/jp/ - Otaku Culture

"Kasen." The oni replied, smiling. "You helped Raki when she - When I - was in a bad place. You've more than earned first name privileges. And - Ah..." She trailed off.

She paused, her eyes caught on something. Yamame's ring. "Uh-oh." I heard Yuugi mutter under her breath. "Some things never change."

Kasen raised Yamame's hand gently, looking at the ring through new eyes. I wasn't sure that sentence had been used quite so accurately before. "My mind's sorting out two copies of all my memories, but...The - The wedding..." She trailed off. To my alarm, she was crying. Tears ran down her face as she continued to look at the ring. "No one will interrupt. No one will cause the slightest distraction. I will break anyone who tries in two." Kasen murmured. "I can't..." She stopped, and I had a feeling that something weird was about to happen. "Oh, I can't believe you two are getting married!" She cried, throwing her arms around us. Clearly, she hadn't worked out her limitations quite yet, because I was roughly dragged into Yamame before both of us were all but crushed beneath Kasen's incredibly strong arms. "It's going to be so romantic! Since you're both so in love with each other, and I don't want to miss a single thing because-" She, much as had been mentioned to me, definitely had a fixation on weddings, and a need to have a complete breakdown when she was talking about one.

Fortunately, someone was more on the ball than we were, and both Suika and Yuugi prised Kasen's arms off of us. "Won't be particularly romantic if you crush them, Kasen." Yuugi commented, smiling.

"Hey, uh..." Reimu paused when all three oni turned to look at her. "Just to be clear, you still remember all of the rules, right? For Gensokyo? I'm not about to deal with the oni trying to take over the mountain, am I?"

Kasen rolled her eyes. "Give me some credit, Reimu. I told you that I'm still just as much the Kasen that you knew, and both of those versions of me could handle it just fine. Besides, I helped make the place. I think I should remember what the rules for it were."

"Right..." Reimu muttered. "And - What about separation? Feels like something we should work out sooner rather than later."

"Hmm..." Kasen paused. "Let's see..." She didn't really move, but her eyes narrowed slightly. She seemed to be thinking intensely. "It'll take some meditation. Or a good fight before I figure it out." she wiped her eyes to catch the errant tears from when she'd been with us. "Don't worry, we went into this knowing that we'd probably not separate until after the wedding anyway." That seemed to threaten a restart of the waterworks. "Okay! I'm freshly merged and I'm itching for a fight! Who's up for it!?" The other two oni immediately agreed, and Tenshi did too after a moment. Reimu looked back at Yamame and me, then sighed and raised her hand too. "Perfect! Now, I think my poor dojo won't survive it, so shall we take this outside?" With a chorus of nods and assents, the party began to head outside, Suika sticking very close to Kasen.

Reimu paused at the door. "I probably shouldn't have agreed to that, but...I think I need to burn some of this energy." I smiled and said that she should go and have a good fight as long as Kasen could keep herself from trying to kill anyone. "Oh, yeah...I'll keep an eye on it."

That left Yamame and I alone in the dojo. We looked at each other tiredly. "Do you ever think that you've stumbled into some really weird things without meaning to?" She asked me faintly. Sometimes, I replied. "How...Do you deal with that?" I thought for a moment. Honestly, I just tried to go with the flow. "...Ah. Right, I can...Probably manage that." The building shook right after that, which seemed to indicate that the fighting had gotten underway. Feeling a desire to be somewhere else, I asked Yamame if she wanted to go for a boat ride. "A - Sorry, what?"

She'd understand once we were there. At least it would hopefully save us from getting punted off a mountain by accident.

Or punted into another one.

>>44553135
She had shoes on, but on the other hand, she had nothing on up top aside from her tabard.