Re: Only A Fairy Tale (The Story Begins!)
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Thousand apologies for the lateness/lack of posting... well Engi practically handed me something for my character to do on a platter (thank you thank you thank you) so I couldn't very well dally now, could I? ^^; Warning: winding, maybe boringish post ahead.
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Fujiwara Kanna (et famille), Yatagarasu
"Blind Deer"
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So far for two out of the three members that made up the collective unit commonly referred to as the Fujiwara siblings, it had not been a good day.
For Kaname, there was only one reason. There were actually many reasons, but they basically equated to one major reason: Women. Uzaki Maiyuki still didn't like him, and made life just that bit more difficult for him whenever they happened to cross paths. As if his sister at home wasn't enough already. And Iyako. He hadn't done anything remotely outstanding, but yet here this girl was doting on him, on his every word and action. He didn't deserve this. He was considering entering a monastery.
Referring to Kanna, there were many major reasons for this. Firstly, their hot water supply was down; the old-fashioned boiler her father had been meaning to replace for years but simply never got around to finally gave out, with much spluttering and steam. She had been told this approximately a minute and five seconds after she had gone into the bathroom and received a rather unpleasant cold shower in the face. She had not screamed. In fact, she had controlled herself remarkably well. She'd only grabbed Kaname by the gullet and squeezed till he squirmed, not like the last time he'd really irritated her, when he'd gotten a horrible greenish-yellowish-black mark on his arm for his pains.
His arm. Right. She'd almost forgotten. The impulse to pinch him reminded her, and then she was sorry that she had made him squirm, for a little while.
Secondly, Tsuneo had tried to tell a joke at the breakfast table. He had never tried to tell a joke ever before. An ill portent.
It was a bad joke. It went something like this: Tsuneo asked, waving his fork in the air, his black eyes shining with some unreadable expression in them, "What do you call a blind deer?"
Kaname had stared blankly, with his best slightly-annoyed-but-willing-to-humour older brother look, and Kanna's chopsticks had stopped halfway en route to her mouth in mild shock. Tsuneo beamed.
The two older siblings elicited a response at the same time: "Dunno?"
"No idea. No eye-deer."
Duplicate blur looks, then Tsuneo, apparently blissfully unaware, continued: "Then, what do you call a paralyzed blind deer?"
"Electrocuted idea," said Kanna, while Kaname tried to consume more of his breakfast without wincing at the utter banality of the exchange.
"Still no idea!" said Tsuneo happily. "Last one, what do you call a dead paralyzed blind deer?" There being no response to this, Kanna massaging her forehead and Kaname looking steadfastly into his mug of coffee, he said, "Still no bloody idea."
Then they went to school, and they were not late. Possibly Tsuneo and his blind deer had something to do with this. Neither older sister nor brother wanted to deal with Tsuneo when he was in a funny mood, though Kanna often wished she knew how. At any rate Kanna had not far to go from parting with her brothers until at the very end of school a large crow with a rascally turn about the head whispered into her ear, in crow-speak: [Orphans. Two. Infirmary.], and she had no choice but to head there instead of the gate, cursing her luck. Why her? Why always her to know first?
Bloody crows.
Only one girl and the required medical specialist in the infirmary. One smallish, belligerent-looking girl, unconscious and probably middle school, and Arakami-sensei the nurse. Two big Orphans, more on the gigantic end of the Orphan food chain than the middling ones she normally saw. She couldn't do it alone, not unless Yatagarasu was the size of the Tokyo Tower, which it was not.
Fending the Orphans off took priority, and she left a spirit image of herself at the site together with Yatagarasu and the flute. Now running, in two minds, one telling her crow to avoid falling masonry as much as possible and at the same time stop the pincered Orphan from reaching in through the smashed windows and picking the limp girl up as though she were candy from a store. The other mind focusing on running. Running through the woods, the shortest shortcut she knew to the main high school building, to where she could maybe find Mudo Freya and that other girl with the wolf and as a drastic measure even Iya-tan would do.
She would have preferred Mudo, her being the most experienced and all, but she ran into a tall girl first, and would have gone on running past had she not tripped over her own feet and fallen onto the girl, having seen the sly sneaking form of Nagi in the very near distance. She had no quarrel with him yet, but she was sure she would have one, soon. With Nagi it was just a matter of time.
He ran off to a pair of girls approaching the woods, one a girl who did not like her brother (and vice versa, though it seemed a love-hate relationship), and the other was Iya-tan. Bingo. But they were all HiMEs, weren't they? Nagi = Orphans = HiMes = trouble.
"Orphans... at hospital..." she managed, catching her breath in great shuddering gasps, the tall shapely girl supporting her, for which she was grateful. "I'm fending them off for now, but... not sure... they're big... two of them..." And her neck jerked, as if pulled by the string of a marionette; the fact was that she was having a hard time of it, Yatagarasu and her other self. Yatagarasu, in this position, could not attack and yet defend at the same time. As a consequence the upper half of the infirmary building had been nearly ripped off, roof tiles hanging from beams. Kanna chose to fight rather than defend, and in reality she had no idea what to do.
The girl that disliked her brother, Maiyuki, was off like a shot, shouting some name that Kanna, intelligently, concluded was the name of the angry girl in the infirmary. Iya-tan smiled weakly at Kanna and dashed off after Maiyuki, making futile attempts to slow her down. The girl next to her said, "Can you walk? I'm Anko, by the way," and she replied "Fujiwara Kanna, nice to meet you, if only it was not this kind of situation," and they both hurried after the two disappearing blurs in front of them, although she turned back just to see what Nagi was doing about it. She saw a crow, and her yellow eyes gleamed. Careful, now. She had to be extra careful.
Back at the infirmary her own overlarge crow had been cornered by one Orphan, the other one, that had the pincers, again reaching into the hole in the building, to be curtailed by a firey blast from the general location of Maiyuki. The girl was incandescent, glowing, her rage making the fires burn brighter. Anko summoned her own weapon, a hefty black sword, and prepared to do battle. Iya-tan.. she couldn't see Iya-tan, but she knew she was there.
Kanna reached for her flute, felt it safe in her hands, and began to direct Yatagarasu to push the Orphan back further, now that there was backup that could do the defending. For her it was ever the onslaught of attack that held the sense of fulfilment, of duty.
This way she could measure her progress by the amount of Orphan bits that she removed in a minute.
