/jp/ - Otaku Culture

We stepped out onto the veranda. "Not walking." Reimu immediately said. I sighed, then agreed because I didn't have a choice. It would have been nice to have a choice, I thought, but it seemed like everyone I knew was sick of indulging my poor, human-from-the-village weakness to not be able to fly whenever I wanted. Yamame had given up on it, Reimu had given up on it, and I suspected that they wouldn't be the only ones. Still, I thought as Reimu lifted me into the air, maybe when I did start working for Lady Hecatia, I'd be able to fly too. Or...Something, at least. Was Miss Sanae like that? "I think Sanae sort of cheats?" Reimu said in response to my musing. "Like she's technically not flying, she's manipulating the wind exactly around her to, uh...Sort of throw herself in the direction she wants." That sounded like a strange way to go about it. What if there wasn't any wind on a particular day? "I've given up on asking those sorts of questions." Reimu replied. "I think the answer is just that a miracle did it." That...Would answer it, I guessed.

It hadn't snowed today. That was good, but I didn't expect it to last. Setsuban may have only been a day away, but the real end of Winter wouldn't be quite yet, and there was still plenty of time for the snow to come pelting down again. Maybe if the snow could stay away for a few more days, I could actually coax Yamame into coming outside without needing to force her via extreme massage sessions. "Hang on, it's somewhere..." Reimu muttered, floating slightly to the left. Then, slightly to the right. Curious, I asked her what exactly she was looking for. "A tree..." Was that...helpful? "It's the tree I've used to remember where Marisa's house is for...As long as I've known her. But it's always harder when the snow's covering everything. Hang on." She was silent for a few moments more. "There it is." Victoriously, she headed toward what looked to me to just be a tree as nondescript as the rest. Considering every single tree was covered in snow, that meant that the whole place more or less looked like a slightly lumpy field that was a bit higher up.

"It's the trees." Reimu told me. "They're insanely dense, both the leaves themselves and the actual forest. Plus, I think there's just something about the miasma in there. The snow just...Doesn't properly take. I mean, it does, but never for very long." Looking around for a moment longer, Reimu brought us over a spot where there was a tiny gap between the branches, just enough to drop down to the forest floor below. "Alright, hold on tight." As long as it took for Reimu to say it was about all the warning I got before she dropped us both through the hole. I did get whacked by a few branches on the way, but made it through relatively unscathed.

True to Reimu's word, the ground level of the Forest of Magic was a strange place compared to the rest of the valley. There was a light dusting of snow, but even it was cast in a strange, almost purplish haze. Otherwise, the forest looked as if it wasn't Winter at all. It was still particularly cold, especially with the clear sky. "Probably that yuki-onna's fault." Reimu muttered. Everyone seemed to be blaming her for the cold lately. "Let's get moving or we'll end up choking to death on this miasma." I paused, eyes wide, and asked if that could really happen. "Well...You probably won't die. It does make it a bit harder to breathe, though. No idea how Marisa can stand living here, honestly..." I just assumed it was one of her quirks. "She should sell her quirks and start acting like a normal person instead." Reimu muttered darkly.

I let Reimu lead me through the Forest of Magic. She seemed to know where she was going and I was absolutely certain that if I blinked at the wrong moment, I'd end up stranded on some cliff in the middle of nowhere. It just seemed like my kind of luck. "We'll come out by the back of her house. Not sure why that's the tree I remembered, but...Well, there you go." In fact, I could already make out a white shape in the gloom of the forest, and I was fairly sure that it was the walls of Marisa's house.

"Is that...A keystone?" Reimu asked with a frown, staring at the massive rock with the streamers on it sitting at the back of her house. That had showed up in her account of her time sneaking into Eientei, I recalled. "Oh, right...I forgot about that bit. Why's she kept it? Actually, why's Tenshi let her keep it? That girl's a raging hoarder at the best of times, but I really hoped that Tenshi would have some influence on that."

/jp/ was beautiful on fire
All funposting stretching shitwards
Everything washed in a thin eastern haze...