Scion – Rada Campaign Guest Appearance – Part 6
This account was originally found on Livejournal, I am not the original author—I am just a fan of the journal and have found reading it on livejournal clunky to navigate and rife with errors/instability (such as having to refresh multiple times due to the page in questions becoming unavailable often requiring multiple refreshes. The original post can be found here, published by DJ-Yomi, and was published on Sep 18th 2008
So I’m back from my trip to Japan and once again enjoying the comforts of home and my loving wife. Of course, she’s a bit miffed that I had a nice spa resort vacation without her, but she’ll get over it soon. In any event, the spa was great! Carina, Maneki and I met Hinako there, and we all had a wonderful time. It was pretty emotional at times…I mean, in some of our long, deep talks, both Carina and Hinako kinda spilled their guts about some things. Hinako remained fairly collected throughout, but poor Carina really needed some comforting at one point. She’s okay, though. It was good for her to let it all out. Among other things, we talked about relationships. I talked about Echo and Ray and Adam, Hinako talked about Sayuri, and Carina talked about Sam. Maneki asked a lot of nosy questions, but it was all in good fun.
We all bonded, and Carina and Maneki became closer. I think there’s a little hero worship going on judging by the admiration with which Maneki looks at Carina. It’s good for her to have someone to look up to, and good that she’s been put in touch with Hinako and her friends now. It’s also good for Carina. I get the feeling she has a bit of an inferiority complex, and having someone look up to her like that should help boost her confidence. ^_^ I also taught Carina a few things about using her charms to influence people. That should boost her confidence too. She was a good student. ^_^
All in all, it was a great little vacation. I do feel bad that Echo couldn’t be there, though. >_<
But I guess I should cover the rest of our mission in Kyushu too, huh? ^_^
Well, I think I left off after dealing with Rin and Toshie. We decided to head back to Maneki’s house so that we could rest and wait for dawn. Maneki doesn’t have the divine stamina that many of the rest of us do, so she needed to sleep. As we arrived, however, we were greeted by an absolutely charming rokurokubi girl named Shinobu. She was dressed in a flirtatious little outfit and cruising around on roller skates. She was coming to check on Maneki and to see if the rumors that Daitokuji had been defeated were true. To be honest, she was a little disappointed. She was glad that Daitokuji had been dealt with, but she was sad that she’d have to go home and stop having fun freaking people out. I managed to convince her that while she really should stop scaring people, nothing said she had to go home or stop having fun. ^_^
A shirime named Goemon showed up too. Storm and his companions reacted strongly to that (Helena spent quite awhile cleaning and disinfecting the window Goemon leaned out of to talk to us), but I can’t blame them. Shirime are…unpleasant. I love youkai, but even I don’t like dealing with shirime. Is that shallow of me? Maybe. But I can’t help it. >_<
Anyway, we convinced Shinobu and Goemon to spread the word about Daitokuji, and then settled down to rest for a bit. Maneki was still excited and stayed up and active for about an hour, and then she just sort of went to sleep. It was amazing, like a light being switched off. One moment she was going at full speed, the next she was practically dead to the world.
While Maneki slept, the rest of use occupied our time in whatever way suited us. I mostly talked to people. I encouraged Sam to try to open up more to Carina, and then I talked to Cesar a bit about Helena. I mean, it’s obvious that they like each other, but the way they dance around the issue is almost excruciating to watch. After talking to Cesar, though, I think I understand a little better. For all of her frigid cold, Helena’s actually rather fragile, at least when it comes to something like romance. So Cesar’s playing things carefully. He seems to know exactly how to handle Helena. It may take time, but those two will get together sooner or later. ^_^
As for the others…well, Jacob mostly seems to miss his home and family. He and I have already gone back and forth quite a bit about Japan, so I pretty much left him in peace. It’s not like we’re antagonistic toward each other. We get along well. He’s just not as accepting of the stranger, darker things in this world as I am.
But the biggest thing that happened that night was that Tabby totally scored with Storm! I was kinda encouraging it anyway, and I knew Storm had a thing for Tabby. So when I noticed that the two of them had disappeared, I wasn’t surprised. Of course I got all the details from Tabby later. They apparently had a great time. ♥ ^_^ ♥ I mean, I know from personal experience that Tabby likes it a bit rough, but apparently the lovemaking of two people with divine strength can easily cause collateral damage.
When morning dawned and Maneki switched on again, she cooked us pancakes and then we left to go meet with the kitsune. The kitsune were lairing in a mysterious cave which they had cloaked in illusion so that anyone who attempted to enter it would be drawn into a horrifying kamikakushi (a kind of illusory “world” that things like kitsune and tengu can create to bewitch and enchant mortals). The journey into the cave was…odd. Those of us with divinely keen senses, like Sam, Cesar, and Carina kept having to readjust their perspectives to make sense of the conflicting sights and sounds they were receiving as illusion mixed with reality. I guess it might have been a little like being on some sort of hallucinogen. As Carina scouted ahead, she kept creeping forward then stopping to refocus on reality instead of the illusion. The rest of us might actually have had it easier. All we saw were the illusions, but knowing they were illusions helped.
We passed through a cavern filled with dinosaurs, walked by a bus terminal populated with skeletal salarymen, and got hit by phantom train (it was really gruesome to watch others smashed to bits by it…Carina seemed really traumatized to see Sam massacred like that though, even if it was just an illusion). Then a creeeeepy little girl approached us. She was dressed in an old fashioned kimono and dragged the rotting corpse of her dead mother behind her. It was so utterly endearing in the creepy way that makes the goth in me tingle that I exclaimed something like, “She’s so CUTE!” ^_^ Needless to say, the others looked at me like I was crazy. Especially Jacob (he has good reasons to be disturbed by the child, though, poor guy). Maybe I am crazy. But death’s my thing, so it seems natural to me.
Anyway, when Carina and the others expressed some distress at the girl with her corpse-mother, the girl “tried” to make things a bit better by changing so that the mother stood and faced us and the girl grew limp and dead, reversing who was alive and who was the corpse doll. It was so freakishly creepy and disturbing that I almost fainted with glee. ^_^ Well, not really, but I did enjoy it. The fact that this girl was obviously a fox spirit playing games with us helped make it more acceptable, of course. Like getting a delicious thrill out of watching something in a horror movie.
The kitsune who was toying with us eventually dropped the disguises and talked to us plainly. Her name was Tomomo, and she apparently bears quite a grudge against humans. As she sees it, the youkia have to take the world back from the humans, because otherwise humans are just going to go on polluting and destroying and corrupting the world. No one wants that, and Tomomo’s pretty militant about it. As we talked to her, though, she was joined by other kitsune, including a more mature and even-tempered woman named Nadoka.
Tomomo was pretty stubborn, but with Nadoka’s help we eventually talked her down and got her to agree to peace with the local mortals. I assured her that we were doing what we could to clean up the damage done by Daitokuji (Amaterasu’s priests should be arriving soon) and tried to show her that mortals do a lot of good for the world as well as a lot of bad. Storm, Cesar, and Jacob threw in their opinions too, and together we managed to reach a compromise. Cesar has some major financial backing, apparently, and is going to pull in favors to get the local countryside turned into a nature preserve or national park or something so that no one can build there or otherwise despoil the land.
Tomomo wasn’t completely happy, but she agreed. And I think she was secretly pleased at the prospects of preserving the area. ^_^ The other kitsune were pretty willing to cooperate with us by that point, and so the deal was settled.
All that remained was for us to get the local shrine priests and the youkai together to ceremonialyl establish the peace and return things to the way they should be, youkai and human peacefully coexisting (well, aside from a few minors scares or the occasional meal for Rakushinpu on the nights of the changing seasons, of course). We got all the youkai to show up at a local roadside shrine, a place that doesn’t see a lot of traffic but that is kept up by local Shinto faithful. While the youkai were gathering there, the rest of us headed out to talk to the local priests and gather them to go meet the youkai.
The priests were a little overwhelmed. They all know the youkai exists and most have seen youkai before, but still, it was kinda like they wandered into a hyakki yakou (the so-called “parade of 100 goblins” popularized by traditional Japanese art), and no amount of warning can prepare someone for that. But the meeting went well, and all was resolve nicely.
Keiko and Oda were there with Teruko, so I finally got to meet her! That was part of the whole reason I made this trip to Japan in the first place! She was delightful. We talked for a long time, and I learned a lot more about her mother and father. I look forward to seeing her again. ^_^
Anyway, once things were resolved with the youkai, it was time to hit the hot springs of Hakone with Carina, Maneki, and Hinako. Saying goodbye to Storm, Jacob, Helena, Cesar, and Sam was kinda tough. I really liked them, even if they weren’t quite sure what to think of me. But I’m sure I’ll see them again before long.
Of course, there was one more surprise after we all parted ways. Storm gave Tabby a gift! He actually had it delivered to the room she shared with Robin after he’d left. It was amazing. He gave her a huge uncut diamond in a gorgeous antique jewelry box, and wrote the most beautiful bit of prose comparing her to the “unmelting ice” and saying that despite her sometimes cold, hard exterior, he could sense the fires that burn within her. Tabby is so smitten right now! And she really, really deserved to hear something like that from someone other than me. She is a warm and sensitive persondeep down inside, but she often keeps it bottled up and hidden. She shows her warmth to Kaori, sometimes, when they’re alone (but not in public). And she shows it to me sometimes. And apparently she showed enough of it to Storm for him to figure her out. He’s more empathic than I gave him credit for, and I like that. He did a great job with the gift’s presentation and obviously put some work into it. What girl wouldn’t be impressed by that? The funerary envelope that held his letter was a nice touch. I guess some people would consider that in poor taste, but for people like Tabby and me, it was perfect!
Ah well, I guess I should be going. Echo’s really missed me, and is starting to give me pretty obvious hints that it’s time to put away the computer and pay attention to her. ♥ ^_^ ♥