There were many words that could describe Marisa Kirisame, and very few of them were complimentary. On this occasion, though, the most objectively truthful thing to call her was 'drunk'.
Of course, like all objectively truthful statements, some qualifiers were required. Unlike the magician herself, drunkenness wasn't quite black and white. There were all sorts of shades of inebriation to get through before you hit full boozehound, and Marisa was going through them at quite a clip. With a cup of sake in her hand and a grin on her face, she'd already reached the point where it was more trouble to stop giggling than to start, and where even the tiniest thought can spark deep, if nonsensical, episodes of self-reflection.
"Hey, Sanae," the magician said, slouching into a more comfortable position on the veranda of the Hakurei shrine. "Stick out your tongue, will ya?"
Sanae looked across at Marisa, one of her few entirely human friends, and assumed a truly beatific smile. "Are you an idiot?"
Marisa frowned. She'd weighed the chances of resistance at about fifty-fifty. On one hand, sticking your tongue out just because somebody asked you to was probably a bad idea. On the other hand, Sanae was famously lacking in common sense. (Marisa hadn't reckoned on the fact that Sanae still retained certain other senses, notably one of self-preservation).
Elsewhere, the party raged on. Youkai get-togethers had turned into a regular occurrence at the shrine as of late, although Reimu had been quite strict on the matter of tributes. The rule, enforced by spell card duels where necessary, was that anybody wishing to join the fun had to bring a dish for the party and a dish for miko – with the caveat that the dish for the miko had better be good. The general consensus was that this was an overwhelmingly positive development, since it meant that Reimu had begrudgingly allowed parties to become a once-a-fortnight deal instead of once a season, which meant more opportunities for feuds, quarrels, socialising, and the all-important wacky hi-jinks that seemed to make Gensokyo function nowadays.
Reimu herself was more ambivalent about matters. Although it was true that she ate better under the new regime, she was ill-disposed for the kind of antics that sometimes took place. Moreover, parties were effort to set up and advertise, and while she could often farm that effort out to Marisa, Aya or Suika, occasionally she had to venture forth with invitations herself. There was also the fact that some of the 'gifts' brought by the partygoers were a little suspect; Yukari, in particular, was prone to showing up out of nowhere with interesting morsels from the outside world. Reimu had eventually gotten over the popping candy, but she still held a grudge about the strange, deliriously sour sweets that had hurt her tongue.
After a second of inebriated pause, Marisa renewed her attack. "It ain't gonna be anything bad. I promise! I just wanna see it."
"You know that the preachy underworld judge is at this party, don't you? Wouldn't it be smart to quit lying?" Sanae asked, continuing to smile as if she was talking to a child. "Don't you think, Reimu?"
Reimu, mere feet away on a cushion of her own, made no answer. She had already had perhaps a few cups more than she ought. Normally, she was lazy and impartial; the introduction of alcohol made her harder than ever to rouse, and even less likely to care. It took her a few seconds to come down from whatever strange, peaceful place her mind had flown to and look Sanae in the eye.
"Why not?" she asked. "Just do it, and then she'll quit whining."
Marisa beamed, having ignored Reimu's passing insult entirely in favour of capitalising on the support. "See? Hostess' rules. Get your tongue out."
Sanae's smile faltered; her knuckles whitened around her cup. "Don't say it like that, Marisa. And before I show anybody my tongue, I want to know why you're so interested."
This, apparently, was the moment the magician had been waiting for, because she answered with undisguised glee. "Okay, so, I was thinkin'. You're shacked up with those two goddesses, right? The snake lady and the frog girl. Snakes and frogs have both got weird tongues, don't they? So, obviously, since you're their third, you'll have a weird tongue too. I wanna see it."
Sanae's cup sailed gracefully through the air and would have bonked Marisa perfectly in the centre of the forehead, had years of danmaku practice not prompted her to dodge. It hit the floor with a hollow, wooden clunk.
"I am not shacked up with Lady Kanako and Lady Suwako," Sanae hissed, rising to her feet. The sounds of the party quieted, and gave way to a wave of interested whispers. Bets were being taken; sides were being picked.
Reimu's eye flickered open. "Sit down, Sanae."
The priestess of the wind turned. "She's besmirching the honour of the Moriya Shrine. If I let her get away with it, everybody else will think–"
The miko's response came swiftly. In the blink of an eye she was on her feet, gohei in hand. Sanae hadn't gotten the next word out before it hit her square in the forehead, with enough force to make her knees fold under her and send her tumbling to the ground. "If you want to fight, do it after the party," Reimu told her, in a voice that was much calmer and more even than it had any right to be. "If I let one fight break out, there'll never be an end to them. Pick your battles."
Sanae scowled, and bit her tongue. Privately, she thought that it was quite suspicious how the 'impartial' maiden of the Hakurei Shrine had taken sides with her best friend, but experience had taught her that Reimu was not somebody to be trifled with on a whim. On the other side of the table, she saw Marisa hold a hand to her face in apology.
"Sorry about that. I just wanted to see if your tongue had any special powers. If I meant to insult the goddesses, I'd do it to their faces, y'know?" she said. If it was a lie, it was convincing. The youkai patrons, satisfied (and a little disappointed) that the incident had been resolved before it went further, gradually decided to go back to their own squabbles.
"...Pour me another cup, then," Sanae said, sighing. "Just for the record, there's nothing special about my tongue. Apart from being able to roll it."
"Aw. That's no fun. Hey, you think Chen's got a cat's tongue?"
Sanae shrugged. "I wouldn't bother her about it. Yukari's shikigami may be a fox, but she's also the biggest mother hen I've ever seen."
"Ah, I'm sure it'd be fine. What about Mystia? She's probably got a sparrow's tongue, right?"
"She'll probably think you're going to make her tongue-cut if you go asking about it. Maybe try seeing Yuyuko? They used to say that "death and life are in the power of the tongue", back in the outside world."
"I don't wanna get myself killed quite yet, though." Marisa replied, and pulled the brim of her hat down a little. "Who else can we grab?"
The night wore on, and the sake kept flowing. By the end of the evening, neither girl remembered why they'd come so close to fighting, or even that they'd come so close at all. As the youkai of Gensokyo had observed, there was nothing like drinking and feasting for patching over old grievances.
Or, as Marisa found when she awoke to the unhappy victims of her tongue-based shenanigans, for creating new ones.
A/N: This one's fairly basic in regards to where I put the prompt; however, I kind of meandered away in the middle to discuss party economics and flesh out the world a little in my own head, before devolving into tongue-based punnery. One of the biggest challenges with writing touhou stories, so far as I can see, is how far to mimic the nonsense dialogue the characters tend to have in canon, as well as how to have characters address each other. (I've still yet to decide how to handle Marisa's 'da ze' verbal tic; it might be okay to just tag it on the end of the English dialogue, since I don't particularly think I'd pull off the drawl that some parts of the fan community give her instead.) Overall, I'm fairly pleased with this one, although I think I could have resolved it better.
Before I forget, however, I'd like to assure you that I don't own any of these characters or settings.
