Another story that I've had in my personal archives for a while. I feel like Mahiro just doesn't get enough love. So here's a little fun for him. Hope he likes dealing with tomboyish, hot-headed squirts with loud mouths.
I'm still a young one, by my kind's standards. My father is over two thousand years old, which is why he is considered old and wise by the younger ones, but also young and full of life and power by the older ones. He is the leader of our clan, a clan of phoenixes, the vermillion birds. We are the birds of the sun, of fire, and of immortality, the guardians of the south, and associated with the season of summer. And most of all, we are among the guardians of humanity. One of the four clans of beast gods.
I think that I'm a century and a half old or so, but time is difficult when you don't age as quickly as humans, and when time seems to stand still. Besides, we only use human years as a relative measurement. To us, it hardly matters, since we don't pass away from old age. But, by phoenix standards, I'm still a young lady, going through what the humans would call adolescence, and my body is still quite small. Because of this, my father decides that it is time for me to be sent out into the world to answer a summons of power by the humans. That should also help me to mature and complete the development of my growing and slightly unstable powers.
When the call finally comes, my father assigns me a mission. "Stay in the human realm until your powers have matured, even if it take years. You will form a summoning contract with a human, and you will aid that human until such a time as that mission is complete."
"Alright. I'll do my best." I agree easily, since a year doesn't seem like very long, not to me anyway. And besides, being around humans might be fun, since I've never even actually seen one. I've been told that they look like our wingless forms, though I still wonder how such frail and short-lived creatures have managed to survive this long. Perhaps it's because they reproduce faster than they die, which would explain their huge over-population issues.
The Sky, my father. The Earth, my mother. Within this country…Sagittarius. The Dipper. Three Pedestals. Jeweled Girl. Left Blue Dragon. Right White Tiger. Front Vermillion Bird. Back Black Tortoise. Help me! Hurry, Tathata's Command!
As I feel the incantation for the summoning spell finish, I become a mass of red light and travel from my realm to theirs, exploding from a paper incantation to distract and strike down a group of drowned gods, somewhere in rural Japan. But as soon as I appear, a shining star to these drowned gods, the two humans run off. It seems that they summoned me in desperation, which would explain several things, including why there are corrupted gods here in the first place.
I look at the drowned gods with contempt. "Fallen to darkness and corruption…how pitiful. If you have no will to continue on, then you should have disappeared long ago. I will end you now." I raise my hand, and light shines from it. It would blind anyone watching, which is why it's a good thing that those two humans left.
I have heard of fallen gods before. The older phoenixes tell me about them from time to time. But I've never had the misfortune of seeing any before today. We hold them high in contempt, because even if they are no longer worshiped, they can still keep their sanity through strength of will alone. These drowned gods have proven that they do not have the strength of will to resist the corruption that destroyed their sanity.
After dealing with the drowned gods, I wander around in an intangible form for a while, even through the night, getting the lay of the land, which is mostly hills, valleys and mountains, with a single village right in the middle, surrounded by forest. I suppose that I should understand my surroundings before starting my official mission. I find the village through the forest, as well as what the humans call a bus stop. I'm fascinated by this human world, because it is far more cluttered than mine. Then again, my kind likes wide open spaces, so perhaps the difference is to be expected, since there are far more humans than there are my kind.
In my world, the sun is always shining, it never rains or snows, we have meadows of flowers and fields of the most delicious foods. Our buildings are open to the sky. And everything is white, gold or green, bright and pure. It's a paradise that no human has ever set eyes on. And best of all is that there are less than a hundred of us, which means that everyone has plenty of space to use for whatever strikes their fancy.
And now, I am in a realm not my own…