Facing East

[IamLEAM1983]

The Japanese spy scoffed lightly at Crystal's question. "I asked questions, your beau here provided the right answers. I'd be back in San Diego if it weren't for the locals' concerns regarding Mab-affiliated Aratama. Dark Yokai, to oversimplify things. Most variants of Obake are conflated into them, even if they're closer to your Western Diviners' conception of troubled shades. So, shapeshifters, troubled ghosts, Veil artists working on Mab's behalf... The smart ones are good actors, those who aren't think looking like a Victorian Clank and his Native American werewolf lover hacks it well enough. They're wrong."

He patted his suit, where the inner breast pocket waited. "In which case, I've spent a week showing them what being wrong about these things means."

Archie frowned. "Are Ofuda cards enough?"

Eiji rolled his eyes. "Space-compression spells and a full set of tools. My katana and wakizashi, my kusarigama and my kunai."

The old man reached inside his jacket and briefly allowed the shark-skin haft of a Japanese longsword to poke through, along with four small throwing knives and their disc-shaped weighted handles. "Add sake or Jack Daniels on my breath and the more moronic impersonators assume I'm just a harmless drunk - essentially Japanese Friar Tuck."

He looked back to Aspasia. "That, young lady, is mortal talk, right there. Some of us, like Lord Holden here, can handle the idea of swinging on a hammock and swallowing flies for centuries on end without going cuckoo. Some of us can't, but I'm not one of them, believe you me! Centuries of warlords swinging their honor around the way CalTech freshmen do their dicks and telling you that their brittle asses know how to handle warfare better than you do makes it easy for people like me to think about spending a few lifetimes sipping on margaritas."

[TennyoCeres84]

"Well, I hope my mortal talk and overall mortaldom serves as a solid foundation for possible future developments," Aspasia responded, referring to her possibly becoming a Wyldfae.

She then glanced at Archie and then back at Eiji. "Speaking of immortals being dicks, you obviously know why we're here. Archibald here needs to gain a buffer against someone who can make a non-aggression deal with the President but then gives the OK for his minions to possess vagrants and then spray bits of gray matter and bone all over the floor of a family restaurant," she groused, clicking her tongue. "I know that's standard Pitspawn logic, but you know."

The werewolf looked from the Transgenic to Katsumoto and sighed. "That sounds like a good impetus to get to the village and have Archibald meet with Sojubo Kurama," she noted.

[IamLEAM1983]

Eiji nodded in approval. "Yes, I'd say so too. As for demonic etiquette," he said, looking to Aspasia, "that's nothing I haven't seen before. The last woman who tried to sleep with me used her tattoos to try and kill me - and she'd warned me first!"

He scoffed. "Lucky for me, I'm too old to fall for the old Nude Geisha in a Hot Spring trap."

Katsumoto then shook his head in amusement. "Kurama, though? Oh, he's going to love you, I'm sure of it. Eighty years of administrative drudgery and you're the first hopefuls to come along. You'll have to forgive him if he doesn't come from the more, erm, progressive parts of the folklore."

[TennyoCeres84]

Aspasia sighed and shook her head. "I know; it's just that I've seen people I've cared about kill themselves right in front of me," she explained. "For all I know, that may have been part of the reason it happened, to viciously prod that sensitivity. I was initially on autopilot, but now I want to direct my anger toward stopping the Prince."

"That's entirely understandable, Aspasia. Ephesian's oppressor is a grade-A prick who wouldn't fully know empathy if it punched him in the face," Crystal mused, sighing as well. At Eiji's description of Kurama, the deputy chief raised an eyebrow. "How do you mean? Surely it's not the school of "women are nothing but delicate flowers", right? I've briefly met Hanako Urakawa during some business between Wyvern Security and the HPD; she's relatively stoic and professional, but she's certainly no shrinking violet. Or is it from the standpoint that we're foreigners?"

[IamLEAM1983]

"She's got it in one," replied the samurai, who dug back inside his suit to pull out a modern hip flask. "You're barbarians, miss Lowell - your gender doesn't have much of anything to do with it. He'll figure out you're both as close as could be to our old Onna-Bugeisha, like those that fought alongside Muneshige Tachibana - but you're Americans. Mister Urakawa could tell you a fair bit about Japan's warrior-women and their skill with the naginata, but he's the busy sort. He's likely to send you back out to the mortal plane and along the bullet train to Okinawa, where some of the country's best martial historians hold classes."

He took a sip of what had to be sake. "Empress Jingu and her conquest of both Koreas, Lady Tomoe, whose exploits in the Ginpei War would've given Brienne of Tarth a run for her money, Takeko Nakano and her participation in the Boshin War of 1868, Masako Hojo, who became the most powerful woman in Japan as of 1200...

I've had plenty of samurai guffaw like idiots at the thought of losing to a woman. When they woke up on their ass-cheeks wondering how an old man had managed to put them there, they usually stopped laughing and started listening."

The village's noise drifted closer. "If you'd old enough to pick up a hoe or a scythe, you're old enough to pick up a weapon. Boy or girl, Fae or mortal, anthro or human - none of that matters across the old Fae country. Everyone trains, even if nobody wants to fight. We're martial artists, not suicidal idiots."

Archie's head lightly bobbed. "I smell fresh bread... Rice, as well. How is this possible, with all this snow?
- There's a stream, behind the village. It's been touched by Titania herself, or at least one of her incarnations. Oberon knew his people would have to survive in these eternal snows, so there's a narrow band a few miles long where it's always summer, with seemingly inexhaustible soil and hot springs. Cherry blossoms in eternal bloom and always partially covered with snow. The locals diverted the water over time, irrigated a few plains..."

Katsumoto shrugged. "It's the way it's always been, in the farthest reaches of Oberon's domain. He offers warmth, but his wife offers sustenance."

[TennyoCeres84]

Crystal displayed a lopsided frown at Eiji's affirmation about the tengu's antiquated stance and huffed out a light sigh. "As the young people would say, hypocrisy FTW," she said. Given that they were almost to the village, she put that aside and followed along with them.

Aspasia frowned uncertainly. "I realize I wasn't born here, but I spent a good 13 years of my life in this village before returning to Hope, from 1984 to 1997. Time can pass differently between the two planes, but I was here for quite some time. That's why one of Holden's coworkers suggested I accompany him on this trip in the first place. Did Kurama-san have a change of heart toward me since I left? Or did he merely tolerate my presence here?" she asked, genuinely puzzled.

[IamLEAM1983]

Katsumoto shrugged. "I naturally haven't asked the man. Maybe your old daimyo or someone else in his staff knows a thing or two. My guess is he was perfectly fine with you developing your martial skills, so long as it meant you'd take those lovely Yankee curls of yours back to Rhode Island."

The old man chuckled dismissively. "We can't all be like Lord Haskill or Hanako's pop, miss Robertson. For some of us, you mortals will always move too dang fast for our own good. Kurama remembers how these slopes wouldn't see anything more fair-skinned than a snow spirit for over ten thousand years - and then Westerners with their funny frocks and curly facial hair showed up. First the Portuguese, then William Adams, then the world. The first ones tried to sell us matchlock rifles and Jesus Christ, the second one showed more respect and ended up hatamoto to the Tokugawa clan - and the third, well..."

Eiji sighed as a group of kids dressed in traditional clothes used sticks to push a wooden hula-hoop along the ground. Most of the boys had the partially shaved heads of the Kamakura period and earlier, and the girls typically showed ratty bangs and a ponytail.

"Now, the world doesn't so much as care for Japan if cybernetics and the Manga and Anime industries aren't involved. Nobody reads our philosophers, nobody appraises our poets, and ninja and samurai are about a step removed from Superman in terms of cultural significance... The Hagakure's been co-opted by necktie-wearing sociopaths looking for a reason to excuse their shady deals, even.

One of Kurama's pupils for this year turned out to be a die-hard Boruto fan. That old bird terrified the kid out of his wits, telling him to go find his jutsus and rasengans back in Shinjuku if he cared that much for the mystical ends of the profession."

The old samurai grinned. "You'll do better, though. I'm sure of it. He didn't loathe you the first time around, or else you'd have gone home a lot earlier. If I didn't plan on sticking around, chances are he'd put the boot to mister Lordship here, though."

Archie bent down to recover his trunk. "How utterly encouraging, Katsumoto...
- Eh, it won't be that bad. I told him you're mine to pester, seeing as I'm the first guy who taught you how to properly unsheath a sword."

The Lord scoffed. "I assume mister Kurama only calling me an abject failure should be construed as a compliment of the highest order, then...
- More or less, yeah." 

[TennyoCeres84]

Given the Europeans' overarching legacy in North America and on its indigenous peoples, Crystal held her tongue about the overall hypocrisy the old tengu would likely display.

Aspasia picked up on the werewolf's restrained behavior and looked over at Katsumoto. "Suffice to say, I think we'll give him the benefit of the doubt."

[IamLEAM1983]

As could be expected, things hadn't changed much from Aspasia's stay. The village's open gates had been constituted of two road-facing nurikabe, the rectangular and slab-like beings barely moving as they clutched oversized naginata, their recessed eyes scanning the road. After Eiji nodded, both golems grunted and trundled back into place across the road's front gate. The houses that lined the road on either side had been roughly the same since the days of the kingdom of Yamato, with only their occupants changing. They'd spot an appreciable number of two-tailed canids and felinids, as well as two or three seemingly human natives leaving the road to morph into foxes and cats. Why enter through the front door if you could hop on a nearby tree's branch and slip into your house's second floor on your own? While there was a menagerie's worth of anthros in sight, these differed from those you'd have found in the mortal plane in how most still kept closely to their cousins' natural evolutionary path. They'd spot a pair of kimono-wearing frogs, barely bigger than the real things, hopping towards what looked like a traditional eatery or lodge. If anyone paid attention to them, they didn't comment it.

A few meters later, a topknot-wearing man slipped past Aspasia, rudely coming in-between her and Crystal. Eiji raised his voice, but someone managed to shout louder even as the Chimera would've stumbled a hoof past a nearby store's threshold.

"Irrashimase!" called the store owner in Japanese. "We've the best small arms, cutlery and metalworks in Yamanashi! Please, come in!"

A blacksmith, then, and one for smaller, more menial work orders than you could've expected out of a swordsmith. Everything you could've wanted in order to tend to a household's traditional fire pit waited - including a small basket filled with intricately-forged iron chopsticks.

"It's alright, friend," started Katsumoto, "my friend was pushed in by mistake. They only have Tokyo's yen for now - not a single koban to their name, yet. Urakawa-sama's retainer will see to their exchange operations."

He looked back to Aspasia. "Not that we have anything against using yen, but running debit or credit terminals in Faerie is, well..."

Katsumoto grinned toothily. "We'd cost Visa or MasterCard a fortune in grilled terminals. There's too much loose via around here."

[TennyoCeres84]

The rude fellow barrelled past the Transgenic enough that she was almost thrown off balance, with the edge of her hoof grazing the bottom of the doorway. It didn't take her long to recover her stance and keep herself from falling. As she stumbled in, her eyes caught sight of the chopsticks. Astra's mysterious instructions to take the chopsticks only vaguely lingered in the back of her mind, while she stopped to admire the variety of items the smith had in his shop.

Aspasia chuckled. "I bet. I'm familiar with that sort of thing happening," she replied, thinking of the few times a piece of machinery had bit the dust in her husband's presence.

Crystal had momentarily remained outside, but she then followed Aspasia and Katsumoto into the business. Recalling her lover's wishes to get some readjustments to his body, she gently grabbed Archie by his hand and pulled him into the shop.

"While I know we'll need to meet with Kurama-san soon enough, would it be feasible for Archie to get an estimate on any work or replacement parts he might want done?" she asked of Katsumoto and then looking to the blacksmith himself.

With the lord and the deputy chief taking up the focus of the moment, the Chimera discreetly and quietly picked up a set of the ornate chopsticks and placed them in a deep pocket of the interior of her winter coat. Given that the smith had the chopsticks just laying out in the basket, she figured they were free samples of his handiwork.