all. They have to let their sacks to dry out. If they're too soggy, they won't be able to float."

"…I'm sure that is all that it is." Harry shakes his head. "I'm rather sure it came from the castle."

"The merman is quite the ventriloquist."

"I'll take your word for it." Harry shakes his head and speeds up, catching back up to the girl. "So, where exactly are we taking your little friend, Luna?"

"Back home, of course. She did wander quite a long way."

"But how did you even find her in the first place?"

The round object in her lap turns up and shoots a glare at Luna. "I told you ten times already! My name is SEKI!"

"Such a sweet girl, isn't she?" Luna pats the disembodied head. "But as it was, I could hardly leave her here. Nearly Headless Nick was disappointed at the sight, saying that he was rather jealous."

"What a freak… You think that a ghost would be able to take care of that trivial thing!"

"…Aren't you just a disembodied head?"

"I'm a Rokurokubi, not some human. I'm a vicious man-eating monster!"

"Aww, don't say such things." Luna rubs the back of the head's head, right near the bow. "You're such a doll, so don't say things like that. You might give Harry a bad impression."

"I think she's already succeeding…" The head closes its eyes a bit as it gets rubbed, but the moment that Harry speaks it snaps them back open and glares at him. "So, erm… she lives in the forest? Is it wise to be going here at this time of day?"

"Well, not until we get lost. Once we don't know where we are, we'll be fine." Luna just smiles. "Besides, the Forbidden Forest does have a nice atmosphere. It helps the thestral's and their lovely coats."

After reading this, I'm not sure if I should drink more or less.

Good job.

Fighting scenes are one of the hardest things to translate to text, but it seems like you did a good work. I like it.

Descriptions are key and you have enough-but empty dialog lines are a pet peeve of mine. I'd say that they should be integrated to the story; at least with a short sentence explaining the tone and feelings that those words are trying to convey.

Boom! The sound of thunder resonates through the hospice room as I slowly open up my eye. Rain hitting the roof of the building with small thuds. Sitting in a chair not too far from my bed is the girl from earlier, Aya was it? It’s hard to tell from the rain but it appears to be nighttime outside and I don’t even know what day it...Is that a calendar? I squint my good eye to try and see through the darkness to the other side of the room where there appears to be a paper calendar situated to the left of the window. Bah! I can’t even tell what those symbols mean, I must be running low on spirit reserves. Sending a mental ping to check my power reserves they are indeed low probably spent making sure I didn't die, barely functioning in fact, however that isn’t the only reason.

A small gap in my spirit energies tells me one of them is made manifest around here. It's strange that one of them would manifest themselves outside of combat situations so this must have been important for them.

A small whimpering comes from the left of the bed. I shift slightly to get a closer look, and peer over the edge. Leaning against the bed huddling in a small ball is my dear Siara, my spirit of water, crying.

This girl is my manifestation of the water spirit, these spirits come in many different forms, depending on the relation between the elementalist and the spirit. For me, Siara is a small girl of eastern origin. She has long black hair that reaches down to her waist, and stands roughly a meter tall. She has eyes the color of crystal clear water, and wears an all blue dress with wave patterns riddled across its surface. You could say I treat her like a daughter. She is a real cry baby but I can’t bring myself to be hard on her compared to the other spirits because of it.

She continues to stifle small tears as I gently whisper to her and ask what's wrong?

She jumps a bit, as if not expecting me to even be conscious right now. Collecting herself she stands up, her head barely able to look over the bed and turns to look at me. "Well umm... The other spirits and myself were worried about your conditions. You seem to be taken care of rather well but we haven&

Post to another board

New thread is here; >>/others/62265

Today is not a good day.

...

I made it home.

It took me a long time to recover enough to pick up a pen.

Minutes, maybe hours passed while I just sat there and tried to breathe.

My heart felt like it would explode if I lost concentration for just one second.

My heartbeat felt too fast, more like a continuous stream rather than individual beats.

But, here I am now.

The first time I encountered the snow maiden, I had just turned ten years old.

I had run away from home. In the excitement of my younger brother being born, and the anger of my older brother being caught stealing, my parents had forgotten about my own birthday. I had been replaced, I thought, and this time I decided to run away for real. Not just to the shed out back, or to the school where I played hide and seek with our friends. I packed myself two meals, a change of clothes, and I left my home. I walked until the village gates, and then walked some more. I walked past the farms, and away from the trails to the shrine or mountains. I walked far away from the safety of the village. I walked into what I knew was the domain of youkai, but I didn't care. I just wanted to run away, as far as I could go.
By the time the sun began to set, I was already hopelessly lost. I had no idea where I was. I didn't know of any landmarks or features I could use to get my bearings. All I saw around me was short grass, tall trees, and great mountains. I sat down to eat the food I had brought, and as the sun set and the winter night began to replace it, I grew cold. The clothes I was wearing were too light. I took out the spare clothes I had brought and wrapped them around myself to keep warm. It was then that I started to panic. With the night came darkness, and with the darkness came fear of what lied beyond the pale moonlight. My imagination ran wild with tales of youkai, and the horrific fates of those who encountered them. I began frantically running, searching for anything that I might be able to use as shelter before the last glimmer of light faded. To me, in that moment, a hollowed tree trunk looked like the inviting arms of my mother. I regretted running away as I holed up inside it, and slept through the night unharmed.

The next morning, it began to snow. The cold winter didn't care that I was out here. As the snow began to blanket the ground, I was no longer able to even tell what way I had come to get here, and my mad dash the previous night cost me all sense of direction. I finished the last of the food I had brought, and left the comforting shelter that the tree hollow provided. A

She hefted me to my feet, and I'd be a liar if I said that lying there on the ground was good for me. But standing was worse.

“You're not the sharpest tool in the shed, are you?” She brushes the broken glass off my shirt, and I groan. I'd jumped through the window after breaking it with a convenient rock, tripped, and landed on the broken glass face-first. And thankfully I missed the broken glass with my face.

“So. Sit down and let's do something about that glass in your arms. Then you will explain things to me.” I'm frogmarched to a chair by a surprisingly strong girl with rabbit ears, and she sits me down.

While she plucks out the glass from my arm and applies (probably-deliberately) overly-stinging peroxide to the cuts, she prompts me to explain what made me break into her pharmacy. During the middle of the day. When she was just in the back for something.

“I, I, got a problem.”

“No shit,” she replies.

“I needed my fix.”

“Fix of what? Aspirin? Sulfa drugs? You get high off beta blockers, kid?”

Isn't it sad, THP? ;_;

It seemed like the perfect break. I had to get out of my city; she had a job nobody in hers would take. I’ll admit, I’d have been suspicious of the payout, too, if she hadn’t paid up front for a business-class seat on a flight there. The job itself was simple enough: break into some old bat’s retirement home and scan some research notes from its library.

There was a catch, of course—there’s always a catch. This one’s was ‘old bat’ being more literal than you’d think. In the sense of ‘centuries-old vampire’. Because vampires are real things that exist and own opulent, non-Euclidean lakefront properties, and so are wizards with wizard libraries and wizard research notes and very strong opinions about intellectual property.

And that’s not even getting started on the neighbourhood.

The upshot is—the client stuck my phone with some sort of magic red metal, so now I can Crosslink magicrap just like regular circuits. Not sure on the utility of that back Outside, but you never know. I mean, I didn’t when I took this job, and look where I am now.


Uh, and that would be hanging from the ceiling, having narrowly evaded a giant laser-turned-breaching-charge out of sheer luck.


A pointy black witch’s hat flies in from the rain, on the head of what is presumably therefore a witch. Shaking herself off from her stint outside in the dark-and-stormy, the witch immediately takes to raking books off the shelves and into a sack of the kind that would have indignant burglars crying about ‘reinforcing the stereotype’.

Observing for a moment, I decide the wisest course of action would probably be to get the hell away before the librarian shows up.

In retrospect, I really shouldn't have expected robbing a palace in Hell to have gone smoothly.

Now, there's a lot I could say about how Sully and I flew to Japan, smuggled an open four-by-four into Gensokyo (and how we found out about that place is another thing entirely), drove underground, and broke into this 'Palace of the Earth Spirits' (a place I'd have loved to explore more but for, you know, the shooting and everything), but I'll just cut to the part where we were driving said four-by-four back out, my satchel loaded down with-

Well, let's just say it was something that'd leave us sitting pretty for a long, long time to come, yeah?

Anyway, you wouldn't think you could easily drive a car around inside a building, but whoever built the place really, and I mean really, went all-out here. I'm talking hallways you could fit a tank in with room to spare, something Sully was taking full advantage of as our ride squealed through the tiled hallways. While that crazy old son of a bitch drove, I was taking wild shots with my pistol at the people chasing us.

Now I've dealt with a lot of crazy stuff in my time, but I don't think they hold up to a woman with a giant orange rod stuck on her arm and raven wings carrying her through the air, and that's not counting the fist-sized Eye of Sauron she had on her chest, and also there was her cape with stars flowing on the inside? I was too busy being terrified of the freakin' laser beams she was shooting out of that arm-cannon to get a better look. In comparison, the little redheaded kitty-girl flying next to her and pitching fastball skulls at us just seemed tame.

"Incoming!" I yelled, ducking just as one of those flaming skulls smashed against the back of the four-by-four and exploded, face-meltingly hot blue fire rising high for a split second. "Holy crap!"

The key word was in comparison.

"Hold still!" Utsuho bellowed (the crow woman, just to be clear (and how I learned her name, as w

“She knew about this, you know,” Lyrica whispers. They sit huddled by the safehouse windows, four in a row. (Not under—they learned that rule the hard way, when the missiles tore through the last rest stop. No windows, no hats.)

“Who did?” Reimu asks.

A long time ago (a week ago), Lyrica's smile was sly and quiet. Today it is filled with teeth. Reimu thought Merlin would crack first across the three of the sisters, Merlin with her boundless energy tumbled into restraints, but it is the thinker Lyrica who is the closest to faling over the edge. She can hear Lyrica during the nights, when they're pretending any of them can sleep—Lyrica, muttering at the walls, creaking louder than the floorboards, with plans and plans and nothing to execute them with.

“Layla,” says Lyrica. “Layla knew about this, I mean. She told us stories.”

And Reimu is the last of the Hakurei at the moment, keeper of the Shrine, guardian of the Border (and you sure did a bang-up job of that this time, didn't you, dear), but it's dark and she's tired and she's spent too many hours already cooped up shoulder to shoulder to a girl who's only barely on this side of real, so she snaps, “Told you stories about Gensokyo and an army of clowns?”

“We weren't from Gensokyo,” Lyrica hisses back. “None of us are. I was just going to ask—” She stops, looks away, lips twitching, and Reimu has the sudden feeling she's gone too far, like maybe she's spent so long watching Lyrica at the precipice that she forgot her own feet were there, too.

“I wanted to ask if you wanted in, but forget it,” Lyrica says. We'll get our things back on our own. Come on.”

She leaves the safehouse, shoulders high until the moment she crosses the doorway and she has to watch her back again (the difference between pride and stupidity). Her sisters follow behind her, single-file, like students on a field trip—Merlin first, then Lunasa, who pauses at the light to look one last time at Reimu and Reimu can't tell if it's disapp

I feel like this isn't even a short, more like a just right. Many stories would benefit from this kind of brevity. Rumia was cute, we fucked a dog girl, some other stuff happened. What more could you ask for?

Congrats on finishing, you are the THP 1%.

Was a good run, congrats on completion

>>1804
>>1805
>>1806

Yeah, about that...

New thread: >>/th/182940

Moving boards because this isn't really a short anymore.

DED STORY

DED THRED

>>1841
And yet that's all she wrote (if my resumed silence and the bold HERE ENDS weren't telling enough). I hope whoever, let's say, commissioned this is satisfied, and once again I apologise for taking so long to wrap it up. With this out of the way, I don't think anything else remains to be said.

>>1842
>>1842
Sorry, you lost me.

Anyway, looking forward for the next update!

>>1842

>I hope whoever, let's say, commissioned this is satisfied,

Yep.

>and once again I apologise for taking so long to wrap it up.

No worries.

>With this out of the way, I don't think anything else remains to be said.

Thanks for the story, YAF. See ya later.