"Say, have you ever seen how shooting stars are made? Those swordsmen seemed to be obsessed with them, but do they even know what they are?" Ichi placed his massive head on his knuckles, rolling over in the air and looking at his new traveling companion with puppy eyes.
"Well… I'm not really sure," Sachiko pondered, squinting her eyes and looking up. She turned to the porthole and began looking around, trying to peer far enough to see what the stars were like since she's never seen one from up close. Maybe if she could look into one, she could guess how they ended up being "shot" down to Earth.
"What are you doing?" Ichi winked an eye in suspicion. "If you can't see something you like, just do this…" he advised, bundling up the sleeve of his robe and licking it only to rub his arm against the wall of his rocket ship and erase the paint Ichi made it of. Sachiko gasped in terror, figuring that this would send them careening out into the cold vacuum of space, but this new hole in the hull didn't appear to impact their breathing at all.
"B-But… Only you can do it, right? You're in control of these cartoons, so you're the one who makes the magic happen. I'm just… Me," Sachiko looked away, realizing how powerless she felt. Even if this entire voyage was so heavenly and unbelievable, in the end, being powerless on a miraculous trip across the universe wasn't that much different from being a helpless object whose life depended on the whims of a ruling military class.
"What? No way, silly! That would make for a boring cartoon! Everyone's a part of it, it's just that stiffly people like those swordsmen lack the imagination to even try," Ichi rolled over and crossed his legs, making a pouty face whenever he recalled those samurai on Earth. "Anyway, I've decided that we should arrive at the forge where the new shooting stars are made. If you make a hole in the hull, you should see it happening right now."
A bit confused, but also intrigued to try to forge her own cartoon miracle, Sachiko blew hot air at her sleeves and rolled them in a heart shape, cleaning away the paint on the side of Ichi's spaceship. She gasped when a solar flare hit her straight in the face. Blinded for a second, the girl turned away and covered her face. The heat felt unbearable! He did it! He did it! Ichi's obliviousness finally got both of them killed!
Still, her wish to see new shooting stars being made overpowered the self-preservation instinct that asked Sachiko to keep bundled up. Even if her face and eyes melted off, Sachiko wanted to see. She wanted to see the shooting stars that samurai used to make those dreadful swords of theirs. Deep down, she knew they must have been beautiful, and it was the wicked will of the samurai that made them become a tool of oppression.
The moment that the charred-face girl turned to the heart-shaped hole she made in the hull, her jaw dropped and her eyes extended into expanding multiplying lenses shooting straight out of her eye sockets. The humongous fireball in front of her had a shaking black pan with a cosmic-sized handle and all rolling it around like a meatball. It was impossible to escape the smell of bacon and eggs that spread across the entire galaxy they were now in. Then, only to make Sachiko's dropped jaw completely snap off, grow a pair of legs, and bolt somewhere beyond the page's borders, the star rumbled and opened its eyes. The pair of animated eyes looked at the two space voyagers.
"Say, you two… That's a nice smell! What's cooking?" the star wondered.
"You are, silly!" Ichi laughed out, pointing one of his long fingers at the gigantic animated fireball.
With an overblown expression, the star rolled to the side of its pan and gazed at its bottom half that was getting a nice bronze color, and screamed out like a hungry goat. Almost as if the pan itself became alarmed by this, the pan flung the burning star soaring across the sky, shooting off into the horizon until it became just a blinking pixel of starlight with a heated red trail of gasses that sprinkled like cosmic glitter. It was only at this point that Sachiko imagined her own lower jaw quaking by the wall of the ship with a pounding cartoon heart, picked it up, and reattached it.
"Hah! That was hilarious, don't you think?" Ichi bawled it out, smacking his knee while rolling on his back in the air, laughing it up and kicking his feet.
"I don't know. I could have lost my jaw forever…" Sachiko muttered, still nervously feeling up if it was in place every couple of seconds. "Plus, it doesn't make much sense. I don't think that there are giant frying pans underneath each star and that they're shooting because those pans fling them like pancakes…"
"Oomph!" Ichi turned into a vase shape and stiffened into a porcelain texture before shattering into tiny pieces as if a bowling ball had rolled through him. "Tough crowd…" he muttered.
"What are you doing? Get yourself back together! I can't control this thing!" Sachiko gasped, frantically searching the different wooden boxes and lockers nearby for something to help her stick Ichi back together. All that she could find was a sweeping brush and a little box to collect all the Ichi shards into. Carefully, Sachiko swept it all into a box and then wrapped it up with a ribbon, shaking it in front of her to the front and to the side. The girl then pulled the ribbon off and checked inside, gulping and turning away.
"Is there a doctor on the ship?" she wept out.
"I'm a doctor!" a man stood up in the audience, reducing all of reality into merely a major motion picture being displayed in a theatre full of shadowy human heads with hats and intricate haircuts.
"Can you please help my friend? He's turned into a vase and shattered of a broken heart…" Sachiko extended the tied box toward the audience, merging with the third dimension and handing it away to the audience member who peeked through the cover and wiped the sweat off his shadowy forehead.
"This looks like a standard case of Vasification Despairitis. I'll have your friend patched up and ready to go in no time…" the doctor shut the box back and tied the ribbon over it, shaking it carelessly in front of him, kicking it up with his legs and catching it out of thin air, then slamming it against the back of his cinema chair a few times, pulling out a saber and slashing at it from a few sides before punting the miserable-looking box into Sachiko's hands.
With diamond-shaped tears glistening in her eyes, Sachiko unraveled the busted box and pulled her friend out of it. Her right eye couldn't help but wink, as she noticed that Ichi was almost fully restored except for the fact that the shattered pieces were assembled a bit out of order, and he looked more like an abstract art masterpiece than his usual celestial self. A cartoonish dog's tongue stuck out from the side of the boy's mouth as he laid limp in Sachiko's arms.
"Is it okay that I'm feeling a bit… Stringy…?" Ichi said in a rumbling and polyphone voice that seemed to echo in low frequency from several key pieces all across his jigsaw body. Sachiko's arms turned into a cartoonish blur and disappeared inside a puffy toon cloud full of symbols and hieroglyphics. After she pulled her arms away from the dust cloud, Ichi swooped out with a surprised look and took a gander at his reassembled body.
"Wow, good as new!" a glimmering smile stretched across his face. It soon vanished when he looked up, only to see his companion smiling through tears of joy. At long last, Ichi made his friend smile.
"I'm so glad you're okay!" Sachiko cried out, wiping her tears while chuckling in a cocktail of mixed emotions. "I don't know what we would've done if you ended up shattered into a million pieces or all abstract and jagged! Thank you, too!" Sachiko turned to the doctor in the audience, but the cinema hall was long gone. Baffled, with widespread eyes and o-shaped lips, Ichi hovered in by Sachiko's side, staring at nothing just like she was.
"What are you looking at?" Ichi turned to his companion.
"You dummy!" Sachiko laughed, nudging her friend to the side.
From that point on, Ichi and Sachiko flew on to see hundreds of different things. At that moment, it felt like Sachiko too was experiencing time how Ichi was experiencing it. It was as if she experienced hundreds of thousands of years' worth of miracles in a blink of an eye. Sachiko saw Ichi stuff a black hole full with a custard pie to where the black hole burped and slurped itself up like a whirl of noodles flushed down the drain. They caught shooting stars by their tails in waffle irons and played with them using flattened with cosmic rolling pins planets like paddles.
"Ichiseiras, you've caused enough trouble. Time to come home!" a firm, masculine voice came from a bipedal raven-like creature with razor-sharp talons wrapped in ribbons that fluttered despite the absence of oxygen in the atmosphere outside of Ichi's rocket ship. The avian-humanoid had knee-long baggy black trousers with a sand-colored embroidered leather loincloth and a sleeveless white kimono robe. A string of fist-sized red beads hung over the avian's chest and he had a horned, red skull-like mask disguising the upper half of its head with the mask extending over the upper half of its beak. Its wings were something in between wings and arms and ended with avian talons for fingers and had matching fluttering ribbons wrapped around them, just like the shins and feet of the Sky Clan ninja were.
"F-Father!?" Ichi's mouth stretched horizontally across his face as cartoon sweat drops started shooting in all directions from his head. "B-But… If you're here…!"
"Unruly child," a soft, feminine wailing sent chills down Sachiko's sides. She turned to look behind her, but a chilling gale, accompanied by a disembodied wailing of lost souls, made the girl stiffen. It was only when she gathered the courage to turn back at the levitating raven in front of the rocket ship she realized that another shape accompanied him. A woman in a long and ghost-like white dress with cherry-red and pink accessories and a burgundy colored belt tied around her waist, long white sleeves that ended in black rings, and haunting fingers that surpassed Ichi's in length and appeared to be coated with the night itself as not even when Sachiko gazed into the singularity of a black hole did she anything as devoid of reflected light as this.
The woman stared into a blank point in space as if she could gaze at some unimaginable cosmic horrors occupying an entirely different plane of existence and could not avert her gaze from them. Her skin was glowing with a phosphorous green, with the upper half of her face being sunken in dripping black ink that rolled down her face like tears. The celestial woman wore a wrapped white and red scarf over her head, but it did nothing to restrain the wild, flowing like a mane, glowing teal hair that seemed fully able to envelop the universe itself in their embrace. Her eyes were all black, except for a glowing, phosphorus-colored iris with a darkened sclera and a luminous black and golden pupil in the center.
"M-Mother… We're dead now…" Ichi coughed out and collapsed on the ground behind Sachiko with whited-out eyes and drool to accentuate his, allegedly, very real demise of a sudden heart attack.
"Do not fake your demise, child. If you were capable of death, someone would have long delivered it to you for all the trouble you cause with your uncontrollable imagination!" the woman pointed her finger, and in her wrath seemed to drown the entire universe around her in sorrow. Turning everything into a washed-out background of glowing teal with inky shades depicted elongated shapes of screaming banshees and souls of the damned being torn apart in the deepest and coldest corners of the infernal abyss as only the woman's own celestial image loomed over all of those nightmarish sights, accentuated with a golden outline around her seething, all-encompassing body.
"We cannot begin to apologize enough to you, Earth Clan child. We are fully aware of the pact made by our people back in the day and we wholeheartedly intend to honor it. It is just that Ichiseiras can be an impossible child to deal with sometimes and his unique ability to warp everything around him into cartoons makes him impossible to control, restrain, mutate, restructure, or disassemble. Not a single Sky Clan entity can do anything about these abilities of his and it is only because they are mostly harmless that we stopped trying," the humanoid crow pressed his hand talons to his chest and bowed at Sachiko in apology. He extended his arm and spread black feathers from his arms through the ribbons wrapped around them, turning the entire universe around like a circular calendar, and, in a blink, the four of them were in a deep forest in an unknown corner of the cosmos.
Sachiko screamed out when she realized she was no longer standing on top of a doodled rocket ship but atop a bottomless bog and succumbed to the pull of her weight. It was only when Ichi's mother waved her hand and created an ethereal bubble of translucent chakra and let it hover in the air that Sachiko could breathe easier and lose the fear of drowning in some ancient cosmic bog inhabited by wailing black shadowy shapes reaching out from it. Sachiko may have only been a second away from joining them in their curse and becoming one of those haunting shadow shapes wailing from their prison in the bubbly bog.
"We cannot begin to apologize for the grave transgression that our son has committed by violating the pact between our clans, Earth Clan child," the terrifying woman of floaty, glowing teal hair turned to Sachiko while Ichi laid like a lifeless wooden puppet with his arms crossed by a tree. Curiously enough, Ichi's head seemed to be missing entirely from his frame. And yet the celestial boy remained seated and tapped his feet with his arms crossed in front of his chest. "We will bring you back to your home and we can only hope that you will forgive Ichiseiras for his transgression. Please understand that he is just a very naughty boy who has matured very little in the three-hundred years that he has been alive. He pulls something profoundly foolish like this from time to time, but we could have never imagined that he would do something quite this calamitous to our relationship. We beg for your forgiveness!"
The two Sky Clan ninja bowed their heads down and kneeled before the levitating golden orb.
"I… Well… Ichiseiras… Is that your real name, Ichi?" Sachiko turned to the headless toddler seated by an ancient oak tree.
"I do not know anyone by that name. No Ichiseiras or Ichi here, sorry…" Ichi jumped up and began shaking his wide and disproportionate hands in front of him while remaining headless and speaking from the ether itself, it seemed. From the air, a plastic brown hound mask fell onto Itchi's head and spun around. Carefully, Itchi corrected how it hung over his shoulders before falling on all fours. "I am just an ordinary Earth Clan dog… Meow!"
"Your feeble attempts only delay the inevitable spanking you are in for, son," the black-feathered Sky Clan ninja crossed his arms. "We do not need to be able to kill you to make you wish you were dead. This little misadventure of yours has earned you another century assisting Mushen on surface duty, young man. Don't you realize you could have caused another war between the Earth Clan and the Sky Clan with your carelessness?"
"No way...!" Ichi froze up stiff with his plastic dog head still turned around and facing the wrong way. "I mean… Meow!"
"We beseech your forgiveness, Earth Clan. We understand that trespassing on Earth and kidnapping an Earth Clan child from her family is no little matter and we do not mean to downplay it but… If there is any way in which we can compensate you and prevent an all-out war between our people… Please… I'm asking of you as a mother of an insufferably naughty child and begging you for your forgiveness!" the terrifying ghost-woman succumbed to her knees before the glowing golden orb containing Sachiko.
"Umm… It's okay. My parents know I'm here… Wherever here is… With Ichi… Ichiseiras, I mean. They let me go on a voyage with him to see the stars, so there's nothing you need to do to make this right…" Sachiko shook her hands out in apology.
"You are on one of the dimensions inside of the Moon," the avian Sky Clan ninja replied. "As my partner put it, we are eternally grateful for your and your parents' understanding. We will quickly return you to your parents safe and sound. Ichiseiras has caused you enough trouble as it is…"
"P-Please…" Sachiko pressed her hands against the golden orb she was in as it twitched just a few centimeters higher. Her reaction made the orb stop in place. "Don't punish Ichiseiras too badly. He… He may have saved my life, and the lives of my family, and he… He made me smile and laugh and showed me so many miracles on the very worst day of my life! Without him, I would have never known how amazing the world and the universe are. Without such knowledge, someone living in the Iron Country would succumb to despair and give in to their fate as a meaningless and expendable cog in the machine. In fact, I'd like… I'd like nothing more than to stay with Ichiseiras and live in his miraculous, cartoon world. Back on Earth, I really, really like reading comic strips. There's just one strip each week, just a handful of pictures, but I read them over and over and over again because… That's the only escape I have. Without cartoons and comic strips… There's just the tyranny I live under."
"Ichiseiras… I cannot believe you've trampled the peace that we've made with the Earth Clan by interfering with their politics! The consequences of this we may never move past!" the celestial wild-haired woman turned to her son, sending an overwhelming infernal chill his way that sent the silly plastic dog mask flying off Ichiseiras' head and revealed his real oversized head down under as the boy fell over on his side in terror. "We apologize, we know it is difficult to understand to someone who survived the cruel cogs of Earth Clan's political machine, but… We had no right to do anything like what Ichiseiras has done. Now, the political leaders of your country will know that we interfered and… This might mean war for our people and, we know you think the deaths of you and your family might be bad but… Neither of our people have known violence and bloodshed like a war between Earth and Sky Clans can cause. Thousands of years ago, such a war nearly wiped both our clans out and forced us to live separately on the Earth and in the Sky."
Ichiseiras hovered back on his feet, looking at Sachiko's desperate tears of being forced to say farewell to the little glimpse of a miracle, of something more than an oppressive Iron Country regime looming over her head and to become a part of that boring machine again. Just a cog to be thrown away whenever the engineers thought it was cumbersome and unnecessary.
A gigantic mouse trap hovered from above the golden bubble containing Sachiko and snapped around it. Both of Ichiseiras' parents froze wide-eyed with their mouths gasping for the unforgivable sin that their son had just committed. Sachiko cried out as the mouse trap snapped through the protective golden bubble and then crushed her throat, leaving her dangling and kicking in mid-air while being choked out. In just a few seconds, the mouse trap vanished, letting Sachiko flop onto the ground but, before she could submerge underwater, a mystical flying carpet caught her off of thin air.
Confused, the two Sky Clan ninja stared at an enigmatic mark forming around the girl's neck. A collection of three interconnected black and white cubes with a bubbly orange fizz surrounding it from all directions and stretching across the girl's body in invasive orange patches.
"Now what have you done, child!" the humanoid raven barked out at his foolish son who only had a sheepish grin to offer for his "crime".
"Don't tell me you've tried cursing this child with a Kama!" his banshee mother cursed out. "Oh… No, it appears to be a Cursed Seal."
"I've sealed some of my ability into Sachiko. She wanted to live in a cartoon world and my ability can protect her from harm. Besides, if the Earth Clan politicians see her perform all of my whacky moves, they won't suspect us anymore!" Ichi snickered, clapping his hands and applauding himself. He then extended his fingers and slathered them in stardust, extracting color from the world around him. All the way from the worldwide forest and bog of lost souls and the flashy colors of his parents' clothing and drew another rocket ship that blasted off from the golden orb turning on a clockwork mechanism underneath the Moon's surface, punched through the dusty surface and shot off home to Earth.
Holding her hand pressed against the sketched rocket ship bringing her home, Sachiko felt the itchy mark on her neck and felt a stretching sensation expanding from it across most of her body. Deep down, she could only wonder what would happen to Ichiseiras for this. At least she knew that no one amongst the Sky Clan knew of a way to keep him down for long. Now the only thing she had to worry about was the safety of her family.
She'd never forget this magical time she's spent voyaging around with Ichi. And Sachiko felt determined to learn how to tap into her own gifted powers to keep herself and her family safe. Not just that, she swore to change the entire world with those powers and liberate every scared little child on Earth from fears of being ground into mincemeat by the cruel reality around them!