"You son of a...! You killed my family! You tormented Aya mercilessly!"
- Chidori Kuruma, Ayashi no Ceres
"I convinced myself it was justified to get the car on the street."
- Commander Delia Thorne, Viper
Yumiko was looking down on a peaceful world from the heavens. The trail of her priestess gown dangled from the ends of her legs like the emerald reeds of a weeping tree. Genbu had brought her to his home in the clouds for just a brief moment so he could offer her his praise in person. He was standing just behind her with a supportive hand resting on the back of her shoulder, a father enjoying the scenery with his adopted daughter.
The beast-god stood at least a whole foot taller than the top of Yumiko's head. In his human projection, he looked like a middle-aged warrior with a sharp mustached face who could still express a degree of kindness. He remained quiet so his priestess could appreciate the view.
Yumiko saw everything from the sky. Not just Hokkan, but Sairou, Konan, and Kutou as well. All sprawled out thousands of miles below her feet like a giant geographic compass. Her face was glowing with joy.
Her husband Uruki was down there somewhere, sitting on his throne in the north and ruling the country in harmony as its rightful king. Yumiko had given him a strong infant son the first year she was with him, followed by a beautiful daughter only a year later. It was hard to believe she already had a third one on the way.
Taiitsukun had (begrudgingly) provided clues on where to find the first few Celestial Guardians in spite of already writing Yumiko off as a total loss. The rest had revealed themselves in time, until Yumiko had united all seven.
Her adventures with her Guardians had taken her to all four corners of the world. Smoothing over hostilities with Sairou and helping their kingdom cure a desert plague. Helping the Konan court resolve a spy crisis. Combining forces with the south and the west to halt the rise of tyranny in Kutou. And at last returning to Hokkan, where her second life had all began, to defeat the final enemy threatening the world and make everything right for the dynasty's future generations. Filka was saved and nursed back to health. She offered her gratitude by joining the new royal court. Taiitsukun personally appeared to congratulate Yumiko on everything she had accomplished and apologized profusely for ever thinking less of the Priestess.
The title "Priestess of Genbu" became as revered on the battlefield as it was to the common people. Yumiko would make a prayer for Hokkan's protection and victory at one of the temples, and then she would join her followers in the fields with a saddle under her lap, an arrow quiver on her back, and turtle shell lamellar tucked into her ceremonial robes. She would gallop across the front lines with long streams of jade and obsidian flowing from her dress, making sure the soldiers were safe and offering her blessings to inspire them. The seven Celestial Warriors would closely guard her every step of the way, but Uruki was the only one who could always keep up with her pace. And any time she had to give a speech in front of the camp, she always spoke from her heart and not from a piece of paper.
Yumiko had come here as a terrified child surrounded by a hostile world. Now she was an accomplished war general and she still wasn't even in her 20s.
Genbu brushed his hand on Yumiko's shoulder as he began to speak. His words carried like the slowly drifting clouds moving past them.
"This is the universe you've created, Priestess. You've done more than I could ever ask of you. You've cleansed your country of the non-believers and rooted out the seeds of corruption throughout every land."
Yumiko humbly lowered her head as she smiled, almost becoming bashful again.
"This realm will know eons of peace thanks to your struggles," Genbu continued. "You've fulfilled everything I had planned for you. Now you can forge any future you desire."
The god's final words made Yumiko's expression sharply sink. Her robe rustled as she slowly glanced over her shoulder and past his hand. Venom dimly gleamed in her eyes.
"You…" she growled softly, her lips bitterly twisting.
She spun around in the air and looked up to face him completely. Her mouth was ready to scream. Her tear ducts were ready to erupt.
Her thoughts rushed back to the world she had known in some dark and ancient recess of her mind. She had thought it was all behind her. She had thought she had moved on and the few memories she had left couldn't hurt her anymore. But looking at Genbu in the eye reminded her of everything she had lost. She was struck with the realization she was standing face to face with the thing that had caused all of her suffering.
"You used me as a tool to fight your war against these people?" she said in anger. "Everything I've done has just been your scheme? I'm not even supposed to be part of this place!"
She shrieked and pounded her fists to his chest like she was back in front of tower of iron tortoise shells with lightning crashing over her head. Genbu flinched only slightly from his beaten chest, more so with a look of bewilderment instead of guilt. He was almost unmoved by her cries.
"I merely brought you to the ocean. You churned the waves of destiny yourself. You started with tiny ripples and created your own fearsome storm. It could only be done by someone with the grace and insight from your world. You were the best option out of many."
"What about the children I had with Uruki?" Yumiko demanded to know. "Were they just part of your game plan too?"
"Only your first," Genbu said stoically.
"You bastard!" she screamed in despair.
"Does that make your son any less a creation of your romance? Would you love your Celestial Guardian any differently without my blessing?"
"N-no, but…"
"I lead you toward a path that benefits us both. It was you who said to use the strategy that spared the most lives."
"Because you manipulated me!" Yumiko hissed.
"Wasn't that how you truly felt? Were you not acting on your own ideals? I may have given you direction, but you still made your own choices on how to play the part."
"You stole my life!" she yelled in rage.
"I gave you the life you always dreamed of," he calmly explained.
"At the cost of everyone I love!"
"I guided you. I protected you."
"You dropped me into the middle of those monsters in the slums!"
"I helped you grow strong so you could survive in this harsh world. Just as the caterpillar must struggle out of its cocoon before it can become a beautiful butterfly, I had to let you learn to fend for yourself. It had to be this way so you would never have to ask me for three wishes and rely on my power. I spared you from being consumed by me."
"You trapped me here! None of this would have happened if you hadn't brought me here! You took away everyone I cared about from my world, just to get what you wanted out of me! You might as well have gobbled me up!"
Yumiko's fists dropped like limp stalks of grass. Her head hung in defeat. Tears rippled down her face as her robes rippled down her arms. Her entire body quivered from her sobbing.
Genbu looked down at her solemnly.
"Priestess, you don't understand what you've prevented in these past few years. As the first god, I had free reign when and where to build the bridge between our two worlds. Let me share my knowledge with you. Watch how this play could have ended with a different cast."
His palm rested on the top of her shivering black hair, petting a gentle circle around her scalp in a clockwise motion. Her mind was shown glimpses of the universe as it could have been.
She envisioned a black void filled with far off star constellations. Seven belonged to her Celestial Warriors, but the rest she didn't recognize. She saw only ghostly shadows of girls like her in robes. She didn't see faces and she never learned their names, but all of their emotions came channeling through her in a condensed matter of seconds. Another Priestess of Genbu, half-devoured by her god and killed by a close relative after all her wishes were granted. The Priestess of Byakko, who fell in love with her Celestial Warrior and survived all her trials, only to be denied her happy ending and have her heart ripped out for decades. The Priestess of Seiryuu, who devoted herself to a madman and found out everything she did was a mistake that caused the slaughter of thousands. The Priestess of Suzaku was the only one who came out relatively unscathed.
"It's not fair…" Yumiko whimpered in a shivering breath. Her voice grew softer, but her tears never relented. "You put all of this on me to save them. Why do you torture us like this in the first place? None of this is fair!"
Genbu pulled his hand away. Yumiko looked up at him with her tear-stained face, desperately searching for a meaning to it all.
"I chose you because you brought all of their best traits with you. The selflessness of my other Priestess. The patience of the Priestess of Byakko. The passion of the Priestess of Suzaku. The resilience of the Priestess of Seiryuu. This world and possibly even yours would have been destroyed in chaos if at least one Priestess wasn't cast to play the part of the heroine."
Yumiko grew quite. Her eyes dried as she shook her head. She simply looked down toward the universe underneath her, the universe she had saved. Her thoughts drifted in a thousand different directions and it took all of her effort not to feel dizzy.
"If you could return to your home, would you really want to abandon the family you've started here?" Genbu asked.
"Of course not," Yumiko broke her silence to answer. "I'd just wind up coming back and staying here. I love them more than anything in any universe. I'm too tied up in this world's history now."
She looked back up at the god.
"I just wish I could have said goodbye before all of this started."
Her head sunk again. Her eyes stared down at the world, sad and lonely.
Genbu, a timeless being predating the universe's existence, couldn't comprehend the way this small mortal woman was thinking. He couldn't understand how she could still feel so miserable with all the benefits and rewards laid out in front of her. He found it a foolish but curious behavior. A decidedly human behavior.
But he could still feel sympathy toward humanity.
"Then perhaps I can make this fair," the beast-god said.
Genbu raised the fingers of his right hand. In the air just beside Yumiko, her old school bag appeared. The last time she had seen it was when it went flying into a pool of mud during her first night in Hokkan. She thought she had lost it forever, yet here it was completely clean and dry.
"I never planned having you create a Shinzaho since you were always meant to stay here," the god said distantly. "I'll have to compromise with what you brought me."
The bag opened on its own. A tiny object Yumiko remembered from a time long ago floated out toward her hand. It was a single 100 yen coin.
She stared at the face of the coin as it rested in her palm. The modern factory-minted copper flickered bright green and reflected in her eyes.
"How many people here knew this is what you always wanted to happen?" Yumiko asked, her eyes staying on her palm. "Who else has been using me?"
"You're the only one who's heard the truth," the beast-god said. "Everyone in the world below you was acting on their own free will and following their own beliefs. I hid myself behind the curtain even from Taiitsukun. I'm sorry."
"And now that I'm here to stay, the book isn't going to pull anyone else in?" Yumiko asked for reassurance.
"The story is over," Genbu responded. "You've saved more souls than even I could, Priestess. Now I set you free to write your own epilogue."
He hovered half a foot closer. He cupped his hands around the sides of his priestess's open palm.
"You've lost your rite to summon me. The continuity of this world depends on you until your descendants are ready to pick up the pen. I can never send you back to your original home, but I can help you reach out to it just once."
Yumiko closed her eyes and wrapped her fingers over the coin. Genbu carefully locked his hands around her small fist and channeled all his will. Rays of bright green shot out from between his knuckles, making Yumiko's hand feel bundled in warmth.
"Meditate on who you want to contact the most, someone most likely to share your blessing with the others you think about," the god instructed. "Imagine what you want them to see. Think hard on what you need to tell them. The message you send must be brief, something that will transfer easily between our two universes. Stress the threads of space and time too far and you'll lose your only chance to communicate."
It was painful for Yumiko to try and fit all her feelings into a single sentence. There was so much she wanted to explain, so many conversations she wanted to have, so much time she wanted to make up for, but almost all of it would have to go unsaid. She needed words that would explain what had happened to her and how she wanted to be remembered. She needed words that would tell the people she cared about not to worry about her. She needed words with enough weight that it would give them closure. She had to summarize the life she was never able to live in a single inch of metal. She wasn't even sure if she could make it work.
Her lips voiced three simple syllables.
A mother and father were cleaning up old family artifacts in their attic. The kids were all grown up and out of the house. The older ones were married with families of their own. The youngest one had just shipped off to college. It was time to clear out some empty space.
The father came upon an old dusty sheet draped over a rectangular piece of furniture. He pulled it away to uncover the old nursery crib of one of his daughters. The mere sight of it brought back a wave of fond memories, as well as many painful ones.
It had been seven years since Yumiko went missing. The last time anyone had ever heard of her was when she went to the library after school one Tuesday afternoon, and then she just vanished into thin air. All the investigators ever turned up was an abandoned math worksheet in one of the study rooms. Her parents had always joked about how she daydreamed so much that sooner or later she was going to get sucked into one of her old fantasy books. Now the joke lacked any humor it once conveyed.
The father started taking the things out of the crib to lighten its load. It had been stored away with a jumbled time capsule of Yumiko's life. A fingerpaint drawing from when she was a toddler. A full-length novel. A few photos of her small circle of friends. Outgrown school shoes. An old baby rattle. A stuffed turtle.
As the father lifted up the empty crib, a small circular object slipped out from between the mattresses, wobbled across the floor, and came to rest on its side on the wooden planks. It was a coin that had no earthly reason to be in the place where he found it.
The father crouched to pick it up and inspected it in his palm. It was made of an unusual melding of copper and bronze. The edges were uneven and clearly minted by hand. The craftsmanship had to have dated back to antiquity, but no historian in the world would ever be able to trace its exact make or origin.
The face of the coin was stamped with the likeness of a young woman who must have been held to the highest regard in her time. She was facing toward the right in typical profile position. She was depicted with long straight hair brushed down the back of her neck and a small bundle of lotus blossoms tucked above her ear. No matter how closely he looked, the father couldn't see any indication of a motto or denomination anywhere along its front side. He was holding something priceless.
The coin couldn't have been more than an inch wide, yet its female icon conveyed so much honor, determination, and independence in just a few raised lines. She invoked the likes of Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, or Himiko. But above all, the upwards corner of the woman's lips and the tiny dimple on her cheek hinted that she was happy.
The father held the coin closer to his eyes and squinted, studying the features of the metal face. The angle of her chin. The depth of her eye. The dainty way her nose bridged. The shape of her ear lobe, barely sticking out from under her brushed hair.
He stumbled backwards with his hand over his mouth, almost letting the coin fall between the attic floorboards. The mother rushed to his side to see what had frightened him. The father picked up the coin and showed her the profile engraving. Almost instantly, she saw it too. It had to be Yumiko.
With their throats growing dry and their eyes becoming damp, they turned the coin over. All that was on the plain back of the coin were three calligraphy symbols pressed in like a blacksmith's stamp. The first and last characters were Chinese. The middle character was exactly the same in ancient Mandarin and modern Japanese. It struck both parents like a tiny whisper echoing through time.
Wo Ai Ni.
Author's note: Teenage Mutant Kyubey Turtles.
Author's note 2: Hi-Tech Busousha Viper: Baxley Kaiden.
