/jp/ - Otaku Culture

We stood there in silence for a moment, and Yamame cleared her throat. I looked at her, frowning, and she pointedly stared at me. I blankly looked back, and she threw her head in the direction of Wakasagihime. I looked at the princess, then back at Yamame. Finally, she elbowed me in the side, then muttered "Stone." at me, and the dots in my head finally connect, making me gasp in relief at remembering. I reached into my pockets and pulled the small bag that Yamame had found for me in her workshop out. It was an incredibly fine woven silk, to the point that I'd almost not wanted to use it, but she'd assured me that she had plenty of silk, so it wasn't a huge loss. So, I'd taken the bag, dropped Wakasagihime' s stone into it, and then promptly forgotten it as soon as we'd left. So, we'd gone back to get it, and now I was standing here with it in my hand.

Finally, the stone had been returned. Here, I said to the princess. This is yours. "Oh, mine?" Wakasagihime's face rounded in curious interest, and she delicately took the proffered bag from my hand and gracefully undid the strings tying it together. "Whatever is...Oh!" Her face lit up in recognition when she finally got the bag open. Inside sat the green stone that she'd shown me when we had first met. I'd taken one of the days that Yamame and I had been fairly idle - Well, I say idle, but Yamame had been sewing for the whole day and I'd had little else to do - and used it to polish the stone. Nothing special, just water, a little bit of elbow grease and a cloth that Yamame had spared me, but I'd gotten rid of any marks on it and left it looking about as clean as I could get it. "This - This is that stone! The one I showed you!" Wakasagihime told me, her eyes lighting up as she gently lifted it from the bag. She looked up at me. "You kept it, all this time?" Shrugging and feeling a little self-conscious at the attention, I said that it was hers, so it wouldn't have been right to lose it.

Wakasagihime raised it to catch what little moonlight there was, and I heard Yamame let out a little noise when the tiny stone began to cast beautiful patterns across the rock below it. "You cleaned it, didn't you?" Wakasagihime asked me, and I nodded, squatting down so I could get a little closer, Yamame following me down. "Oh, it's beautiful." She murmured. "It was the first stone I ever found." She looked at it, but I got the impression that she was looking through it at something that none of us could see. "May I, er, hug you?" She slowly asked me. I, caught off-guard by the question, stammered something incomprehensible until Yamame sighed and knocked me in the back just hard enough to push me forward so that Wakasagihime could wrap her arms around me. "Thank you, for looking after it." She told me, squeezing just a little tighter before releasing me. I stumbled backwards, since I'd been awkwardly leaning over the large rock that served as her table, and realised that my sides were damn where her kimono had caught me. "Oh, I've found more pretty stones since you were last here!" She told me excitedly, turning and diving into the water, leaving nothing but spreading ripples from where she'd just been.

"You've got her excited." Yamame commented, elbowing me again, but a lot more lightly this time. She sounded a lot more relaxed than she had going into the meeting, which I took to be a good thing. "Did you put some of your divine luck into that thing?" I shrugged, not really sure what I'd done to excite Wakasagihime so much. "You're always like this, you know." Yamame said, concealing a smile. Like what, I asked. "You just...help people. Sometimes you don't even seem to realise it." I stared at her blankly. "Oh, come on." She insisted. "You come into contact with Reimu and suddenly she's calling you her brother? You've told me that that ex-celestial and Marisa Kirisame have taken up a close friendship, right? That's after you met with them both." I blinked, then said that it had just been a coincidence. "Really? What about me? I meet you, then suddenly I'm changing my diet and seeing my sisters more, and I'm out here, now, at a meeting for youkai, even though I've always been more solitary. Are you sure that you didn't have something to do with this?" I opened my mouth, then trailed off. Yamame giggled, then pulled me down to give me a kiss on the cheek. "It's a good thing, you silly man." She told me, letting me stand up, but retaining my hands. "Especially you and Miss Kasen." I raised an eyebrow. "She mentioned how you'd given her advice when she took me for that talk in the hot springs." Had she? Yamame had told me about their meeting, but I hadn't really thought about that part. "Maybe that's why I love you. You're just...kind."

>>21856219
I hope it's this dolphin.

Well?