[Silent Hill F]
Drawback: Entwined With The Divine, Wake the Dragon (1500)
Ebisugaoka
Outsider, age 20
Please See Me As I Am (Free)
Blessed By The Stars (1200)
Power of a Patriarch (600)
Divine Dowry (200)
Sacred HospitalityX3 (+200, 100)
AFTER ONE THOUSAND YEARS, I’M FINALLY FREE! (Free)
SPACE DOG (50)
Failed Audition (0)
“So I’ve been having this weird dream the other night” I told the other visitors. The ragged-looking girl gave me her biggest, most unhinged smile for a millisecond before defaulting to an affectation of genuine curiosity. The vulpine woman adjusted her hat. The space dog barked family, his crashed UFO incongruously perched in an open field. The mist was rolling in early tonight.
“Do tell” said Tammy, flickering what may have been stick-on ears. The river water was churning awfully strong this time of year, almost like silver scales.
“Okay so, in the dream I’m arguing with my sister right? Over something trivial. I don’t even know what, I just knew I wasn’t going to stand there and take it. I get so mad, I start tearing up the fields. I start smashing up the palace. I grab AN ENTIRE HORSE and hurl it straight into her loom. She’s so radiant, my sister, but she runs and hides. Everyone else in the family kicks me out”
“Good” said Mitzi suddenly, “family’s just a burden. So that’s your dream, huh?”. Then she startled as a sudden geyser erupted, near us.
“Not quite. I leave home with my sword, and I’m so damn angry and my pride’s so wounded I just start cutting down whoever’s in my way. I cut down the woman who tried to feed me with her vomit. I cross the sea in a boat made of clay with my son. My sword brings disease and healing; they call me by a different name. And then there’s the snake”
“Oya?” said Tammy, meaningfully staring down at the river. A second tributary had sprouted from it, cutting a streak through the loam.
“Yeah. Biggest damn snake ever, eight branching necks”
1/5
The fog was really rolling in now. And not the usual white stuff, but a bilious yellow with what seemed to be ball lightning that pushed at the edge of the white. There were blooms of red flowers suddenly revealed only by the white fog, but wherever the yellow fog went they wilted and rotted into riverbed mud.
“You guys want to take shelter somewhere?” I asked. “Woof?” said the space dog, which translated to “I think it would be preferable to escape the calamity into low orbit, from whence we can monitor the situation!”. “That’s a better idea actually. You guys do that, I’ve got a few things to take care of” I said, fixing the ship with a casual God-Machine Protocol cast.
The ongoing event wasn’t really my business, but there was a young lady who seemed pretty lost headed it’s way. I stopped by, quite accurately pointed out there was nobody visible still in town, and asked if she was confused. She seemed to be, upon realising she was too old to be in school. I quietly pocketed her pill supply, gave her directions out of town and convinced her to let go of the crowbar she’d gotten from somewhere.
When she was safely out of sight, I smashed the crowbar down over and over again on a nearby doll that was just sitting there. Watching. It was definitely just a doll and not an avatar for a divine tree jealously watching over it’s abandoned followers.
“So where was I?” I asked, after they beamed me up.
“You were telling us about the dream” said Mitzi coyly. Despite everyone being surprisingly accepting of the space dog’s existence, she in particular looked very glad to be out of a traditional Japanese town and in space.
“Right, the big snake” I said thoughtfully. “It’s so big even I stop and think: Poison, that’s the trick. So I’ve got all this wine prepared. But then something goes wrong. The people living near the snake are so scared they decide it’s not worth it. They take the wine and leave me with the poison. And…they make an offering”
2/5[Expand Post]
“Yes, yes, the Orochi clan were always-I mean, such creatures are always haughty, hungry beasts in folklore” said Tammy, while the dog fiddled with gadgets and gizmos. “Tell me, does this dream of yours have some deeper meaning…?”
“Not really” I said, peering through one of the space dog’s scanners. “It’s just a local legend. It can be a metaphor or a parable, but I think you’ll find it hard to actually confirm anything. I’ve probably been working too hard, with the local real estate boom and everything. Hey, beam me down for a sec. There’s someone else I want to talk to”
The dog set me down in a place that wasn’t a place, and a temple that wasn’t sacred, where a frustrated young man was currently trying to lead Hinako away from the nearest bust station back to her would-be wedding. I brought the shattered pieces of the doll with me. The conversation we had was surreal and ambiguous, but either I told a privileged but well-intentioned wealthy heir that he needed to actually sit down with his betrothed and talk things out, or I told a divine fox that he was actually being manipulated by an ancient tree. Either way, Hinako and Kotoyuki quickly decided they didn’t want to get any more lost than they already were. They thanked me but insisted this was something they had to deal with themselves, I agreed since I was there for something else.
Kotoyuki was kind enough to point out to me where the last bottle of Agura no Hotei-sama was hidden in the village. It wasn’t much compared to the stuff I had at home, but every drop helped.
While I was there I found a sacred sword, ran a whetstone down it, had it blessed in a thunderstod and ritually purified it in a well. After that I came across a place of rushing water and twisting wind, that heaved and churned like two coiling serpents. Two of which seemingly loomed out of the darkness.
“Looking for group?” said Tammy and the gang, who’d appeared behind me.
“Sure. This IS turning out to be a Bloodborne/Sekiro kind of day” I said.
3/5
I proceeded to engage in an animesque fight resembling the battle with the Divine Dragon in Sekiro, except instead of dragons made of rotting wood there were dragons made of slimy driftwood, and there were TWO dragons coiled around what seemed to be a long dead tree. But the goal was still to jump on the right wind spiral, catch lightning on my blade and bring it crashing down on it’s heads. My new friends had their own slew of skills: Tammy turned the lightning into claws and teeth she raked the dragon with, Mitzi turned her pocket scythe into a Rivers of Blood reference, and the space dog brought laser drones to an anime swordfight.
At one point when the dragons literally washed us away with a flood of noxious water, we went crashing into a different open air arena where Hinako and Kotoyuki appeared to be fighting a giant black fox. “Tamamo-no-Mae! Why is the Water Dragon and it’s sibling here?!” shouted the black fox. “Inauspicious celestial alignments, Kyubi-dono. We’ve all been played” said Tamamo. “Inauspicious celestial alignments! At this time, in this place, localised entirely in the sacred shrine?!” exclaimed the black fox. “CLANSMEN! Forget these impudent children, we have a duty to uphold!”
The rest of the night turned a Nightreign-style raid into a confusing PvE brawl involving lots of shadowy figures rushing down the weakened dragons. Even Hinako and Kotoyuki dropped whatever issues they had to join in. Not long afterwards the fog parted, day broke and a tired not-couple in the news for heroically acting just in time to save Ebisugaoka from a flash flood.
“So are we not going to talk about that?” asked Mitzi. “Talk about what?” I said innocently. “Uh, the fact that gods are real and-“ “They looked like gods to you?” I said.
We stared at each other. “Nah I’m just fucking with you, those were totally shinto spirits. Me though, I’m just a dude” I said.
4/5
“Just a-I JUST saw you turning lightning into a blade!”
“Healthy exercise and a good diet”
“What is going on?!”
“Syncretism” said Tammy, with a flick of her tail. I mean, her tail-like decoration. As we went home (which was simultaneously just down the road to Tokyo and also into a spiritual plane as high above the mortal one as Tokyo was from the rural villages) I opened the doors of my fabulous estate and invited all my guests to take some respite.
…
“This is literally a heavenly sanctum, you realise?” said Tammy.
“Or it COULD be a metaphor for how tradition inspires artistic design even in the homes of the modern upper class” I said innocently.
“The nameplate above your literal throne reads ‘Susanoo-no-Mikoto’ and what is clearly the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi is holstered by your side” she pointed out.
“Ah don’t worry about it, it’s just a metaphor for how religious beliefs continue to shape modern Japanese society”
“I see, I see, and…the other six decapitated heads of the Yamato-no-Orochi arranged in a stack next to your casks of sacred divine medicine, which are currently being polished by faceless serpents with legs of vapour?” she tried, while Mitzi just embraced her SAN loss and the space dog happily received a treat from a nearby storm servant.
“It’s a metaphor for unchecked corporate greed, and the dire threat of stagflation in this country’s future” I insisted.
Tammy stared, and stared, and finally just gave up and stopped trying to argue she wasn’t in a mundane Japanese luxury mansion after all. Meanwhile I commanded the power of the storms and sea themselves into pleasing forms (or at least appeared to, using an elaborate Bunraku puppet theatre).
5/5