/jp/ - Otaku Culture

This, I was not sure about. "Well...She likes me, apparently. That's why her kasha talks to me like that. At least - I think it is. Rather, I hope it is." There I stood, somewhere I'd only stood once before, and in strange circumstances. The similarities were there, though. There was an earth spider by my side, a youkai who had been the one to bring me here once before. "You've got your thinking face on." She said to me. "Oh - It's not a thinking face now. That's more of...A consternation face." Was that better or worse? "Er...Well, it could have been a constipation face instead." I turned to stare at Yamame incredulously. "Right - Yeah, you know what? Let's just, er..." She awkwardly waved a hand in the direction of the wrought iron gates in front of us.

Following the visit from Akiru Kurodani, everything seemed to speed up. Perhaps it was just getting over what we'd both perceived as a hurdle, or perhaps it was the whirlwind experience that had been Yamame knocking down part of the wall of her bedroom to install a window that she could open and shut. It seemed to give an excellent view of her work yard, which I supposed was at least better than it giving an excellent view of the cave wall. "For a bit of a breeze. I was looking to change something up in here, anyway." She had informed me seriously. Clearly, she wasn't willing to take any more comments from the Kurodani matriarch on the matter, though I wasn't entirely sure why she was refusing to admit it to me. I also wasn't sure how much breeze you'd even get underground, but Yamame assured me that it would all be fine. Then, she'd promptly sent me off to the village in search of incense. Fortunately, if there was one thing that the village never lacked in, it was arts and crafts. That meant that it took me minutes to find a shop that was selling incense by the bucket load. If only I had brought a bucket. Still, I figured that filling all of the pockets of my coat with bundles of incense sticks would have to do.

On my way back, I'd almost crashed into Nai in the tunnels. "Wah!" She'd cried. "Don't scare me like that!" Personally, I'd thought that I, the big lumbering man with the massive coat, would be easier to spot than the very thin and very slight figure of Nai. "What's that smell?" She had asked with a frown. I'd blinked, my eyes still adjusting to the darkness of the tunnels, then realised that it was probably all of the incense sticks. Even though they'd been bagged up, they were still fairly strong. Curious, I'd asked her what she'd been up to. "Er - I was going to the surface, actually. There's a bazaar - Kappa, in the Ravine. They don't like us, but they like money more than they dislike us, so..."

Yamame had filled me in on what had happened when she'd gone to meet her sisters, so I'd already had a suspicion that it was about woodworking. Asking her, she'd been surprised. "How'd you know that!?" She'd jumped back slightly then, looking at me suspiciously, until I reminded her that her big sister had told me. "Oh, um...Right. Yeah..." She'd trailed off, fidgeting slightly. Finally, she'd found the courage to ask the question that had clearly been weighing on her. "How did - Um, I mean, how was...Our mother?" Intense, I'd replied after a moment's thought, but in the end, she'd given us her blessings. "Oh...That's good. Big Sister looked really worried about it before...Actually, they all did. I don't think our mum is that bad..." Well, I'd replied with a shrug, I supposed it was something that you couldn't quite understand until it happened to you. Maybe it was an age thing. "Uh...Yeah, maybe." Curious, I'd asked a question that had been bugging me. I'd sort of expected that Akiru Kurodani would have spider limbs coming out from her back. "Oh, um...We don't really show them off unless we need to." Nai had replied, scratching her head. "I mean, we all have them, but...Maybe she was trying not to scare you?" That was a curious thought. She'd seemed fairly intent on scaring me in other ways. Nai blinked twice, then shook her head. "Sorry, er, I'd better get going." Nodding, I stepped to the side and wished her a safe trip. "Um, yeah. thanks." She awkwardly nodded and disappeared toward the surface.

I hadn't even known that Nai made surface trips on her own. I supposed that with everything else that had been happening, I hadn't really spoken to her much. Not since I'd seen her while she'd been working on the Hot Springs, anyway. Shaking my head, I 'd made it back to Yamame in time to find her hard at work on her impromptu house extensions. In the end, it had taken her several days, during which my job had mostly been to pass her whatever tools she needed. I'd not really internalised that she was just as capable in the building department as she was in the clothing department, mainly because she'd not been all that involved in the Hot Springs project, and I hadn't actually seen her working on anything before that.