Oh, right, I'll do this here, too.
Yoko was not nearly as comfortable as she’d been that morning. If someone had asked her twelve hours ago, she’d have told them that that was flat-out impossible - she’d actually had to use the paper bag that bleak-eyed guard, Outa, had handed her, after all - but here she was in one of the Imperial Palace’s private reception rooms in the nicest dress she’d ever seen, let alone worn, trying not to throw up.
“Ah-hah! It is you!” said a cheerful voice that it took several moments for her to place, and she felt her eyes get even wider once she took in his face. It was, indeed, the friend her stalker had brought along the previous day, holding the arm of-
She bowed, deeply, to the very elderly man in the slacks and dress shirt. “Your Majesty,” she started to say, in the humblest and most formal phrasing the language offered, “I-”
“Stop,” the Emperor of Japan interrupted, and she cut off mid-word. Then, “Raise your head.”
She did, and saw him smile. “I think that for tonight, and between ourselves, we can all rely on plain speech.”
Yoko wasn’t quite able to keep herself from boggling, and he chuckled and waved her towards the door. “I take it that you and my grandson have met,” the Emperor said.
Well, that explained that, she thought under her crogglement, though not what he’d been doing wandering around annoying waitresses. “Um... once,” she said, not using the plain forms she’d have adopted with someone her own age but not going any farther than she would have to anyone else of his generation. “At my part-time job.”
“She does amazing things to a maid uniform,” the prince said, and Yoko was amazed to realize she could still produce her ‘no touching’ glare under these circumstances.
The Emperor chuckled, a sound as dusty and parchment-dry as the finely wrinkled hand that rested on his grandson’s supporting arm. “Please remember what I said about women carrying weapons, Ichirou.”
“...She’s not armed, Grandfather.”
Yoko forced herself to smile sweetly despite her stomach’s hysterical flip-flops. “Don’t worry, Ojiisama, I promise not to set him on fire.”
The Prince looked rather nonplussed as he remembered that she could, indeed, do just that, but the Emperor chuckled again. “You do have more bite than your mother,” he observed, and Yoko felt herself go gray.
“You know her?” she heard herself ask, as though on the other side of pane of glass, as the Prince helped his grandfather into a seat at the splendidly-set dining table.
“One of the family secrets,” the older man said, waving her into a chair opposite him as the Prince appropriated one on the third side of the table. “Meeting her and gaining her approval is part of the private ceremonial of coronation. So, you see, though I have been urged to deny your claim, it is impossible to do so honestly. Leaving aside the words of her favored messenger, the physical resemblance is remarkable.”
“Claim?” Yoko repeated blankly.
“To the Throne,” the Emperor said.
“You’re a lot more closely related to her than we are,” the Prince pointed out.
Yoko stared at them both for a moment, then put her head down and tried not to hyperventilate for a while. Eventually, she took one deliberate deep breath then sat back up and met the old man’s compassionate eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, firmly. “Since the throne was given to the Jimmu Emperor, right? So even if it was originally-”
Impossibility caught at her throat, but she forced herself to go on. “-my Mother’s to dispose of, it already has been, and aren’t children usually ahead of... of half-siblings for this kind of thing?”
“Historically, the matter has most often been determined by temporal power,” the Emperor observed as a squad of blandly well-dressed servants conjured a breathtakingly presented feast out of thin air then vanished with as little fuss as they had appeared.
Yoko focused on the conversation to keep herself from boggling still further, calling up memories of her history classes and the extra reading she’d done for them. “Temporal… like, armies, you mean? But, really, neither of us has that much of either, do we? Just… influence, I think is the word I want. Persuading people because, well, religion and so on. And you have the Imperial Household Agency, and its contacts in the civil bureaucracy, will let you do that much faster, much more firmly, than I can, right? So even if I were interested in becoming... becoming the Empress, I’d have to be stupid to think I had a chance.
The Prince was staring at her in pure shock, but the Emperor smiled as he picked up his chopsticks. “Young Miss Tanaka could easily overset those factors and provide you with a more than adequate powerbase,” he said, before politely initiating the meal.
“Ittadakimasu,” Yoko echoed, wondering how a girl her own age was supposed to do that, then realized with a frisson of shock and renewed awe that he was referring to the mother, who was indeed several generations younger than most of her peers, far less the man the Americans had installed in place of the Showa Emperor at the end of the Great Pacific War. “She’d have the power to change things, and more importantly she’d know how,” she admitted, “but nothing I’ve ever heard about her, including from S... From Izuna-san, makes me think that the idea her deciding to do so against the, whatsit, the rule of law is even believable, much less likely. Even if she were willing to ignore the law like that, I’d probably end up trying to do a lot more than is traditional, and that’d make her lose influence, lose power. It wouldn’t do her any good.”
The Emperor looked amused, and approving. “Perhaps we were both fortunate that the prospect does not compel you.”
“I know what having my body on display’s like,” Yoko said, voice flatter than she’d intended. “The thought of spending a lifetime with my every moment that way doesn’t appeal.”
“Why would you need her, though?” the Prince asked. “The power to smite the heathens and call down the fire sounds pretty temporal to me.”
“Yeah, but it’s a pretty personal sort of power, isn’t it?” Yoko said. “I mean, I can’t exactly burn down the entire city in one go - and even if I did, it’d be pretty stupid for a lot of reasons.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” the Prince said. “I mean, no one could blame you for fighting your enemies.”
“Who says that they’d have to be my enemies if I didn’t start burning their home?” Yoko said. “And look at how the entire economy felt it after Fukushima - burning a city would be at least as bad... And, it’d be evil.”
“Evil,” the Emperor repeated leadingly.
“Openly evil. I mean, I’d be literally burning people alive on national television!” She looked as though the thought made her physically ill, but kept talking. “And after seeing that, sure, people’d be scared - but they’d also be furious! And I know I’m not even needle-proof, let alone bulletproof.”
The Prince was looking at her funny, but the Emperor nodded. “Always a cogent point to keep in mind.”
She nodded. “Yeah, and not just for its own sake - it’s the Twenty-First century, not the eleventh, and people have their own ideas what’s ‘right’ rather than just their gods’ - I’d lose most of my, my moral authority, a lot more than I’d pick up impressing people.”
“Wait,” the Prince interrupted, “that’s not right. The bit about ‘right’, I mean. It might not be our gods anymore - not be you-”
Yoko tried not to look too much like a deer in the headlight of an oncoming high speed express train at the thought.
“-but ultimately all of our ‘modern morality’ does derive from a religious source - just a Christian one, imported by force or the threat of it.”
“From the West during Meiji or, well-”
“Just after my accession,” the Emperor said when Yoko’s argument tripped over who she was talking to. “But speaking as, shall we say, a private citizen, I don’t believe that the greatest factor of the time and its enduring influence was the Americans’ interest in in creating a situation that suited their own agendas. The hybrid arrangement that existed in my own youth had promised glory and security as its great value to society, after all, and led instead to a thorough military defeat.”
“That was more or less the impression I always got from the books I’ve read,” Yoko said, “but I was actually going someplace else with it - a lot of modern ethics work that way, yes, and come from the West, but if you look at classic Kabuki stories, and other views that go back before Meiji, Buddhist ideals and such - they might be religious, but they don’t come from the gods, just from, from looking at the universe and thinking about it, and they were imported from China and Korea without force.”
The Prince looked vaguely insulted - she could just hear his incredulous ‘Korea?!’ - but the Emperor focused on a different point, smiling as though at a deeply charming notion. “The intrinsic rightness of existence, is it?”
“More the rightness of evolving society,” Yoko said. “The universe can’t be just, it has botflies in it.”
For a moment, the genial old man sitting across from her seemed far less gentle and far more like the man the history books credited with bringing Mao Zedong and Douglas MacArthur to the same peace table at the hottest point of the Cold War. He met her eyes thoughtfully, then nodded, slowly and respectfully.
Bizarrely, painfully, the gesture of acknowledgement made her wish that her father had been there to see it, rather than closeted with the generals and doctors she’d spent the day with.
The Prince, for his part, looked clueless. “What,” he asked, “is a botfly?”
* * * * * * *
Yamaguchi Gorou, it was an open secret, was the single most powerful figure in the single most powerful of Japan’s yakuza criminal ‘families’. When the local yakuza group had moved in to take over the gang Tsukusa had thrown together out of the other whores’ kids, it hadn’t been the fear of the mangy collection of drunks, losers, and wanna-bes that they had called ‘soldiers’ that had made her decide to cut a deal - it had been their association with an ‘enterprise’ big enough to force concessions out of multinational megacorporations.
Tsukusa had been prepared for the kumichou to take several different tacks on the conversation - expectation of her future duties to the greater clan, genteel warnings that all ties would have to be cut, threats, bribes… almost anything but his propping his chin on one mangled hand - missing the entire pinky finger and the last joint of the ring, rumored to have been chopped off as an insult by a now-dead rival rather than self-inflicted in the repentance of proper yubisute - and asking after the health of her mother.
“What?” she asked blankly.
“I might regret her choice to retire,” he said, “but I do remember-”
“My mother has been dead for three years,” Tsukusa interrupted harshly, without the faintest care how unwise doing that to this man usually would have been.
The old man stopped. “What happened?” he asked.
“She started coke when I was eleven. Heroin the year after that. I was able to make sure she ate, even after she started buying rather than bringing home rent, but eventually she ended up with a bad batch.”
“...When did her allowance from your father stop?”
“There was never any money but what she earned or I got on my own.”
Yamaguchi just sat there for a long, grim moment, then inclined his head in a slight, but very real, bow. “There was,” he said quietly, “a time when I seriously considered proposing, oh, many things to her. But my position at the time was considerably junior to the one I now hold-”
Tsukusa’s mother had been sixteen when she was born, and the kumichou would have been past forty at the time, but that was hardly that unusual and as shaken as the news of her death had left him, she figured that Mom probably would have been better off.
“-but instead she caught the attention of a patron of our organization and I yielded precedence. It is to my shame that I forgot my regard for her and never inquired after her well-being past that point.”
“A… patron,” she repeated slowly, keeping the rage throttled back as far out of her voice as she could. “You knew who he was.”
“At the time, I did not. but my predecessors in my current position did.”
She had to think about it fairly hard to choke the killing fury down, but eventually she said, “Raise your head,” which was a formality since, remorse or not, his neck wasn’t exactly bent, “And let’s let that lie for now. What, exactly, do the family and that man have to do with each other?”
He explained the Yamaguchi-gumi’s bargain - trading ‘favors’ and entertainments, and arranging companionship during the god’s visits to the corporeal realm, in return for-
“Good luck,” Tsukusa said skeptically.
“It sounds insubstantial,” Yamaguchi admitted, “but several of my predecessors were modern men who attempted to negotiate matters otherwise. The difference the lack of his favor made was… striking.”
“...Guess I’m not gonna be just a legbreaker any more,” she said after a few moments thought.
“Certainly not if you’re prepared to talk to me like that,” the older man agreed.
“Ulp,” Tsukusa said when she realized what she’d said and to whom, making him chuckle.
“You have the great virtue of being right,” he said dryly. “Any irregularities in your own introduction aside, you are one of ours, and having control of such advantages will be of benefit to both yourself and your direct patrons.”
“‘An arrangement of mutual convenience,’” Tsukusa said, quoting something she’d been told when she was first brought in.
She’d hoped that the Yamaguchi-gumi could provide her - and more importantly, Tsukishi and Tsukiko and Tsunoko - with a reliable insurance for their future, something that wouldn’t abandon them and kick them into the abyss the way everything and everyone in her mother’s life had. But apparently the yakuza had been simply one more abandonment.
Tsukusa wasn’t sure what she’d do about that, yet, but in the meantime she could probably find some advantage in playing along.
She tried not to think about how much the de-facto betrayal hurt. ”I’ll look forward to it,” she said.
* * * * * * *
Izuna returned from her dinner with the Papal Nuncio in a towering - if well-hidden - fury, storming past the security posted outside the Prime Minister’s residence with her own guards trailing blank-faced behind a swirl of ozone, outrage, and fluttering sundress.
Her mother, of course, was still working in a late meeting, and strictly speaking she should have used the ‘free time’ to study the military and tactical manuals that had been dropped in her lap after she finished the starting tests…
But unless she managed to calm down a great deal, she wasn’t going to get anything productive done, not with her eyes crossing in sheer rage. She hadn’t expected a gaming session to be as calming as it usually would have been, since it made sense to expect that her two usual companions would be just as busy as she was.
But no, they were both on.
That wasn’t how it went, was it? But it wasn’t important.
Sadly not a surprise.
Magic. Goddess. Typing. Powers.
Bought her? Honestly, ew.
There was a long pause while Tsukusa’s character just stood there blankly and the other two annihilated a random monster that had spawned on top of the trio.
She probably actually would have to step in to prevent a cold-blooded murder, but a straight-up fight between daughter and erstwhile father was much more likely, and she knew which side of that she belonged on.
Izuna boggled.
It took several moments to collect herself enough to put fingers back to keyboard.
For a couple of moments, nothing happened, and then Sunsword - the character - turned to face Izuna’s own avatar and performed the ‘well duh’ animation the game developers had thoughtfully provided for such cases.
There were a lot of reasons why that wouldn’t stand.
* * * * * * *
Mentioning their intentions to Outa-san and the rest of their ‘handlers’ the next morning, though, had caused the advent of three ruggedized and not at all fashionable ‘secure phones’ like Izuna’s mother used, only minutes before Tsukusa - and, at her insistence, Izuna and Yoko as well - was ushered into a different section of the military base they’d all but moved in to.
“My Lady, My Lady!” Mokumoku cheered when Tsukusa poked her head into the comfortable room where the magic moon rabbit had been talking to the interrogator from the Public Security Intelligence Agency. Since they’d been told he was the one to request their assistance, the lack of surprise from the interrogator seated at the table the bunny was sitting on made sense, even as he stood up and stepped formally back to let Tsukusa take his place.
“Hey,” she answered, and habitually reached down to rub the tiny lapine behind her ears as Princess and Sunshine found their own seats. “You been getting along with Yamanaka here?”
“Yes!” the rabbit chirped back, obviously delighted by the contact… before she drooped in sudden depression. “But… I’m so sorry! I know that My Lady wanted me to tell him everything I could but, a lot of his questions aren’t things I really know the answer to. I’m not a healer or a politician, I just make mochi.”
Izuna’s expression was almost excessively bland, but Yoko looked like she was about to choke on her own tongue with the effort of suppressing the laughter that danced in her eyes.
Tsukusa shot them both a quick glare, then told Mokumoku, “Well, maybe you can give answering some questions we’ve got a shot.”
The rabbit sat up and squeaked eagerly. “Yes, My Lady!”
“What is a ‘god’, anyway?”
“...Oh dear,” Mokumoku fretted. “That’s…”
Tsukusa gave the worried little ‘animal’ another ear rub. “Hey, calm down. I know you won’t have the complicated version - I’m asking ‘cause I know that what you do know, you’ll give me straight rather’n trying to lead me around by my nose like the crow and the snake could.”
“My Lady!” the rabbit wailed, overcome by emotion as she clung to Tsukusa’s hand with both front paws - crying.
There was a sharp shutter-click noise, and she looked up to see Izuna lowering her phone, and smirking.
She flipped her off with her free hand, but addressed Mokumoku instead. “Come on, have some dignity. You’re never gonna not be my first minion, right?”
Yoko giggled as the rabbit let go and sat up, exuding an air of conscious dignity.
“Long ago, when the world was young and newly made…” Mokumoku said, in a tone that reminded Tsukusa of some storyteller in a period costume drama and made her picture the explanation as a series of ukiyo-e woodcuts.
As the rabbit had it, spirits had always existed in the world, which Tsukusa pictured as glowing orbs floating above trees and other objects.
Primitive human peasants had worshipped them, sending the power of their faith to those they revered, shown as much smaller orbs lifting off of their heads surrounded by white flames that flew over to the ‘god orbs’ to be absorbed.
Pleased by these sacrifices, the gods had taken their increased power and used it to create physical bodies, new flesh to hold their essences corporeally for the first time - pouring light into blood-colored human outlines until they turned into people.
After that, the new gods had gone among the humans, gathering still more power, and spent some of it - by no means all - to create new, lesser divine servants.
“Like, say, mochi-making moon bunnies?” Yoko asked.
“Yes, Lady Yoko!” Mokumoku squeaked back.
Izuna leaned forward. “How does that tie in to, say, my own association with lightning, or Yoko’s ability to generate radiation?”
The explanation made Tsukusa picture the worshipping peasants again, stamping little kanji labels on their spirit-orbs before they sent them to the patron goddess of a mountain, leaving her with a bit more power of her own, but also possession of a larger combined orb labeled as ‘Mountain Only’.
“That’s why none of the legends about my Mother sound anything like what I can do,” Yoko said, with the tone of voice someone used when they had a piece of a puzzle slide into place. “She was getting boosts ‘tagged’ as being about life and light and all the things people in the stone age could tell about the sun, and I’m getting the sort tagged for, well, the actual sun.”
“I… guess?” Mokumoku said hesitantly.
“It does confirm Yatagarasu’s explanation of the process,” Izuna said, making all three of the others look at her in surprise.
She blinked back. “What? I read those reports they sent us. Didn’t you?”
Tsukusa shook her head. “Nah, I figured it’d just be stuff we’d be hearing anyway.”
“They weren’t done last night,” Yoko said, “and I wanted to sit down and actually think about them rather than just doing it in passing.”
Tsukusa chuckled. “Guess I’d better get used to studying again.” She gave Mokumoku another ear-rub. “Thanks.”
Glossary:
”we can all rely on plain speech.” - Japanese, of course, has differing levels of politeness. In English, this function is performed by switching vocabulary - some words are inherently more formal than others. The technical term for what Japanese does instead probably isn’t actually conjugation, since it happens to other word classes as well as verbs, but it gets the idea - verbs, adverbs, and adjectives all get different grammatical endings depending on who is speaking to whom. Addressing the Imperial Person is its entire own class in its own right; the Emperor telling Yoko to use plain speech, as to an inferior or an intimate acquaintance or family member, is possibly even bigger than her crogglement implies. You’ll note that she doesn’t take him entirely at his word; ‘Ojiisama’ is far short of what his title would usually require, but it’s the most courteous way of addressing an elder gentleman.
The Showa Emperor - Traditionally, Japan reckoned years by counting from the crowning of the current Emperor, what’s called a Regnal Calendar. As an Emperor takes the throne, he selects a name that he intends to represent the kind of era he’ll rule over. When the Emperor dies or abdicates the throne, he’s known thereafter by the name of his era, as he was known simply as ‘The Emperor’ while on the throne.
the man the Americans had installed in place of the Showa Emperor at the end of the Great Pacific War - Welcome to Alternate History Land, folks. In MSSS’s world, the Imperial line are factually related to Amaterasu, and enjoy her active approval, so the Showa Emperor’s dropping that claim can’t happen. Picking a new Emperor was an alternative, and so Yoko et al live in the year Kousei 66.
Kumichou - I’m not as certain of this as I’d like, but I believe that kumichou is the title for the overall head of a yakuza family, the ultimate Godfather who’d have possible rivals, of other families, but no superiors.
Yubisute - The ritual removal of one or more joints of the little finger of the off-hand in repentance and payment for a sin or failure. The details are genuinely gruesome.
===========
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
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Mahou Shoujo Shinto Scion
Episode Five:
“Connection”
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Mahou Shoujo Shinto Scion
Episode Five:
“Connection”
==========================================================
Yoko was not nearly as comfortable as she’d been that morning. If someone had asked her twelve hours ago, she’d have told them that that was flat-out impossible - she’d actually had to use the paper bag that bleak-eyed guard, Outa, had handed her, after all - but here she was in one of the Imperial Palace’s private reception rooms in the nicest dress she’d ever seen, let alone worn, trying not to throw up.
“Ah-hah! It is you!” said a cheerful voice that it took several moments for her to place, and she felt her eyes get even wider once she took in his face. It was, indeed, the friend her stalker had brought along the previous day, holding the arm of-
She bowed, deeply, to the very elderly man in the slacks and dress shirt. “Your Majesty,” she started to say, in the humblest and most formal phrasing the language offered, “I-”
“Stop,” the Emperor of Japan interrupted, and she cut off mid-word. Then, “Raise your head.”
She did, and saw him smile. “I think that for tonight, and between ourselves, we can all rely on plain speech.”
Yoko wasn’t quite able to keep herself from boggling, and he chuckled and waved her towards the door. “I take it that you and my grandson have met,” the Emperor said.
Well, that explained that, she thought under her crogglement, though not what he’d been doing wandering around annoying waitresses. “Um... once,” she said, not using the plain forms she’d have adopted with someone her own age but not going any farther than she would have to anyone else of his generation. “At my part-time job.”
“She does amazing things to a maid uniform,” the prince said, and Yoko was amazed to realize she could still produce her ‘no touching’ glare under these circumstances.
The Emperor chuckled, a sound as dusty and parchment-dry as the finely wrinkled hand that rested on his grandson’s supporting arm. “Please remember what I said about women carrying weapons, Ichirou.”
“...She’s not armed, Grandfather.”
Yoko forced herself to smile sweetly despite her stomach’s hysterical flip-flops. “Don’t worry, Ojiisama, I promise not to set him on fire.”
The Prince looked rather nonplussed as he remembered that she could, indeed, do just that, but the Emperor chuckled again. “You do have more bite than your mother,” he observed, and Yoko felt herself go gray.
“You know her?” she heard herself ask, as though on the other side of pane of glass, as the Prince helped his grandfather into a seat at the splendidly-set dining table.
“One of the family secrets,” the older man said, waving her into a chair opposite him as the Prince appropriated one on the third side of the table. “Meeting her and gaining her approval is part of the private ceremonial of coronation. So, you see, though I have been urged to deny your claim, it is impossible to do so honestly. Leaving aside the words of her favored messenger, the physical resemblance is remarkable.”
“Claim?” Yoko repeated blankly.
“To the Throne,” the Emperor said.
“You’re a lot more closely related to her than we are,” the Prince pointed out.
Yoko stared at them both for a moment, then put her head down and tried not to hyperventilate for a while. Eventually, she took one deliberate deep breath then sat back up and met the old man’s compassionate eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, firmly. “Since the throne was given to the Jimmu Emperor, right? So even if it was originally-”
Impossibility caught at her throat, but she forced herself to go on. “-my Mother’s to dispose of, it already has been, and aren’t children usually ahead of... of half-siblings for this kind of thing?”
“Historically, the matter has most often been determined by temporal power,” the Emperor observed as a squad of blandly well-dressed servants conjured a breathtakingly presented feast out of thin air then vanished with as little fuss as they had appeared.
Yoko focused on the conversation to keep herself from boggling still further, calling up memories of her history classes and the extra reading she’d done for them. “Temporal… like, armies, you mean? But, really, neither of us has that much of either, do we? Just… influence, I think is the word I want. Persuading people because, well, religion and so on. And you have the Imperial Household Agency, and its contacts in the civil bureaucracy, will let you do that much faster, much more firmly, than I can, right? So even if I were interested in becoming... becoming the Empress, I’d have to be stupid to think I had a chance.
The Prince was staring at her in pure shock, but the Emperor smiled as he picked up his chopsticks. “Young Miss Tanaka could easily overset those factors and provide you with a more than adequate powerbase,” he said, before politely initiating the meal.
“Ittadakimasu,” Yoko echoed, wondering how a girl her own age was supposed to do that, then realized with a frisson of shock and renewed awe that he was referring to the mother, who was indeed several generations younger than most of her peers, far less the man the Americans had installed in place of the Showa Emperor at the end of the Great Pacific War. “She’d have the power to change things, and more importantly she’d know how,” she admitted, “but nothing I’ve ever heard about her, including from S... From Izuna-san, makes me think that the idea her deciding to do so against the, whatsit, the rule of law is even believable, much less likely. Even if she were willing to ignore the law like that, I’d probably end up trying to do a lot more than is traditional, and that’d make her lose influence, lose power. It wouldn’t do her any good.”
The Emperor looked amused, and approving. “Perhaps we were both fortunate that the prospect does not compel you.”
“I know what having my body on display’s like,” Yoko said, voice flatter than she’d intended. “The thought of spending a lifetime with my every moment that way doesn’t appeal.”
“Why would you need her, though?” the Prince asked. “The power to smite the heathens and call down the fire sounds pretty temporal to me.”
“Yeah, but it’s a pretty personal sort of power, isn’t it?” Yoko said. “I mean, I can’t exactly burn down the entire city in one go - and even if I did, it’d be pretty stupid for a lot of reasons.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” the Prince said. “I mean, no one could blame you for fighting your enemies.”
“Who says that they’d have to be my enemies if I didn’t start burning their home?” Yoko said. “And look at how the entire economy felt it after Fukushima - burning a city would be at least as bad... And, it’d be evil.”
“Evil,” the Emperor repeated leadingly.
“Openly evil. I mean, I’d be literally burning people alive on national television!” She looked as though the thought made her physically ill, but kept talking. “And after seeing that, sure, people’d be scared - but they’d also be furious! And I know I’m not even needle-proof, let alone bulletproof.”
The Prince was looking at her funny, but the Emperor nodded. “Always a cogent point to keep in mind.”
She nodded. “Yeah, and not just for its own sake - it’s the Twenty-First century, not the eleventh, and people have their own ideas what’s ‘right’ rather than just their gods’ - I’d lose most of my, my moral authority, a lot more than I’d pick up impressing people.”
“Wait,” the Prince interrupted, “that’s not right. The bit about ‘right’, I mean. It might not be our gods anymore - not be you-”
Yoko tried not to look too much like a deer in the headlight of an oncoming high speed express train at the thought.
“-but ultimately all of our ‘modern morality’ does derive from a religious source - just a Christian one, imported by force or the threat of it.”
“From the West during Meiji or, well-”
“Just after my accession,” the Emperor said when Yoko’s argument tripped over who she was talking to. “But speaking as, shall we say, a private citizen, I don’t believe that the greatest factor of the time and its enduring influence was the Americans’ interest in in creating a situation that suited their own agendas. The hybrid arrangement that existed in my own youth had promised glory and security as its great value to society, after all, and led instead to a thorough military defeat.”
“That was more or less the impression I always got from the books I’ve read,” Yoko said, “but I was actually going someplace else with it - a lot of modern ethics work that way, yes, and come from the West, but if you look at classic Kabuki stories, and other views that go back before Meiji, Buddhist ideals and such - they might be religious, but they don’t come from the gods, just from, from looking at the universe and thinking about it, and they were imported from China and Korea without force.”
The Prince looked vaguely insulted - she could just hear his incredulous ‘Korea?!’ - but the Emperor focused on a different point, smiling as though at a deeply charming notion. “The intrinsic rightness of existence, is it?”
“More the rightness of evolving society,” Yoko said. “The universe can’t be just, it has botflies in it.”
For a moment, the genial old man sitting across from her seemed far less gentle and far more like the man the history books credited with bringing Mao Zedong and Douglas MacArthur to the same peace table at the hottest point of the Cold War. He met her eyes thoughtfully, then nodded, slowly and respectfully.
Bizarrely, painfully, the gesture of acknowledgement made her wish that her father had been there to see it, rather than closeted with the generals and doctors she’d spent the day with.
The Prince, for his part, looked clueless. “What,” he asked, “is a botfly?”
* * * * * * *
Yamaguchi Gorou, it was an open secret, was the single most powerful figure in the single most powerful of Japan’s yakuza criminal ‘families’. When the local yakuza group had moved in to take over the gang Tsukusa had thrown together out of the other whores’ kids, it hadn’t been the fear of the mangy collection of drunks, losers, and wanna-bes that they had called ‘soldiers’ that had made her decide to cut a deal - it had been their association with an ‘enterprise’ big enough to force concessions out of multinational megacorporations.
Tsukusa had been prepared for the kumichou to take several different tacks on the conversation - expectation of her future duties to the greater clan, genteel warnings that all ties would have to be cut, threats, bribes… almost anything but his propping his chin on one mangled hand - missing the entire pinky finger and the last joint of the ring, rumored to have been chopped off as an insult by a now-dead rival rather than self-inflicted in the repentance of proper yubisute - and asking after the health of her mother.
“What?” she asked blankly.
“I might regret her choice to retire,” he said, “but I do remember-”
“My mother has been dead for three years,” Tsukusa interrupted harshly, without the faintest care how unwise doing that to this man usually would have been.
The old man stopped. “What happened?” he asked.
“She started coke when I was eleven. Heroin the year after that. I was able to make sure she ate, even after she started buying rather than bringing home rent, but eventually she ended up with a bad batch.”
“...When did her allowance from your father stop?”
“There was never any money but what she earned or I got on my own.”
Yamaguchi just sat there for a long, grim moment, then inclined his head in a slight, but very real, bow. “There was,” he said quietly, “a time when I seriously considered proposing, oh, many things to her. But my position at the time was considerably junior to the one I now hold-”
Tsukusa’s mother had been sixteen when she was born, and the kumichou would have been past forty at the time, but that was hardly that unusual and as shaken as the news of her death had left him, she figured that Mom probably would have been better off.
“-but instead she caught the attention of a patron of our organization and I yielded precedence. It is to my shame that I forgot my regard for her and never inquired after her well-being past that point.”
“A… patron,” she repeated slowly, keeping the rage throttled back as far out of her voice as she could. “You knew who he was.”
“At the time, I did not. but my predecessors in my current position did.”
She had to think about it fairly hard to choke the killing fury down, but eventually she said, “Raise your head,” which was a formality since, remorse or not, his neck wasn’t exactly bent, “And let’s let that lie for now. What, exactly, do the family and that man have to do with each other?”
He explained the Yamaguchi-gumi’s bargain - trading ‘favors’ and entertainments, and arranging companionship during the god’s visits to the corporeal realm, in return for-
“Good luck,” Tsukusa said skeptically.
“It sounds insubstantial,” Yamaguchi admitted, “but several of my predecessors were modern men who attempted to negotiate matters otherwise. The difference the lack of his favor made was… striking.”
“...Guess I’m not gonna be just a legbreaker any more,” she said after a few moments thought.
“Certainly not if you’re prepared to talk to me like that,” the older man agreed.
“Ulp,” Tsukusa said when she realized what she’d said and to whom, making him chuckle.
“You have the great virtue of being right,” he said dryly. “Any irregularities in your own introduction aside, you are one of ours, and having control of such advantages will be of benefit to both yourself and your direct patrons.”
“‘An arrangement of mutual convenience,’” Tsukusa said, quoting something she’d been told when she was first brought in.
She’d hoped that the Yamaguchi-gumi could provide her - and more importantly, Tsukishi and Tsukiko and Tsunoko - with a reliable insurance for their future, something that wouldn’t abandon them and kick them into the abyss the way everything and everyone in her mother’s life had. But apparently the yakuza had been simply one more abandonment.
Tsukusa wasn’t sure what she’d do about that, yet, but in the meantime she could probably find some advantage in playing along.
She tried not to think about how much the de-facto betrayal hurt. ”I’ll look forward to it,” she said.
* * * * * * *
Izuna returned from her dinner with the Papal Nuncio in a towering - if well-hidden - fury, storming past the security posted outside the Prime Minister’s residence with her own guards trailing blank-faced behind a swirl of ozone, outrage, and fluttering sundress.
Her mother, of course, was still working in a late meeting, and strictly speaking she should have used the ‘free time’ to study the military and tactical manuals that had been dropped in her lap after she finished the starting tests…
But unless she managed to calm down a great deal, she wasn’t going to get anything productive done, not with her eyes crossing in sheer rage. She hadn’t expected a gaming session to be as calming as it usually would have been, since it made sense to expect that her two usual companions would be just as busy as she was.
But no, they were both on.
Quote:Stormward: Shouldn’t you be studying?
Moonspawn: Pot, kettle, white?
That wasn’t how it went, was it? But it wasn’t important.
Quote:Sunsword: Fight with my dad.
Sadly not a surprise.
Quote:Stormward: Yeah, I just got back from my dinner meeting.
Stormward: Which, by the way, was a complete and total disaster.
Moonspawn: 2 venting, 1 thinking. Bsy nite.
Sunsword: Moons’ dad’s an asshole.
Stormward: I suspected. But Sun, since when can you spell?
Sunsword: Since magic goddess typing powers, apparently.
Magic. Goddess. Typing. Powers.
Quote:Stormward: Seriously?
Moonspawn: Srsly.
Stormward: We’ll need to mention it to the brain types tomorrow.
Sunsword; You think my -typing faster- is important?
Stormward: No, but who says I’m right?
Sunsword: ...Point.
Stormward: So, what’s this about the great god Tsukiyomi?
Moonspawn: He didn’t just ditch my mom, he chased off anybody that’d’ve helped her out.
Moonspawn: And -didn’t- do whatever freaky good luck thing let him buy her off the yakuza in the first place
Bought her? Honestly, ew.
Quote:Stormward: ...Wow, that -is- a dick move.
Sunsword: Let us know if you need help getting rid of the body.
Sunsword: I’m pretty sure I could burn it.
Moonspawn: You do realize that that seriously might be an issue, right?
Sunsword: If he’s willing to deliberately make someone dependant on him, then ditch them comple
Sunsword: tely, he’s not just a creep, he’s evil.
Sunsword: Seriously, let us know.
There was a long pause while Tsukusa’s character just stood there blankly and the other two annihilated a random monster that had spawned on top of the trio.
Quote:Moonspawn: Princess’d have to stop us.
Stormward: Or just make sure you weren’t caught.
She probably actually would have to step in to prevent a cold-blooded murder, but a straight-up fight between daughter and erstwhile father was much more likely, and she knew which side of that she belonged on.
Quote:Moonspawn: Shit, now you’ve got me going all sissyeyed.
Stormward: Sadly, we will never have pictures.
Stormward: Unless we bribe your siblings to take them.
Stormward: What was your little brother’s number again?
Moonspawn: Orite, we can afford cells now.
Izuna boggled.
Quote:Stormward: You don’t have a cell phone?!
Moonspawn: Nope.
Sunsword: Neither do I.
It took several moments to collect herself enough to put fingers back to keyboard.
Quote:Stormward: HOW?!
For a couple of moments, nothing happened, and then Sunsword - the character - turned to face Izuna’s own avatar and performed the ‘well duh’ animation the game developers had thoughtfully provided for such cases.
Quote:Sunsword: Poor, remember?
There were a lot of reasons why that wouldn’t stand.
Quote:Stormward: We’ll have to fix that.
Moonspawn: Im game.
Sunsword: I’ve never needed one before.
Stormward: You’ve never had an on-call job before, either, have you?
Moonspawn: ofc, ur really just trying to seduce us 2 the hip side.
Stormward: An incidental benefit.
Sunsword: ...Sure, a shopping trip does sound kind of fun.
* * * * * * *
Mentioning their intentions to Outa-san and the rest of their ‘handlers’ the next morning, though, had caused the advent of three ruggedized and not at all fashionable ‘secure phones’ like Izuna’s mother used, only minutes before Tsukusa - and, at her insistence, Izuna and Yoko as well - was ushered into a different section of the military base they’d all but moved in to.
“My Lady, My Lady!” Mokumoku cheered when Tsukusa poked her head into the comfortable room where the magic moon rabbit had been talking to the interrogator from the Public Security Intelligence Agency. Since they’d been told he was the one to request their assistance, the lack of surprise from the interrogator seated at the table the bunny was sitting on made sense, even as he stood up and stepped formally back to let Tsukusa take his place.
“Hey,” she answered, and habitually reached down to rub the tiny lapine behind her ears as Princess and Sunshine found their own seats. “You been getting along with Yamanaka here?”
“Yes!” the rabbit chirped back, obviously delighted by the contact… before she drooped in sudden depression. “But… I’m so sorry! I know that My Lady wanted me to tell him everything I could but, a lot of his questions aren’t things I really know the answer to. I’m not a healer or a politician, I just make mochi.”
Izuna’s expression was almost excessively bland, but Yoko looked like she was about to choke on her own tongue with the effort of suppressing the laughter that danced in her eyes.
Tsukusa shot them both a quick glare, then told Mokumoku, “Well, maybe you can give answering some questions we’ve got a shot.”
The rabbit sat up and squeaked eagerly. “Yes, My Lady!”
“What is a ‘god’, anyway?”
“...Oh dear,” Mokumoku fretted. “That’s…”
Tsukusa gave the worried little ‘animal’ another ear rub. “Hey, calm down. I know you won’t have the complicated version - I’m asking ‘cause I know that what you do know, you’ll give me straight rather’n trying to lead me around by my nose like the crow and the snake could.”
“My Lady!” the rabbit wailed, overcome by emotion as she clung to Tsukusa’s hand with both front paws - crying.
There was a sharp shutter-click noise, and she looked up to see Izuna lowering her phone, and smirking.
She flipped her off with her free hand, but addressed Mokumoku instead. “Come on, have some dignity. You’re never gonna not be my first minion, right?”
Yoko giggled as the rabbit let go and sat up, exuding an air of conscious dignity.
“Long ago, when the world was young and newly made…” Mokumoku said, in a tone that reminded Tsukusa of some storyteller in a period costume drama and made her picture the explanation as a series of ukiyo-e woodcuts.
As the rabbit had it, spirits had always existed in the world, which Tsukusa pictured as glowing orbs floating above trees and other objects.
Primitive human peasants had worshipped them, sending the power of their faith to those they revered, shown as much smaller orbs lifting off of their heads surrounded by white flames that flew over to the ‘god orbs’ to be absorbed.
Pleased by these sacrifices, the gods had taken their increased power and used it to create physical bodies, new flesh to hold their essences corporeally for the first time - pouring light into blood-colored human outlines until they turned into people.
After that, the new gods had gone among the humans, gathering still more power, and spent some of it - by no means all - to create new, lesser divine servants.
“Like, say, mochi-making moon bunnies?” Yoko asked.
“Yes, Lady Yoko!” Mokumoku squeaked back.
Izuna leaned forward. “How does that tie in to, say, my own association with lightning, or Yoko’s ability to generate radiation?”
The explanation made Tsukusa picture the worshipping peasants again, stamping little kanji labels on their spirit-orbs before they sent them to the patron goddess of a mountain, leaving her with a bit more power of her own, but also possession of a larger combined orb labeled as ‘Mountain Only’.
“That’s why none of the legends about my Mother sound anything like what I can do,” Yoko said, with the tone of voice someone used when they had a piece of a puzzle slide into place. “She was getting boosts ‘tagged’ as being about life and light and all the things people in the stone age could tell about the sun, and I’m getting the sort tagged for, well, the actual sun.”
“I… guess?” Mokumoku said hesitantly.
“It does confirm Yatagarasu’s explanation of the process,” Izuna said, making all three of the others look at her in surprise.
She blinked back. “What? I read those reports they sent us. Didn’t you?”
Tsukusa shook her head. “Nah, I figured it’d just be stuff we’d be hearing anyway.”
“They weren’t done last night,” Yoko said, “and I wanted to sit down and actually think about them rather than just doing it in passing.”
Tsukusa chuckled. “Guess I’d better get used to studying again.” She gave Mokumoku another ear-rub. “Thanks.”
==========================================================
Glossary:
”we can all rely on plain speech.” - Japanese, of course, has differing levels of politeness. In English, this function is performed by switching vocabulary - some words are inherently more formal than others. The technical term for what Japanese does instead probably isn’t actually conjugation, since it happens to other word classes as well as verbs, but it gets the idea - verbs, adverbs, and adjectives all get different grammatical endings depending on who is speaking to whom. Addressing the Imperial Person is its entire own class in its own right; the Emperor telling Yoko to use plain speech, as to an inferior or an intimate acquaintance or family member, is possibly even bigger than her crogglement implies. You’ll note that she doesn’t take him entirely at his word; ‘Ojiisama’ is far short of what his title would usually require, but it’s the most courteous way of addressing an elder gentleman.
The Showa Emperor - Traditionally, Japan reckoned years by counting from the crowning of the current Emperor, what’s called a Regnal Calendar. As an Emperor takes the throne, he selects a name that he intends to represent the kind of era he’ll rule over. When the Emperor dies or abdicates the throne, he’s known thereafter by the name of his era, as he was known simply as ‘The Emperor’ while on the throne.
the man the Americans had installed in place of the Showa Emperor at the end of the Great Pacific War - Welcome to Alternate History Land, folks. In MSSS’s world, the Imperial line are factually related to Amaterasu, and enjoy her active approval, so the Showa Emperor’s dropping that claim can’t happen. Picking a new Emperor was an alternative, and so Yoko et al live in the year Kousei 66.
Kumichou - I’m not as certain of this as I’d like, but I believe that kumichou is the title for the overall head of a yakuza family, the ultimate Godfather who’d have possible rivals, of other families, but no superiors.
Yubisute - The ritual removal of one or more joints of the little finger of the off-hand in repentance and payment for a sin or failure. The details are genuinely gruesome.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
