Disclaimer/warning/author's notes: this story is a tie-in Tainted Bonds, on /th/. It presents a new Gensokyo after it receives an influx of a few hundred high level adventurers from a plane that more or less runs on D&D 3.5 mechanics. If you're looking for a ?vanilla? Gensokyo, then this may not be the story for you.

This story is meant to explore a side character that Sai will soon be meeting, and also to get some ideas and history about my new, changed Gensokyo out into prose, instead of mere notes. Also, to satisfy my burning desire to write when I still want to keep votes open on Tainted Bonds.

This story is in /shorts/ because I don't intend for there to be any votes; Gand's story is already ?established?. Don't worry about losing the opportunity to vote in Sai's story; that'll still be up to the will of Anon.

There is also (intentionally) far less ?neckbearding? planned in this story, for those of you who hated that about Tainted Bonds.

Feel free to comment, discuss, ask me questions, or make suggestions in this thread, so long as you keep the shitstorms out.

Oh, and most importantly: have fun.

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Laughter isn't always a sound of joy. Sometimes it's the sound of displacement, that halting chuckle you let out when you're not sure if you're the butt of the joke. Sometimes it's the sound of fear, puffing yourself up and out to deny that you're scared. Sometimes it's the sound of mockery, a noble's laugh of derision at some disgusting sight, like you once heard from the Scarlet Devil as she took a rare tour of the village.

And sometimes, it's the sound of the end, where there's nothing left but amusement at all your failed dreams.

You've only heard that last laugh once before now, from an old, childless youkai hermit. He'd lost all his family one by one as they had bucked against what they considered a battle for their homes against the humans They'd launched themselves headfirst into the patrols of combined youkai hunters and Travelers, their unfamiliar bestial true forms no match for years of experience of putting down the far more dangerous feral youkai. After he'd lost his last son, he had nothing to live for - when you checked up on his home in the forest the next week, plants had already begun taking over the rooms, vines and ivy slowly but surely strangling the walls while leafy groundcover had already spread over the entire dirt floor. Within the next month, the shack was completely gone, not even the dug-out cellar remaining.

Only a month later, that same hollow laugh is echoing upon your lips as well.

"Geez, you'll scare away the customers, sounding like that," the cook admonishes you, her winged ears flicking nervously as she puts a second plate of grilled eel on top of the now-empty first in front of you, Mystia Lorelei; night sparrow; youkai turned professional singer turned food stand owner and manager, which is to say the establishment is too small to support more than one worker. She has a voice to die for; one you used to live for, a few years before the Travelers came. The two of you had a strings-and-voice number, you lending harp and tenor vocals to back her sweet, soprano melodies. You were also lovers then, as musician couples often were, but as your musical tastes drifted, so did the romance, and both of you decided to break the relationship before it soured completely, parting ways with nothing more violent than a stiff, awkward embrace.

"I can't help it," you chuckle, ignoring the sizzling eel to grab the bottle of wine beside it; Mystia's treat, a relic from the time you spent together. Supposedly the grapes were stamped by the bare feet of fairies themselves, but right now you care less about that and more about its alcohol content. It certainly tastes magical enough, although you waste it by taking a large, gulping swig instead of sipping it properly. Hell, you're not even bothering to decant it; Deion would be aghast.

You couldn't give two shits if your life depended on it.

"And besides, there's no one else here, is there?" You motion broadly to either side, pointing out the clearly vacant seats.

"That's because this is a dinner establishment and it's bedtime," she says sharply. "The only reason I'm open at all this late is because you came by." Right as she was closing up, in fact.
The shadows underneath her eyes glower at you as if blaming you, yet the eyes themselves are surprisingly soft and concerned. "Come on, Gand," she says softly, using your old pet name. That irritates you, just a little bit, but you protest with anything louder than a soft grunt of displeasure. "I stayed open for you, but you've refused to open up all evening. What's eating you?"

With a sigh, you put the wine bottle down and reach down to the base of your seat, finding your bag - your harp bag, to be precise, not the rucksack of necessities that accompanies it. "The same that always is, Mys," deciding to use her own shortened name just to continue the atmosphere. If she wants to refer to you like that? "Music. Music is eating me."

"Play it for me," comes the ritual response. She puts down the metal brush, meant for scrubbing the wires of the grill, and comes up to lean on the opposite side of the counter.

Unfortunately, this time, you won't answer in the traditional way.

?" there isn't a song anymore. I can't compose.?

Mystia still understands you, as her first response is to gasp like you'd just declared you had a terminal illness; seeing as composition is what you used to live for, you might as well have. You unzip the bag and pull out the harp from inside it, balancing it on your knee. About the size of your torso, it's an old instrument, but those are often the best; its maker said she'd carved from a fallen tree from the Forest of Magic, and you believe it, as the wood lends it a timbre the likes of which you've never heard before, not from Gensokyo nor the outside world nor any of the instruments the Travelers managed to bring with them. Being unique doesn't mean anything, though, especially here in Gensokyo of all places.

Your hands and ears still know the habit of tuning the instrument, plucking the feral youkai gutstrings that have stayed strong and taut ever since you started playing, through years of frenzied plucking and strumming, hundreds of concerts and years of accumulated playing time. A few knob turns later, you strum a few arpeggios up and down. Not to check your tuning, for you already know that it's perfect, but just to hear the voice of the instrument again.

That's the best you can manage. Your melodies are dead.

An arpeggio. A scale. A couple of basic cadences. Mystia stares at your fingers as they work the strings and reaches out towards them, keeping a respectful distance so as to not block your movements. "Your hands," she murmurs. "What happened to them?"

You pat the strings with your palms to quiet them. The action feels foreign; you have calluses there now to accompany those at the ends of your fingers. Even if you haven't been able to string a melody together, you've been keeping your playing muscles in shape. "Harping doesn't keep a roof over my head anymore," you sigh. "No one wants to hear a silly human strum and sing when there are so many other, more interesting sounds to be heard, more skilled players to be found." Youkai have always been better mechanical players, and anyone with magic relating to music or sound will enthrall a listener more deeply. There's a reason Mystia always sung lead in your duets, after all, even if you wrote most of them.

"Farming? Hunting? That's not scribework, right there, and you're not one of those newfangled magewrights."

"We both know I have no patience for farming, and I'm not brave enough to hunt for my livelihood." You do still keep a kappa-made folding carbine in that rucksack, a relic of those times when you used to travel through the forest on a regular basis, but the company you kept on those walks was always sufficient deterrent to whatever feral youkai might have considered you a meal, so you've never had to fire it before. Hell, if it wasn't kappa-made, it probably wouldn't even be functional by now - it's been two years since you've last slung it under your arm.

Two years since the Travelers came.

The night sparrow pointedly takes a stick of eel and bites into it, despite her earlier assertions that working with food all night causes her to lose her appetite; it's a gesture that informs you should be eating more as well. You've lost any fat you once had before you and Mystia broke up, a combination of poor diet and your new job. "I'm working on the lightning rail now. Only thing left for a talentless man like me to do."

At the mention of the lightning rail, Mystia's lips purse in distaste. "That thing is going to be the root of a great deal of problems to come, and we both know it. We all remember the riots when that? thing? was announced."

The village has been overcrowded ever since the mass immigration, after two years of settling in, marriages, and children; really, it's no longer a village, but at the very least a town. If the lightning rail manages to see completion, it might even deserve the title of city. You learned during the announcement that the massive, far-reaching structure, threading all throughout and around the village/town/city, is meant to facilitate transport of goods and passengers quickly via ?bound-elemental powered cars?, which was hastily translated as a sort of very fast spirit-powered vehicle. That ?spirit-powered? part offended many of the youkai in the audience, even the generally technologically-welcoming kappa, but that was hardly the biggest contributor towards the rising unrest.

As the speaker - you remember she was described as a former hermit and Taoist who was elected to office as a ?prefect? of the village, whatever that meant - went on elaborate on how the rail would benefit all, a riot broke out, seemingly organized by a few of the more strongly-spoken anti-human youkai in the audience. There were casualties; you remember fleeing with your harp cradled underneath your arm, shielding it with your body from the storms of bullets both danmaku and lethal flying overhead, praying that a ravening youkai wouldn't cleave through the man beside you and claim you as a meal. The casualty number only increased after the Hakurei maiden identified those responsible and exacted an equal punishment, the first ?extermination? with fatalities for as long as any of the humans could remember. Supposedly the harsh retribution was because for once the deaths were not due to youkai hunger and miscommunication, but actual, deliberated malice against the humans of Gensokyo. Terrorism, she had declared it.

You've reflected on what the prefect said. The rail will obsolete the youkai teamsters, yes, the strongmen who haul goods from one end of the village to the other. In the short term, there'll be a sudden dearth of jobs amongst them; while the she and Traveler artificers insist that this is a ultimately a good thing, as they find ?more educated? occupations, the rail's completion will undeniably bring with it a short vacuum of unemployment. That vacuum will be eventually filled when new commerce and industry starts up, also facilitated by the existence of the lightning rail ?

That's the problem. New residence, new buildings, new roads, new people. Mostly humans, as they reproduce and expand. The population of the human village - which includes you - once kept a stable population, births and immigrants from the Outside balancing out natural deaths, keeping in mind that wanderers and adventurers travelling through various hotspots like the youkai-dominated mountains and forests directly contribute to the latter. In all reality, it's not the Travelers? magic, technology, or culture that's the problem. it's just them: the people, who live, love, and have families together - families that are as often as not with the very same youkai that complain about the Travelers? expansionist tendencies.

Gensokyo is changing, and there's very little anyone can do about it.

"I'm a hungry man, Mys," you sigh. She offers you a stick of eel, dangling it in front of your mouth, causing a pang of nostalgia to rise up within your chest. You shake your head, though. "Sorry, I'll feed myself. Can't accept that much charity, after all," you chuckle, carefully putting your harp back into its semi-rigid bag and securing it before you dare to pick up a grease-slick bamboo skewer yourself. Never mix food and instruments; one of the first rules of a musician.

She doesn't look at all offended, only understanding and sympathetic. "When we broke up? you said you'd be fine. Said you'd landed yourself a job that would keep you fed, said it was a fun job to boot."

"Well, you said that you'd practice your singing more and more, until you became a star," you riposte, a wistful smile crossing your own face. "Instead, we're both? here."

"Hey, now, it's not my fault the Hakurei maiden took offense to my style!" she whines. "She said I couldn't perform such music for a living because ?deceiving men for your livelihood sets a bad example?. I can't help it if they love my voice so much!"

You chuckle. This is one of those youkai advantages that you'll never be able to bridge, and it's very much like a youkai that Mystia refuses to accept it as anything but natural. "You know, I listened to a recording of one of those performances, before you got closed down."

"Oh, how was it?" she suddenly demands, eyes wide with anticipation.

?" it was awful."

That eager expression shatters too dramatically to be anything but affected. "Bah, you had to be there!" she declares airily, deliberating closing her eyes and sticking her nose into the air. Of course you had to be there - Mystia's magic doesn't record and playback on a phonograph, after all.

"Precisely. Music that can't travel without its performer is not music at all." You used to pride yourself on the music you wrote? the music that's suddenly dried up like a rain-fed spring during a drought.

"You're just saying that because you don't have any charisma."

"I don't," you agree readily, taking the wind out of her play-argument sails. She visibly deflates and reaches for the fairy wine, taking a swig straight from the bottle just as you have been without any complaint. Maybe you're both just too tired - or tipsy - to care about pouring a proper glass or even a mug, but you'd like to think that even after years of not keeping in touch, you're still close enough friends to share a bottle, and just the bottle.

?" also, apparently my nightly practices were luring youths off the safe roads and into the jaws of ferals," she admits sheepishly, still nursing the bottle. You have to wave your hand and beckon with your fingers until she relinquishes it back to you.

"I hear that you're continuing those road performances still, except now you're back to making noise."

"Oh, that!" she laughs, waving a hand as if to dismiss the claim. "Kyouko liked a lot of what I had started to come up. She was the one who got the idea to use those instruments from the Outside, though. She's better at writing music than me, but I do most of the vocal lead work, so we pitch in about even, I'd say."

Just as she had with you; although unlike you, it seems this Kyouko never studied music a day in her life. "She sure is talented," you say carefully, letting sarcasm figuratively drip off of your chin.

"She sure is?" Mystia starts to agree, before seeing your cheshire smile. "Hey! You're mocking me again!"

"No, no," you insist, patting the air around her, earning yourself a playful swat as she reclaims her personal space.

"If you're feeling like you can't compose? you know, maybe it would help you to come to one of our concerts," she offers. "Take a load off. Vent some frustration. Look at life afterwards. A lot of our fans say that listening to our music helps."

You know she's only trying to be helpful, but you shake your head. First of all, staying up as late as you are right now is something you can't make a regular habit of. You're counting on that grilled eel to keep you full as you sleep in tomorrow - today?" as you certainly will miss the work shifts tomorrow. Even if you had the energy to spare, you've heard about the music from your fellow laborers and coolies, and there doesn't seem to be anything of musical value there; just raw expression of dissatisfaction with life in general, accompanied by amateur shredding on those misshapen lutes they call ?heavy metal guitars?. You still can't imagine how anyone could think an intentionally distorted sound like that could sound good. Maybe they value it as a metaphor for the anger they feel or something.

"Well, at least you learned your lesson."

"Eh?" She raises an eyebrow, uncomprehending.

"Well, you're still luring youths off the road, but this time you have the decency to scare away the ferals first, with all that noise."

That comment earns you another playful swat, this one on the shoulder. You press on. "Come on, I know you wouldn't hurt the hair on a fly ? ?

? ? I have to swat those things on a regular basis, you know," she interjects sardonically, waving a hand over the few remaining sticks of eel as if shooing one away. "Hygiene and all that."

? ? as I was saying," you continue, "I know you don't have anything against us humans, but you need to be a little more aware of your abilities."

"I'll take it then that you'll not want a sample performance, then?" she pouts, although her eyes dance with mischief.

"I may not be able to compose, but I still keep soft wax in my bag. Don't make me pull it out."

"Art! We, the creators, are so often misunderstood." That mischief spreads to her smile as she beckons back for the bottle, which you sullenly pass back, reluctant to relinquish your source of oblivion. But when she receives it, she doesn't immediately take a swig, instead holding it around chest level and swirling it in circles. "But seriously, Gand? what happened to you? Surely you didn't also have the maiden breathing down your neck, telling you to ?stop that noise?."

?" they just disappeared.."

The swirling stops mid-tilt. "Excuse me?"

"My employer. She just? disappeared, when the Travelers came. All she did was leave me a packet of ?severance pay? at our normal meeting place and a note that basically said ?sorry, going to be really busy now?. To be fair, it was a lot, more than I deserved? but I wasted it," you sigh, angry at yourself. There had been enough money to live comfortably for a few months in that packet, but you managed to blow through it in a mere few weeks. First you purchased a new harp in an attempt to change your sound to something that would appeal to a wider audience - you'll be the first to admit that the timbre of your current and only instrument can occasionally grate on one's ear, if purely due to the difference between the expected and actual sound. You almost immediately became disillusioned with the new instrument, though, eventually reselling it at a huge loss.

Then later, there was the lightning rail riot; a hunter saved your life that day but lost his own for it, and you gave most of your remaining money there to keep his wife and children afloat. Maybe you should have kept in contact with them, but you wouldn't have accepted any charity from them anyways - and it would have been too awkward, you feel.

To cap it all off, your spending habits became looser and looser as you slipped into depression over losing your ability to compose, and before you knew it you were living a hand-to-mouth existence, paid by the day doing hard labor on the lightning rail, unable to compete effectively without either youkai strength or magic and therefore earning a mere pittance, only enough for the day's food and a bed; sometimes not even the latter, turning your supply-pack into a pillow and your cloak into a blanket. This eel and wine that Mystia's providing is a much-needed change of pace, and while you feel guilty about not paying for it, from the looks of things she can afford the hospitality, if only barely.

Mystia doesn't ask what you mean by wasting it, though, so you don't have to regale her with any of that. "But what did you do?" she asks instead. "You never did tell me, but kept it a secret. Heaven knows if you were anyone else, I'd have suspected you of two-timing me somehow."

You flush slightly. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

She smiles, nudging your elbow with her own. "We were that close, at least. Tell me," she repeats.

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