27 - The Gods' Meeting

[godsoffortune]

Who: Everyone!
What: The Meeting of the Gods is here at last.
When: October 30
Where: Heaven's Meeting Hall
Summary:







Pre-Meeting

Guards at the front door are carefully checking each god who enters off on their list of attendees, and taking the names of each of their shinki attendants.

Once the participants are past the doors, they are guided down the hallway to a huge meeting room by one of the guards, who will announce them by divine title, and each of their shinki by whatever name they gave. It's an open question as to who's actually listening, though, because the room is swiftly filling up with gods and shinki. As well as the newcomers, old gods are here, some in human form attended by their uniformed shinki, others in stranger shapes -- giant bears, round-bellied tanuki, turtles, dragons, and more. There's even one tricolored tabby cat in a small blue cap, seated majestically in the arms of a uniformed shinki and chatting with another god.

Buffet tables bearing every kind of food and drink imaginable are set up at one end of the room, and a dais with a podium is at the other, draped in bright gold and white bunting and emblazoned with a chrysanthemum emblem.

Early Announcements

Finally, the socialization comes to an end, and the meeting itself begins as Ookuninushi grabs the microphone and steps up to the podium. The year's most popular gods are named first: Hotei, one of the Seven Gods of Fortune, is in third place, Tenjin in second and Ebisu in first place. Each steps up to bow and accept their accolades in turn: Hotei is a big man with a wide smile, Tenjin a tall, ascetic man wearing old robes and concealing his smug expression behind a fan, and a tired-looking younger man in a business suit announces himself as representing Ebisu, who is watching over the Near Shore during the event.

Next, the most popular new god is announced: Ookuninushi has to stop and wrinkle his nose at the name for several seconds before he pronounces it-- Nekhbet, a new arrival in the Heavens.

He moves on to call for a moment of silence recognizing the difficulties of the last year. Many gods have faced reincarnation and returned wearing unfamiliar faces! The Heavens can't yet explain the cause of these changes, but Amaterasu herself urges them to welcome their friends' new incarnations as brothers and sisters in the Heavens.

His final announcement is that, after the successful resolution of the trouble associated with some recent deaths, Orihime has been restored to her place among the eight million gods.

Fortune Weaving

Announcements finished, the main activity of the evening begins. The white-robed shinki bring in huge baskets filled with wooden prayer plaques, setting them down all around the room, and the gods begin to form into circles around each basket. The older gods will gladly explain to any confused newcomers that they're weaving fortunate connections between mortal lives as they spread the plaques out and tie strings off together with great care. All the plaques have names written on them; some are filled out with prayers, some just with notes, and others adorned with pictures of flowers, animals or favorite characters.

Gods and shinki are given blank plaques to inscribe with their own names, too, in order to give them the chance to make fortunate connections as well. (Not necessarily romantic, the other gods will assure them! There are many different kinds of fated connection.)

Help out, take the opportunity to chat, and make some fortunate matches for yourself as well as these hard-working petitioners.

Midnight Disaster

Just shy of midnight, while the gods are still matching up plaques, finishing the last of the banquet, and getting into drunken arguments over who to connect to whom, a shinki in a dark suit torn at the shoulder comes dashing into the Meeting Hall.

"Calamity!" he cries-- and tells the assembled Heavens that a mysterious blight has fallen across a sleepy residential community in the Tokyo suburbs. The blight, a huge circle covering about two blocks, is sucking the life out of everything inside it: plants are wilting, and people and animals have fallen into deathly slumber. As if that weren't bad enough, it's also attracting big, dangerous ayakashi. Ebisu and his shinki are there now, but there aren't enough of them to fight the ayakashi and move the people trapped inside the blighted circle to a safer place before they die.

Volunteers will need to fight ayakashi and rescue the mortals trapped in the blight -- once they're outside its edge, they'll begin to wake up and recover on their own.

In Summary:

• Enjoy the banquet before the announcements
• Hear about the most popular gods
• Help make fortunate connections for the living
• Respond to a disaster
• Have fun~

Comments

[boneofsword]

Her temple is in Central District. [Archer points out. It's hard to not notice the purple monstrosity, and Shun actually lives there too.] Only three of the new gods live there, and I'd say you're the best choice.

[revolutionfalcon]

Four. It's me, her, Kusanagi and Hakkai. [Which is not a fantastic selection, all things considered, but there are certainly people more suited to the position than Hibiki there.] Kusanagi only became a god recently, so if I had to guess who was next under me, I'd say Hakkai.

[He doesn't sound terribly impressed by it, but he can't imagine Izumo would have that kind of following so soon after switching roles, and Hibiki is an idiot as far as he's concerned. While he might not like Hakkai, he is very active in both helping his followers and helping others on the Far Shore, and he's been here longer than Shun (if not a god for as long) so he seems like the most logical next choice.

[boneofsword]

Kusanagi... is that the guy who runs the bar here? Wait, he's shinki turned god, isn't he? [Archer narrows his eyes. That's another possible source of information he needs to check. He's never met him before.]

[revolutionfalcon]

That's him. Maybe something about his standing as a shinki carried over, though I can't imagine his previous god would've made himself that popular. [Mikoto seems like the type who'd spend more time sleeping than doing prayers, even if he does come through for most of the major incidents they have.]

[boneofsword]

Who knows. [Archer makes a mental note to seek the god in question and see if he's willing to answer his inquires, but that's for another time. He shrugs.]

Try to see the other side - this announcement is the worst that can happen to Hibiki. You score without doing anything different that you usually do.

[revolutionfalcon]

[Shun gives a faint snort at that, more derisive than amused.] She needs the slap in the face. From the way she reacts to me, she seems to think I'm some kind of uncontrollable terror, even though I've never attacked her without good reason, and still thinks of herself as some ridiculous paragon of perfection.

[boneofsword]

Her castle offers a good vantage point. [Archer suggests innocently... or not that innocently, given his smirk.] She almost fainted when she saw me there, although she immediately assumed I was there to be her butler.

[revolutionfalcon]

I suppose it has to be useful for something. [Shun puts that rather dryly, since he considers Hibiki's temple an eyesore at the best of times.] I've never bothered with her temple grounds, but the idiot's come into mine a couple of times to complain or act like she owned the place. The vultures made a convincing argument against that.

[boneofsword]

It's design can be always improved with a few vultures using it as a perch. [Archer shrugs. He's well aware of how Hibiki is, there's no need to explain that. The fact she's had a run in with Shun's vultures is filed for later, just in case.]

[revolutionfalcon]

Her shinki might not like that, and I actually give a damn what Wendy thinks. [To some degree, at least. But enough that he'll at least respect Hibiki's right to go without exposure to vultures in her own temple.]

[boneofsword]

Point taken. Wendy deserves better. [Archer inclines his head. He suspects she's able to steer Hibiki the right way if her god goes overboard - in Wendy's sense, since she's able to put up with Hibiki being Hibiki.] She has a good head on her shoulders.

[revolutionfalcon]

[Shun hums slightly in agreement.] It's strange for someone who looks as young as she does, but I suppose she wouldn't remember anything else about that herself.

[Shun is...somewhat suspect of whether Wendy is the age she looks, primarily since he saw how she died, but for the moment he's just leaving it as is since it doesn't matter a great deal to him in the end.]

[boneofsword]

Hn. You're aware she's either in her late teens or is an adult? [Archer suspects it's the case here, and given how unsurprised he is, he had seen it before.] She has a solid grasp of concepts she'd be unable to understand if she was still a child.

[revolutionfalcon]

She's definitely not a kid, that much is obvious. She doesn't act anything like one. [And while that is excusable in some cases, she doesn't have the particular issues that even very intelligent kids would have, implying she's not one.] But we're not going to find out from her unless she remembers, so there's not that much point wondering.

[boneofsword]

That's true. She can always use more people taking her seriously. [Archer is quite sure that he could dismiss her as a kid if not for his instincts telling him she's much older than she looks like.] On the other hand, it makes it easy to gather information.

[revolutionfalcon]

Considering her god almost certainly doesn't, I'd say so. [Hibiki doesn't strike him as the sort to take anything seriously that isn't what he'd consider idiotic.]

So I've heard. She apparently guilt tripped Amaterasu's shinki into allowing her a meeting.