== Be the girl with the doll limbs.
You are Marisa Kirisame, all nine years of her. Currently, you are standing on the bed and stretching as much as you possibly can in order to grab one of your caretaker's dolls off of the top shelf. Thankfully, the small wooden thing notices your fingers peeking over the edge of said shelf and hovers down to sit on your shoulder, pushing your large white hat aside to make room for itself. Your caretaker's dolls rather like you. You think it's probably because your arms and left leg are just like theirs.
Huh? No, you would not particularly like to talk about how you lost your original limbs. It doesn't matter, anyway, because Alice's house is safe from cats and you can move by yourself again and as previously mentioned you would not like to talk about it so let's move on, shall we?
You have a lot of great friends here now, anyway. You know just about every doll in this house by name, even if Alice hasn't given them a name yet, and they are more than pleased to take some time to play with you should they be momentarily unoccupied. Since you have been confined to the Makaian princess's home for the past year and a half, you are quite well versed in making up your own fun. For example, you have managed to organize an entire doll soccer league. And a basketball league. And croquet. And a sport that doesn't actually exist but looks fun to play. Every corner of your room is painted with random little scenes, your desk is papered with drawings and stories, your bed is full of toys and books and games that have been "well-loved" to put it nicely.
The long and short of it is that you are starting to get very bored.
Alice means well, you understand this, and she loves you very much, which is nice because you really haven't had an adult even like you very much in a long long time. But you aren't exactly built (you giggle slightly at the pun as you bend the well-made wooden joints of your fingers) to be cooped up in the house for so long. You love having adventures, even if you're a bit cowardly (perhaps owing to your small size). You lived on the street - with the most imaginative little vagrants the Village had ever seen - for as long as you can remember, and honestly you don't know if you can really settle into the lifestyle of the well-to-do Gensokyan: that is, keep to your house, pay off the cats, and carry enough magical weaponry to destroy a small planet. Well. You could certainly settle into that last requirement quite easily. But Alice isn't teaching you the stuff that could blow a cat off the face of the Earth. She's teaching you mostly small illusions, automaton control, flares, things like that. Not that you don't think all that stuff is awesome, but you're more concerned with explosions than stage-grade magic.
Maybe you could steal some more fire magic from Hakurei the next time Alice takes you and the rest of the dolls to the shrine for... uh, you really don't know why she goes. She and the miko end up screaming insults at each other an hour into the visit and then you go home. Maybe it's for the food? Hakurei really does make some excellent lunch. She's told you thrice that it's easy enough to make it when you can minutely control the fire. She likes you more than she likes Alice, which isn't saying much, and she still has a tendency to shove you out of the way and light your stuff on fire, but it's at least something. Besides, you do have to concede that you burn quite easily. "Kindling" isn't a nickname you would have even thought of before you met Hakurei, but now it's all she calls you.
Alice never calls you that, though. It's always some variant of your real name, with a -chan at the end and dripping in sap, most of the time, but you can't say you don't like it. It's a welcome change from the cruder nicknames and straight-up screaming you used to have to put up with, and she's a lovely sort of unnaturally warm and she always smells clean and nice and her wings are ridiculously soft and downy for looking as much like tattooed bat-wings as they do. She tells you she'll have three pairs one day, and she says that when it happens she'll bring you and the rest of the dolls away with her and make a land all her own that's sunny and marvelous and green and you can play outside all you want, won't it be nice? It might take another couple hundred years, but you're not going anywhere and not getting much bigger. You're more wood and Alice's magic than human, after all, it's not an easy feat to keep a mauled child's blood pumping after her torso's been ripped open and her arms are lying ten feet away and her leg's barely attached and oh many gods you're not going to think about it no no no you are not. You are going to think about living with Alice in the nicest place you can possibly imagine.
Actually, you're going to think about living with Alice in Makai, because she says as soon as your last little bits of human fade away into magician, she's going to find a way to get you back to Makai and you're going to stay there until she's a full goddess. It's not the absolute greatest place in the world, but she says it's leaps and bounds above anarchy and poverty and wanton manslaughter. Besides that, her mother runs the place, and you can then meet her family and live in a gigantic palace and probably never explore the fullest reaches of it and make friends and, in general, it will be much better than here. You told Hakurei once and she just scowled and spat something about relief efforts only caring about cute kids, and singed your hair with a short breath of black fire and assaulted your ears with about five hundred different words you're not supposed to say. Although you'd never heard "pisscouch" used as an insult before and doubt you will again.
In any case, you have boredom to alleviate, and also you have to get around to properly fireproofing yourself before you and Alice go visiting again.