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

[kokuyoyo]

[If this is a proper sort of drainage, then it has to go somewhere.... But that's a theory to pursue another time. For now, Chikusa blinks at her.]

[He's, alas, not particularly familiar with Maria's particular pantheon.]

...So.... Is the singing necessary...?

[declamando]

[That makes Maria smile slightly in amusement.] Not all the time I'm wearing it, as you can see, but I do need to do it most of the time. It's how I synchronise with it, so if I try to attack and I don't have that synchronisation, it's more likely it'll fail or damage me instead.

[Granted, it's going to damage her instead eventually anyway, but at least she can prolong it by singing as necessary.]

[kokuyoyo]

Ah.

[That.... seems like a really pain in the ass system, but, whatever. He doesn't have to wear it.]

Doesn't that draw ayakashi towards you...?

[declamando]

Not more than they come to any other god, I'd think. [Maria doesn't appear to have considered that factor, judging by the thoughtful look on her face, but it doesn't really seem to matter to her either.]

It's not really a problem, since I have a shinki with me, and this is still a powerful weapon against them even if it can't deal the finishing blow.

[kokuyoyo]

Ah.... Well, as long as you're sure...

[That means he won't have to bother worrying about her... Works for him.]

Have you seen anything unusual since you've been doing this...?

[declamando]

Define "unusual". [Maria just about sighs that out, because really, this isn't the kind of thing she remembers them having had to deal with before. Still, she does consider the question more seriously to give a proper reply.]

It's strange that there's so many ayakashi and yet it seems to be the spell doing the most damage to the people. Maybe they're needed for something.

[kokuyoyo]

[He won't bother to reply to that so, good on you for continuing on, Maria. Chikusa glances back to the blighted zone.]

I wouldn't jump straight to that... Ayakashi feed off of negative emotion, and things like that.... It could just be a side effect.

....But there are a lot of the larger ones, however... Which is a lot more rare. When they're that size, they don't group together as much....

[declamando]

Wouldn't more people be dead already if it were the ayakashi, though? [Maria doesn't really like putting it like that, but it really doesn't seem to take larger ayakashi long to kill someone from the energy drain. She hasn't yet run across anyone already gone, herself.]

I'd agree about the larger ones, though. This is definitely the first time I've seen this many of those in one place.

[kokuyoyo]

I wouldn't say so. Ayakashi only try to devour us right away.... Usually. The first sizable ayakashi I saw only floated through the air, and drained people of their energy.

[...So, a little like this, really.]

[declamando]

I've seen more that directly go for people than passively drain energy, and most of these ones seem to be on the attack. Have we seen something like this before on the Near Shore to compare it to?

[It's harder to say which of them might be right if they have no real comparison point besides the individual ayakashi they've both encountered.]

[kokuyoyo]

Something that draws ayakashi to it.... and powerful ayakashi as well....

[No matter how much he thinks about it...]

I don't think so.... Not while I've been here.

[declamando]

So that means there's not much we can say for sure until we see where this leads...and if there's anything remaining at the end to tell us why it might've happened.

[It seems...odd, to time it to the gods' meeting. Of course, there was the advantage of the gods being preoccupied, but there was also the guarantee that a huge number would intervene once word of the incident made it back.]

And why now, while we're at it.

[kokuyoyo]

I doubt it.

[Chikusa "Eternal Pessimist" Kakimoto, everyone.]

When mysteries happen here.... finding leads is troublesome, and often doesn't work.... but all we can do is either give up or keep looking. It'd be better if there was a more reliable source to follow on this... Besides the library, which only half works, or the old guard, which tells us nothing.

[declamando]

I've noticed. [Maria has been here for a while herself, and despite her reluctance to admit it, the lack of leads on anything, not only from the newcomers but from the old gods as well, is starting to get to her.]

Still, I don't want to give up on the chance before it happens. Even if things often go one way, there's always the possibility things can go differently even just once or twice.

[kokuyoyo]

Mm. There still has to be something, anyway.... We're just dealing with something... that's centuries old.

[So he guesses it would be a little difficult. But...]

Gathering pieces together... That much we can do, at any rate.

[declamando]

I certainly hope we can gather enough to figure this out before it gets any worse. There's been a lot going on here since we came.

[And the vast majority of it is bad. Maria can clearly see there's something else working behind this, but it's the matters of who, why and how that are the most important, and the ones they seem to have nothing on.]

[kokuyoyo]

Mm.

Anyway... [He rolls his head in the most minimal gesture towards the buildings as he can.] You're going back?

[declamando]

Obviously. There's much more to deal with before this night is out.

[Even as she says that, she's starting to turn back towards the afflicted area.]

[kokuyoyo]

...Good luck with your singing, then...

[He has more investigation to do, and check ups on a small child as well.]

[declamando]

Good luck with your investigation, too.

[With that, she heads out again, picking up the song from around where she left it off as she vanishes into the night.]