thenearshore | 018 | Season Spirits

018 | Season Spirits

Who: Everyone!
What: Season spirits and spooky things
When: IC August 1-15
Where: The Near Shore and Far Shore
Summary: It's the time for spirits to get a bit more 'lively'.

August is a spiritual season in Japan with many people preparing for the Obon festival but many others get into the spirit in another way. All across Japan, people have begun to share their favorite summer ghost stories. Movie theaters advertise the hottest horror flick of the season, teenagers challenge each other to do trials of courage, haunted houses begin to pop up, and it feels like you can't change the channel without switching to some ghost hunting urban legend special. All of this talk about spirits comes at a cost, though.

July comes and passes easily enough but it's almost as if as soon as August begins, so do the incidents. There's an increase in spiritual activity and shenanigans on both shores. Some of them are harmless spooks but others are much more sinister. Arm yourselves with all of the ofuda and omamori you can find and get out there and restore peace!

Possessed Possessions

Inhabitants of the Far Shore may awaken to find their sheets trying to strangle them and shoes stomping on the floor around them. Others may go about their day and find out their teapots suddenly only serve lukewarm tea or their weapons are trying to take swings at them. They're just playful spirits that will abandon their hosts if you shove any ofuda/omamori at them or yell loudly enough. They aren't malicious spirits... they were only just trying to have some fun.

Spirited Festivals

There's a festival every weekend and some of them have set up haunted houses for patrons to visit. You have your standard haunted house thrills... costume make up, jump scares, special effects smoke, the usual! But it looks like some real ghosts have made themselves at home here. Visitors are going in and emerging hours later absolutely traumatized. It looks like once you enter, the real spirits walk you around in circles and give you real scares. There are some spirits here just to have fun thrills and these are spirits that can be chased away with regular ofuda. But it looks like the more violent ones are actually ayakashi out for vengeance. Be careful in there!

Cursed Charms

There sure are some weird trends out there, huh? The latest one is buying cursed trinkets off the internet and passing them off as gifts to unsuspecting victims whether it be to prank a friend or get revenge on an enemy. Cursed mirrors, dolls, fake ofuda, VHS tapes, and so on are being passed around the Near Shore and spreading all sorts of curses.

Bad luck. As long as you're in possession of the cursed item, you'll be followed by bad luck to varying degrees depending on the quality of the charm.
Fear. Holding onto this charm results in intense, crippling fear. The fear can manifest as an intense paranoia at all times or being frozen with fear in the face of danger. Some say you can even die of fright...
Sickness. This charm is pretty straightforward. Having this charm just makes you feel incredibly under the weather and your health will worsen the longer you have the charm.
Evil. Holding onto this charm results in you being followed attracting evil instead of warding it. Suddenly, you feel as though you are always being followed, as if something is stalking you and clearly out to get you. You begin to run into smaller ayakashi at first but they keep growing in strength and number until you can't fight anymore.
Bad romance. Someone's meddled with a romance charm so it ends relationships instead of making them! People stuck with this charm are suddenly hyper aware of the faults of others. Everything gets on your nerves and you can't stand being around that person because they're just that annoying. It doesn't just work on couples! It also works on friends and relatives too.
Bears? An oddly specific curse. It looks like someone has taken a protection from bears charm and made it so now you attract bears where ever you go. Some of them are nice but others...

You can try to destroy the charms but you will find that unless you have purification powers or rend it, the effects last. It looks like most people have been able to shake off the effects by simply disposing of them at temples and buying another charm to counter the effects.

Haunting Hour

There are reports of violent attacks at night-- people being pulled into alleys and attacked, school children being chased by slashers while walking home from school, homes being broken into-- and all of it is done without a single clue left behind to explain who did it. People are warned to be careful at night and as the sun begins to set, something happens. The hour between sunset and dark is supposed to be the scariest hour them all. At this time, the shadows are suspiciously bigger and darker and you constantly see things just out of the corner of your eye. Suddenly, the wind blows cold and there's a rotten smell in the air like blood. It's Oumagatoki, the hour evil spirits meet. Small time ayakashi and spirits on the verge of becoming ayakashi spill into the streets and begin to terrorize others. Protect the people of the Near Shore and watch your own backs.*

* These are just generic ayakashi! Nothing special, nothing specific. Feel free to make up and NPC your own two-bit ayakashi.

THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

In the evening, everyone will receive a set of coordinates and a message from an Anonymous sender,

I want to talk about the
mysterious things that have been happening
lately.
OF course, i
NEED
EVERYONE to come. so don't be
late! see
yoU.
:)

Everyone receives it and there is no way to track where the message came from. If you follow the directions, you'll arrive at a small temple on the outskirts of a city. A sacred fire is lit on the grounds for people to dispose of any cursed or old charms they may have collected. Hang around a bit and it'll become obvious that no one knows who has gathered all of you here tonight. The only ones around are gods and shinki. It doesn't look like any evil spirits are around so other than being invited to the middle of no where at night... there's nothing to worry about. If you wait around, nothing will happen. So while you're here, you might as well discuss the strange happenings! Or tell ghost stories around the fire.

Wildcard

Choose your own adventure! Feel free to make up your own prompts. Ronald Knox's player (

diehardreaper) has offered up their temple as a test of courage in the Far Shore for those who want to try their luck. Check out their description under the Baron's manor.

In Summary:

Beat the heat by feeling a scary chill
Deal with cursed and spirit-imbued items
Keep the Near Shore people safe
Chat about your scary encounters
Have fun~

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm not here for you.

[But the fact that he has a dagger makes that statement...questionable, despite his words.]

I always look into things like this. Why is your dagger wet?

You must not have been here long, then, if I've never seen you. [Shun's already looking the woman over with a calculating eye, as if establishing a picture of her for future reference. At the question, he shows her the metal bottle at his side.]

Blessed water. It might not get rid of ayakashi, but it makes it hurt a hell of a lot more.

Just arrived.

[She drops her gaze to look at the metal bottle. So...same principle as coating a blade with Madou flame. Which is as much of a relief as it can be; with the brief glimpse she'd had and the smell in the air, she wasn't sure it wasn't blood.]

If you reacted like that to me, then can you not sense them? [Horror-detectors were a cornerstone of her work back home; if those don't exist for ayakashi here, then that makes things harder.]

Thought so. At least this didn't happen on your first day. [There's a somewhat dry note to his tone there, as if he's very familiar with the grind of that happening. When his own arrival involved purging ayakashi from a school, he was never too surprised when things got worse.

Her question gets a shake of the head.] Aside from the powers all gods have and the unique one I was given, I don't have anything else supernatural about me. Including being able to sense spirits.

I would have been prepared. Nothing's happened quite yet... [Other than the victims that gave rise to the reports, but that's normal. (...She may have a skewed sense of what counts as normal.)]

Sense— [Spirits? Horrors are— No, he was talking about ayakashi. There must not be any tools around to that effect, then.] That must make things difficult. How do you normally tell? [A small pause.] I haven't seen one, just had them described to me.

Being prepared usually means you have to babysit the people who aren't. [Which is largely the unfortunate thing about major events coinciding with arrivals. Shun himself doesn't have an issue with handling it either.

Her observation gets a slight, assenting hum.] Usually it's because of their effects - if there's a large concentration of people suddenly acting strangely, usually in some kind of negative way, it's safe to assume there's an ayakashi involved. On a smaller scale, you just have to do the work and find them. They're not hard to identify.

That's not an issue. [...Perhaps she's being overconfident in saying these things, and she isn't ready to answer inquiries into why it wouldn't be an issue, so—] There are other people here.

[Some of whom have fighting abilities, as she's already noted, and people who walk around with daggers.] What do they look like? [She can't keep thinking of them as pseudo-Horrors forever, if ayakashi are as different as them being spirits implies.]

If you were here to hunt them, then let's keep moving. [So saying, she starts walking in the direction they were both headed.]

There are, but it depends on who's around to deal with what. Not all of them are arould all the time. [It can get harder or easier depending on what number of newcomers there are compared to those who've been here a while.

As they start to move on, Shun keeping up with Rekka's pace, he answers her question.] It depends on the situation. Often they're formless and brightly coloured, with lots of limbs and eyes. If they take form, usually they look shadowy, so if they're trying to blend in by copying an animal, it's easy to pick them out anyway.

...That's true. I assume you're talking about something more dangerous than this, though. [Since gods and shinki weren't among the casualties for this occasion, as far as she knows.]

[The description he gives doesn't sound much like the things she's used to; she's glad she clarified that before one could surprise her.] Do they ever copy human forms?

We've had a few things more dangerous than this happen with arrivals. [The demon summoning and the undead attack immediately come to mind, but for now, he doesn't elaborate, since there's more important things to focus on. Shun keeps his gaze constantly in motion, picking out and marking off movements anywhere within his sight.]

If they do, I've never seen it happen before, though it seems like they can coerce humans into fueling them.

[Rekka, in contrast, keeps her gaze mostly ahead and her pace brisk. Even with the knowledge that more dangerous things have happened (in turn implying that more dangerous things can happen), lifelong habits die hard, and she's too secure in her abilities to be wary about an enemy she's only currently finding out more about. On top of which, the description ("brightly-colored," he'd said) makes them easier to spot than Horrors that are almost guaranteed to have taken human guise.]

By "fuel," you mean their emotions? How often does that happen? [But then she pauses.] ...You're used to answering questions.

[Shun notes the body language there - confident, but he'll reserve judgement as to whether it's overconfident until they run into anything. With people here, he's found, it's certainly best not to judge too early when anyone could have any kind of power.

Her first question gets a nod, and her lingering remark gets another, shorter one.] I've been here longer than most people, so I get a lot of questions. And it's happened a few times while I've been here. The first was when I arrived, and a school principal had seemingly summoned an ayakashi to feed off the students.

I see. [She wouldn't have that kind of patience, herself. On the other hand, she's never needed to, short of debriefing whoever's she working with. Despite how basic the information seems to her, maybe she should consider it the same kind of thing from now on.]

They didn't—attack? How did you deal with the principal?

[These things being attracted to emotions, rather than emotions forming a gate and then the monster attacking whoever is a new one to her.] He wasn't one, was he? An ayakashi?

[While Shun isn't a patient person overall, nobody asking questions has pissed him off enough yet not to answer them. The more people who know what they're doing, the better off all of them are.]

It attacked eventually. The ayakashi did something to him when it was summoned, so by the time we defeated it, he was out of commission as well. I didn't keep track of what the Heavens might've done with him after that. But no, he wasn't an ayakashi, even if he managed to control one.

[If he had been, then he should've vanished when they won rather than just collapsing.]

[She nearly stops at the explanation, but only briefly—looks like she just stumbled more than anything else. It's not like she has a good reason to think of Loop; that was a special case.]

If he was still human— [No, he said he hadn't kept track. She'll have to find out about the rules regarding harming humans from someone else. She'd been blatantly assuming that that rule was the same, since it's so deep-rooted for her, but she's been discovering that a lot of the things she took for granted don't hold sway here.]

...Sounds like a possession. Can ayakashi do that?

[Shun gives her a sharp glance, but doesn't comment on the falter.] Possibly. I've never seen something that major happen personally, but they can influence people's minds strongly enough that it wouldn't surprise me if they could do something like that as well.

[From what he'd heard, though, the principal hadn't been a case of that so much as just someone who was greedy and got caught up in his own vices and power. But with all the suspicious material they'd found around the school and the apparent connection to the later demon summoning with the similar side-effects, it's unquestionable he was being used one way or another.]

[Well, that's one more thing she needs to find out; how to discover if someone is possessed. It's most likely too much to hope that blessed water could function as a straight Madou flame analogue.]

[In light of that, influencing minds is par for the course.] You've never dealt with things like this before?

[...Considering his blade was coated with blessed water, she can guess, but it may not be accurate; if something from home doesn't work, then it doesn't work.] How'd you come up with the idea to use shrine water?

If you mean before I came here, we didn't have this sort of thing in my world. By the standards of what I've seen and heard of here, it was mundane. [Granted, they did have some extremely advanced and abusable technology, but he prefers not to talk about that unless he has to.

As for the blessed water question, Shun gives a faint snort.] A friend suggested it a while ago, though his choice of weapon to use it from was a water gun instead of something that could also be used as an actual weapon.

[So that's something the people who get dragged here don't have in common. She...may have known that already, but it's not like there's an official tally, and double-checking isn't burdensome when it requires this little effort. She's not qualified to speak on whether something's "mundane" or not, though, considering this world resembles hers in so many ways, so she merely inclines her head.]

[...She also may not be entirely sure what a water gun is (that's a toy, right?), but it's not like her ilk run around with flamethrowers, either.] Depends on the weapon, I would assume. [She knew someone who used a magic gun. Briefly.] It wasn't effective?

It sounds like he had some trouble with it because he didn't bring any other kind of defense with him. It seems to work a bit better backed up by something else. [Like a sword. Conventional weapons may not actually do much to ayakashi, but they can still at least bother them, and combined with blessed water also bothering them, it makes for a marginally better effect overall.]

I just figured using it with a weapon you could use against things that aren't ayakashi was a better idea.

I see. [She can see that being a thing; even Rian had had a conventional brush with her as well as the gun. And obviously someone alone wouldn't be able to deal with ayakashi completely, since everything indicates that it requires not only two people, but a specific method. But if it does work, even a little, that might be useful.]

[At the mention of things other than ayakashi, she turns abruptly.] What else would you use your weapon on?

It's not always ayakashi we're dealing with. We had an attack of undead once, and occasionally gods or shinki go rogue and start attacking people themselves.

[There's a rather terse note to his tone at the second thing, because he's actually seen that several times since coming here. The recent killings were just one example among many.]

[She relaxes and continues walking. In a way, that's good news, since that's way better than her gut-response assumed it would be; the edict about harming humans is so ingrained that that's what she jumped to, and it was already on her mind. On the other hand...unfortunately the second thing doesn't surprise her.]

Blessed water doesn't work on the ones who go rogue?

[...More importantly, do gods count as human when they do that? If blessed water works, then that's a no, but that's contingent on blessed water being identical to Madou flame, which...sounds like it isn't. For one thing, there's the critical difference that ayakashi are spirits whereas Horrors are different things entirely. There are ethical problems with this entire set-up and she doesn't know what to think about it.]

[Outwardly, though, her slightly downturned head where before she was looking up is the only indication that she got rattled by something.]

How are they dealt with? [...Okay, that and her slightly forceful tone.]

No. It doesn't seem to do anything to their status here, or their power, so blessed water doesn't do any more to them than it would while they're a normal god or shinki.

[They've got at least one god still persona non grata for unacceptable behaviour who doesn't seem to have been taken down from his position in any way, so it seems like the ridiculous edict of "anything a god does is just" still holds when they're abusing their power.

At the more forcefully put question, Shun spares her an aside glance before returning to scanning their surroundings.] Either the Heavens apprehend them, or if it's bad enough, they're killed. The only god I've heard of being killed for it was an incarnation of Susano'o we had a while back, who used power from his world to craft a new kind of ayakashi that attacked the Heavens.

[And then there's Ebisu, but he's not getting into that. Suffice it to say it takes pretty major treason to earn execution, assuming the Heavens get the right target.]

[So... Human. Unless she isn't human now herself by becoming a god. Which, while unsettling, is pointless to speculate on right now; from what she's looked into herself, the god she currently embodies may essentially be a god of evil, but they can't all be gods of evil here, and she's even recognized one or two names while fiddling with the phone she was given.]

[The execution part is the more pressing issue.] "His world," you said. So he was one of the ones who was drawn here against his will.

[...Which circles right back around to whether that's the right thing to do if gods aren't human anymore. She doesn't know how to think about that...]

How was he killed?

B

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