Where's Marisa?
This is the twelfth night I've waited till late. She didn't come, again.
It's a situation that demands patience: my true love is with her new other lover. But no one in all Gensokyo is more patient than I am.
I put up with her for years: Over she'd come, whenever she felt like it. Banging on my door. Demanding food and company. Usually not forgetting to pilfer my most valuable books within reach as she left. When I think of the tonnage of my sweets, alone, she's eaten, I wonder where she put it all. Her metabolism must be like a wildfire. Maybe that's the secret to powering Master Spark.
I put up with the shrine maidens and their death sentence hanging over those like me - for years. I put up with it because in the end I knew taking care of this world I chose to come to required us all - those of even modest good will. I want to hate her, but I can't.
No, not Marisa, Reimu. Don't be silly!
I put up with not having a father, and nearly always not having my mother, either. Yes, I was a cliche - the lonely child of a good family who had no friends but her dolls. Or sometimes one of the servants. But my dolls were as close to real sisters as someone of my sort has, after all. Long ago, before my memories start, I know I was a doll. In the other world that is not my world, Makai, and is not Gensokyo, there had already been written a fanciful tale that suited our world and Gensokyo more than it did that world, which has no magic. They borrow ours at night, in their dreams, then laugh about it when they wake. But this tale reflected surprisingly well what real magical worlds are like. They have their own logic. Shinki found it so charming, she fell in love with the young heroine, Alice.
Other beings have daughters, she thought. So why not such as I?
And because she is a god, when she made me in the image of Alice Liddel and her dream-world counterpart, I took on some of the nature of humanity, and some of fantasy. Of course, neither of us knew that. I had no mind at all, and Shinki had no experience to judge by. I like to think my mother poured some of herself into me. I know how she might have felt: my daughters, Shanghai, Hourai and Medicine, who I adopted though she hated me at first, are my daughters indeed.
And I know there is something different about me, for I am the only person in this world that can make as Shinki did. Shanghai and Hourai are proof of that. I need to stop making other dolls in their image. It can't feel good for them to see, and in the heat of battle I couldn't bear it if they were injured because I mistook A Shanghai or AN Hourai for the real thing. I think I can still make even my real, alive daughters explode. I worry I can. But even if not, I am glad I decided on that path. The new dolls, that don't look like anyone already here, are using more traditional methods of disguise. And I don't let the ones I put my time and attention into act as weapons.
For a while, I made dolls in my own image, too. And my size. But that was condemned universally as dirty pool, and not honoring the hold-a-little-back spirit of our danmaku battles. Even she holds back, even with her crowning Master Spark attack. If you don't know which Alice is a bomb and which is real, you might go all out against the real me. Such is the nature of our existence, and our struggles. As I said, I am glad. Would she have left me once and for all if I started making her? I hope that's not in her nature, but witches are strange.
I am an alive, conscious being, who was once inanimate material. I do not age more than I wish to. In Makai, I was mostly human, because my namesake Alice was, and Shinki is a faithful re-creator. Since I moved to the Forest of Magic, my human qualities fell away, including my human aging, sicknesses and mortality. I became able to live mostly off of the ambient magic, not really requiring food and drink.
Because of those things, I am a youkai in Gensokyo terms, and new youkai, as I was once, are supposed to be destroyed. But I am not alone in having outlived my sentence. Once a youkai has survived long enough, you're supposed to give up. It's not a formal rule, it's an unwritten one. And after all, we saved the moon - the entire moon - the three of us! Me and her, and of course her new lover, too. Gensokyo owes me a lot. Every girl who loves another girl under that moon owes me.
And in my battle with Reimu now over her, there is a hold-something-back rule, too: we both want her to be happy. It's corny, and it's a terrible bother, but there it is. It hurts that in my time spent patiently preparing and preserving food, crafting my dolls, perfecting new areas of magic, most of it non-martial, and drinking my millionth cup of tea, I have no choice but to follow my thoughts over to wherever they are. It's not the shrine, which Reimu is neglecting for the first time I can recall since she became a miko. Where did she take Reimu? Which is worse, one of our places we visited as lovers, or some new place she thinks Reimu is worthy of, but not me?
No one pays the seven-colored magician any mind, I've noticed. Patchouli has a clue, and Remilia much more than that. Eirin and Kaguya understand what I'm capable of. If I ever turned more than a dust speck of my energy to hostile purposes. Take the one thing I'm known for: doll-making. My dolls can make more dolls, and those, dolls in turn, and all of them can be armed. I could turn the forests, rocks, streams, and most of the beings in Gensokyo into raw material for an ever-increasing plague of dolls, blowing up any opposition the way a flooding river washes away everything that blocks its path.
And I am the only known master of all the forms of magic. So with a little ingenuity, and enough time storing up magic in the Forest, I could be equally lethal in all the others. It amazes me how light-hearted everyone is about that fact. I am a little grateful. If they really contemplated it, I might be the target of a preemptive strike. At best, they would shrink away in fear. Shinki did not, unfortunately, bequeath her godly charm to me. I think another reason I am not more feared, in addition to my unfailingly polite and modest nature, is that those with discerning eyes sense my despair. If I am bottomlessly sad nearly all the time, it makes it hard to motivate myself to rise to the challenges others can, and in that sense, I am divided, and my own worst enemy. She makes me feel a little better. I owe her much for that.
I have been tempted to leave here; take Shanghai, Hourai and Medicine with me back to Makai. Many times. But I know shebelongs in this world. Gensokyo is still, for her, a gigantic playground. And she deserves to have happiness in what passes for a life for creatures like her here in Gensokyo, brief as it is. Because she's a witch, she does preserve her life a bit. She'll live two or three times as long as the people in the magic-less world do. I have offered, of course, to mend that. To preserve her for real. For me. But:
"Being a youkai? No, that doesn't suit me. I want to have every breath, every day, be an adventure and a thrill. Youkai usually have to worry about some fixation, like sunlight or bones in a graveyard, or some such. And they are always coldly plotting for bizarre reasons against other youkai and humans. I know you're different, Alice, and so are some others. But my mother wasn't the goddess of her own world. And I'm not as innocent and angelic as Flandre."
When I pointed out that, of course, I had the time to make potions to keep her from aging, or to help her do so, she pointed out that that was how Eirin and Kaguya got started on the path they followed. And she often talked with Eirin who said she didn't recommend real immortality as a choice.
And as much as I hate to face it, Reimu, too, deserves some happiness in her mayfly life.