The air is red and gross and heavy. It permeates every inch of Gensokyo, and every moment that Marisa spends breathing it clogs her lungs and makes it hard to breathe and hard to move. She had kinda just ignored it for a couple of days and relaxed at home, but then there was an... accident with some potions (they weren't supposed to be explosive!) and there was a hole in her wall so she couldn't really act like it wasn't there anymore.
So, using her amazing deductive ability, Marisa had traced the source of the mist to that creepy, definitely haunted mansion that had suddenly just appeared near the lake one day. Sure, to an outsider, it looked like she had just followed Reimu and pestered her for about an hour, but they had just come to the same conclusion through their shared brilliance.
God the air is awful. It was like walking through a room filled with smoke from a failed magical experiment, except the room was all of Gensokyo and the smoke apparently made humans fall into a deep, nauseating sickness. So, Marisa had put together a rudimentary gas mask to stop herself from dying awfully on the trip there.
Marisa's thoughts come to an abrupt end when she hears the sound of shattering stone echoing through the air, as Reimu continues to fight the gatekeeper. Marisa watches for a few more moments, admiring the thousands of shimmering bullets that covered the garden, a beautiful cascade of rainbow colors.
She's almost jealous, but her attention strays to the unguarded doors, and her thoughts shift to all the things she could find in this... mysterious lakeside villa. It's definitely haunted; things like this never aren't haunted. It looks really old, too… who knows what she'd find inside? All sorts of ancient things worth stealing…
With a grin on her face, Marisa drops down behind Reimu and her opponent, and blows down the (impractically huge) doors with a flash of the Mini-Hakkero. With this new world open to her, Marisa flies in on her broom, into the darkness of the mansion.
The air here is clear, and light, so Marisa pulls her makeshift gas mask down around her neck and takes in a nice, deep breath. "Ah, it's so nice to breathe in actual air," she murmurs to herself, looking around. The halls are dark and unlit, so Marisa extends her hand and forms a glowing ball of light to show the way.
Glowing eyes at the end of the halls suddenly become visible, but the indistinct shapes behind them disappear further into the shadows. Marisa swallows, heart pounding in her chest. This is so cool. She should definitely break into old haunted mansions more often. Too bad Gensokyo is so empty. This is probably the only haunted mansion here! So she has to make this last.
Marisa takes her time, wandering around aimlessly and entering any closed door she finds. Every time, she expects some monster to jump out at her, maybe a ghost, or something, but all she finds are increasingly weird rooms. Some are pretty normal, with couches and fireplaces and little tables. Marisa quickly finds more fireplaces than there are smokestacks, though. Other rooms are filled with discarded furniture; shredded chairs, tall candelabras, even a shattered chandelier. She snatches some things, shoving them into her pockets.
As Marisa explores, deeper and deeper, feeling the constant presence of eyes on her, she begins to realize that there's no way this mansion's layout makes sense. The outside wasn't shaped like this; halls branch off for miles away from the rest of the mansion, only to weave back to the main hall. Marisa opens a door, strolls through, and she's exactly where she was when she opened the door. She goes from a hall to a room with a single locked exit without ever having passed through a door.
It's terrifying and thus, extremely great. It's been so long since she's found something this interesting and fun. It reminds her of Mugenkan, almost. Those were really the only two mansions Marisa knows, and Mugenkan isn't really haunted so much as it is in a terrifying place and filled with terrifying people.
Marisa's sure the mansion's filled with terrifying people too, though. She just hasn't met any of them yet, unfortunately. She hopes they're nasty in an interesting way, though, she doesn't want a rehash of Yuuka or something. Well, that wouldn't be boring, at least. It'd just be overdone.
She opens a door, steps forwards, and then realizes that the door lead to a stairway, as she promptly falls. Thankfully, there's a landing, a little break to prevent herself from dying like that. God, that'd be humiliating, if she died by falling down a staircase in a haunted mansion. If she's going to die here, she'd rather she was torn apart by a ghost or something. That'd be much less stupid and arbitrary.
Wincing, Marisa stands up and brushes the dust from her dress, looking around. Unlike the rest of the mansion, which is impossibly clean and immaculate, this staircase was dusty. It was lit, too; simple candles on the walls that lit up the staircase, showing a long, long set of stairs that reached too far deep to see the end. Holy fuck.
Marisa does what anyone reasonable would do, which is jump on her broom and shoot downwards at the perfect angle as fast as she can. Oh, hey, there's the bottom! She can't pull up fast enough, and she doesn't even try, so she crashes the door, hits the floor, and skids for several meters.
She's about to complain loudly about skinning her knee, but when she opens her eyes she realizes she's in fucking Heaven.
The room she's in is immense, with bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling, almost too high to see. Each one is filled with books - not hundreds, this has to be thousands. Thousands upon thousands. Marisa's smiling so wide that her entire face hurts, and she jumps onto her feet, bouncing in excitement. She had been hoping for something cool and interesting like this, but she hadn't dared raise her expectations this high! She couldn't even process the fact that a library this big, or that even this many books existed in the world! It seemed so impossibly titanic.
She stares in wonder at it all, running over all the possibilities, about everything she has to look through. God, there's no way Marisa could even fit the time to read all these books in her lifespan! She'd have to throw away her humanity to accomplish that, a premise that's never been as appealing as it is right now.
"Who are you, exactly?" A soft, deep voice breaks Marisa out of her amazement, and she pulls her eyes away from the massive, beautiful library. It takes her a few moments to find the source of the voice; a small, distant woman at a desk. Even when it's this far, Marisa gets that feeling she gets whenever someone is glaring at her. "What the hell are you doing in my library?"
Marisa chuckles, hopping up onto her feet and grabbing her broom. "Oh, I'm just an ordinary witch! I came here 'cause of the shitty weather, but it seems I've struck gold!" She whirls around, gesturing to all the bookshelves. "You're the librarian? The magician of this mansion? You have a beautiful library! I think I'll just browse, thanks -" She reaches out to a bookshelf, but the tips of her fingers are singed by a magic missile that soars across the room. Ouch.
"There are no ordinary witches. We're unordinary by definition," the girl's voice rings through the air, and Marisa turns around to face her. She's floating in the air, a large, heavy book tucked under her arm. She drifts closer, coming into focus. She has long, carefully cut purple hair, and is indeed glowering at her with intense, bright purple eyes. She's wearing a cute, striped purple dress, and one of those hats that seem to be popular lately. "And don't touch my books. I'll ask again. Who are you, and why do you think you can just walk into my library and take my books?"
"Tell ya what! If you tell me your name, I'll tell you mine! I mean, we're meeting for the first time, right? And I'm definitely going to come back here, so we should get acquainted!" She floats closer, and lower down, but she doesn't touch the ground. She's actually taller than Marisa thought; even if she was standing normally, she'd be taller. As it was, she was about a head higher than her. Marisa offers her hand for a handshake, anyways. She's rich, right? If she has a library like this? Isn't that how you greet rich people?
The mystery purple witch stares at her for a while, looking at her hand with blatant disdain. Marisa drops her arm when it becomes clear she'd rather keel over and die than shake her hand. "I'm Patchouli," she says, flatly. "Who are you and what are you doing here." Her voice is a hoarse monotone that makes everything she says sound like a condescending statement.
"Well, uh, it's nice to meet you, Patchouli!" Patchouli. Patche. "Patche. Can I call you Patche? I'm Marisa! Marisa Kirisame!" She puffs out her chest proudly.
"It's not, and no. Marisa, get out." Wow, someone's prickly.
Marisa shakes her head, and reaches out to take a book again. "Haha, no thanks! I've spent like an hour wandering around this deathtrap of a mansion, and I'm not goin' without a reward! By the way, are you the owner of this place -"
Patchouli slaps her. Ow? "I don't care how long it took you. Get out by yourself, or I'll drag you out."
Marisa rubs her stinging cheek, and pushes the book back into the shelf with an irritated snort. She'll come back to it later. Before Patchouli can say anything else, or slap her again, Marisa grabs her broom and smacks her with the bristly end. "I'll take the third option, thanks!"
Patchouli stumbles back, slips, and falls. It's all rather cathartic, but it doesn't make Marisa's cheek sting any less. She sits down on her broom, and then shoots up into the upper reaches of the library, taking a moment to appreciate all the books. "Come on, Patche!" She pulls down her eyelid and sticks her tongue out, "Catch me if you can, or I'll take everything you have!"
The witch in question rises up from the ground quickly, with her book floating up in front of her, and Marisa gets the prickly feeling that comes with being glared at again. Patchouli's book opens up in front of her, glowing with magic. She doesn't say anything, but, almost instantly, lasers fire out from around her in the shape of a cross. Marisa barely ducks out of the way, and the laser punches a singing hole into her hat (one of many, at this point).
Extending her arm, Marisa makes a finger gun and aims at Patchouli with a shaky hand. She fires as many star-shaped bullets as she can, just as waves of danmaku fly out from around Patchouli. Marisa quickly loses track of her own bullets, so she continues to shoot more, flying through the hail of bullets and dodging the lasers, which were still sweeping back and forth.
It was a really sweet bit of magic, Marisa thinks to herself, absent-mindedly shooting bullets and failing to notice as they stray way off target and instead smash into bookshelves. As it fires up again, she focuses on the glyphs that appear in the air around Patchouli, etching them into her memory.
A bullet slams into her broom and almost knocks her out of the sky. Ah, fuck, I have to focus. Marisa points her finger at Patchouli again, and fires a thin, powerful laser straight at her head. Patchouli doesn't bother to dodge, and the laser poofs harmlessly against a barrier that shimmers around her.
Marisa shoots again a few times, but the other lasers don't do much better, unfortunately. As Patchouli's cross-laser thing whirs up again, Marisa runs over the magic circles in her head again, and grins. "Hey, Patche, watch this!" She throws together the magic circles herself, but with her own little special spin on it, and then activates the spell card, which she had definitely not come up with on the spur of the moment.
Her front laser fires out and shatters Patchouli's barrier, while the other three… drag over the bookshelves and destroy several presumably priceless magical artifacts. "Oh, whoops, fuck. I didn't mean to do that!" Patchouli's glare is growing more and more intense with every moment. Well, this isn't the worst first impression I've ever made…
That's a lie and she knows it.
She pulls the Mini-Hakkero from her pocket and gives it a quick burst of magic, enough to propel her through the air at high speeds. She ducks under one of Patchouli's lasers, and slams into her, like a beautiful, blonde comet. Patchouli makes a disturbingly pained shrieking sound, and is knocked out of the sky, slamming into one of her bookshelves. She regains her balance and floats up again, and then, as Marisa's lasers move towards her again, opens up a barrier.
Marisa's laser strains against it for a few moments, and the barrier cracks, but the spellcard gives way first, shattering around her. "Well, uh, that's a new spell card, don't get a big head! Anyone could've broken that!"
"KOAKUMA, KILL HER!" Patchouli's voice is different, now, a loud, shrill, and terrifyingly angry shriek.
"Hey, hey!" Marisa raises her arms innocently, "No need to go to such drastic measures! And the hell's a Koa -" She feels something on her broom, sudden unbalancing her, and she turns around.
There's a red-haired girl with big, leathery black wings and claws. Oh, that's Koakuma. A little devil. I get it. Koakuma kicks her in the stomach - ow, heels! Heels! - and knocks her from her broom. Air knocked from her chest and rushing past her, Marisa can't breathe - she waves her arms in a panic, before managing to catch herself, barely moving to the side as Koakuma lunges down after her. Mini-Hakkero still in her hand, Marisa pumps it with magic to fuel a burst of momentum.
The force spins her around, and she slams her fist, backed up by the power of the Mini-Hakkero, into Koakuma's face. The familiar is knocked to the ground, slamming into it with enough force to leave a crater. The shockwave blows over a nearby desk, sending paper and books flying everywhere. "Uh, sorry about that! It's just that your master's a major bi -"
Marisa is cut off by a fireball, which knocks her hat from her head and sets it aflame. "Ah, no!" She catches it, still struggling to fly without her broom. She waves the hat around, trying to put out the fire, as she clumsily dodges a few more fireballs. Her broom flies back to her - loyal as ever - and Marisa jumps onto it, setting her smoking hat on her head.
Patchouli's readying up another spell card. Probably something with lots of fire. That doesn't seem like the best idea in a library filled with flammable books. Wait, what is she even saying? All her books are probably fireproof. Regardless, Marisa twirls the Mini-Hakkero around her finger, and then jabs it forwards, calling on every bit of magic in her body.
"MASTER SPARK!" God, I'm so cool. Her biggest laser yet blooms from the Mini-Hakkero, bright enough to blot out everything else in the library, a painfully blinding light. And then, it fires forwards, clearing the distance to Patchouli extremely rapidly. It's a laser, after all~!
Patchouli shouts something she can't hear, and a massive, burning sun-like object appears in front of her, blocking the Master Spark. Great. Struggling to stay on her broom, Marisa continues to fuel the Master Spark, attempting to overpower Patchouli's magic with her own.
It's not easy, though, which is bullshit. Marisa had to steal this unbelievably expensive, powerful, and dangerous magical furnace to get this much magical power at her disposal, and Patchouli's matching it with her own stock. Then again, Marisa's a young adult with no formal magical education, and Patchouli's probably like a million years old, so it's not bullshit, it's just unfair. At this point, a magician like her is more magic than flesh. She's probably got a magical furnace like this for a heart. That's so cool, and Marisa's jealous.
Anyways, at this rate, this isn't going to go well. Patchouli's fireball-sun-thing is overpowering the Master Spark, bit by bit, inching closer and closer to her. Given that Patchouli told her familiar to kill her, Marisa's guessing she's going to be incinerated extremely painfully if that gets to her. She'd rather that didn't happen, though, if she's going to die today, this would be the way to go. She's being extremely badass, and so is the mage she's fighting. It's great.
Still, she'd like to stick around for at least a few more years, so she dips into the nearest source of magical energy. Which is her own body. Marisa tries (and fails) to ignore the pain as she burns up all her stores of energy and fat into pure magic, but it pays off. The Master Spark shines brighter, and the Mini-Hakkero flares with magic that knocks Marisa off her broom.
Patchouli's big fireball explodes, and the explosion knocks over the surroundings bookshelves, and with them, Marisa, who ungracefully falls to the floor. Her broom clatters beside her, and she raises her head slowly. "Ow, ow, ow." Her entire body hurts. There's boiling blood bursting from and burning her skin. Jeez. She drops the Mini-Hakkero. It's too hot to touch; her hand's covered in burns, and she smells like a fucking barbecue.
That makes the hunger caused by her sudden absence of nutrition even worse, and she whines, rising to her feet shakily and turning around.
Floating in the air, at the same distance away, is Patchouli. Even from here, Marisa can see that she's in bad condition; a hole in her abdomen, a missing arm, covered in blood and smoke. "Oh, fuck, are you okay!?" That wasn't supposed to happen - well, she did mean for that, but the consequences are only now dawning on her. The spell card rules are supposed to prevent this kind of maiming and killing and now she was going to die and everyone in the mansion's going to want to kill her, on top of Reimu, and -
Oh yeah she's a youkai, she can regenerate, she's fine. Patchouli's wounds are already regenerating. Her arm's growing back, and the hole in her abdomen is disappearing. "Actually, you're fine! Forget I asked that, it's not important!" Marisa knows she sounds like a bitch but she doesn't really care. She's already ruined this first impression. She can't make it any worse.
"So, is this over? Is that all? Cause I gotta get going!" Talking hurts, and Marisa tries to act like she's not about to vomit up blood. She fails, and by fail she means vomits up blood and almost collapses. Whoops. With the little magic power she has left, she clumsily repairs her busted veins. She's not great at healing magic - pretty shitty, actually - but this is better than trying to walk around and fly like this. Probably. She'll get Reimu to do a better job after this is done.
A bright white laser runs over the ground next to her, and Patchouli lifts her grimoire above her head. It's shining with a blue light. "God, you're stubborn." Marisa jumps off the ground. She has to end this quick, or else she'll burn up all her energy and she'll just be a sitting duck. She grabs the Mini-Hakkero from the ground - it's cooled off, but it's still warmer than usual - but leaves her broom.
She doesn't need it, anyways. The Mini-Hakkero is already producing sufficient energy again, so Marisa calls upon it, fuelling another burst that propels her into the air, above Patchouli.
Patchouli look up at her, and Marisa burns up the rest of the Mini-Hakkero's available energy. She shoots through the sky, straight towards Patchouli, like a meteor, backed up by all the magical force her body can muster. Marisa screams something that she immediately forgets, passes out midair, and then slams into Patchouli, and, with her, collides with the ground.
The resulting explosion knocks away the surrounding downed bookshelves and scatters books and pages everywhere. As the smoke clears, Marisa regains her consciousness.
Her arm is lodged up past the wrist in Patchouli's stomach, which resembles a molten, bloody slurry. Patchouli shoves her hand into her face and pushes her away, gurgling and cursing under frantic breaths. Marisa stumbles away, vomits again, and then stands up straight, trying to casually wipe the blood from her mouth.
God, that sucked.
Marisa wipes off her bloody hand on Patchouli's ragged, burnt dress, and then limps away, grabbing her broom and trying to ignore all the burning debris around her. Koakuma's lying on the ground, in the crater Marisa had knocked her into, trying to rise up to her feet. Marisa walks past her, up to the bookshelf she had visited at the beginning, and grabs the book she had tried to take before.
"Yeah, I'll be borrowing this. You can have it back in like, eh... gimme thirty years, tops? I'll probably blow myself up before that." If you don't kill me first, hahaha.
Already regenerated into relatively working order, Patchouli manages to hoarsely screech, "IF YOU TAKE THAT BOOK OUT OF THIS MANSION I WILL GUT YOU AND EVERYONE YOU LOVE!" from her crater.
"See ya, Patche." Marisa walks out the broken down doors and up the stairs.