Chapter 6 – Subterranean Rose: Neumann's Youkai Girl

Memories surged though her mind as thought a dam holding out the waters of the past had finally given out and collapsed, and in the midst of that deluge Marisa Kirisame recalled a day long forgotten, a time when she imaged things were far simpler, when the worries of the present would just be an indistinct speck on the horizon. She was sitting on a veranda, fanning herself with a paper fan so furiously that it looked as though it might fall apart at any second.

"Could you be a little more gentle with other people's possessions, Marisa?" a voice called from behind her, and in a moment a girl was standing at her side, sitting down with a pair of glazed earthenware cups.

"Hah, sorry, 's just so freaking hot. It's almost the end of September; shouldn't it be gett'n cooler or somth'n?" Marisa accepted the cup as it was offered and drank it down in one gulp before heaving an exaggerated sigh. "Ah, chilled barely tea, just what the doctor ordered."

"You could at least try to enjoy the flavor," the girl said, making a little huffing sound as she crossed her legs and propped her chin up on the heel of her hand after taking a sip from her own cup. "If you want more, you're going to have to get it yourself."

Marisa laughed, setting both the cup and the fan down and began swinging her bare feet.

"You know, I think I have a couple of yukata stowed away somewhere. You would probably feel a lot better if you changed out of those heavy clothes you always wear."

Marisa snorted and shook her head. "Yukata? Fancy stuff like that ain't really my style. Sure, my mom used to like to dress me up all the time, but now…" her voice suddenly caught in her throat, but she kept on as if nothing had happened. "You, on the other hand, I bet you'd look great in one, with your hair done up all pretty-like. My hair just gets in the way, gotta tie it back so it doesn't get caught in the open flame of a burner… would be helluva lot easier if I just cut it short and be done wit it."

"Don't say that, Marisa," said the girl, "You really do have nice hair, it would be a shame to do something so dramatic. Here, hang on a second." Then, scooting her way behind Marisa she took a comb and quietly began working it through Marisa's long, wavy golden locks before taking a lock of it and wove it into a braid. "See? That wasn't really all that hard, was it?"

Marisa felt the blood rush to her face as the other girl ran her hands though her hair. She turned to face Reimu, whose face in the dream seemed so distant to her now.

Drifting through that turbulent sea of memories, Marisa could only watch – watch that reflection of herself swallow the words she had always wanted to say and laugh like a fool before changing the subject.

"Reimu…" she sobbed. "Reimu… I'm sorry."

Memories even earlier than that played through her mind, of herself running along the edge of a winding river. She had known she shouldn't have been there, remembering her father's warning her to stay away from the river but she had snuck out of the house anyway. She had gotten lost, but that didn't even matter to her then. It was an adventure, just like in the stories. She was free to do what she wanted, when she wanted, finally free of those suffocating walls of that boring shop and that boring village. So caught up in her moment of freedom he didn't even realize something had grabbed hold of her ankle until it had pulled her down. She had cried out mostly in surprise when she gashed her knees on the rocks of the riverbed, and she screamed in genuine terror as the thing that held her slowly dragged her into the water.

Why am I remembering this now…?

The water came up around her like a thing trying to consume her itself. Her eyes burned where it touched them, her lungs burned where it filled them as she struggled, her arms burned when she tried helplessly to flail them, but there was nothing she could do but sink deeper and deeper. She didn't quite know when it happened, but at some point she realized that she was going to die there with no one to find her. She wanted to cry, but she couldn't. She wanted to call for help, but she couldn't. She wanted nothing more than to be home, tucked into her warm bed, but she knew know that her bed from now on would be a cold one.

No…

There was a sudden pulse of light, and then the weight pulling down on her was gone. Marisa felt herself floating, aimless and alone. A face, blurry and indistinct, appeared before her eyes and peered curiously at her before taking hold of her hands and pulled her back up.

Up, up, up towards the light.

Marisa awoke, coughing and choking on the phantom water, her arms still sore from her struggling in the dream. The vision before had been so nice, so pleasant. Why did it have to be ruined by that nightmare?

She lifted her arms and found them wrapped in thick gauze bandages, and when she pulled the covers off she saw that her clothing had been removed and her body, too, was covered in bandages. It was then that she realized that something was wrong with her vision and, looking around (an action made it feel as though her neck was on fire) she came face to face with a reflection of herself in a mirror hung against the wall. The left side of her face was been concealed with white gauze wrappings, and the ends of her once golden-blonde hair were singed. She could suddenly recall the smell of it burning and felt her stomach turn.

Where… how…?

She remembered bringing her arms up to erect a barrier against the explosion, but after that everything became blurry. Clearly she had made it in time, or else…

"Oh! The patient is finally awake, I see. You gave us quite the scare, you know."

A soft, whimsical voice came from the side of a bed where an empty chair was sitting - except it wasn't empty anymore – or had it ever really been empty? The girl sitting in the chair was dressed in green and yellow and wore a black wide-brimmed hat over her green-tinted grey hair, and her green eyes – the two that were open at least – seemed to look at Marisa, into her, and through her all at the same time.

"Koishi," Marisa groaned, sinking back into her bed. "I thought I told ya to stay outta this."

"You did." Koishi bobbed her head once and smiled almost too cheerily. "And lucky for you I didn't listen."

Marisa heaved a long sigh and brought a hand up to her own face, only to flinch away after touching it lightly. She abandoned the idea of testing the extent of her injuries for the time being and let her arm drop to instead study the room she had awoken it, with its stone walls, torch sconces, and hanging tapestries that lent a little bit of warmth and light into an otherwise dark and cold place. "Where're we, anyway?"

"A hidden place," Koishi said with an enigmatic smile. "A safe place – one of many I have underground. It wasn't close, either. I had to carry you all the way by myself. I could have waited until the sun to set and brought the others to help, but I fear you would have long succumbed to your injuries by then. I presume from the state of things it's safe to say that negotiations broke down?"

Marisa tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a hacking cough that shook her entire body. There wasn't really any point to the question. The youngest and least socially adjusted of the Komeiji siblings has probably observed the entire exchange and subsequent skirmish unseen from a distance from the very beginning.

No, wait; wouldn't Satori be the one with the most issues, all things considered? At least Koishi got out and occasionally communicated with beings other than her pets. Why was she even thinking about this, anyway?

"I'll take that as a yes." Koishi tilted her head as she looked at Marisa, and her eyes seemed to focus on her for a moment. "You ought to know, Reimu really thought she could save you, somehow. That you were somehow being coerced into doing this."

"I guess I'm beyond savin' now." Marisa felt a strained smile come onto her face. "If she hates me now, well that's fine wit me."

Koishi smiled – a bit too widely, perhaps – and jumped onto the bed beside Marisa.

"Oh, don't let it get to you," laying her arm across Marisa's shoulders, Koishi leaned in close and spoke gently into the black-and-white magician ear, her soft breath ticking the magician's skin. "No matter how broken you become, I'll never reject you. Reimu wouldn't understand, she's far too concerned with maintaining the status quo. You, on the other hand, you have always embraced change, sought after it, and change it exactly what Lady Mikaboshi is offering us."

For a moment Marisa imagined seeing yellow roses blooming while vines coiled around their limbs, thorns biting into skin. She blinked and the image was gone. "Are those your words or hers?"

"Mine." Koishi answered, cocking her head to the side with a strange smile while she ran her fingers gently over Marisa's face, tracing them over the bandages and across the her cheeks, and then with an index finger she lifted Marisa's chin so that she was looking directly into her bottomless, dark green eyes. Her lips curved upward into an impish smile and she repeated herself. "Mine."

"Koishi… what are you…?" Marisa shivered, feeling the urge to pull away from that gaze while all the same being unable to resist looking deeper while Koishi's face drew closer; she could almost feel the youkai girl's breath on her skin shortly before the door to the room burst open, Marisa looked up, startled, and Koishi was suddenly sitting in the chair beside the bed, her hands folded on her lap.

Marisa blinked. Had that just…?

"Marisa!" A blur of red cloth, golden hair and a prismatic array of crystals flashed across the room and struck Marisa in the solar plexus like a pile driver, knocking the wind out of her while at the same time bringing the postponed inventory of her various aches and pains back to the forefront of her mind.

"Well, h-hello there Flan," Marisa said through clenched teeth while the vampire girl wrapped arms around her that could have easily snapped ribs; thankfully, Flandre Scarlet seemed to be restraining herself for once. "How's it goin'?"

"Marisa!" The girl repeated hopping up and down excitedly, giving Marisa mild whiplash as she did so. "You really came for me! You really came just like you said you would!" She then seemed to notice the bandages for the first time. "Are you hurt? Did someone hurt you, Marisa? Don't they know that only Flan can play with you? Is it okay for me to break them?"

"It's not quite time for us to go out to play," Koishi interjected, watching the two of them intertwined with a vague expression that was more than a little unsetting. For a moment it looked as though the purple sphere that floated over the satori's breast - connected to her body by a number of tubes - was trembling, but Koishi's face suddenly broke into a smile and it stopped. "Why, we still haven't met our newest friend yet."

As soon as she said this, a patch of darkness, which Marisa had at first assumed to be a shadow in the corner of the room began to recede like a tide of black ink, gathering into a single mass which floated in a languid manner above the ground. The mass unfurled outward like a pair of wings to reveal the girl within. Marisa had seen her before and knew her as Rumia. Under normal circumstances the small-fry of a youkai wouldn't have even registered as a blip on Marisa's radar, but incapacitated as she was, a chill went down her spine when Rumia's glowing red eyes turned to her and it was all she could do to suppress her fight-or-flight instinct.

Even as she sat there, those twin little pinpoints of red light that swam in the pool of darkness which constantly surrounded her seemed to be sizing her up, doing the simple calculations of an opportunistic predator; would she see Marisa as something to be feared, as she had learn the last time they crossed paths, or would she be culled as the "weakest of the herd." The very thought of being looked upon as potential prey made her grind her teeth and ball her hands into fists so tightly her nails bit into her palms while a little voice from who-knows how many years past whispered into her ear in singsong.

Do I spy with my little eye… something I can eat?

Bracing herself, she swung her feet off the bed and landed awkwardly onto the stone floor. She didn't know when Koishi moved to support the weight on her right side, and wasn't sure if it mattered. Well, she hadn't fallen on her face in a room with three youkai, so she imagined it must have. She looked herself over in the mirror again, the walking train-wreck she appeared to be, and idly wondered where she had heard that phrase; she had never seen a train before in her life except in pictures, then slowly, methodically, she began to unwrap the bandages around her left eye.

She took in the sight of the patchwork of red splotches that covered her face and allowed her brain to process it in a detached, mechanical fashion. She had been burnt before, plenty of times, learning how to manipulate the unpredictable nature of fire as an apprentice under her master, Mima, and she recalled the lessons she had learned in dealing with pain. She controlled her breathing, isolating the areas of her body that hurt from her mind, identifying them and filing them away as simple data. It was merely stupid receptors in her nervous system, demanding her attention with useless details, annoying her incessantly by reminding her daily of the limits of the human body - it infuriated her, and she held onto that feeling as she hastily tore the rest of the wrappings away and stood there, dispassionately observing her scarred body in the mirror while one corner of her mind wondered how Reimu would react if she ever saw her like this and still another laughed defiantly that 'chicks dig scars, yo.'

Marisa shook her head, and realized absently that she was running her hands through her own hair, feeling the burnt ends on her fingertips. Somehow she found her bag resting by her feet; the very bag she had used all these years to stow her loot, and the same bag she used to smuggle Flandre out of the house of Scarlet. She reached into it, feeling the familiar edges of her mini-Hakkero, and took a second to thank Koishi silently before producing from the bag a plain knife in an undecorated sheath. With one hand, she slowly drew the blade from its cover, letting the sheath fall to the floor while with the other she gathered her hair together and tilted her head to the side, looking at herself in the mirror once more as she rested the blade against her ruined golden locks.

"Sorry, Reimu," She said under her breath with a sad smile. "Guess this means the days of ya braidin' my hair are over." And with that said, she closed her eyes as tightly as she could and fought back the tears as she felt the blade carve its way through her hair.

Maribel let out an exhausted sigh and stretched her arms out where she lay on the floor of Keine's classroom. It was a small, cluttered room with about ten desks, not all of which had been occupied during the lesson, and bookshelves lined the wall filled with texts of all kinds, many of them well-worn with both use and age. The children had reacted to her with curiously at first, as she had expected they would, but after her initial novelty wore off so did their timidity. Her hair was still sore from where they had pulled on it, and her shoulders ached from giving piggy-back rides around the room.

Once the class was over and the parents had come to collect their children, Keine had clapped her hands together and announced that she would begin preparing dinner. Maribel was allowed to go get some rest, but Mokou did not get off so easily, and was dragged away by Keine wearing a resigned look. It almost made Maribel laugh to see Mokou sulking like that. At the end of the day she had to look at Keine and anyone else in her position with a newfound respect for managing her class with such skill and grace while she floundered along, feeling more and more like a babysitter than someone who could teach another person. What had the past few years been for, anyway, she wondered, feeling the cool, late afternoon air blow in through the open door. What had she been preparing herself for? She shook her head, as though that would fling off the doubts that were clinging to her mind and she pushed herself up to sit and looked around the room at the various curiosities accumulated on the bookshelves, and hanging or leaning against the wall.

Hanging on one wall there was an ukiyo-e painting that depicted a scene of a castle under siege; men stood upon the ramparts with bow and arrow and spear while at the other side of the scene an army of demons of every imaginable shape and size – tall and lanky, squat with a single bulbous eye, heavily muscled sporting a single horn upon their forehead – had arranged themselves in ranks against the castle defenders. Maribel could be sure if it was because she was tired or not, but as she studied the painted she occasionally thought she saw one of the archers loose an arrow from out the corner or her eye, or she swore she caught a glimpse of a cyclopean eye blinking. Rubbing her eyes, she turned her attention to the object hanging on the wall immediately next to the painting; a flat disk of dark stone carved with many concentric circles around its diameter, polished to a mirror shine. As Maribel looked at it, the faint reflection of her form upon its surface came into focus, becoming clear and clearer until the image on the surface of the disk was no less clear from any other mirror she had seen before; except that there was something… odd about her reflection, and the longer she tried to figure out what exactly it was, the back of her head began to throb as though someone was pounding out a irregular drumbeat inside her brain, and she quickly looked away so that her eyes fell upon the most peculiar thing she had seen in the room yet.

It was an umbrella; that much was plain to see, though it was like no other umbrella Maribel had ever seen before. It was dark purple in color, a shade of purple one would never expect to find gracing the side of any umbrella, and at the end of it there was a bent stem-like protrusion where a metal tip would typically go, bringing to mind the notion of a giant eggplant when one looked at the entire thing. It was actually kind of ridiculous when Maribel thought about it; after all of the strange, wonderful, and terrifying things she had seen ever since she had found herself in this land, this eggplant-shaped umbrella seemed to her the strangest so far. She picked the umbrella up by the handle with a lopsided smile and looked for a button or a catch to open it and, finding none, she soon realized that this was one of those traditional Japanese, hand-made sorts of umbrellas she had seen in museums and antique shops before. Finding the runner, she pushed it upwards, opening the umbrella to its full width and lifted it over her head spinning it around with a playful little laugh.

What she did not expect was for a face to suddenly drop down from the inside of the umbrella, its bright eyes – one ruby red and other sky blue – looking directly into hers, and proceed to say "Heya! Didn't your mother ever tell you to never to open an umbrella indoors?"

At least, that was what she had intended to say if Maribel hadn't screamed at the top of her lungs, flung the umbrella across the room, causing the girl to fall the rest of the way out of the object halfway through her sentence. So in the end it turned out sounding more like was more like,

"Didn't your mo-wahGYAH!? Woyaaaaaahhh! Oww!"

Meanwhile, Maribel was in the process of trying to think up the most levelheaded and intelligible response to this unexpected turn of events – but, for the time being, the best she could come up with was, "Kyahh!"

A door on one of the interior walls slid open with a bang and Keine rushed into the room, holding a straight longsword in one hand and a card similar to the one Maribel had witnessed Mokou using before in the other. It might have been more intimidating had she not been wearing a frilly apron over her clothes with her long hair done up and covered a handkerchief that had paw patterns printed on it. "Maribel, is everything alright?" She asked, clearly ready for a fight; her eyes sweeping across the room in search of a threat, but when her gaze fell on the blue and white clad heap on the floor her expression became more befuddled, her arms fell to her sides and she almost seemed to visibly diminish in size. "I thought I heard a… I heard a… Kogasa? What in the world happened in here?"

"Y-yokai!" Maribel finally managed to spit out, pointing at the girl sprawled out on the floor, now picking herself up and straightening her turquoise-blue hair, which was in a bob cut at the length of her shoulders. "S-she's going to eat me!"

Keine only sighed and shook her head as both card and sword shimmered and vanished from existence, and rubbed the sides of her head in a way that only an overworked teacher can manage, and spoke to them in the tone of voice she generally reserved for particularly noisy students. "Calm down, Maribel, Kogasa is not going to eat you… Kogasa, in the future could you please try to refrain from dropping down on like a tsurube-otoshi onto people you don't know?"

"Oww…" The blue-haired youkai moaned woefully, not hearing Keine as she rubbed her sore bottom and brushed out her skirt. Then her eyes locked onto Maribel's and became as wide as plates. "Were you… surprised?"

Maribel, feeling her breathing come under control again, nodded her head uncertainly. Without warning, the youkai girl flew forwards and caught Maribel in a hug that elicited another started yelp from Maribel and a look of elation from the youkai.

"My name's Tatara Kogasa," she said, looking up at Maribel with tears of joy in her heterochromatic eyes. "I'll follow you to the ends of the world!"

"Er… Kogasa here helps out with lessons occasionally." Keine said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully as she watched the scene unfold before her. "The children find her appearance endearing… for some reason. She's not a man-eater, rather it seems as though she subsists of human emotion; specifically, surprise. But as far as I can tell she wouldn't so much as hurt a fly. Now, if the two of you will play nicely, I have to go back to dinner before Mokou burns it beyond recognition."

And with that, Keine turned on her heel and returned to the kitchen, from where various aromas that somehow reminded Maribel of home began to float into the room. A moment after Keine was gone, Mokou, who had apparently been standing with her back to the wall on the other side of the door peeked her head around the corner, sporting a grin that could only be described using the phrase 'shit-eating.'

"Did you seriously just go 'kyah'?" Mokou said, watching amused as Maribel frantically tried to pry Kogasa off of her.

"You're not helping!" Maribel answered, exasperated. "You're enjoying this way too much, Mokou! Don't you have a fire to light or something?"

"I'm back," The front door opened and Reisen stepped inside, setting her rucksack on the floor and pulling her shoes off as she entered. She froze stock still after she lifted her gaze and finally saw the scene that had unfolded in the room for the first time then quirked her mouth up ever so slightly.

"What did I miss?"

"So… we finally get aht of that drum, na could ya tell me why we're actually doin' wot we were told and not just skiving off?"

Garnet turned a weary glance toward Cirno, who was casually floating at her side with her arms crossed behind her head, crystalline wing fluttering lackadaisically as though she were relaxing in a comfortable bed and not at all motivated to go to work.

"Because like it or not, we're Miss Patchouli's familiars, now." The great fairy said. "If we are to make any headway in finding out more about what is happening, and how we can stop it, that is a role we have to accept. We are under her protection for the time being, so it's for the best."

"Ya might be, I could of taken 'er if ya ain't stepped in and made with th' sugar and spice."

"The… uh, what?"

"Nice. You made nice with the stupid lil' bint!" Cirno spat, flash freezing a fly that had started buzzing her head, just because she could. "And now here we are off makin' bloody deliveries! At least we finally lost dem fook'n outfits. I thought I was garn ter melt in there."

"Cirno!" Garnet hissed in a reproachful tone, and placed a finger to her lips with a terrified look.

"Come on, what're ya so worked up abaht?" Cirno said, not noticing the metallic orb that floated up beside her. "It's not loike she can 'ear us or nuffin."

"As a matter of fact," said the orb in a flat, half-annoyed, half-disinterested tone while blue light throbbed around its surface. "This 'stupid little bint' can hear you both perfectly well."

"BUGGER ME WOT IS THAT?"

"Merely an old tool that has once again proven its utility," the voice of Patchouli Knowledge intoned through the orb. "Did you really think that I would have entrusted my brand new, untrained familiars on a task of this significance without first taking certain measures? Do not bother trying to run thinking you can get out of its operational range; it has been field tested and has proven to function even deep underground. I also took clippings from both of your hair while you were sleeping, so I wouldn't recommend doing anything untoward, else I can make things very unpleasant for you." There was a brief pause. "Oh, and I have just been informed that Sakuya will be preparing a rare delicacy for this evening: frozen custard. The ice fairy will not be having any, unfortunately."

Cirno listened to this with the growing look of having realized she had just swallowed a bug. "'re ya takin' the bloody piss?" then said before turning to Garnet. "Did she just send me to my room without desert?"

"I took into consideration that Miss Motoori might have reservations with regards to carrying out a transaction of this nature with a pair of fairies; therefore I will assist with negotiations should the need arise. Suffice to say anything you can see or hear I will, likewise, perceive." A tint of smugness seeped into her voice. "So, you two… do try to conduct yourselves in a professional manner. Comprenez-vous?"

There was a click and the light subsided as the orb floated away while Garnet felt her face turn red with embarrassment and Cirno simply scratched her head.

"Wot was she talkin' abaht at the end, there?"

"N, nothing!" Garnet blurted out, waving her hands in front of her. "Let's just finish this up quickly and get back before she thinks of something to do with our hair, okay?"

"Yeeaah, abaht that, luv," Cirno said, cracking her knuckles as the air snaped crackled around her with frost. "Dan't fin' I'm garn ter let that part off bright and breezy."

The two fairies finally stopped before the entrance of the human village, wood and thatch building looming around them like monuments. Garnet hugged the book Patchouli had given them close, as though it might serve as a shield, while Cirno just crossed her arms defiantly, unimpressed.

"Who the 'ell lives aht it the middle o' everythin' and not in trees?" she said aloud, with all the humility of an oncoming avalanche, and kept walking forward with long strides that covered in three steps the same distance a human could travel in one. It would have been adorable or at the very least comedic if she wasn't carrying herself as though daring someone to take a shot at her. "Pfft… sodding humans."

Then, halfway through the village she stopped and turned to Garnet. "So, ah, ya wouldn't 'appen ter kna where it is we're garn, would ya?"

A moment later they could hear the voice of Patchouli Knowledge muttering something along the lines of, "Fée de merde, je le savais…"