Apollo woke up. That, in itself, was a strange thing.
"What . . . ?"
Gods don't sleep, at least, not in the way humans do. They can rest, but a part of them is always awake, keeping their domain safe and attending to their personal responsibilities. So for a god, the feeling of waking up, of truly waking as if from a deep slumber, was more than just a little unusual; it was an outright impossible occurrence.
Apollo looked around, wondering where he was. He spread his divine consciousness around the area, as well as focused his senses towards his Sun Chariot –
Wham!
Only to have it all forcibly shoved back into his head.
"Wha –!?" he cried out, surprised by the sudden feedback.
Okay, that definitely shouldn't have happened, he thought, cradling his divine cranium. One moment his influence was spreading fine, then after a few dozen kilometers, wham!
It felt like he'd sprinted head-first into a wall.
Something was preventing him from spreading his influence beyond a certain area, and the fact that it could do so was the most unnerving part. There were only a handful of things that could prevent a god from accessing his domain.
As for his Sun Chariot, that went even worse. The vehicle was what allowed him to keep the sun going for mortals, and regulated day from night, and he couldn't access it! Needless to say, this would cause a whole pantheon of problems that Apollo would not like to deal with.
Where was he anyway?
Looking around, he found himself surrounded by an endless row of bamboo trees. From a mortal point of view, there was nothing but bamboo for miles. Thankfully, he didn't have to see things as mortals did. It was obvious that this forest was heavily saturated in magic, an amount that was comparable to the one surrounding Camp Half-Blood, though it was wild and unfocused. The magic in the forest could easily confuse the mind of a mortal or demigod, and Apollo could feel his sense of direction being tampered with, and he could just as easily see how some of the bamboo would subtly change locations, making this place almost impossible to navigate.
Was Hecate behind this? He couldn't really recall doing anything that would've inspired something like this from her . . . lately. Unless . . . there was that one time, right after the Vietnam War ended . . .
"No, she wouldn't be that petty. Or . . . could she?" he thought.
It was a rather funny incident (at the time) that involved hippies, human rights rallies, lots of drugs and a lot more magic. It all ended with Hecate getting hilariously high on 'godsweed' – which was actually just enchanted bamboo and LSD – with Hermes recording it and Apollo creating a song to immortalize the incident.
It had taken centuries and the intervention of Zeus for Hecate to stop hexing them and calm down. Now though, it seemed that Hecate was out for Apollo's ichor.
"I swear if she really is behind this, I'm posting that video on Olympians Most Hilarious Home Videos!" he thought pettily. Truthfully (it was impossible for Apollo to lie to himself or others, being the god of truth) he didn't really suspect Hecate all that much. There was a myriad of other beings that could have done this and all of them for better, or to be precise, less childish, reasons, and it was for those very reasons that Apollo preferred to blame Hecate. The alternative was not a good option that he could afford to consider.
Hakurei Reimu sat idly at the entrance of her shrine. It was the middle of summer and the weather was in short words, glorious. It wasn't too hot, even if the sun was out and there wasn't a single cloud in sky. The wind blew strongly and felt cool, rather than the usual warm winds that summer tended to bring. Even better, however, was the lack of any incidents occurring for six whole months! Maybe there wouldn't be another one for the whole year!
Reimu liked to be optimistic. It helped deal with the stress of her job.
Hope though she might, she knew that an incident was bound to occur soon. As always, the Shrine Maiden of Paradise' famous intuition told her that something was definitely stirring. She didn't know what it was, but when she stepped out of her shrine this morning to clean the grounds, she got this tingle down her spine the way she usually did when she figured something was off, and the first thing she noticed was the sun. The sun seemed that was so bright and cheery this morning felt wrong, even if it was pleasant. It felt out of place, and seemed overall larger than usual, not in size but in presence, as if the sun had gotten more personality.
Reimu just knew that somehow the latest incident would involve the sun, but she wasn't sure how. In any case, nothing had happened so far, and as good as her intuition was, until something problematic occurred, she had no idea where to start. So for now, she would simply kick-back and enjoy the breeze. She would deal with the incident when it when it came.
She was just about to sit back and enjoy a nice tray of tea and dango's when she felt something large hit the Great Barrier.
Our resident shrine maidens' only thought was a sullen, "I'm not even done with my tea yet . . ."
Apollo walked through the bamboo forest, which was a new personal low for a god that was used to teleporting and flying around, but he had no choice: A quick scan of the place had revealed that there was no trace of the Mist here, which meant that there was no concealing the supernatural actions of an Olympian, so flying was out of the question, not to mention that he had decided to play it cautious. Wherever he was, it was unfamiliar territory, so he couldn't make himself known in such a showy manner as flying just yet.
He could have tried air travel, the extremely fast method of transportation that the gods of Olympus favored, but air travel required prior knowledge of where you were going to go, or else you'd hit something on the way. The way in which gods secured that knowledge was by spreading their conscious further, and Apollo had just failed at doing that.
"Stupid magic forest," he uttered under his breath. His earlier assessment of the forest was accurate, but flawed. The forest did more than just shift about and confuse the senses; it also actively made itself a pain in the pantheon by –
Whump!
"Us damn it!"
– making you trip and fall all over the place. Apollo took a look at the bamboo shoot that had caused his thirty-second fall and immediately the thing burst into golden flames.
The sun god huffed and got to his feet. The place was starting to get on his nerves, and he was less cheerful than he'd like. He was half-tempted to just fly up and get out, lack of Mist and caution be damned!
He trudged forward, promising himself that when he got out of here, he would party as much as he could at Las Vegas to make up for lost happy-time.
He had been walking for a few minutes when he heard the sound of rustling behind him.
"I knew it. Hey, you there, are you lost?"
Turning, Apollo's golden eyes met fiery red ones. The girl in front of him was taller than average, and had long silver hair. She wore some sort of ribbon on her head and a plain unflattering shirt with jeans that had multiple paper talismans stuck on it.
And she had just spoken in Japanese.
"Uh, hey, whoever you are, if you're lost, I could help you out," she said unsure of what make of Apollo's lack of response.
The sun god's brain was going into overdrive. The girl had spoken Japanese, and unless he was in some part of America that spoke Japanese frequently, then the only conclusion was that he was not in America, which also answered the nagging feeling he'd had when he'd first woke up in the forest; there wasn't nearly so much bamboo in one place over at the U.S.
But why was he in Japan? Who could've been responsible?
Apollo's mind categorized different names, all of them gods who could have been responsible, and not all of them Olympian.
Though they've kept it a secret from their children, the other pantheons from different myth's existed, and though it was true that the Olympian one was the most powerful in the world currently, that didn't mean that the other pantheon's would just lie back down. Each of them was aggressive in their own way, and even they though they all disliked the western gods of Olympus to some degree, there were two pantheons in particular that stood out when it came to hating them: The Chinese Taoist gods and the Japanese Shinto gods.
Guess which of the two Apollo suspected.
Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt soared high above the clouds in the form of an eagle. Close by and in the form of a large owl was Athena, and Hermes, who had taken the body of a falcon.
"Any sign of him?" called Artemis from her mind.
"No," replied Athena immediately. "This is most disturbing . . ."
"I'll say!" said Hermes irritably.
The source of the three's distress was Artemis twin, Apollo. The Sun God had gone missing, and consequently, the cycle of the sun was off-kilt, which was how they were alerted to his disappearance in the first place. At first they had thought that Apollo had maybe slacked-off in his duties while chasing after another mortal, but they knew even he wasn't that callous. Only after an initial search by several minor gods turn up nothing did the Olympian council decided to start searching in earnest. The ones that were tasked with looking for him were Hermes, Athena, and Artemis, their swiftest, wisest, and their best hunter and his, respectively.
Suddenly Hermes paused, and Artemis detected surprise in his posture.
The god of thieves and travelers dived low, his form disappearing momentarily behind the clouds. When he came back up again, he was accompanied by a wind spirit.
"Brother, who is this?"
"Wind Spirit, a servant of Zephyr, I caught him talking about an interesting piece of gossip; it concerns our missing Sun."
The spirit was transparent and trembling, no doubt intimidated to be in the presence of three of the main Olympians.
"M-my lords –!" he began.
"Save it and just tell us what you've heard," snapped Artemis.
"O-of course." The wind spirit took a moment to gather his wits, before speaking. "S-so of course, me and my buddies were all talkin' about the disappearance of Lord Apollo with a coupla nymphs, and I was sayin' 'Ha! Guess what, I din' just hear about tha', I actually saw him go!' an' of course tha' got the nymph's interested, and I was like, 'Well, if yah wanna hear more, then I suggest you stop by over at mya place, and we can get all comfy like in there and –"
"I didn't drag you here to listen about your passes on women," interrupted Hermes dryly. "Just tell us what you saw."
"Oh right, of course! Well, so I was just on my way over to talk to some Naiads, when I saw the Lord Apollo flyin' over, and I thought 'Hey! Lord Apollo likes himself some Naiads,' and Naiads always like it when the guy comes an talk to 'em, and I was thinkin', 'Hey, if the Lord Apollo comes with me, I can get a whole lot of Naiads to come an' talk to me,' you get what I'm saying?"
Artemis looked at him with cold eyes. "All too well," she said balefully.
"Anyway!" interrupted Athena quickly. "What happened to Apollo?"
The wind spirit looked at Athena gratefully, before speaking. "Ah, see, that's the strange part. So I was flyin' to the Lord, and then suddenly, there this real loud zipin' noise, and then the Lord was gone!"
The three Olympian's stared at the wind spirit like he had suddenly grown a second head.
"Please elaborate, what do you mean by 'gone'?" said Athena. Artemis suspected that if she was in human form, she'd be pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration.
"That's just it! There was this hole in the air –"
"What hole?!" cried Artemis impatiently.
The wind spirit looked panicked and was waving his hands in the air. "Some hole appeared after the zippin', lot's of eyes inside- I don't know!"
"What do you mean by eyes?" asked Hermes. He could tell that Athena and Artemis were as disturbed from the news as he was.
"There were eyes inside the hole, Lord Hermes."
The three Olympians were silent, each one occupied with their own thoughts. The silence stretched on for a tense few minutes, before Athena spoke. "Very well, you may go," she said with a beat of her wing.
The wind spirit bowed quickly and was gone in a puff of wind.
"Well," said Hermes, "this is bad."
"Understatement of the century, brother," said Artemis.
"I'm pretty sure Percy Jackson said something worse, Artemis, something about –"
"It's a figure of speech, Hermes," said Athena, "meant to point out how foolish your statement was."
"Way to kill the joke, Athena."
Apollo followed the young silver-haired woman through the forest. He hadn't gotten around to asking her name yet, and he quickly learned that she didn't like being flirted with. Her first response to his patented playgod style of hitting on women was lighting her hand on fire and staring at him until he stopped.
Yeah, apparently, the forest wasn't the only thing unusual around here.
He had no idea how she managed to find her way and navigate through the forest without the cursed thing trying to trip her or mislead her, but she did.
When he asked her about it, she simply replied that 'the forest knows her' and that was that. He tried reading her mind, but got pretty much the same answer, along with some exasperated thoughts about how annoying it was for people to get stranded in here all the time.
"Anyway," she said, breaking the silence that had settled between them, "from the lost look on your face, I take it you're an Outsider?"
Apollo detected a capital in the word 'outsider' so he assumed that she was talking about more than just being a foreigner.
"What do you mean by 'Outsider'?" he asked.
"It's a term around here that refers to people from outside the barrier."
"What barrier? And where is 'here'?"
The woman scratched her head in frustration. "Ah, well, it's kinda hard to explain. I'll just lead you back to the village and get Keine to take you to Reimu. She'd do a better job explaining this to you than me."
Apollo wondered about this girl. She seemed to be an anti-social, and talked in a rather awkward manner; she was speaking in slow broken sentences, like she was trying to decide on the right words to say even as she spoke.
"Who are you anyway?"
The girl shook her head. "No one important, but you can call me Mouko. Anyway, we're nearing the exit of the forest, so you'd better get ready."
Apollo nodded. "So, Mouko-san, who is this 'Reimu', anyhow?"
Mouko shrugged, but answered. "The guardian of this place, she's the one that keeps the barrier running and makes sure nothing gets out of hand."
"Huh. What do you mean by barrier?"
"The Great Border, the Hakurei Barrier, it's got lots of names. Anyway, why don't you save the questions for later, alright? Like I said, Reimu does a better job of explaining these things than I do."
Apollo nodded. It seemed like he wasn't getting anything else out of this girl.
After half an hour of walking, they finally cleared past the last line of bamboo. Apollo sighed in sacred relief. He was finally out of that accursed forest!
And that was when the hailstorm started.
Apollo's arm shot forward and a wave of flame melted the incoming projectiles. Next to him, Mokou did the same thing. She looked at Apollo in surprise. The god smiled wirily in response. Mokou just huffed and focused forwards, which Apollo took as her saying, 'Not my business'.
"Dammit Cirno, what did I say about attacking me?!" shouted Mokou.
Apollo looked past the whirling snow and into the center of the hailstorm. His jaw slackened.
"Um . . . is that what I think it is?"
"A fairy?" responded Mokou, not taking her eyes of their target, "yeah, and a real annoying one."
Indeed, at the center of the storm was a blue-haired girl that looked no older than eleven years old. She wore a blue dress and ribbon. Six 'wings' of pure ice protruded from behind her. She had an elfin face that still had baby fat, and an obnoxious grin was plastered on her face.
"Hey Phoenix Lady, I came for a rematch!" declared the ice fairy Cirno. "I'll prove once and for all that I am the strongest!"
"Not now you little pest!" shouted Mokou. She clenched her fist and at once it was enveloped in flames. "I'm only warning you once, Cirno, back-off or I'll burn you again!"
The little fairy just raised a hand up, and the frost surrounding her centered on top her open palm, slowly turning into a rectangular piece of ice. Once the ice had formed it began cracking, revealing a glowing blue card underneath. At the sight of the card, Mokou sighed and the flames in her hand swirled and focused themselves into a spot between her fingers. Soon, both Cirno and Mokou were holding cards in their fingers.
"Spell Card Duel, one minute, one card!" announced Cirno.
Mokou responded dryly, "Accepted."
Apollo was about to ask what they were doing, when the card in Cirno's hand exploded with a cold and brilliant light.
"Freeze Sign: Icicle Fall!"