/jp/ - Otaku Culture

"Yes...?" Yamame ventured. Rarely had someone asked a question like that in an excited tone rather than a fearful one. The only one she could see doing so was her human, but he was a strange case at the best of times, so she wasn't sure if he counted or not.

Chen's eyes widened even more, and she took in an excited breath. "Wow, really!?" This had officially gone beyond Yamame's wheelhouse and ventured into the unknown. "You're so pretty! And - And the pattern of your dress, that's the pattern of the kind of spider you are, isn't it? Is it an Argiope? A - A funnel weaver? Orb weaver?" The questions were coming fast, and Yamame definitely couldn't keep up, so she took a different approach.

"Miss Chen?" Chen's mouth snapped shut at Yamame' voice, and Yamame took the moment to breathe. "Are you really here to ask me about the minutiae of being a spider?" She injected a little humour into her voice, otherwise Chen might feel like she was dismissing her.

"O-Oh, um, no, but...Reimu said she was busy, and Lady Ran's talking with that guy in there..." Chen pointed at Reimu's room in the Shrine. "I'm, um, sorry for getting overexcited."

"That's okay, Chen. I don't mind. So, you like spiders?" Yamame asked with a smile, inviting Chen to sit on the veranda with her. It was surprisingly easy to talk to a child - even a youkai child, especially compared to how tongue-tied she became around the oni of legend like Yuugi Hoshiguma, Suika Ibuki and Kasen Ibaraki.
"Y-Yes! Lady Ran gave me a book on spiders as a present for doing really good at manipulating big data recently and I found it really interesting, but then I finished it and I couldn't find another so I asked Lady Yukari if she knew anything about spiders but she said that she'd never really thought about it so I tried to-" She was babbling, and while Yamame found her rather cute, it was a little much.

"Chen." She said, and Chen quietened down. Big data? Yamame wasn't really sure what that was. "I can tell you a few things, I suppose. My name is Yamame Kurodani. I am a spider youkai, yes. A kogane-gumo, if you were wondering." Chen had said something before she’d suggested funnel weaver. Arhg-ee-ope. She didn’t recognize the term, and it didn’t even sound like Japanese. Was it an outside world term? Hearn certainly seemed capable of having her shikigami fetch a book from the outside world. Perhaps it was a foreign language. English? She’d heard English in the Scarlet Devil Mansion, back when she’d been working on the renovations there.

She did something then that she rarely did, because frankly, she didn't have enough space to. She allowed her additional limbs to manifest. Four limbs appeared from her back, and she demonstrated her control over each one. It wasn't something she'd done in front of her human yet, at first out of fear that he'd reject her, and now just out of convenience, because with an extra pair of hands in their home, she hadn't really needed to use her additional limbs. Usually, she didn't even use the real limbs, but allowed them to essentially inhabit four striped pieces of her outfit which allowed her to manipulate them as if they were her own limbs. Still, Chen looked suitably amazed, and didn't seem to know where to look. After a few moments, she let the limbs fade back into their usual state and raised her hands. "Is there something in particular you want to ask me?" She asked, then immediately regretted it when Chen launched into another volley of questions, some of which were so barely related that she wasn't sure where Chen had come up with them.

Idly, she wondered if her human’s conversation was going as strangely as hers was. He couldn’t beat her in confusion after that strange chase, she was certain about that.