I own the protagonist. The Touhou Project series of games belongs to ZUN and Team Shanghai Alice.
I won't be uploading Divine and Horned Oni today, sorry! I need to write up some more stockpile chapters to post along the week. Also, this is not a one-shot (obviously), but chapters will be less frequent than DaHO.
A teenaged girl stood in front of a mirror, streaks of white, blue and black hair skipping along her large head. Her yellow eyes had a cute shine to them and bounced around, her expression a look of excitement and glee. A wide, joyful smile rested on her lips, and she spun like a little child while looking into the glass. Her old-fashioned clothes were worn, but well taken care of... She had a small, tightly closed sack on her belt, containing powder. She spun once more and decided she was ready. The girl turned around and took her own steps forward. She opened the broken and run-down door with a gentle push. The stench of rotting corpses lied on the other side.
"Oh, right! I forgot about that!" She excitedly picked up a shovel from behind her. It was made using but a bamboo stick and the head of a broken paddle strung up together, but it was more than enough. She tied her sleeves back and got to work. The grim scenery that followed was awfully upset by the cheery blue girl, who dragged and buried the men in her garden, careful not to dig out any of her bushes or flowers. The bed of daisies and lilies were picked up on one of her usual patrols through the forest, and had been grown with love, bad puns and dead bodies. Yuuka would be proud. She also had a growing plum tree, and a couple sweet wild berry bushes.
She broke through the dirt after a few minutes of struggling, and half-buried the bodies in there. The girl hoped Mother Nature would make them go away faster this time. They were good for plants, but not for her nostrils. She wiped the sweat off her brow and started doing maintenance. Pulling weeds, giving some of the water she had to the plants to make them happy and telling them funny jokes. In the solitude of the forest, there really wasn't anyone to talk to except the fairies, and they always ran off when they saw her work.
'I wonder why they're scared of the garden. It's just fertilizer, why panic?' thought the girl surrounded by bones and bodies. Her humanity was something the fairies doubted still existed, even if she was more technically human than they were. But of course, the "person who buries dead people in their flower garden to fertilize it" will always seem like a low point to reach as any kind of sentient being. She also had the nickname 'Blue Yuuka', coined by the fairies (though she didn't reach that point of flower mania). She thought the problem was that they didn't know where the bodies came from. And she didn't know who that Yuuka girl was, either.
She hadn't been anywhere near the Human Village or interacted with any normal people in her life. The closest she got to it was talking with some saner youkai for a moment just before they got immediately creeped out by her garden while she toured them through her home and promptly made their escape, hoping they wouldn't get buried along with the remains of those people and never would have to come back. She had various kinds of tea leaves prepared for her personal use or any casual passerby who would be interested in speaking with her, though almost nobody came, except for the monthly weirdo or lunatic villager that ran into the forest. Some of them thought she was some kind of Shinigami that'd come for their lives, and others, that they were at Hakugyokurou's garden. These usually ended up buried five-feet underground after trying to kill her, and the few people who lived to tell the tale called her a youkai, even though she was a perfectly normal human person, odd quirks aside.
The girl stopped to stretch and look at the evening sun. It would dusk soon. She decided to make something of it and forage through the forest. The thick and heavy miasma year-round was the only thing she didn't like about it, but she got used to breathing it in long ago. She looked through the roots of trees, searching for mushrooms. Some were tasty, some glowed bright, and others made her feel weird. It was a neat kind of weird, though. It only took one light sniff to know what a mushroom was like. If it made her see neon bright colours, it was a weirdshoom. If it did nothing at all, it was a goodshroom. If she felt sick after eating any of them, they were magishrooms. The feeling of magic overload was pretty much the same as that of overeating, only with shiny laser puke...
By the end of it all, she held another pile of fresh pickings in her arm, and bit into a ripe and red apple with care not to spill her newly-acquired loot. She followed some landmarks (trees she cut with rocks) and arrived at the place she'd been living in for the past 15 years. The blessing of fresh air that the little clearing her house was in held was a rare commodity she had made with her own hands after rooting out all the poison mushrooms that used to populate it. The mind-numbing fog still blurred her up despite her resistance to it, so she relaxed when her throat didn't feel sore from breathing in spores. The full moon shone down on her, lighting up her humble abode. She hopped into the kitchen, separated the mushrooms and made the weird ones into powder to dump on the next maniac that tried to murder her to death. It had knocked out most of them, so she kept on making it. They weren't good people anyways, she wanted some quiet and peace in her garden, and her flowers never could have too many nutrients. Maybe the fairies did have a point while making up her nickname.
She made roasted mushrooms for dinner using a bonfire she started next to her home. It was some of the better stuff she'd eaten that week, though it seems she cast a Master Spark using her mouth not long later. Those magishrooms were still hard to distinguish from the goodshrooms. She got up from her chair and looked at the still functioning clock on her wall.
She picked out white flowers from a small jar and put them into a teapot. She started boiling water in her favorite pot on the bonfire she'd started before. After a few minutes, she used a ladle to pour in the boiling water into the teapot, and let it rest. Yuuka was no longer proud. Yuuka now wanted retribution.
She went back into her home and pulled up an old antique wooden chair. She carefully left the pot on a clean, small dish on the table after getting a small glass where she dumped some of the tea in. She held it carefully with a tight grip which would keep it in her hands. The two cups of glass she had were some of the little luxuries that were left in her home, and no way was she going to drop it on the floor and let it shatter.
She took small sips of it with elegance. The only time of the day she would look like an actual, normal girl was at her night-time tea-time sessions, but even then she would still have dirt and bloodstains on her before going to bed. Still, the grace she held while drinking was comparable to that of the Lady of the Scarlet household, in some bizarre way. But in the rare occasion that the prompt lunatic of the month came in screaming at this time, punishment was assured to be dealt to them swiftly and painfully. She had a special mushroom mix for those people.
She closed her eyes and took a moment to appreciate the smell of chamomile tea. It was warm and had a small bitter tinge of taste to it. The delicate engravings on the glass always made the experience exquisite, and the steam that rose from it heated up the cold room and gave her a sense of calm, chemicals aside. She enjoyed every single drop of the tea like a man in the Sahara Desert, to the very last one. She got up, stretched, dressed down to her underwear and went to her metal frame bed. It was the only thing she found while looking near the border which would have let her have a decent night of sleep, questionable magazines aside. Those still gave her shivers.
The patched up mattress supported the little weight she had. She put a thin, ragged blanket over herself and went to sleep, a fulfilling day just behind her.
The amanojaku covered herself with her mantle. The bullets passed through as if she had vanished into thin air. She yawned boredly while shooting at the oni. She had been fighting people for weeks on end now, and even if she didn't show it, she was extremely worn out. Sukuna had abandoned her after learning of her lies, the Tsukumogami which shared her goal ended up joining the other side, and her revolution had completely failed... 'Ah, I want to take a rest...' The only good thing that remained is that she could start a coup d'etat by herself using the cheat items. She had an unamused expression as the oni fell into the ground. Her face betrayed any feelings she might have wanted to express. She ran away from the scene of the crime. She headed for the Forest of Magic, where she could make a hideout to recover and let people drop their guards...
A ruined little house with a rich looking garden. It looked quite old, and seemed to have been abandoned long ago. She didn't like the foul smell that came from the plants, but it was something that she could work out herself. She hated the dark atmosphere, but it was the perfect thing to drive away any pursuers which were still looking for the bounty. Seija let herself in through the massive hole in the door. It was locked with a bolt, but there was no point.
She looked through the dimly lit home, the loud ticking of a clock unsettling her. It had a western style, with the same vibe as a haunted house. She expected to find a phantom jumping at her. Her movements were calm and seemed pre-meditated. Her senses told her to flip everything and clean up the house. It was THAT dirty and unorganized. The stairs were in front of her, but looking through the house first was a better idea. She headed into the passage at the right. It had four doors, each leading to a separate room. She headed into the first to the left. It was an old kitchen, with no equipment to be found. There were mushrooms in a basket, which told her someone was already living in here. Of course, she could just kick them out or throw them into the basement bound with a rope if they decided to confront her. She knew it wasn't the witch's home, though; she'd already been there before. She guessed it was a really messy magician who lived in here. She exited the room.
Tiredness overtook her, and she went upstairs, hoping to find somewhere to rest on. 'My back's killing me...'. She was not in the right physical condition to fight, but was confident enough in the power that the items held. The upper floor was half as small as the main one. The only door led to a big bedroom, not too furnished. It was well lived in., and had some lovely decor hanging from the walls. The expected magician was fast asleep. Bloodied boots stood beside her, while she seemed to sleep like a log in bed. She approached her quietly. Unfortunately, she was a light sleeper. The girl awakened and slowly got up.
"G'mowning..." she mumbled drowsily. "Do you need sumthing, miss Kijin...?" she said, wiping her eyes.