The Lantern Festival (10) : Scientists have been hard at work trying to understand the strange, glowing qualities of the luminescent caterpillars found in the caves by the reservoir. The caterpillars still shrivel up if they are taken out of the caves but their glowing secretions have been processed into an organic paste that can withstand the outside world. The city is selling paper lanterns infused with various seeds. The glow paste is full of minerals to support healthy plant growth without risking damage to the environment; all lantern purchases come with a small packet of activating power that will heat the paste up enough to mimic the effects of a candle without the concerns of flammability. When the glow paste loses its heat, the lantern will return to the Earth and upon the first rain (or any contact with water) the paper will dissolve and the seeds may begin to grow. All proceeds from the lanterns are put right back into the community to support local conservation and environmental protection efforts.
The dead spots around town wouldn’t leave Reiki alone.
Well, strictly speaking, they probably would’ve done if he had stopped checking around the city parks for them when he went out on patrol, trying to keep track of different dead spots and any observations about them that seemed relevant to report back to Kerberos and Ida. Strictly speaking, Reiki could have just walked away and gone off home to, he didn’t know, draw all over his journal, making lopsided hearts around nonsense like “Mrs. Levi Burningham,”“Mr. Rokugin-Burningham,”“Mrs. Reiki Burningham,”“Mr. Levi Burningham-Rokugin,” and so on.
(He hadn’t done anything like that. Sometimes, Reiki liked to pretend he had a crazy little thing called dignity.… But Levi’s name did show up quite often, usually surrounded by phrases like “brilliant,” “beautiful,” and “way too good for me.”)
But……Reiki was supposed to be a magical girl now. For one thing, he wasn’t going to get a better handle on his magic and making it work properly if he tried to avoid doing magical girl things. For another, weren’t magical girls supposed to, y’know, help people? Defend the cities they served? Stand up for whatever values they prized most highly? (Reiki had never heard of a magical girl whose guiding principles were things like “solidarity,” “queer liberation,” and “harm reduction,” but he supposed that was probably a bit above the heads of the usual target audience for manga like Cardcaptor Sakura.)
Either way, a real magical girl would not, in his estimation, just ignore something as big and obviously important as these dead spots all over town.
The issue was that simply observing them……didn’t actually accomplish much of anything. It was like staking out the home of someone who never went outside, waiting for something that wouldn’t come. On their own, they seemed to exist in a state of equilibrium……which meant that, even though he and Fang had certainly dealt with a mess when using their magic around the dead spot in Ramsett Park, Reiki was going to need to do something to upset that delicate balance.
What to do, though, was an enormous question……until he looked around the park and noticed: there certainly were a lot of little lanterns hanging up, weren’t there. City Council or the Chamber of Commerce or somebody had been selling them as part of Star Festival, helping raise money for local environmental protection efforts. Instead of glowing by virtue of a candle, they’d been lit up thanks to some paste made from the glowing worms out in the reservoir’s cryptid caves. Most of the lanterns around South Bend Park were still blazing, despite the time of night, which meant they still had some of the glow-paste in them.
Hmmm.
Touching the plants in the dead spot only made them turn to ash, but Reiki wondered……how might they react to the glow paste? Or to the water that was supposed to break apart the lanterns and let their seeds take root? Only one way to find out, he supposed—and tonight, that way was going to be “gathering up lanterns, placing them around the perimeter of the dead spot, hitting them with drinking fountain water, and seeing what happened.”
Sweenys_Revenge
Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 4:43 pm
It was Rana's first time with the Star Festival, and she was loving it. All of the food and the festivities and the stalls all around the city... it felt like the festivals back home, in China. There were even fireworks lighting up the sky every night, enchanting Rana with their colors. She loved fireworks. The way they clapped through the sky, resonating through her chest cavity as they did so. They were like little sun exploding over and over and Rana couldn't get enough of them. She made a note to beg Xi to let her take him and the rest of her harem out to see a show this week.
Tonight, however, Rana wanted to see the lanterns.
She had not, herself, seen the glowing catterpillars, but Miss Acubens had been investigating them the way she and other ranking senshi on their team investigated phenomena to make sure it wasn't Mirrorspace being ill tempered. Miss Acubens' report had been characteristically but still tragically underwhelming.
"They're caterpillars, Rana. Break a glow stick over one later if you're really interested."
Of course her tone had changed when Acubens found out how good for plant growth the glow was. Suddenly Rana was charged with fetching about half a dozen with money Miss Acubens had given her -- which Rana would NOT be using, Daddy gave her her own money for a reason. Not that she minded really but... she'd been a senshi for so long and... Rana wished Acubens trusted her with more responsibility. Aside from Tegmine everyone else had terribly important roles to play on the team. Kiuchi co-led with her. Logos was second in command. She and Tegmine were relegated to the outskirts, always shielded and never engaged in real work.
Important work.
Rana supposed this was Miss Acubens' way of protecting the newer of the senshi while they were training but...
Rana was bored. And she wished that there was something terribly important for her to do.
A dark mirror aura pulled Rana out of her self-pity. Greeting one of their kind with open arms like Miss Acubens taught her was more important work, at least, than fetching seeds. And Miss Acubens also wouldn't fault her for not getting those seeds if it meant that she was doing this slightly-more-important-than-seeds work, right?
Rana didn't give another moment to thought and instead approached the other senshi. Her fuku certainly was gorgeous, and it made Rana feel slightly humbled in her own tattered one. There had to be something like that online somewhere, or in some far off boutique. Hell, if she just remembered enough detail, Rana was certain her father would have that made for her.
But that was for later.
"Hello," she greeted, mandarin accenting her speech just lightly. "I don't think we've met. I'm Rana, of the Kuchisake Onna."
Reiki had been so engrossed in trying to turn everything on his mind about the dead spots into an actual coherent plan, he completely missed the fellow Dark Mirror aura approaching him. He didn’t notice a thing until she’d already snuck up on him and made him jump a bit……which he felt more than a little silly for as he turned to look at her, lanterns in hand. Blinking, he needed a moment to process both whom he was looking at—a dark-haired teenage girl in a short, kimono-adjacent-looking fuku, very cute and done in black and red, with gold bracers glimmering underneath her bell sleeves—and what she’d said.
Lifting a hand, he gave her a finger-wave and a small smile. “Sailor Murikabushi of Hunger,” he told her kindly, “and we haven’t—but for what it’s worth? I’m pretty new here, so there are a lot of us I haven’t met yet. And before you can ask,” he added with a wry little grin, “I do think you’re pretty, though I also hope that answer isn’t going to get me knifed?”
Sweenys_Revenge
Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2022 6:09 pm
amorremanet
???
Oh! A man! Rana was about to apologize for her transgression, even if it was in her head, but he kept talking, and Rana's face lit up. She clapped soundlessly like the teenager that she was and nearly dancing to the other senshi's side.
"You know about my sphere? Almost no one else does!"
She composed herself afterward, taking her giddy smile down to one that was more demure and said in a serious tone, "but I thought that the way to defeat her was the say she looked average?" And to be fair, that would defeat Rana too. The idea of not looking totally stunning was just... It was too much. Rana spent too much money and worked too hard to be anything less than sensational.
"Did Miss Acubens send you out too," she asked, gesturing at the lanterns. "She sent more for some of these. Evidently they're good for planting, and Miss Acubens has a prolific garden in Destiny City and on her realm."
Though it did chafe her that Miss Acubens may have sent someone else out to do the same job. Did she not trust Rana? Did she think Rana would fail? Was this a babysitter or insurance?
