It occurred to me that, quite inexplicably, I hadn't actually posted this here.
Let me correct that error.
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MAHOU SHOUJO SHINTO SCION
Episode One:
"Sunrise"
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Satou Yoko sat back a little in the chair facing her wheezing, elderly computer and wiped away the sweat starting to trickle down her face. Her tiny room in the equally tiny three-room-and-bath apartment she shared with her father was swelteringly hot in the summer heat, even with the fan set in the window and the brief, threadbare hot pants and tank top she'd put on as soon as she'd gotten home and been able to change out of her work uniform.
Yoko giggled quietly and smacked the hotkey for her opener area-effect attack, and took a pull off the glass of ice water sweating all over the coaster in the middle of the crowded TV-dinner table next to her PC.
Yoko managed to not laugh out loud herself; her father was just on the other side of the thin wall separating their bedrooms, trying to rest after an overtime shift at his company's latest construction site. Work had been disrupted by an earthquake early in the process, and the client had paid extra to have their building finished by the original completion date. The extra work was good - the additional money from contracts just like that one had saved them from disaster several times in the past - but if her father wasn't old, yet, he'd lived a hard life, and keeping up with the pace wore at him.
Despite how long they’d been gaming together, and despite their all living in Tokyo proper, none of the three had ever met each other face to face. With Yoko’s part-time job only needing a morning shift for that Sunday and both of the others being free, they had finally found an ideal moment to correct that.
Yoko didn’t like to think that she might be vain, but she only needed eyes to realized that she did have the kind of face and figure that the ‘popular’ girls of her school needed special diets, push-up brassieres, and extensive cosmetics to imitate. Even if she hadn’t, a never-ending parade of boys at school and male customers of all ages at her waitress job were invariably all too maddeningly eager to remind her.
On screen, one of the spider-like mechanoids Moonspawn’s character ‘built’ brought down the last of the twisted monsters with a tinny shotgun blast, and the schoolgirl took off her headphones to stretch and enjoy the momentary rush of cool air on her sweating ears and the singing tension all through her spine as she bent her entire body into an arc before yawning. Moonspawn’s description of herself had made Yoko think of the kind of delinquent she’d usually have gone out of her way to avoid, while Stormward had quoted some pretty effusive gushing by her own classmates with a kind of patient irritation that Yoko found very familiar.
The three friends discussed the details of their meeting for a few minutes more, then Yoko logged off to go to bed - whatever her plans for the evening, she had work the next morning, and once she’d shut down the computer she brushed her teeth in the closet the apartment’s landlord called a restroom and laid out her futon without covers so she could try to get some sleep.
* * * * *
“Rise and shine, Daddy!” Yoko caroled the next morning.
As usual, Satou Reiji reacted by throwing his pillow at her head. She ducked out of the way with a giggle and went back to the corner of the apartment’s main room that served as their kitchen, dishing out breakfast for both of them out of what was left from putting together their lunchboxes.
That one room made up half the space of the apartment, but it wasn’t by any means large itself. A small refrigerator, a two-burner stove, a sink, and about a meter of counter space filled the entirety of one wall. A card table in another corner had breakfast laid out on it, while the other walls held one door on the inward side and three - open, so that the fans in the outer windows could move cooling air through the living space - in the wall facing the outside of the apartment building.
For now, before the heat of the day kicked in, the apartment was only a bit warm, and Yoko dug into her breakfast with a will. when she opened her eyes, she found her father watching her, his own food untouched and a wistful smile on his face. “What?” she asked, a little creeped out.
“You look just like your mother when you’re happy like that,” he said fondly.
Yoko blinked. He’d commented on the resemblance before, which, since he hadn’t admitted to having any pictures of her, was the only clue she had as to what her mother had looked like - black hair, worn ‘much longer’ than her daughter’s, which was only a little past the shoulders, impossible, brilliant golden eyes set in a lovely face, a sleek figure with a prominent bust...
But the emphasis on her expression was new. “I make a different face when I’m serious?” she asked.
Her father blinked, then laughed quietly. “I only ever saw her be serious a few times, for maybe five minutes at a stretch.”
Yoko grinned triumphantly, delighted to’ve won another scrap of information free from her father’s reticence on the subject. “So, Mom was kind of a goofball, then?” she asked.
Reiji blinked again and picked up his chopsticks. “She was very lively,” he said, and began to eat.
She made an irritated noise and threw a grain of rice at him, which he picked out of the air and ate placidly. Her father rarely talked about her mother. Over nearly twelve years of actively trying, she still hadn’t filled the notebook she’d started to keep track of very fact she’d wormed out of him. Having him drop a fact like that and then clam up again was heartbreakingly frustrating. Yoko finished her breakfast in three oversized gulps and mumbled the morning’s goodbyes around the food with bad grace.
It was a few minutes later, when she got her bike - an ancient, half-rusted relic, but it worked - off of the rack by their apartment building’s parking, that the day started getting strange. The biggest bird she’d ever seen in person, a raven as long as her arm, was perched on the top of the rack, watching her. when she approached to unlock her bike, it flapped over to a nearby fence and cocked its head to keep staring at her with one dark eye.
“Okay, that?” Yoko muttered, “is officially creepy.”
Halfway through the several-mile trip, while she was waiting in traffic at a stop light, she saw the giant raven perch on top of a lightpost just ahead. A crowd of people on the street pulled out their cell phones and started snapping pictures. A part of her mind wanted to start pedaling as hard as she could to escape the disturbing thing stalking her, but she controlled the urge. Trying to race through morning rush traffic would be a good way to turn herself into street pizza, and a creepy bird was only possibly dangerous.
When she pulled her bike into the narrow access way behind the restaurant she worked at, the raven settled onto one branch of the shade tree planted just outside the entrance. A few moments in the staff restroom to change into her uniform and she was ready to start her shift just as the morning rush began to pick up. The minidress, stockings, and short jacket flattered her figure, and those of the other waitresses, quite nicely. Granted, working at what was essentially an off-brand Anna Miller’s had its downsides to dignity, but the pay was enough to make up for that, letting her pay for her small family’s entire food budget while still leaving time to attend school, if not to study much.
Fortunately, her grades could take it.
When Yoko glanced across the sidewalks as she walked over to tap the greeter on the shoulder and advise her of the opening of her assigned stretch of tables, she saw a familiar face sitting in a familiar place and groaned internally. If there had been any point putting it off, she would have, but there wasn’t, so instead she bustled over, put on her best lying cheerful welcome face and tried to ignore the way the college boy kept staring at her bust.
Today he’d brought a friend, just to complete the joy of the encounter, about the same age but with shoulder-length hair rather than short-cropped. Not bad looking, really - not at all - but then, the Annoying One was better than tolerable right up until he actually started drooling. She wouldn’t roll her eyes at the new one’s openly stunned expression, but it was a distinct strain to keep her irritation out of her face and voice as she took the orders.
And that was more or less how the morning went - dodge the occasional grope, smile at the juvenile twits ogling her ass, refill her stalker and his tag-along... if they hadn’t kept telling her not to make change, the kind of day she’d been having, she’d have slugged one of the perverts and told them to hang the damned job.
Eventually, half an hour short of the end of her shift, she managed to make her trip by the stalker’s table while he was away in the bathroom, draining away the endless cups of coffee she’d poured into him. She wasn’t going to turn down any chance to dodge dealing with the creep. his friend shook his head and kept nursing his own iced coffee, then, unexpectedly, asked, “Why don’t you just tell him you’re not interested?”
“Interested in what?” Yoko asked, as innocently as she could.
“In dating him,” the new guy answered, bluntly cutting through her attempt to dissemble her way around the question.
“I’m a waitress,” she told him, relaxing enough that her smile was more irony than cheer, “smiling at everyone comes with the job.”
The tag-along blinked at her - rather than her breasts - for a moment, then, befuddled, asked, “Why not just quit?”
“I like to eat,” she said, more sarcastically still.
And then the stalker came back and interrupted, and she made her escape by being flagged by another table. Behind her, she heard them still talking to each other.
“Dude! She was actually talking to you! You have to teach me your secret!”
“Oh, that’s easy. I didn’t try to get her in bed...”
Yoko giggled and got back to work.
* * * * *
On Sundays, this time of year, Yoko ate her lunch after changing out of her uniform, sitting on a bench at the bus stop. Absently, she flicked a bite of cheap hot dog over her shoulder, and a black spearpoint beak snapped it out of mid-air. “You’re going to keep following me?”
The raven, barely visible out of the corner of her eye, settled itself deeper onto the back of the bench and fluffed its feathers out a bit.
Yoko sighed. “Thought so.”
She ate slowly, finishing her meal and sipping on the bottle of tapwater she’d brought. She had a couple of hours yet before the meeting, and even with the length of the ride there was no need to hurry.
Then, in an alley nearby, someone screamed. Despite the pitch, it was a young man who bolted out into sight with bleeding gashes along his side and arm. He didn’t even pause or turn on the sidewalk, sprinting right out into traffic and only barely avoiding being hit.
The zombie - a withered, mummified, skeletal thing with long rusty talons on the gauntlets of its ramshackle armor - wasn’t as lucky. The sedan was moving quickly enough that its entire front end crumpled a little and, though the thing kept trying to move, the impact was enough to shatter ever bone beneath the undead husk’s waist.
That, in itself, would have only been startling, but that first monster had friends following it, dozens of them, reaching out with clawed fingers or bearing horribly corroded ancient weapons.
Someone else screamed - Yoko didn’t think it had been her - and then everyone started running. Not being a fool, she herself was one of them, and as she fled a corner of her mind was frantically trying to call to mind all the news reports she’d previously dismissed as unlikely to directly impact her life.
The walking dead, as impossible as it sounded... they were quicker and more agile in real life than in most games or fiction, but still less so than a healthy adult. No magic or acid vomit, and now bows or other ranged weapons save rotten javelins. Running was, in fact, what the sober, worried talking heads had recommended - most people in modern-day Tokyo weren’t athletic enough to properly outrun the untiring dead, but the few minutes they could keep ahead of the monsters were long enough for the Police and Japanese Self Defense Force units the government had stationed throughout the city to begin to respond.
Ahead of her as she ran was a mother, dragging her grade-school daughter behind her by one hand. Crossing a cross street - vehicles were nowhere to be found, all of them having fled by now themselves - the child tripped, skinning her knees, pulling her hand from her mother’s... and, most importantly, stopping her where she had fallen.
“Hanako!” the mother cried in terror, planting her feet to go back.
“Don’t stop, I have her!” Yoko ordered, and reached down to scoop the girl up into her arms, yanking her off the ground without breaking stride.
“Thank you!” the older woman gasped, and started running again. After a few strides she and Yoko were running side-by-side, with the graceless stomp-stomp-stomp hammer of the zombies close on their heels. If she’d pushed herself, Yoko could probably have outpaced her even carrying the daughter, but something inside her rebelled at the idea of escaping by leaving someone behind.
“This way!” a voice urged from ahead of them, and Yoko looked up from watching the ground in front of her feet to see a man in a police uniform waving them down a side street.
Yoko and Hanako’s mother traded glances and went as directed.
Fifty feet down the new street, they skidded to a halt in horror as a second force of undead began pouring out of the broken windows of the shattered shopfronts on either side of the road.
“All too easy,” the policeman said from behind them, and Yoko whirled to see him literally rip his face away from the weathered bone beneath. “Really, Sunchild, did you think you could hide forever?”
Yoko turned her head to give her comrade-in-terror a wordless ‘do you know what the hell he’s talking about?’ look, only to realize that she was receiving the same expression in return.
The skeleton-man laughed as the zombies rushed past him. “You didn’t know? How truly foolish the forces of Heaven are!”
“Not,” boomed out a clarion bass from overhead, “So foolish as to leave her unguarded in such times!”
“Yatagarasu!” the skeleton screamed as Yoko’s very own bird of ill omen swooped close overhead to settle to the ground in front of her.
“Wait, what?!” Yoko found herself blurting in shock.
“I bear many missives from Your holy mother,” the crow said to her, “But as things are we must begin with-”
“Kill them!” hissed the undead commander to his minions.
“-survival.” Yatagarasu’s beak fished... a compact? …out from beneath one wing. Despite the obstruction, his beautiful voice remained as clear and resonant as ever. “At the recitation of your name and lineage of the first order, this charm may loosen the restrictions placed upon your holy birthright by-CEASE, KNAVE!”
The crow interrupted his explanation to launch himself at the leading assaulting zombie, plunging all three clawed feet into its eyes and mouth with a thunderous shout.
Lineage of the first order... with certain death closing in quickly on all sides and no better options at hand, she accepted the... carved golden - no, it was a compact... and held it up, unconsciously striking a pose straight out of an anime.
“I am Satou Yoko, daughter of Satou Reiji and-” for a split second, the impossibility of the words made them catch in her throat. “Amaterasu-Omikami...”
When had it gotten so bright? She felt-
Light. Weightless, effortless, and alive.
Like she could run a marathon.
Like she’d just been freed from a boring classroom on a beautiful spring day and could dance for hours.
“...and I forbid you to harm anyone else!”
And then a zombie swung a sword at her head.
She shrieked and flinched and, instinctively, tried to ward it off with a thrown up arm.
It stopped the blade dead, in a flare of light and rush of heat, and a sound like an incoming jet engine. Splatters of molten steel splashed away from the searing shield, some of them falling on the bare skin of her arm and face.
It felt like hot water splattering out of a sink or shower.
“Put the peasants from your mind, My Lady! I shall ward them!” Yatagarasu called from outside her field of view.
Oh, lovely.
How dangerous were these zombies to her now, anyway? If her power could sear away even rusted steel like that, then it should have no trouble doing so to their rotten flesh...? Did it require conscious effort? How often and how consistently did it work? If it had just jumped out at her like that, then it should be fairly simple, though if ‘complete commitment’ or focus were needed, then...
She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She’d have to take the chance.
The skeleton-man was the only one of her foes that had talked. If any of them had more impossibilities at its command, it would be that one, the boss, so, he had to go first. The question was, how? Could she throw this... sunfire?
It was worth a try.
Experimentally, she reached for that just-passed feeling, the stretch and exaltation, like a runner’s high... and shoved
Flames burst from the air in front of her, flaring out in a rough, broad cone like some trumpet-belled flower.
“What?” the skeleton taunted as his minions closed in again. “What was that supposed to be, ikebana?”
“Ikebana this,” Yoko muttered, and grabbed at what she’d concluded was her power again as she broke into a sprint. A simple burst of fire might be more visually impressive than practically, but-
A screaming sweep turned one intercepting group to ash, then she ducked around a second group and incinerated the third and last bunch between her and-
It felt like being doused in a city aquarium’s worth of ice water, a freezing shock so intense it was an actual pain, and an incredible physical impact that literally picked her up and tossed her bodily across the street and into a solid wall with such force that fragments of brick and a cloud of dust billowed away like a volcanic eruption.
It felt like landing back-first in a box of styrofoam packing peanuts.
“Pathetic!” the skeleton laughed, with something much like relief in his voice, as she pried herself out of the brickwork and shook off the surprise.
If she’d felt any temptation to let her newfound power let her stop being afraid, that surprise, the feel of that... whatever it was... was enough to quell it.
She didn’t ever want to feel like that... whatever it was... had felt like ever again. But she couldn’t hurt the boss without getting at him, and if she didn’t...
Yoko was out of her crater and charging again before she realized it, riding a wave of fury that she knewwas mostly panic. It felt like running across a field of warm mud in her bare feet, and everything on the street was so very bright that she could see the shield that had repulsed her before, like a dome of dark smoke that left the false policeman half-visible at its center.
This time she was braced for the impact, ready to push back against it, so it only knocked her back off balance. She staggered, then shouted incoherently at the gloating skull on the other side and leaned back and put her entire body into the hardest haymaker she could throw.
This time the flower of sunlight was already at its target, and the nauseatingly-shaded shield pulsed a solid black under the impact.
The skeleton, sorcerer, commander, whatever he was inside the shield recoiled a step at the impact, so she hit the shield again. Then again, and again, over and over, ignoring the stinging ache building in her fists.
By the third blow, there was a visible mark drawn on the pavement, a razor sharp separation between the protected asphalt within and the road surface outside, exposed to the waste heat of her assault. By the seventh blow, she could feel a peculiar rippling around her feet as the tar in the asphalt she was standing on started to boil. On the eighth, the storefront behind her target burst into flame.
On the eleventh, the uniform the undead leader was wearing did the same, and the twelfth - aided by the way that distracted him, perhaps, or simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, shattered the resistance at last.
“No! My Lady, do not abandon your-” the skeleton-man cried in terror as she lunged forward, only to have his words cut off as one last swing and burst of flame ate away at his bones until there was nothing left but charred chips and ashes on the wind.
Panting, Yoko hauled herself to a stop and looked around. The street looked like a vision of some Western hell - boiled, blasted, desolate and desecrated. Aside from the still immaculate sanctuary where mother and child huddled under Yatagarasu’s protection, what wasn’t on fire was already charred to black ash and cinders - cars and storefronts alike swallowed by the conflagration and reduced to twisted wreckage that went perfectly with the molten, ruined puddle of sullenly burning tar that had swallowed most of the street.
As she looked around, she became abruptly conscious of the aches and scrapes and throbbing all down her back, and the numb, frozen pain, shot with spikes of cracked-bone agony, that had replaced her hands. She also, on looking down a moment later, realized that her clothes had burned away along with half the rest of the block, leaving her literally as naked as the day she was born, save for the golden compact which had somehow found its way to a jewelry chain around her neck.
“...dammit.”
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Let me correct that error.
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MAHOU SHOUJO SHINTO SCION
Episode One:
"Sunrise"
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Quote:[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Inq's ded, now 1 more wave b4 I go punch RL 1s again.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: did htehy hit your neighborhood?
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: No, would’ve told U2. Hypothetical HHOS.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: ican stil lhardly belive these thigns are suppodsed to be real. Straight out of a mvoie...
[Team-OOC]Stormward: They are. My mother's been working all hours and worrying a lot, and she's scattered her work all over the place whenever she's been home.
Satou Yoko sat back a little in the chair facing her wheezing, elderly computer and wiped away the sweat starting to trickle down her face. Her tiny room in the equally tiny three-room-and-bath apartment she shared with her father was swelteringly hot in the summer heat, even with the fan set in the window and the brief, threadbare hot pants and tank top she'd put on as soon as she'd gotten home and been able to change out of her work uniform.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Sunsword: yes but sombies?1
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Less talk, more tank! Leave my pets alone you fucks!
Yoko giggled quietly and smacked the hotkey for her opener area-effect attack, and took a pull off the glass of ice water sweating all over the coaster in the middle of the crowded TV-dinner table next to her PC.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Sunsword: there ,aggroded.
[Team-OOC]Stormward: Don't worry, we'll finish them quickly.
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: LOL Sic em, boys! Fuck up their shit!
Yoko managed to not laugh out loud herself; her father was just on the other side of the thin wall separating their bedrooms, trying to rest after an overtime shift at his company's latest construction site. Work had been disrupted by an earthquake early in the process, and the client had paid extra to have their building finished by the original completion date. The extra work was good - the additional money from contracts just like that one had saved them from disaster several times in the past - but if her father wasn't old, yet, he'd lived a hard life, and keeping up with the pace wore at him.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Sunsword: monsters or not wer’re still on for tomorros, right/
Despite how long they’d been gaming together, and despite their all living in Tokyo proper, none of the three had ever met each other face to face. With Yoko’s part-time job only needing a morning shift for that Sunday and both of the others being free, they had finally found an ideal moment to correct that.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Damn straight. I refuse to believe either of you is /that/ fucking pretty.
[Team-OOC]Stormward: Whatever your judgement on that score may prove to be, I am indeed that tall.
Yoko didn’t like to think that she might be vain, but she only needed eyes to realized that she did have the kind of face and figure that the ‘popular’ girls of her school needed special diets, push-up brassieres, and extensive cosmetics to imitate. Even if she hadn’t, a never-ending parade of boys at school and male customers of all ages at her waitress job were invariably all too maddeningly eager to remind her.
On screen, one of the spider-like mechanoids Moonspawn’s character ‘built’ brought down the last of the twisted monsters with a tinny shotgun blast, and the schoolgirl took off her headphones to stretch and enjoy the momentary rush of cool air on her sweating ears and the singing tension all through her spine as she bent her entire body into an arc before yawning. Moonspawn’s description of herself had made Yoko think of the kind of delinquent she’d usually have gone out of her way to avoid, while Stormward had quoted some pretty effusive gushing by her own classmates with a kind of patient irritation that Yoko found very familiar.
The three friends discussed the details of their meeting for a few minutes more, then Yoko logged off to go to bed - whatever her plans for the evening, she had work the next morning, and once she’d shut down the computer she brushed her teeth in the closet the apartment’s landlord called a restroom and laid out her futon without covers so she could try to get some sleep.
* * * * *
“Rise and shine, Daddy!” Yoko caroled the next morning.
As usual, Satou Reiji reacted by throwing his pillow at her head. She ducked out of the way with a giggle and went back to the corner of the apartment’s main room that served as their kitchen, dishing out breakfast for both of them out of what was left from putting together their lunchboxes.
That one room made up half the space of the apartment, but it wasn’t by any means large itself. A small refrigerator, a two-burner stove, a sink, and about a meter of counter space filled the entirety of one wall. A card table in another corner had breakfast laid out on it, while the other walls held one door on the inward side and three - open, so that the fans in the outer windows could move cooling air through the living space - in the wall facing the outside of the apartment building.
For now, before the heat of the day kicked in, the apartment was only a bit warm, and Yoko dug into her breakfast with a will. when she opened her eyes, she found her father watching her, his own food untouched and a wistful smile on his face. “What?” she asked, a little creeped out.
“You look just like your mother when you’re happy like that,” he said fondly.
Yoko blinked. He’d commented on the resemblance before, which, since he hadn’t admitted to having any pictures of her, was the only clue she had as to what her mother had looked like - black hair, worn ‘much longer’ than her daughter’s, which was only a little past the shoulders, impossible, brilliant golden eyes set in a lovely face, a sleek figure with a prominent bust...
But the emphasis on her expression was new. “I make a different face when I’m serious?” she asked.
Her father blinked, then laughed quietly. “I only ever saw her be serious a few times, for maybe five minutes at a stretch.”
Yoko grinned triumphantly, delighted to’ve won another scrap of information free from her father’s reticence on the subject. “So, Mom was kind of a goofball, then?” she asked.
Reiji blinked again and picked up his chopsticks. “She was very lively,” he said, and began to eat.
She made an irritated noise and threw a grain of rice at him, which he picked out of the air and ate placidly. Her father rarely talked about her mother. Over nearly twelve years of actively trying, she still hadn’t filled the notebook she’d started to keep track of very fact she’d wormed out of him. Having him drop a fact like that and then clam up again was heartbreakingly frustrating. Yoko finished her breakfast in three oversized gulps and mumbled the morning’s goodbyes around the food with bad grace.
It was a few minutes later, when she got her bike - an ancient, half-rusted relic, but it worked - off of the rack by their apartment building’s parking, that the day started getting strange. The biggest bird she’d ever seen in person, a raven as long as her arm, was perched on the top of the rack, watching her. when she approached to unlock her bike, it flapped over to a nearby fence and cocked its head to keep staring at her with one dark eye.
“Okay, that?” Yoko muttered, “is officially creepy.”
Halfway through the several-mile trip, while she was waiting in traffic at a stop light, she saw the giant raven perch on top of a lightpost just ahead. A crowd of people on the street pulled out their cell phones and started snapping pictures. A part of her mind wanted to start pedaling as hard as she could to escape the disturbing thing stalking her, but she controlled the urge. Trying to race through morning rush traffic would be a good way to turn herself into street pizza, and a creepy bird was only possibly dangerous.
When she pulled her bike into the narrow access way behind the restaurant she worked at, the raven settled onto one branch of the shade tree planted just outside the entrance. A few moments in the staff restroom to change into her uniform and she was ready to start her shift just as the morning rush began to pick up. The minidress, stockings, and short jacket flattered her figure, and those of the other waitresses, quite nicely. Granted, working at what was essentially an off-brand Anna Miller’s had its downsides to dignity, but the pay was enough to make up for that, letting her pay for her small family’s entire food budget while still leaving time to attend school, if not to study much.
Fortunately, her grades could take it.
When Yoko glanced across the sidewalks as she walked over to tap the greeter on the shoulder and advise her of the opening of her assigned stretch of tables, she saw a familiar face sitting in a familiar place and groaned internally. If there had been any point putting it off, she would have, but there wasn’t, so instead she bustled over, put on her best lying cheerful welcome face and tried to ignore the way the college boy kept staring at her bust.
Today he’d brought a friend, just to complete the joy of the encounter, about the same age but with shoulder-length hair rather than short-cropped. Not bad looking, really - not at all - but then, the Annoying One was better than tolerable right up until he actually started drooling. She wouldn’t roll her eyes at the new one’s openly stunned expression, but it was a distinct strain to keep her irritation out of her face and voice as she took the orders.
And that was more or less how the morning went - dodge the occasional grope, smile at the juvenile twits ogling her ass, refill her stalker and his tag-along... if they hadn’t kept telling her not to make change, the kind of day she’d been having, she’d have slugged one of the perverts and told them to hang the damned job.
Eventually, half an hour short of the end of her shift, she managed to make her trip by the stalker’s table while he was away in the bathroom, draining away the endless cups of coffee she’d poured into him. She wasn’t going to turn down any chance to dodge dealing with the creep. his friend shook his head and kept nursing his own iced coffee, then, unexpectedly, asked, “Why don’t you just tell him you’re not interested?”
“Interested in what?” Yoko asked, as innocently as she could.
“In dating him,” the new guy answered, bluntly cutting through her attempt to dissemble her way around the question.
“I’m a waitress,” she told him, relaxing enough that her smile was more irony than cheer, “smiling at everyone comes with the job.”
The tag-along blinked at her - rather than her breasts - for a moment, then, befuddled, asked, “Why not just quit?”
“I like to eat,” she said, more sarcastically still.
And then the stalker came back and interrupted, and she made her escape by being flagged by another table. Behind her, she heard them still talking to each other.
“Dude! She was actually talking to you! You have to teach me your secret!”
“Oh, that’s easy. I didn’t try to get her in bed...”
Yoko giggled and got back to work.
* * * * *
On Sundays, this time of year, Yoko ate her lunch after changing out of her uniform, sitting on a bench at the bus stop. Absently, she flicked a bite of cheap hot dog over her shoulder, and a black spearpoint beak snapped it out of mid-air. “You’re going to keep following me?”
The raven, barely visible out of the corner of her eye, settled itself deeper onto the back of the bench and fluffed its feathers out a bit.
Yoko sighed. “Thought so.”
She ate slowly, finishing her meal and sipping on the bottle of tapwater she’d brought. She had a couple of hours yet before the meeting, and even with the length of the ride there was no need to hurry.
Then, in an alley nearby, someone screamed. Despite the pitch, it was a young man who bolted out into sight with bleeding gashes along his side and arm. He didn’t even pause or turn on the sidewalk, sprinting right out into traffic and only barely avoiding being hit.
The zombie - a withered, mummified, skeletal thing with long rusty talons on the gauntlets of its ramshackle armor - wasn’t as lucky. The sedan was moving quickly enough that its entire front end crumpled a little and, though the thing kept trying to move, the impact was enough to shatter ever bone beneath the undead husk’s waist.
That, in itself, would have only been startling, but that first monster had friends following it, dozens of them, reaching out with clawed fingers or bearing horribly corroded ancient weapons.
Someone else screamed - Yoko didn’t think it had been her - and then everyone started running. Not being a fool, she herself was one of them, and as she fled a corner of her mind was frantically trying to call to mind all the news reports she’d previously dismissed as unlikely to directly impact her life.
The walking dead, as impossible as it sounded... they were quicker and more agile in real life than in most games or fiction, but still less so than a healthy adult. No magic or acid vomit, and now bows or other ranged weapons save rotten javelins. Running was, in fact, what the sober, worried talking heads had recommended - most people in modern-day Tokyo weren’t athletic enough to properly outrun the untiring dead, but the few minutes they could keep ahead of the monsters were long enough for the Police and Japanese Self Defense Force units the government had stationed throughout the city to begin to respond.
Ahead of her as she ran was a mother, dragging her grade-school daughter behind her by one hand. Crossing a cross street - vehicles were nowhere to be found, all of them having fled by now themselves - the child tripped, skinning her knees, pulling her hand from her mother’s... and, most importantly, stopping her where she had fallen.
“Hanako!” the mother cried in terror, planting her feet to go back.
“Don’t stop, I have her!” Yoko ordered, and reached down to scoop the girl up into her arms, yanking her off the ground without breaking stride.
“Thank you!” the older woman gasped, and started running again. After a few strides she and Yoko were running side-by-side, with the graceless stomp-stomp-stomp hammer of the zombies close on their heels. If she’d pushed herself, Yoko could probably have outpaced her even carrying the daughter, but something inside her rebelled at the idea of escaping by leaving someone behind.
“This way!” a voice urged from ahead of them, and Yoko looked up from watching the ground in front of her feet to see a man in a police uniform waving them down a side street.
Yoko and Hanako’s mother traded glances and went as directed.
Fifty feet down the new street, they skidded to a halt in horror as a second force of undead began pouring out of the broken windows of the shattered shopfronts on either side of the road.
“All too easy,” the policeman said from behind them, and Yoko whirled to see him literally rip his face away from the weathered bone beneath. “Really, Sunchild, did you think you could hide forever?”
Yoko turned her head to give her comrade-in-terror a wordless ‘do you know what the hell he’s talking about?’ look, only to realize that she was receiving the same expression in return.
The skeleton-man laughed as the zombies rushed past him. “You didn’t know? How truly foolish the forces of Heaven are!”
“Not,” boomed out a clarion bass from overhead, “So foolish as to leave her unguarded in such times!”
“Yatagarasu!” the skeleton screamed as Yoko’s very own bird of ill omen swooped close overhead to settle to the ground in front of her.
“Wait, what?!” Yoko found herself blurting in shock.
“I bear many missives from Your holy mother,” the crow said to her, “But as things are we must begin with-”
“Kill them!” hissed the undead commander to his minions.
“-survival.” Yatagarasu’s beak fished... a compact? …out from beneath one wing. Despite the obstruction, his beautiful voice remained as clear and resonant as ever. “At the recitation of your name and lineage of the first order, this charm may loosen the restrictions placed upon your holy birthright by-CEASE, KNAVE!”
The crow interrupted his explanation to launch himself at the leading assaulting zombie, plunging all three clawed feet into its eyes and mouth with a thunderous shout.
Lineage of the first order... with certain death closing in quickly on all sides and no better options at hand, she accepted the... carved golden - no, it was a compact... and held it up, unconsciously striking a pose straight out of an anime.
“I am Satou Yoko, daughter of Satou Reiji and-” for a split second, the impossibility of the words made them catch in her throat. “Amaterasu-Omikami...”
When had it gotten so bright? She felt-
Light. Weightless, effortless, and alive.
Like she could run a marathon.
Like she’d just been freed from a boring classroom on a beautiful spring day and could dance for hours.
“...and I forbid you to harm anyone else!”
And then a zombie swung a sword at her head.
She shrieked and flinched and, instinctively, tried to ward it off with a thrown up arm.
It stopped the blade dead, in a flare of light and rush of heat, and a sound like an incoming jet engine. Splatters of molten steel splashed away from the searing shield, some of them falling on the bare skin of her arm and face.
It felt like hot water splattering out of a sink or shower.
“Put the peasants from your mind, My Lady! I shall ward them!” Yatagarasu called from outside her field of view.
Oh, lovely.
How dangerous were these zombies to her now, anyway? If her power could sear away even rusted steel like that, then it should have no trouble doing so to their rotten flesh...? Did it require conscious effort? How often and how consistently did it work? If it had just jumped out at her like that, then it should be fairly simple, though if ‘complete commitment’ or focus were needed, then...
She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She’d have to take the chance.
The skeleton-man was the only one of her foes that had talked. If any of them had more impossibilities at its command, it would be that one, the boss, so, he had to go first. The question was, how? Could she throw this... sunfire?
It was worth a try.
Experimentally, she reached for that just-passed feeling, the stretch and exaltation, like a runner’s high... and shoved
Flames burst from the air in front of her, flaring out in a rough, broad cone like some trumpet-belled flower.
“What?” the skeleton taunted as his minions closed in again. “What was that supposed to be, ikebana?”
“Ikebana this,” Yoko muttered, and grabbed at what she’d concluded was her power again as she broke into a sprint. A simple burst of fire might be more visually impressive than practically, but-
A screaming sweep turned one intercepting group to ash, then she ducked around a second group and incinerated the third and last bunch between her and-
It felt like being doused in a city aquarium’s worth of ice water, a freezing shock so intense it was an actual pain, and an incredible physical impact that literally picked her up and tossed her bodily across the street and into a solid wall with such force that fragments of brick and a cloud of dust billowed away like a volcanic eruption.
It felt like landing back-first in a box of styrofoam packing peanuts.
“Pathetic!” the skeleton laughed, with something much like relief in his voice, as she pried herself out of the brickwork and shook off the surprise.
If she’d felt any temptation to let her newfound power let her stop being afraid, that surprise, the feel of that... whatever it was... was enough to quell it.
She didn’t ever want to feel like that... whatever it was... had felt like ever again. But she couldn’t hurt the boss without getting at him, and if she didn’t...
Yoko was out of her crater and charging again before she realized it, riding a wave of fury that she knewwas mostly panic. It felt like running across a field of warm mud in her bare feet, and everything on the street was so very bright that she could see the shield that had repulsed her before, like a dome of dark smoke that left the false policeman half-visible at its center.
This time she was braced for the impact, ready to push back against it, so it only knocked her back off balance. She staggered, then shouted incoherently at the gloating skull on the other side and leaned back and put her entire body into the hardest haymaker she could throw.
This time the flower of sunlight was already at its target, and the nauseatingly-shaded shield pulsed a solid black under the impact.
The skeleton, sorcerer, commander, whatever he was inside the shield recoiled a step at the impact, so she hit the shield again. Then again, and again, over and over, ignoring the stinging ache building in her fists.
By the third blow, there was a visible mark drawn on the pavement, a razor sharp separation between the protected asphalt within and the road surface outside, exposed to the waste heat of her assault. By the seventh blow, she could feel a peculiar rippling around her feet as the tar in the asphalt she was standing on started to boil. On the eighth, the storefront behind her target burst into flame.
On the eleventh, the uniform the undead leader was wearing did the same, and the twelfth - aided by the way that distracted him, perhaps, or simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, shattered the resistance at last.
“No! My Lady, do not abandon your-” the skeleton-man cried in terror as she lunged forward, only to have his words cut off as one last swing and burst of flame ate away at his bones until there was nothing left but charred chips and ashes on the wind.
Panting, Yoko hauled herself to a stop and looked around. The street looked like a vision of some Western hell - boiled, blasted, desolate and desecrated. Aside from the still immaculate sanctuary where mother and child huddled under Yatagarasu’s protection, what wasn’t on fire was already charred to black ash and cinders - cars and storefronts alike swallowed by the conflagration and reduced to twisted wreckage that went perfectly with the molten, ruined puddle of sullenly burning tar that had swallowed most of the street.
As she looked around, she became abruptly conscious of the aches and scrapes and throbbing all down her back, and the numb, frozen pain, shot with spikes of cracked-bone agony, that had replaced her hands. She also, on looking down a moment later, realized that her clothes had burned away along with half the rest of the block, leaving her literally as naked as the day she was born, save for the golden compact which had somehow found its way to a jewelry chain around her neck.
“...dammit.”
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."