Re: Iku (original story)

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

The office of my former supervisor was quite bare in comparison to his status. Facing the door, the obese, balding man with the same dirty grey suit looked at me with rheumy eyes and a businessman smile, sitting in front of the same old rickety steel desk. He wiped his chin of what was undoubtedly the remainder of a Ko-Reimu, a favorite of his since the day I met him. On one side of the desk, a dirty fishtank covered with an acrylic lid and full of bouncing, crying little balls inside. On the other side, a worn-down, ancient computer. In the center of the desk, of course, the manila envelope I've grown to hate so much.

"Have a seat, champ," he said the moment he dropped his smile, hand pointing to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. I closed the door and complied, facing him. The chair greeted me with a handful of all too familiar squeaks before finally settling.

Nobody talked for a moment. We were both still trying to figure out who should talk first.

"It's been a while,” he said, finally.

"It has."

Cue the awkward silence, broken only by the constant squeaking of the chair and the muffled yet incessant yu-yuing coming from the fishtank. I let my sight wander for a moment towards the window - I soaked in the beautiful, unique sight of the big building's concrete parking lot.

"So?" I asked.

"I've got a job for you," he replied.

Of course you do. I got up, mimicking my leave.

"I must remind you I'm not… vowed to Factory operations anymore." I turned around, seeking the door.

"You know I would never drag you down here for some boring, routine field work. If I called you it means I have something interesting."

I sighed. Heavily and loudly, to reach my point across. I realized that pretending to have a moral high ground was only doing a good job at fooling just myself. I turned around.

"I do freelance research now, you know that. If you hand me a flamethrower, I *will* turn around and leave."

"Not even for the good ol' times?"

"Don't be ridiculous, old man."

"Good, because you're going to love this." He motioned back to the chair; I sighed again and sat down. That goddamned smile.

He grabbed the envelope with sausage fingers and pulled out, not without difficulty, a black and white picture of something fuzzy. It took me a while to figure out I was looking at a photograph, taken by a satellite or a drone, of a forest area.

"This is an aerial of our latest retrieval site we found seven clicks West."

"Latest?” I laughed. “The old ones aren't giving you guys enough output?"

"You know we always attempt to broaden our horizons, buddy," he smiled again. "Anyways, back on point, it isn't much of our other locations giving us less, but this one giving us more. When it comes to a yukkuri body count, this place is incredible. We’re talking about hundreds here. Virginal, too, great for R&D. Middle of damned nowhere in the countryside."

"Alright. So?"

“So we started with retrieving operations, as we usually do. Cataloguing, sampling…”

“The usual, then?”

"The usual, yes. Now here is where things begin to get... ah, give me a second."

He lifted his palm towards me and, without anything that could remotely resemble as previous notice, used his other hand to nudge the fishtank's lid open and quickly fetch a tiny ko-Marisa from the inside. After flicking its hat away with a single jerk of his free hand, he sharply bit off the koyukkuri's posterior half - the poor thing barely managed to release a high-pitched "YUAAAAAAAA--!!" before quickly expiring in front of its despairing brethren still inside their glass prison, who began to shake and shit violently all over in fear. After squeezing out the insides with thumb and index finger, he took another chomp and the ko-Marisa's carcass was no more.

"Delicious. Want one?"

"I'll pass. Please go on."

I was so used to my old boss' attitude at this point that I didn't even bother in acting surprised. He spat out one eye to the side, towards a metal trash bin. It bounced off the rim and rolled off on the floor. He clicked his tongue in disappointment.

"Oh, yes. I was telling you, we've started to see a very, ah, peculiar behavioral pattern ." There goes that smile again.

"Hm?"

"You're just going to love this," he said, quickly wiping his fingers on his trousers and fumbling with the manila envelope.  “Thing is,” he continued while trying to pry out a particular sheet of paper, “they don’t fear the Factory at all. You’d think that every single Yukkuri in a hundred mile radius would be scared shitless at the prospect of going to the Factory, but these particular sons of bitches don’t even flinch at it. In fact, they barely register it as an entity.”

“…Huh,” I replied. I tried to keep my excitement at bay. Fear of the Factory is so widespread in Yukkuri colonies that it’s even been theorized that it’s an innate instinct, present in all as a major source of uneasiness – The Factory has screwed the Yukkuris’ biology so much they were now afraid of it since birth. The existence of a Yukkuri community who doesn’t fear it might just have blown this theory out of the water completely.

And he knew this would get me hooked.

“Got you interested, eh? And that isn’t all. Their aggressiveness is off the charts.”

“Could be an old generation. Taunting Yukkuris. You said the place was ‘virginal’, so no outside contact. Kinda like those tribes in the middle of bumfuck nowhere that have never seen civilization…”

“Exactly what we thought until we saw Koyukkuris from all damned types exhibiting identical behavior. Every time, without fail, they demand their release, otherwise we’ll all…” He paused, grabbing the sheet of paper at last and reading it aloud, “…’suffer the wrath of the great Iku-sama’. Word by word, I kid you not”.

Only then I was truly speechless. I stared at him, most likely wide-eyed, the office absolutely quiet other than the muffled cries for help of the baby yukkuris inside the fishtank.

“So?” He said at last, his smile turning into a shit-eating grin.

“Well, I’m… I’m stumped,” I conceded.  “I’m surprised you guys haven’t declared them as damaged goods, packed your bags and looked for someplace else. Or firebomb the whole damned place as you guys are so keen to do lately.”

“As you can see, we’ve got quite the case. There’s no evident Dosu-based social group, but they still present a Deity-like veneration to a higher being. This, their aggressiveness… hell, initial reports claimed these fuckers are psychologically resistant to pain and we haven’t even had a chance to prove that yet! Pain-resistant! Pain-resistant!! Can you bloody imagine?”

“Okay, I see now. This thing is golden, alright. But why me? You people have actual researchers working for the Factory to check this out. You know I’m just a freelance scientist.”

“I just knew you would just love the challenge,” he answered, back to his smile. “That, and the pay.” Back to the grin. I merely grimaced in return. “Besides, we already sent two – one approached by chopper and they all fled, never to be found until the guy was gone. The second went in there directly, same thing. We’re short on personnel wasting resources on people who just aren’t ready to deal with this – and, to be honest, they just don’t have the same intelligence and years of experience as you do. We’d rather have someone who knows what they’re doing.”

 “Watch it, that almost sounded like a complime—wait, short on people?” I asked, interrupting myself.

He sighed and used his blubber as momentum to wheel himself away, revealing a small television behind him. The device was tuned to a TV channel, the screen showing familiar images of a mushroom-shaped cloud rising over a treeline.

“The incident with the Utsuho.”

He nodded. “All hands are currently there to figure out what the hell just happened, count the dead –or whatever’s left of them- and retrieve anything that might have survived the explosion. That, and try to figure out a diplomatic solution to the gals on the other side of the border who are currently bugging us nonstop because some fallout reached their goddamn shrine or whatever.”

I said nothing. He sighed back in return.

“Anyways, I thought you might enjoy it, all things considered. You get the scoop, we figure out what the hell is going on there, you get paid, you write your paper, everybody wins.”

“…I see,” I said, although I barely needed to think it over. “What do you want me to do?”

The damned smile again, of course. “We’ll drop you off nearby with basic surveillance equipment – HD camera with telephoto lens, directional microphone, binoculars, audio recorder, walkie talkie for announcements, communications, requests, emergencies… the usual deal. Of course, you get to bring your own stuff if you need, plus food and water. The area in question is here,” he said, grabbing a red marker from a desk drawer and circling a bare, white area in the aerial photograph. It’s a clearing, deep in the Western forest. Here and here,” he added, using the marker to draw two big red crosses around the circle, “are potential vantage points. See?” He kept tapping his sausage finger against the crosses.

“Anything else I should take into consideration?” I asked.

“We’ll drop you off nearby, but you’ll have to approach the area by foot. Minimizing disturbances, you know. The idea is to get information of their untainted habitat as best as we can. We’ll get in touch with you on the radio from time to time, as well.”

“Let’s talk about payment.”

“How does twenty kay yen per day sounds to you?”

“What-”

“It’s not that far from civilization, maybe less than an hour from your home, so we’re not adding a travel bonus. It’s also enough to actually get back and get enough sleep, so no bonuses for staying in the field either.”

“Ugh…”

“Don’t worry, it’s supposed be a very short study – I’ll call off the scouting by next week and reach a resolution from there with the rest of the board.”

He knew I wasn’t in it for the money anyhow.

“Ehh, I suppose I’ll be here tomorrow morning, then,” I replied, sighing.

“Glad to hear it. I’ll get someone to wait for you outside the building and give you and the equipment a ride to the forest.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Get some rest, champ. Six AM sharp tomorrow. We’ll fill out the paperwork on the go.”

Well, at least it was going to be some easy money and an interesting case study to boot. I got up and made my leave; just after I turned around to the door, I heard another voice in the room.

“Yu~! Ich fweels like fwying!! Yu- YubiiiaaAAAAA--*munch*”

“WHY WOULD YOU DO THAAAAT?! MAWISCHA’S SCHWISTERRRR!!”

A soft clunking noise and the fishtank’s lid quickly muffled the koyukkuri’s screams of help. I quickly closed the door and left before I started thinking in taking up his offer.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The man who was waiting for me with the white Factory van at the office building’s entrance was a young, greasy, overenthusiastic foreigner who was barely in his twenties and wore a peculiarly stupid grin in his face at all times. When I boarded up and he began driving me to the “drop zone”, with me sitting in the back of the van along with all my supplies and gear, he started to headbang with the rhythm of some ghastly heavy metal band from the vehicle’s radio, long dirty brown hair going everywhere.

I was hugging my backpack with today’s food as tightly as I could, trying my best (and failing) not to slam my head against the van’s roof due to all the turbulence while trudging along the worn-down dirt road.

“So, how long have you been in the Factory?” he asked.

“I’m not.”

“You’re not? …Oh! I thought you were, being brought in by the old man and whatnot.”

“We just go way back.”

“Huh… so whaddya do?”

“I’m a freelancer. Research. Yu-biology. That kind of stuff.”

“Oh! Ah!” he said, as if suddenly discovering! some big life mystery. “Cool shit, huh?”

“I suppose. How about you?”

“Oh, just one year in transport! I never do any fun shit, but the pay is decent enough!”

“’Fun shit’ like?”

“I dunno, man, like, running over a field chock full of those little fucks, or carrying a hunting team somewhere, you know!”

Suddenly, I started to feel somewhat uneasy near that young man.

“I, uh, I see,” I muttered. “Good for you, I imagine. Getting a job here, I mean.”

“Thanks, bro! So you’re, like, a Yukkuri expert?”

“Eh, if you wanna put it that way.”

After that, nobody exchanged a word until we arrived at the convened place twenty minutes later. We both got off after the driver killed the engine next to the road.

“Well!” He said, while I attempted to regain control of my legs. “Here’s your remaining stuff, gear, and whatnot! You have to go over—“

“Over there, yes,” I interrupted, waving my hand at a thicket of trees standing on a sloping hill.

“Yeah, you’re right, over there,” the driver continued, hand pointing nowhere near my designated spot, “my orders are to be here at 7 PM, which is, like, uhh… eight hours from now?”

“It’s not even six thirty in the morning.”

“Oh! Ehh, well, I’ve never been good at that math stuff, y’know. Well, I’ll see you later! If you need to get to me, try through the usual transport radio channel during my work hours,” he said while getting back on the van. “Best of luck!” he added as he took off the way we came from.

What a weird guy.

Compared to all that time being cramped up in that rusty van, the walk was a relief, even if a tad exhausting. In about twenty minutes, I managed to position myself at the top of an elevated hill, hidden between a thick layer of bushes overlooking directly the area in question.

The forest clearing was actually quite large – if I hadn’t remembered its shape from the aerial picture, I would’ve never realized that it was indeed my target. The terrain was slightly irregular in elevation, surrounded by a thick layer of tall-trunked trees all around. A small brook, crossing the clearing like a tiny vein full of water, emerged from the forest at north, made a slight curve towards the interior of the area and turned once again before getting lost deep in the trees at the West. A few bushes spread around collided against the uniform green pattern that the short grass had so beautifully imposed on the clearing’s ground.

I grabbed my binoculars hanging from my neck and looked through them. So this was the so-called “retrieval site”… although I won’t be seeing any of the specimens anytime soon without some sort of magnification, I couldn’t find anything that could remotely resemble life. I pulled my old tape recorder from my backpack and began to record, microphone pressed against my mouse in order to make as little sound possible.

“Day 1, oh-six-fifty. I just arrived at the first designated vantage point. A quick surveying of the retrieval site shows no signs of Yukkuri in the area. Deploying gear now.”

I paused the recording and took my time to mount a folding chair and a tripod, with the HD camera plus its telephoto lens affixed on it. Now it came the waiting game.

Fifteen minutes passed, not a single critter on sight. I was about to get impatient, considering that I should’ve seen something by now, but then I notice something strange near the brook. My binoculars help me focus on a small structure made out of piled-up rocks, large but nearly indistinguishable due to a generous coating of moss. I added these details into the recording, and continued:

“Currently recording the structure. After looking at it through the telephoto lens, I can see that the elevated structure has a prominent ledged surface that resembles a stairwell. On a second look, I can see that there’s some sort of flat, circular surface next to it. A tree stump? It also appears to be covered in either moss or some plant matter. Most certainly artificial. I thought the dossier said there was no sign of human activity…”

I fished out a sheet of paper with the terrain info, and effectively confirmed my doubts. Chalking it up merely as odd, I quickly forgot about this discrepancy when I noticed the directional microphone’s gain needle twitching to life, going barely past the white noise threshold. I fumbled around with a headset before being able to plug it in, while I desperately looked through the area with my binoculars. At first, the headset returned nothing but static – but then…

A murmur of what was undeniably voices.  I increased the apparatus’ sensitivity and laid very still on the ground, listening.

“…Eajy day today, wight, mwommie~?”

“Yuyu~! Sure is, little one!”

Aha. I quickly aimed the camera lens towards the source of the voices, and the device promptly showed me a large Yukkuri , a Reimu, walking out of the dense treeline towards the clearing. Following her was a tiny bouncing ball, not even one-eighth of the Reimu’s size – focusing the sensitive telephoto lens confirmed me it was an infant –also a Reimu-, surely the daughter.

“Time for some of Iku-sama’s nature sweet-sweets, little one!”

“Yay!! Happwinesh~!”

I pulled the tape recorder back near my mouth again. “First contact with two individuals. Yukkuri species, certainly, Reimu variety, one adult and one toddler, latter one no older than two or three weeks old. Accessories appear to be in working order, no other defining characteristics. Nobody else in si—“

I stopped the moment my headset started to pick up more sounds from the directional microphone.

“Another family in sight, currently recording. This time it’s a Reimu-Marisa couple, plus three infants… two Reimus and one Marisa. Just like the first pair, they’re out from the thick of the forest and into the clearing, looking for… ‘Iku-sama’s sweet-sweets’ –am I hearing this correctly?-, or so they appear to claim. I think I might have found the clan in ques— hold on, I’m picking up a third reading… another Reimu and Marisa couple, no infants this time, but the Reimu is bearing a stalk… two-pronged-type, four koyukkuris on the way-- a fourth yukkuri on sight, this time a lone Patchouli– a fifth reading now,  a small gang of Alices… no external genitalia visible on any of them, are they actually not aroused? They all appear to be talking about the same thing, food and the so-called sweet-sweets—I’m getting more readings now--ugh!”

The voices became too strong for my ears to handle. I pulled the headset away from my ears and lowered the gain sensitivity, but I realized I barely needed them anymore: while I was busy overlooking the particular area of the clearing where all these critters were showing up, the rest of the clearing got quickly crowded in the meantime. Accompanied with a cacophony of distant, family cries, I find myself overlooking the forest clearing with dozens of yukkuris pouring themselves into it.

Then, routine kicked in. The first thing in my mental list of research protocol, describing systematically the entirety of the pack was on the top of my list. I counted a total of twenty-eight families, mostly your average Reimu/Marisa couple, but some of these families were isolated groups of Alices; other than that, the most uncommon subspecies was a single Patchouli/Akyu duo. Only this particular duo, which barely showed signs of family-like behavior, and the Reimu/Marisa couple I’ve seen at first, had no children. The rest averaged with an amount of 4 children - even the Alices, who use to bear up to a dozen children at once – with the few adult families that only sported only one or two koyukkuri’s, I suspected mammalian-type pregnancies. In total, one hundred and eighty six Yukkuris, a size consistent with a large clan; now that’s something I haven’t seen in a while around here. No wonder everyone back at the Factory is so desperate for this place – they might have missed the spot when they were wringing this region dry.

Time flew by quickly. After a little while, the band of Yukkuris started to flock towards the darker spots in the greenery. Focusing with my binoculars, I noticed they were aiming at the bushes which were actually mottled with hundreds of small, round, red berries. Their main food source, it would seem? I kept the camera rolling while I jotted down notes, theories. Nearly all the little critters had a very decent body ratio, some of them even being surprisingly spherical - this suggested a good sugar-heavy diet, unlike the deflated wild yukkuris forced to feed on grass and mushrooms; in fact, if I hadn’t seen those berries I would’ve thought somebody was actually feeding them. They didn’t seem to eat much of it either, though – most of them ate two berries, while some big ones went as far as three. The few old-looking ones ate merely one, and the children would either fetch one from the lower bush branches or impatiently wait for their mothers to chew one up and spit it back into their mouths.

Soon enough, the Yukkuris finished eating, having barely diminished the amount of berries in the bushes.  I kept whispering into the microphone, dumping all these details back into the recorder.  Later they began to disperse, slowly, inside the clearing; some families flocked back to the tiny stream to relax, play, and lick-lick their offspring, while some other child-less groups socialized with each other in a carefree fashion. Some others chose to nap under the sun or back into the shade provided by the trees beyond the edges of the clearing.

I tuned the directional microphone towards a mixed group of Marisas and Reimus in the clearing.

“...Eajy days~”

“Refeshing days~~”

“Yuyun! Reimu really enjoyed Iku-sama’s mister sweet-sweets today~!!”

“Yu! Iku-sama’s mister sweet-sweets are really the best!”

“We really can take it easy like this!”

“Yeah! We can always take it easy thanks to Iku-sama!”

“Easy, easy~”

They chanted until some of them fell asleep, and the group disbanded on its own shortly after.

I pointed the microphone somewhere else, now at a small family of three near the brook. This time it was slightly harder for me to discern what they were talking about.

“…lick-lick you so little one can be really clean!”

“Yu~~ Mawisa is weally clean now~~”

“It’s good that Iku-sama brought us close to easy mister brook, right?”

“Yesh! Thank you Iku-chama!!”

The big Reimu, evidently the mother, wiggled up and down in a vague resemblance of nodding. “Yuyun! If you want Iku-sama to take it easy, we need to take it easy too!!”

“Yuun~!!” The Koyukkuris chanted in unison, all peeing themselves at once.

What the? I pointed at another family. Again, the name of Iku-sama showed up again. Another family… they extended their thanks to this Iku-sama yet again. Another loose group of Reimus… Iku-sama, too?

“I, uh,” I whispered into the microphone again. The old man had told me, but seeing it myself was a different thing altogether “…I’m not completely sure I’m listening to this correctly, let alone interpreting it correctly… but nearly all specimens are referring in their social speech to an entity they call… Iku-sama. The clan seems to be under a wing of a benefactor, one I haven’t seen yet. There either is –or was- a human benefactor overseeing this clan or we have an entire population that was displaced from the other side of the border to here. Although I’m sure you already thought of this before…” I added, my train of thought directed towards the Factory grunts who tried to wrap their heads around what they found when analyzing the fetched specimens. “I hope you didn’t make me come all the way here for me to catch some forest hermit or a goddamn Gensokyo escapee…”

I paused the recorder and checked the time. Not even  10 AM, huh.

Frolicking, playing, eating and shitting occupied the rest of the Yukkuris’ activities in the clearing. More songs were sung, all of them about the same two things: Taking it easy and Iku-sama. I remembered why I hated surveillance of “easy” clans: little shits messing around and doing nothing worthwhile for hours. It was in moments like these I understood the reaction of some homeowners after seeing that a stray Yukkuri (or even a pet Yukkuri) had gone where it shouldn’t and broke something in their useless leisure. This ‘Iku-sama’ anomaly was the only thing that kept me hooked into continuous vigilance, but at points my absolute boredom turned to sincere anger every time one of the Koyukkuris heard the words “Iku-sama” and pissed itself in dumb glee. More fuel to the crying-moe theory the guys at the Factory are working with, I suppose…

Time passed by. I might or might not have fallen asleep at some point.

“They’re all heading back to the forest now,” I added to the recorder. Evidently, they’re using the clearing as some sort of Roman forum, a common gathering place for the entire clan to eat, rest, socialize and enjoy some all-around easy leisure time. Their actual homes are probably deep in the surrounding forest, but the clearing was no more and no less than their designated area to simply take it easy. I dumped my thoughts into the recorder again, and waited enough time in case they showed up. Probably the laziest seven hours of my life, I made use of the time to catch up on the newest research papers and a battered copy of Borges’ fiction tales. Of course, I was only going to let the old fart know once he decided to read my notes and eventually figure out that I spent seven hours doing jack – if I had to sit on my ass for hours on end doing nothing but watching some bouncing manjuus, I’d either procrastinate and do something else or go insane from boredom.

At around  5 PM, the sun descended behind the tree line and the sky took a slight purple hue. Knowing that Yukkuris don’t venture outside their easy sleeping places at nightfall, I packed up my things and, after finishing a closing statement on my recorder, I went down the hill and into the forest path that led back to the rendezvous point with my driver. He was expecting me outside of his van, smoking a cigarette, and waved at me as soon as he saw me walking down. Another rough, bumpy ride (this time in complete darkness), and the sore mass of muscles that was my body reached home and collapsed into my futon for most of the night.

[[In retrospect, a lot of exposition... Things get more interesting, I swear.]]

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

Hi there!

I've been following the group for years now, but other than a story published under another account I haven't contributed much.

I wanted to publish here an original story I've been working on since 2010 (!). Actually "working on" is a misnomer. I started writing it in 2010, back when Yukkuris were still in vogue, and was too lazy to finish it. When I realized, six years went by and I wasn't done! In retrospect it looks like a bad joke. So I finished it, but now there are only a few of us in the West who follow Yukkuri media and I better publish it here now before I end up being the only one around...

It's kind of a doozy (nearly 18k words) so I'll be posting it in chunks while I edit it, as it's still kinda rough around the edges and I'm editing/proofreading it as I go. I hope you enjoy, feedback is very much appreciated!

[The Didact]

I do like a talented writer coming in and posting stuff. It's been kind of hard to find interesting reads around here, I've had to dig way back. Glad to have some new current stuff to look forward to.

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

The second day started even more uneventfully than the first. Even though the driver attempted to strike a conversation, he took the hint even quicker than the day before. Poor guy, I couldn't blame him - but I was too busy trying to ignore the pain irradiating from my body, flaring up every time the truck jumped at the bumpy road.

The climb uphill was less of a sacrifice than what I thought it would be; the ache was there, sure, but being able to stretch my legs was a blessing. By the time I set my equipment up again, dawn was barely beginning to break. The directional microphone woke me up at some point of the mid-morning, echoing back the soft yuing of the incoming critters. Jutting down a few notes here and there, this process of drifting in and out of wakefulness would go on until well into the afternoon, right as the Yukkuri began to slowly cease their frolicking under the sun.

My impressions during the second day were essentially identical during the first. The Yukkuri bodycount was practically the same as yesterday and the behavioral patterns did not vary at all. There was, however, something that got my attention: clan life in Yukkuri communities is, by all intents and purposes, really hard to maintain when it comes to sociability and happiness. All clans exist casually, as a mechanism of defense against either predators or famine - the pretense of harmony is there, but even with a visible figurehead like a smart Yukkuri or a DOSU type specimen in charge of the pack, social links between members of the community degrade over time. This didn't appear to be the case in this clan at all - generational gaps within families gives me a rough estimate of the age of this clan of anywhere between five to ten years - an eternity for the short, easy-seeking lifespans of Yukkuris. And both inter and intrafamilial conversations show no sign of evident social strain.

I spent the rest of the afternoon brooding over this peculiarity while reading some second-rate science journal, and considered the hypotheses for such a display while the Yukkuri were slowly going back into the thickness of the forest: the first one would be to assume the presence of a clan leader, as it would be very hard - not to say impossible- to keep a clan together for so long without one. At first I thought it was this Iku-sama, and all signs pointed to it, but first and foremost yukkuris do not refer to their clan leaders as such, and second of all - where was this Iku-sama? Leaders of the clan are very visible by definition, and this purported leader was nowhere to be found. The possibility that this Iku-sama was long dead was present during my pondering, but I quickly discarded it - a dead clan leader, if not quickly replaced, could only keep a community united in its collective memory for so long until the Yukkuri's faulty remembrance took over and allow all hell to break loose. Then again, it's not something I'd completely discard - everything about this group looked so outright strange from the start. Iku-sama could even be another animal, or a human... But if that were the case, it should've been referred to as a Mister Iku-sama, like normal Yukkuri speech patterns dictate.

So, all in all, I was either wildly wrong about the age of this clan (something very unlikely) or I was facing the most inconsistent Yukkuri clan in recorded history. Feeling a mixture of scientific curiosity and low-key fear, I whispered all my thoughts into my recorder, long after the Yukkuri were gone. When I got back to the truck, I deflected the where-have-you-beens from the driver with a dismissive movement of my hand and, still thinking about all this, hopped to the back without uttering a word.

My mind was too busy to register the now dull aches of my trunk and limbs, and soon fell into a dreamless sleep, disregarding even the experiments I was running on my own, in my half-lab half-house.

Even as I got up, I was still trying to make heads or tails of this whole situation. What I would experience later that day would blow my theories out of the water.

The driver didn't even bother to engage in mindless chitchat anymore. Perhaps he found out I was busy with my own thoughts, because the alternative - of him finally taking the hint - was too far unlikely. He spent the whole trip trying to tune into the local radio, which was announcing clear skies and pointless politics.

When I got down, the painkillers had already kicked in and barely felt the pangs of muffled pain from my cramped legs. The driver waved me goodbye, and I barely bothered to return the courtesy to him. Setting up my vantage point and whispering my beginning narration of the morning's events became, almost by necessity, purely mechanical and thoughtless.

It was around midday when a soft ululating sound took me off my stupor. Although what got me on edge was the clan's reaction to it - every single yukkuri froze where they stood, and looked up.

From above the trees, opposite to my vantage point and following the brook, a Remilia dived its way into the clearing.

"Uu~ uu~!" exclaimed the flying yukkuri, loud enough to echo through the clearing beyond the need of my microphone. I quickly turned the recorder on, aimed the camera and rambled on:

"twelve oh six PM, an incredible opportunity to test this clan behavior just flew by. Literally. A Remilia type Yukkuri has entered the area and appears to be looking for food."

"Gonna eat you~!"

"The clan should disperse at any moment n--... They're... They're not dispersing. The entire clan, all of it, is standing where they were and is looking at the Remilia. None of them," I went on, zooming into their faces as I did "are showing the usual expressions of fright or despair. They're almost like... expecting..."

The Remilia circled on, gaining altitude before attempting a dive. Nobody was moving. Nobody was saying anything. Where were the dumb cries for help? The trails of shit as the mothers abandoned their children for selfish safety? The koyukkuris pissing and crying in terror? Why were they all looking up at it?

The flying Yukkuri didn’t care about this.

A fatal mistake.

“Gonna eat you gonna eat you gonna eat you gonna e—“

My vision went blue - white, and my eardrums nearly burst at what I first thought to be white noise and only later identified to be a terribly close thunderclap.

The Remilia fell gracelessly straight to the ground. A trail of smoke and ionized air, visible as the white ghost of a lightning bolt, followed it. The body of the predator Yukkuri was coal-black, its wings burned to a crisp.

My hands moved by themselves, registering the cheers of joy of the entire clan, and how the biggest Marisas worked together to push the lump of charcoal the Remilia left for a body into the water. The cheering became twice as loud when the charred Yukkuri hit the stream and was carried into the trees, away from my sight. The smell of ozone filled the air.

As for me, I couldn't move. I couldn't think. A few more minutes of cheering went by before I finally fetched my walkie talkie from my belt.

“Transport. Transport, do you copy? Over.”

“Transport here. What’s up, pal? …Oh, over!”

“We’re calling it a day. Get over here and get me out. Over.”

“Wha’? Is something wrong? Did something happen?”

“I’ll be waiting at the foot of the hill. Hurry up. Over and out.”

I don't remember having packed my things, but there they were, in my bag. I don't remember what the driver told me or what I answered, but I did a good job in pretending I was keeping my cool. All the way to my house, to my bed, reviewing that day's footage in the camera, I could only think not of the dead Remilia, but what came directly after. When the film's audio confirmed what I heard, doubt and fear grappled my mind keeping me from falling asleep until well into the night.

When that Remilia was hit, the clan was not only cheering. They were chanting.

"Praise the great Iku-sama! Thank you for protecting me easy, Iku-sama!"

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The alarm rang very shortly after I fell asleep. Savoring the instants right after you wake up, when you haven’t yet remembered the worries and anguishes of your life, I thought to myself I’d make up for the lost sleep with quick naps through today’s surveillance. Right there, I remembered why I slept so little in the first place – the drowsiness wore off almost immediately.

I barely had time to shower before getting to the rendezvous point in time. No time to even think about abandoning the job, I met with the driver once again out of nothing but mental inertia. However, while munching down a bland breakfast in the van (with the previous consumption of motion sickness pills) I finally opted against it with a handful of dumb, poorly rationalized reasons – all to hide that my pride was too big to admit that this was quickly getting over my head.

Even if in the back of my mind I knew that going to that clearing was a threat to my life. I somehow convinced myself that nothing would happen to me as long as I kept a low profile, and that I couldn’t abandon the surveillance expedition without figuring out the mystery of that clan. Sooner or later, I told myself, Iku-sama (whoever or whatever it was, if it were even alive, or if it even existed) would show up. I figured that by the end of the allotted week I’d find a way to perform research on the clan by myself or, at the very least, retouch my report so that the Factory wouldn’t torch the place just yet. My pride, thinly disguised with the veil of scientific inquiry, kept me motivated to continue.

Even if in the back of my mind a (rational? Irrational?) part of myself kept on telling me that the entire clearing and its surroundings should be torched, or firebombed, or perhaps even nuked from orbit.

Setting up the equipment took longer than usual, and by the time I turned on the camcorder the Yukkuris were already in the clearing. No signs of yesterday’s event were visible in their behavior, and if it wasn’t for my recordings there would’ve been no way to guess that a Yukkuri Remilia was burned to a crisp in mid-air. The more I thought about it, the more likely it became that this Iku-sama was in fact a DOSU-type Yukkuri, with a defensive attack superficially reminiscent to the variant Marisa’s DOSU Spark. However, the inconsistencies were obvious as is – Dosu yukkuris are present, active members of a clan; and there was no way that a clan would call a dosu “-sama”. The assumption that I was in front of an unprecedented, undocumented case was a necessity at this point, and documented accordingly. If Iku-sama happened to be a human, or something else entirely (I didn’t want to think what this ‘something else’ could be), I would figure a way to deal with it in the moment if the situation ever arose. I muttered all these musings back to the recorder. The critters, in the meantime, were all there going on with their daily routine of food-gathering and frolicking. Their simplicity in their lives, in contrast with their uncanny behavior, nauseated me through a vague, insidious feeling of disgust and fright.

“Four forty-nine PM. Nothing of note seems to be occurring in the community,” I slurred into the recorder’s microphone, “and even some families are heading back to the woods.” While musing whether or not I should just get up, leave early and later pretend all the critters went to bed early, the directional microphone picked up something else.

“Four fifty-one. A Ko-Reimu is fighting with a Ko-Marisa, most likely—no, definitely members of the same family. Sisters. The Reimu is… demanding something to the Marisa, I think. Switching feed to the directional.” I hastily plugged the directional microphone to the recorder, and listened on.

“…stole Mister sweet-sweets from Reimu!”

“Mawiza didn’t shteal anychjing da je!  Weimu’s lying da je!”

“Marisa is the one that is lying to Reimu!” The koyukkuri replied, puffing up. “Reimu had mister sweet-sweets and I saw Marisa eating them!”

“Those were Mawiza’s shweet-shweets da je!”

“No they weren’t!”

“Yes they were!!!”

“Little ones!” The bigger Reimu next to them said. It looked back at its partner, another Marisa. “Fighting is a very uneasy thing to do! You have to take it easy!”

“But mommy, Marisa is the one who can’t take it easy! Uneasy Marisa stole Reimu’s sweet-sweets!” Even if smaller than its Marisa sibling, this one Ko-Reimu did not slur. It was solidly in a near-“teenaged” age, at least behaviorally.

"But little one, you can get sweet-sweet from Mister bushes any time you want, da ze!" The bigger Marisa said.

"Reimu wants Reimu's sweet-sweets! Marisa can't take it easy!"

“You’re the one not chaking ich eajy, Deibu! What will Iku-chama think, da je?”

“Iku-sama…” repeated the Ko-Reimu to herself.

“Yeah,” mother Reimu said, “Think what would Iku-sama say, little one!!”

“Iku-sama… Iku-sama would say that thiefs can’t take it easy! That thieves should die easy!”

“YuBYA—“

And with a sudden push, the tiny Ko-Reimu lunged towards the Marisa and head-butted her, bouncing off her slightly-larger body. The Yukkuri recoiled with the impact and was sent barely beyond the few centimeters that separated it from the stream.

Skimming the water with a splash unheard by the directional microphone, and in front of not only the astonished family but also the speechless passerby Yukkuris attracted to the previous ruckus, the Ko-Marisa shook and twitched violently in the water, along with a horrifying gurgle.

The Ko-Reimu’s face turned into an expression of harrowing surprise.

“YUPIPI?!?!”

Marisas are generally able to find their way into swimming, using their hat as a raft of sorts. However, this knowledge is acquired in the majority of cases, a lesson passed from parent to offspring. And even if this ko-Marisa knew how to swim above water with her hat, not much can be done if one is thrown into water without warning or preparation. Guttural cries of help came from the small Marisa’s mouth as everyone lined up helplessly on the side of the brook, unable to help. The screams became more and more gut-wrenching, intertwined with hideous gurgling noises as the Marisa bobbed up and down, screaming while submerging. As the camera's long-range lens focused on the Marisa through my morbidly curious hands, I noticed how the water around the drowning yukkuri acquired a dull black color – unable to discern for sure, the softball-sized yukkuri had either lost control of its sphincters or was leaking filling as its bottom half had begun to dissolve, or both. The gurgling screams intertwined with the desperate cries of help from the parents (a disconcerting mix of “Nooooo, little one!!!”, “Iku-sama, help!!!!”, and the like) became an almost unbearable cacophony of unintelligible suffering, until ko-Marisa’s eyes went blank and vomited a diluted mix of swallowed water and its own filling. Only an intermittent gurgling remained, perhaps a pitiful attempt at saying “wanted to take it easy some more…”, until the drowning yukkuri’s frantic movements in the water abruptly stopped. The body, bubbling still, half-sunk half-melted slowly.

Seconds of unbearable silence went by, until the spectators finally realized what had just happened.

“Reimu pushed Marisa! Reimu pushed Marisa into mister water!”

“Uneasy Reimu threw Marisa to mister brook and made Marisa take it easy forever!!”

“The Reimu that can’t take it easy must be judged for her crimes!”

The words alone, coming from an unidentified Yukkuri in the constantly growing crowd, took the breath out of me. A clan justice system is hardly a novel thing, but for clan members to… demand it so quickly, and demand it with such a tone in their voices! The cries for a trial became louder and louder, an unrecognizable vocal mess which metastasized throughout the crowd of eighty or ninety angry Yukkuris of all sizes and types. The parents had also merged seamlessly with the mob.

At first I thought the (accidental, in my eyes) killer Ko-Reimu had either merged with the crowd, not by intention but thanks to the

Yukkuris’ famous volatile memory; but in reality she fled the stream bank and frantically hopped her way through the clearing in hopes of reaching the thick of the woods. From my position, the sight was incredible – with a dash of comedic ridicule: the ko-Reimu, a baseball-sized little thing, was leaving a tiny trail of dust behind her as it tried to cross the distance from the brook to the edge of the clearing. A few dozen meters behind her, a poorly-distinguished mass of screaming balls, irradiating over-proportioned rage, closed in. I found the situation entertaining, and even hilarious – until I zoomed in with the camera to the ko-Reimu.

The little Yukkuri had a face of otherworldly terror, a contorted grimace of desperation and utter anguish; for this koyukkuri, the idea of being caught was not only a certainty, but also equal to an emotional checkmate – not unlike the faces of Yukkuris who, for the sake of human amusement or biological experimentation, had their families gruesomely massacred in front of their eyes before experiencing their own drawn out, torturous murder.

When the crowd was on the verge of catching up with the fleeing ko-Reimu, my heart sank as I saw through the zoomed-in recorder screen something I’ve never seen. Defiantly, although with tears in its eyes and its bottom dirty with a mixture of piss, soil and shit, the koyukkuri faced the crown and quickly began to chew its own lips. The bottom one came out first, ripped by the koReimu’s own teeth – screams drowned out the sounds of the mob and the cut strip of manjuu dough fell to the ground, but it kept going with the top lip. By the time the mass of yukkuris reached out to the Ko-Reimu, it had already finished chewing out a piece of its own tongue before puking bean paste out of its sheer pain; without slowing its pace, the faster members of the tumult tackled the bleeding yukkuri and pinned it to the ground as the rest caught up.

They took careful precautions in not killing it. Usually, yukkuris who are caught in the act of committing a crime are lynched on the spot, smashed to death by one or more of its clan compariots who jump on it over and over until rupturing. However, once thrown to the floor and surrounded, one of the biggest of the critters gently sat atop the ko-Reimu, and waited until there was no way for the offender to escape.

Once a tight circle was formed around it, the large Yukkuri jumped off and they all moved as one, pushing the now dazed koyukkuri along. The circle-shaped mass moved towards the clearing’s single lump, and opened into a U-shape to deposit the koyukkuri in front of the circular, mossy elevation. The ko-Reimu, in front of a pile of rocks of increasing height that served as a stairwell of sorts, could only react by coughing up more bean paste, shivering. The larger yukkuri tackled hard once, twice, and the criminal was forced upon this makeshift stairwell and on top of the tree stump. The U-shaped crowd closed again into a tight circle, blocking the only way out of the mossy platform.

“REIMU!” one of the yukkuris shouted – the directional microphone didn’t help in pinpointing which. “REIMU KILLED REIMU’S LITTLE SISTER! REIMU CAN’T TAKE IT EASY LIKE THIS!”

Silence, or so I thought. The microphone faintly called a whisper – “j-just wanted to… chake it ea… jy… some…”. The camera, now focused on the ko-Reimu, showed that the big gaping wound that was now its mouth was twitching slightly.

“REIMU CAN’T TAKE IT EASY DA ZE!” Another one cried out. “IKU-SAMA CAN’T TAKE IT EASY! DA ZE! SHITTY YUKKURI WHO CAN’T TAKE IT EASY FOR IKU-SAMA MUST DIE! RIGHT NOW IS FINE!” The crowd exploded in screams and assorted yu-yuing of various pitches.

The ko-Reimu’s eyes open wildly at the words “Iku-sama”, and began to tremble. A faint “noooo” seeped out of its mutilated mouth.

“YU, YU, IKU-SAMAAAAAA! HELP US TAKE IT EASY!!!”

The circle broke again, this time to give way to three massive Alices hidden in the crowd. Very slowly, one after the other climbed the stairwell and surrounded the now very clearly dying ko-Reimu, who had just vomited bean paste twice in a row and had dyed the moss black between it. The tiny yukkuri looked up, saw the Alices and promptly shat itself again.

“HELP US TAKE IT EASY!!! SHITTY REIMU WHO CAN’T ALLOW US TO TAKE IT EASY MUST DIE! MUST DIE! MUST DIEEEE!” The mob accompanied the chorus – “Must die! Must die! Must die! Must die!”

The larger alice of the three jumped hard on top of the ko-Reimu. Its eyes popped out from the pressure, ejected comically out of the socket – one flew past the audience with a trail of bean paste, and the other dangled in front of its squashed face. Promptly, tongues out and eyes wild in a display of (literally) inhuman lust, the other two Alices suddenly sprouted massive peni-peni and, in genuinely uncontrolled Alice fashion, began to repeatedly puncture whatever was left of the ko-Reimu’s undamaged skin. More bean paste –and I couldn’t believe the thing still had any left in its body- leaked out of every hole, as both the two Alices and the Alice on top, who gave in and joined the act at some point, gangraped what could only be described as a miraculously alive koyukkuri carcass.

This continued on for more time than I cared to quantify. The ko-Reimu, who could only mutter “wanted to… dage id eajy… some…” over and over, having been mentally broken after driven to attempted suicide, expired at some point in the middle of the ordeal. Sequentially, the Alices finished their defilement of the corpse with a scream of “REEE-FRESHED!!!!” and silently went back to join the crowd, losing themselves within the mass. What used to be the Ko-Reimu was now a flattened, swiss-cheesed mass of dough and bean paste, mushed against the mossy stump. A single sidelock, complete with accessory, was the only thing that told me that it was once one of these creatures.

But I don’t think they even noticed it was dead.

“IKU-SAMA! WE OFFER MISTER CRIMINAL REIMU TO YOU SO WE CAN TAKE IT EASY!” one Yukkuri screamed. Another one repeated this sentence. And then another one. And another one. The lynching mob began to chant once more. “IKU-SAMA! IKU-SAMA! IKU-SAMA!”

The chanting grew stronger in my ears, outside the bounds of the directional microphone’s range. I looked up and realized, under the setting sun, that the Yukkuris that had already left for the woods had come back and gathered to watch the spectacle in the edge of the clearing, joining with the chant.

There was no mistake  -  the words “mister criminal Reimu” came out from the crowd.

This was insane. The use of the word “Mister” is reserved to any entity, alive or otherwise, that wasn’t a Yukkuri. Calling the offender “mister criminal Reimu” gave way to a pretty obvious, if harrowing, conclusion: in their eyes, the ko-Reimu wasn’t part of the clan the second it killed its sibling.

In their eyes, the ko-Reimu wasn’t a Yukkuri any longer.

“WE OFFER YOU MISTER CRIMINAL REIMU WHO CAN’T TAKE IT EASY! WE OFFER YOU MISTER CRIMINAL REIMU SO WE CAN TAKE IT EASY! TAKE IT EASY WITH YOU! IKU-SAMA!”

“My god,” I involuntarily whispered into the recorder, which was still taking input from both its inbuilt microphone and the connected directional. “My god, it’s an altar. This is an offering.”

The chanting got cut short by another flood of light and noise which, even if I recognized it again as a lightning bolt, it caught me off guard as before.

The smell of ozone again. The camera’s CCD sensor re-stabilized again, and the carbonized remains of the ko-Reimu came into view.

The entire clan cheered. A flock of birds fled from their refuge in the trees.  The circle broke and the critters haphazardly began to approach the stump. The ones on the edge of the clearing closed in.

Once the crowd of Yukkuris began to eat the charred remains of the ko-Reimu, I turned off all my gear, packed up, and left.

I tried my best to wait until reaching my house, but once I reached the foothill, and in front of my driver (who now learned to keep quiet and limit himself to only express facial gestures instead), I vomited profusely.

I didn’t sleep that night, of course. I spent the hours tending to my long-neglected experiments, throwing to the garbage those that didn’t survive my two days of negligence. By the time I had finished, I realized it was time to go back to meet the van driver once again. Using my backpack the best I could as a makeshift pillow, I slipped into a (luckily) dreamless sleep for the entirety of the trip.

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

My mind was someplace else during most of the day. I didn’t know, in retrospect, what caused me to react so badly to the past two days’ events. Rationally speaking, this was the greatest possible opportunity to observe for the first time what could be the greatest socio-evolutional variation in Yukkuri life. Something had to make them tick the way they did – and the challenge of figuring it out was the most compelling challenge for me to keep going.

Just like when the stray Remilia was struck by lightning and turned into a cauterized mass of dough and paste, nothing in the clearing showed evidence of the ritual cannibalism that took place the day before, save for a subtle darkening of the moss that covered the tree stump, most likely a consequence of the ko-Reimu’s bean paste seeping into it.

Even though I wasn’t as on edge as I used to be a few hours later, I couldn’t help but sense a feeling of looming apprehension. As hours went by, this apprehension became reckless courage and, having carefully explained my reasons to do so on the recorder, I waited until an hour before sunset and opened the cage I had brought with me.

Inside, an adult Reimu was sleeping soundly in it. I carefully grabbed the basketball-sized manjuu and put it on the ground in front of me.

“Mmmyuu? Is Reimu’s sleep-sleep time over?”

“Yes it is,” I said. “Would you like to go take it easy with other Yukkuris?”

Eyes closed, the Reimu nodded. “Only if they’re as easy as Mister!”

“Oh, I’m sure they are,” I replied with a smile. “So, wanna go?”

“Mm! Reimu wants to meet easy Yukkuris like Reimu!”

With as much care as possible, I grabbed Reimu with both hands and lifted her up.

“Yu! It feels like flying in the sky!!”

“It sure does.”

With an upward movement, like throwing a softball two-handed, I launched the Yukkuri off my vantage point and onto the clearing.

She would survive the fall, of course. I made sure to pick a Yukkuri that was resilient to fall damage from a young age, taken from one of my most recent experiments. It was purposefully grown in a Yukurrarium coated with broken glass and psychologically rewired, through lengthy conversations and the latest in yu-hypnosis techniques, into thinking that the “painful Mister ground” was, in reality “the easiest possible place to live” – a psychologically susceptible lineage was provided to me for this exact reason.  A few (very painful) months later, the Reimu developed a thick layer of dough that would protect it from the glass and, by extension, a lot of different types of direct trauma. Needless to say, this all-terrain Yukkuri wouldn’t be safe from damaged caused by a human or a large animal – a foot would only feel a bit more resistance before squashing it against the floor, and no thick dough skin is good enough protection against a knife.

But the most basic of injuries, those that by bad luck end up fatal to Yukkuris such as a fall or a lodged pebble, are of no concern for this Reimu.

That’s why I chose it. There was no way I could easily approach the clearing to deposit the Yukkuri without drawing attention from the clan; let alone the fact that I didn’t know any evident way in that wasn’t directly through that damned forest (and that I was still too cautious about going in directly). Leaving it well outside the clearing and tell it where to go was out of the question as well – even if it survived the forest, the Reimu’s wonderfully short term memory would cause it to forget its goal within fifteen or so minutes. Thus, I threw it from my nest.

There wasn’t much I could do when it came to passive observation, as normal clan life had been carefully documentated for days on end, and I couldn’t hope on another intervention such as the Remilia or the offending ko-Reimu from the day before within the two remaining days. I had to push an interventionist angle onto the clan if I ever wanted to grasp the mystery of Iku-sama or, at the very least, document the clan’s behavior against foreign elements more thoroughly. It’s not unusual for stray Yukkuris to become accepted in a wild clan, even those that don’t appear to be in immediate need – on the contrary, healthy Yukkuri are selected for the sake of being productive members of the clan as-is.

The height between my vantage point and the clearing itself was something like five solid meters, but sloped just enough for the Yukkuri’s resilient body to survive It without much issue. The Reimu, feeling a mixture of confusion and betrayal, bounced twice before hitting the soft grass of the clearing, not far from one of the clan families. I aimed the camera and the directional microphone towards it.

“Who are you, da ze?”

“Yu! I’m Reimu! Let’s take it easy!”

The family looked at it very strangely. Eerie silence went by.

“We all take it easy here, da ze! Iku-sama allows us to take it easy in here!”

“Iku-sama…? Who is Mister Iku-sama?” Reimu asked, tilting its head/body a little bit.

“Yupi?! You don’t know who Iku-sama is?!” an Alice in the family asked –the mother, surely.

Reimu said nothing. I wiped my hand across my face. “Here we go,” I thought.

“…Iku-sama is our leader da ze! Iku-sama helps us and lets us take it easy in this easy place! Iku-sama’s the best da ze!” Marisa exclaimed, bouncing.

“Yes!” The Alice added. “Iku-sama is very city-sect and also protects us!”

“Protect…?”

“Iku-chama givesh Reimyu shweet-shweets from Mister bushes when Reimyu behavesh!” the child Reimu from the family said. It jumped in glee at the thought of sweet-sweets with a trail of pee-pee coming from its mamumamu.

“Yu?! Sweet-sweets?!” My Reimu asked, surprised.

“Yes!” The family said in unison. “We really can take it easy around here! Iku-sama protects us!”

“C-Can Reimu be in this easy place too?”

Silence again. The moment of truth.

“Well,” Marisa finally said, “it’s not up to us to decide that da ze! Iku-sama is the one that decides what goes on around here!”

“W-What will Iku-sama say, yu?”

The Marisa clicked its tongue. “Well, I don’t really know, da ze. But we can’t let you be uneasy while you’re here!”

The Alice husband grinned and added, “Indeed! You look like a very city-sect Reimu! We should let you take it easy while you’re here and Iku-sama decides!”

“Yuyu!! Reimyu wantsh to be friendsh with eajy Reimyu too!” 

“So you mean Reimu can take it easy here?!”

“Yes! While Iku-sama passes judgement, let’s take it easy together!!!”

After hearing those words, Reimu began to sport a bright grin. Accepted in this easy place…!

The first lightning bolt didn’t kill Reimu outright. Even though unexpected, the flash and explosion didn’t surprise me this time. Morbidly, I figured that the thick dough provided a slight layer of insulation. The camera refocused back to a half-scorched Reimu, with the right half of its face melted into a grimace reminiscent of the toothy smile that sported a few seconds ago. The left side was very evidently in gruesome agony, and began to emit screams which filled the entire clearing again. Flashes of orange crisscrossed its hair as it burned and singed.

“YUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT HUUUUURRRTTTTSCHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HEEEEEELLLLPPPPP!!!!! HEEEEEEEEEEE-”

Another lightning bolt struck the Yukkuri and the screams ended as fast as they began.

Another one hit, within a second. And another. And another. Faster than anything nature could ever produce, a total of five lightning bolts struck the intruder Reimu’s body in quick succession. The remainder was, just as the others killed by the mysterious bolt, a smoking, charcoal-like lump vaguely shaped like a Yukkuri.

Ozone, again. Silence.

“THANK, YOU IKU-SAMA!!!”

The clearing erupted into yet another high-pitched roar. Even the family that had just tried to accept the intruder into the clan cheered on. Did they change their mind so suddenly, thanks to the Yukkuri's terrible memory? Did they just pretend, in fear?

Or did they know all along, and just lured my Yukkuri in?

Reimu wasn’t eaten like the ko-Reimu – perhaps due to its condition as an “outsider”, its burnt corpse was carried by a half dozen yukkuris across the clearing and to the stream bed, where it was thrown. I tried my best to evoke any emotion from me as I saw my Yukkuri being carried away by the water, but I already knew that it wasn’t coming back alive out of it anyway.

So only the “offenders” within the clan were killed and eaten in that sort of ritualistic nature, while “outsiders” were eliminated on the spot and disposed of through the tiny brook.

It made me wonder why the humans that came here earlier by order of the Factory weren’t attacked. One was a ground team and another via aerial recognition, wasn’t it…? Did this Iku-sama, who was most likely the entity or the force behind these lightning bolts, realize that their intruders were too powerful for the lightning strikes to destroy them? Yukkuri are burned to a crisp instantly, but if just an inch of dough thicker delayed death enough to require multiple strikes, then the threshold must be evidently low and not one of a truly atmospheric lightning bolt - one of those elusive elements of Yukkuri behavior that are preliminarily explained away as ‘magic’; a catch-all term to define all of our fuzzy knowledge of the things that come from beyond the Hakurei border.

And, man, I worked so hard on that goddamn Yukkuri. I'm gonna have to redo the experiment if I ever hope to get that thing published into a journal.

I stayed in my spot well until night-time, making sure that no other activities took place after the disposal. Realizing there really wasn’t much else to do, I placed my gear inside my backpack and got up to leave.

The sound of rustling leaves stopped me.

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

Hmm, I sent in the third part yesterday but it seems it got caught in the spam filter. I guess Poweryoga hasn't gotten around to see it yet...? Anyway, it'll be posted in five parts. Two are already up and the third one is... somewhere. Hope those who are reading, if any, don't mind.

El sábado, 30 de julio de 2016, 22:10:38 (UTC-3), The Didact escribió:

I do like a talented writer coming in and posting stuff. It's been kind of hard to find interesting reads around here, I've had to dig way back. Glad to have some new current stuff to look forward to.

Thank you for your kind words. I'm happy as long as someone reads it and likes it. I hope it's of your liking.

[Hitosura]

Very interesting story thus far, and no, your third part got posted.  I suppose it goes in what order Poweryoga approves, and it's possible he missed that one.

Can't wait to see how this goes.

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Afterword
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

And that's it, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it.

Back in 2010 when I first started writing this, Yukkuri text stories still followed a very yukkuri-centric plot - my biggest fear was to end up writing a very human-centric story and having the Iku-sama clan as secondary. Now, as I kept writing the Yukkuri dialog scenes and realized how rusty it got over the years. my fear is giving you unsatisfactory Yukkuri scenes, either with lazy speech patterns or just undeveloped ones - sorry for that!

My only regret here is evident - six years is absolutely unacceptable for having writing this.Then again, my 2010 self was objectively a shittier writer than what I am right now, so the story would've been subpar by any and all standards, hopefully this will be of your liking a bit more. Sadly there aren't many people writing Yukkuri text stories anymore, and even our Japanese counterpart has been (as I currently understand it, I could be wrong) also not producing as much Yukkuri media as they used to back in the day. This was also one of my concerns as I was finishing this, a silly twist on the tree falling in the forest riddle: if someone writes a Yukkuri text story and there's nobody in the fandom left to read it, was it ever written? But hey, maybe someone out there is crazy enough to translate this, who knows?

My deepest thanks to everyone here and in OYP keeping our little Western Yukkuri bastion alive and kicking. I'll still be around.

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

“Hey, you!”

I turn around. “Who, me?”

“Yeah! Come over here!”

I walk towards the fat, almost-bald dude waving at me in the entrance.

“You see this box over here, kid?” He says, pointing at a huge cardboard box lying at his feet. While the fat man is kind of short, the cardboard box almost reaches his belly button.

“Pretty hard to miss, man.”

“I want you to carry it to this address.” He gives me a piece of paper with an address sloppily scribbled on it. It’s stained with what seems to be bean paste.

“Sure thing, bro!”

I lift the box and carried it to my van. Heavy as shit, I might add! I drive my way to the address in the paper, almost running over a bunch of nicehead-lookin’Yukkuris along the way (Gotta watch that Karma!). Twenty minutes later, I pulled up to a nice, medium-sized home in the suburbs. I get out of the seat, drag the box out of the van and to the entrance, and ring the bell.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, uhh, I got a delivery... It’s from, uhh, Fukuicchi? Factory regional department number… uh… well, I forgot, but um...”

No response, until I hear numerous clicks, and then the door opens. Before me is a tall, bespectacled man, supporting his weight in a wooden cane. His hands are half-bandaged and he’s wearing an orthopedic boot in his limping foot.

“You don’t need to sign or anythin’, it’s just a… Oh, it’s you!”

“Nice to see you again, man. How've you been?”

“I didn’t recognize you with the short hair! W-What happened back there? Fukuicchi called me and, well, everything was a fuckin' mess! I thought you kicked the bucket or somethin’!”

“Nah, I… I lived," he says. "Doctor said I’ll be able to walk without this thing in a couple of weeks, so all is good, I guess. No field trips for a while, though. Wanna come in?”

“Sure, let me bring you this inside.”

He gets back home and I follow. His living room wasn’t that much of a luxury, with just a small TV, a kotatsu and some furniture here and there. Not something I expected from this guy at all. There are papers lying around everywhere, though, and every single surface has at least one sheaf of them, some having pictures of different yukkuris stapled on them.

He closes the door behind him. After taking a look at it, I can see that it was filled with locks and deadbolts. “That thing looks heavy,” he says, as he grabs his cane upside down and clears the kotatsu free of papers using the L-shaped handle. He tries to pick up one last sheet, but grunts in pain as he bends down. I do it for him, putting it in the floor with the rest of the mess.

“A-And it sure as hell is! What’s in it?”

“I actually have no idea. Here, let me open it.”

The man crouches, and he hands me his cane. With a slow, crippled pace, he rips the tape and slowly opens the box.

“Ugh! Man, what’s that?”

Inside it, three huge jars filled with crystal things inside (plus one full of some blue gel thing) and filled with liquid are the companion of a very huge, rotten and half-charred carcass of a GINORMOUS yukkuri. The thing’s contorted in a gesture of pain and… surprise?

“That,” he says, pointing at the box with a cane, “is the fucker that made me use the thing you’re holding in your hands.”

I look at my hands. At the cane.

 “…That thing? So it was a Yukkuri? A Yukkuri was the thing that almost killed you?”

He doesn't reply, but grabs a letter that was lying between the jars and got up while making a grimace akin to the one of the dead yukkuri in the box.

“Don’t force yourself, dude! Here, take it.”

I give him the cane and he mutters a ‘thank you’.

We look at each other, without finding words to say.

“Well, bro” I break the silence.  “I better leave before the boss kills me for being late. See ya.”

I wave my hand and turn on my heels to go back to my van, but I’m stopped by his voice.

“Wait.”

“Huh?” I turn around.

“You don’t have to be like that, man. We haven’t had time to socialize.”

“Well…”

“Meh, I know I’m not too much of a people person and sound like an ass sometimes. I'm sure you noticed that too.”

“What? Never crossed my mind!” I lie.

“Let me make it up for you. Doctor says socializing is good once in a while. So, how much did you hear about that yukkuri in the box?"

"Well, nothing really. Whatever you were doing there was way off my clearance."

"Wanna hear the story, then? I can invite you with a cup of tea if you’d like. A beer, perhaps?”

He smiles at me, kind of a half-smirk. I never thought I would see that guy smile in my life! And he looked like such a tight-ass dude before... What made him change that much?

My schedule’s free for the day, anyway...

“I’ll accept that beer, please!”

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

Hey buddy,

Sorry I wasn’t able to pay you a visit while you were in the hospital. They told me you’re undergoing an excellent recovery, and I imagine you’ll be able to get back on track in no time. I suppose I also owe you a heartfelt apology for having to put you in a situation like that – although I don’t think anybody would’ve even imagined what was going on in that forest.

You’ve always told me that the Factory only speaks in the language of money, and I guess I have no choice but to prove you right once again: I’ve arranged to get all your hospital expenses paid for and the Board agreed to deposit you a compensation bonus for all the hassle on top of your end payment for the job – we’ve also arranged to compensate you for retrieving invaluable information that I’ve no doubt you’ll study and deconstruct the same way our researchers have been doing for days on end now.

The Factory has finished with the autopsy and analysis of the Yukkuri Iku specimen you’ve referred to as “Iku-sama”  -results available upon request any time you want, of course-. As you might have already noticed, I’ve taken the liberty to mail you the preserved dissection in case you want to run your own , which I’m sure you will. All of our info will remain classified for a while now, but if you ever feel like getting a place in a scientific journal I’ll make sure you get the data and credit you need; hell, it’s the least I can do. Just give me a call and you’ll get your name on our research papers.

To make it as short as possible,” Iku-sama” was the bearer of an incredible, never-before-seen mutation. This has no precedent whatsoever... but then again, after seeing your recordings, what did? Not only incredibly enlarged in size, the dissection showed us that in its interior there was a massive solidified paste core of a material not unlike hard candy, which amounted to about eighty-five percent (!) of its total body mass. As you surely know (after all, you helped us in coming up with it), we operate under the framework of Yukkuri neurobiology based on the biochemical composition of its paste core, sugar molecules working as neurons and its bonds as synapses (surely, not our most solid paradigm, but so far it’s better than all the crap we’ve came up with for the past few years) – the sheer size of the paste core (estimated to be almost a meter wide!) and its compactness gave the Iku unprecedented intelligence. The consequences of this were documented first-hand through your work: advanced clan dynamics, complex Yukkuri worship, the disappearance of human beings or the Factory itself as an innate fear evoker… sadly, there is no way for us to replicate this or get witness accounts of Iku-sama’s lackeys: once the Yukkuri demigod died, most of them went catatonic at the sight of the corpse of their  leader-slash-deity and died shortly after, and the rest either relentlessly attacked (without much success, it goes without saying) the strike squadron sent to extract you or ran off the designated area in a frenzy, although we made sure nobody got out to an urban center – and yes, we did it through good ol’ Factory cauterization; I trust that you won’t gloat about how you were once again right about firebombing.

Out of the estimated two-hundred something yukkuris present in the clearing (I don't have the exact numbers on me right now, but there were a lot more specimens than the ones you described in the clearing), only two were extracted alive: one of them went crazy and killed itself in a way that would take me a whole other letter to describe it to you, and the remaining one refused cooperation and starved itself to death, refusing to touch our food and with full rejection of orange juice immersion treatment. Interestingly enough, a dissection of these two yukkuris showed no evident abnormalities. Electronic microscope examinations of their paste cores are still pending but we don’t expect any major discoveries.

Back on the subject of Iku-sama, it’s worth mentioning that its astounding anato-physiological variation was also the cause of its demise. As you also know, Factory operatives don’t carry firearms in the job because it’s not sufficiently effective when it comes to eliminating Yukkuris en masse – at best, it only succeeds in piercing the Yukkuri and may even recover from such a wound. However, a small-caliber bullet fired from the personal .22 handgun of your assigned fieldwork driver made its way through the Iku and the enlarged paste core, almost as big as the Yukkuri itself (a peculiar detail I’ve fished out of the autopsy report: whatever little “filling” Iku-sama had, was located mostly under the paste core – the guys at the lab theorized that the sour gel filling inside the Iku seemed to have served a protective function against everyday movement such as walking and whatnot). The rock candy-like composition of the paste core caused it to shatter upon the bullet’s impact, causing instantaneous death by massive trauma to the core. Even if resistant to concussions due to its size, its large paste core ended up being its ultimate demise. Well, that plus the bullet wound of course.

We’re currently trying to scout out the adjacent area to confirm there are no escapees or, worse, another Iku-sama going around like that. We can’t risk a civilian going through the forest and getting zapped to death. Yeah, yeah, we’re getting humanistic, whatever.

I’ll visit you when you get better, that way you’ll be in a better condition to beat me up. After all, without a personal apology, how could I ever convince you to work with me some other time?

Just kidding, by the way. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to open the door when I come knocking.

If you need anything, you know where to find me.

Wishing you a speedy recovery,

-Fukuicchi

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

My little vantage point was surrounded by a myriad of shrubbery and tall weeds. Under the faint moonlight, to my left, the grass shivered against the direction of the wind. I tightened my grip on the backpack.

Unable to withstand the tension, I walked to the moving grass, shoved my hands into it and removed a scruffy-looking Patchouli. I lifted it up with both hands, holding it at eye level.

Yukkuris usually react to this, with either fright or more likely with the usual “Feels like flying!!” spiel. The Patchouli said nothing, and looked at me with a disinterested face.

I started to have a very bad feeling about this, but what the hell could a single Patchouli even do to me? Betraying my demeanor, I gulped involuntarily.

I walked towards the slope that separated me from the foothill where the driver awaited. “Well, hello there, Patchouli!” I said, with my trademark cardboard smile and a shit-eating tone in my voice. “What are you doing here?”

She said nothing, and kept staring.

“…Well then,” I stammered. This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t normal at all. But I wanted no involvement in this anymore. At that moment, with such ominous atmosphere in my shoulders, all I kept thinking was to keep my cool and scram.

Right as I began to lower the Patchouli back where it was, it spoke.

“Mukyu.”

And with no other warning than that, it bit one of my fingers, digging hard with its teeth.

“OW, MOTHERFUCKER!” I dropped the manjuu to the ground – or so I thought. When I let go with my free hand, gravity brought the Patchouli down while still attached to my finger, pulling even harder. The pain increased fivefold, and between the inertia and the confusion I gave in and fell kneeling to the ground. The Yukkuri was still relentlessly holding onto my finger, biting hard.

“You manjuu cocksucker, I’ll fucking—urgk!” somehow, the little shit found a way to bite even harder. Unable to get it to open its mouth or force it open, I had to deactivate it in old-fashioned, well-practiced Factory procedure:  I ripped its accessory off, put my thumb, index, and middle finger of my free hand in a duck-beak shape and, keeping them taut and rigid, dug into the backside of the Yukkuri, easily piercing the dough. I could try to flex my fingers inside the body and pull back my hand, scooping out as much paste as possible – but it didn’t guarantee instantaneous death. So I made my way through the paste and found the chickpea-sized paste core, pressing it between my fingers until it gave in. The Patchouli’s eyes rolled in separate directions from each other and its jaw slacked just enough for me to be able to wiggle my finger, now purple and bleeding, from the Patchouli’s mouth.

I sat there for way longer than I would like to admit, tearing the Yukkuri’s body apart in chunks out of petty rage. Once I was done with the eyes, I realized something terrible. Not once the Yukkuri reacted to me jamming my fingers into it and squeezing the equivalent of its brain – not a change in its expression (or rather, its lack thereof) or the strength of its bite, not a grunt or a yelp of pain even having been quick in dispatching it. No living being, let alone a Yukkuri, can go through getting a trepanation and having its brain squeezed without at least reacting to it. It’s true that Patchoulis are more resistant than the rest, but jam a finger inside one and they’ll cry and squeal like useless little shits just as much as any other one.

This wasn’t a normal Yukkuri. And there was only one place where I’ve seen abnormal Yukkuris around.

I softly exhaled a long, heartfelt “Fffffuuuuuuck…” as I realized I’ve been compromised. There was no way that Yukkuri wasn’t from the clan. I had directly interacted with a clan member and by any scientific standard imaginable I had fucked any future chance to observe them untouched. I had already pushed it far enough with the Yukkuri I brought from outside, but this was too much.

Even worse, if one Yukkuri had spotted me the odds that another one did were too big. Trying my best not to think what happened to the past intruders of the clan – and not fully realizing that I had just killed one of its own – I got up and stepped towards my way out.

Only to slip hard and backflip out of the vantage point and onto the opposite direction, towards the forest clearing.

Both the slope and my backpack cushioned my fall, but that didn’t stop me from rolling once, twice, thrice against the ground and land hard on my shoulder and head.

I had already lost track of time when I saw my Yukkuri getting zapped, but I think I passed out when I fell – either for a few minutes or a few hours. The sky looked a little darker and my finger had stopped bleeding when I got up, trying to curse my way out of an explosive headache.

“I could’ve broken my fucking neck there, god fucking damn…” I muttered. Looking up at my former ‘nest’ from this place I concluded I had no feasible chance to climb it back up. I had to go around it through the forest and rejoin the foothill from there.

The clearing looked even bigger when in it. I began to walk my way towards its edge.

“Piece of shit goddamn Yukkuri fuck s-huh?”

The sole of the shoe I slipped with felt funny. I lifted my leg to see it, and noticed under the moonlight that a dark paste was smeared all over it. Not being unaccustomed to stepping on shit (and who is, really?), I was about to release another wave of expletives against my terrible (for not saying shitty) luck until I noticed that along with it there was something else stuck to my shoe.

It was a tiny black hat, decorated with a tiny white ribbon.  

I put my foot back on the ground.

“What the actual fuck?”

That second of confusion was all it took. Before I could even react, I went down on one knee as a bolt of sharp, screaming pain shot up from my foot to my thigh.

I twisted my trunk and neck to see behind me.

I couldn’t believe my own eyes.

A Marisa holding a tree branch with her mouth, its affixed to the back of my ankle. It pierced my skin and lodged itself a few inches in.

My eyes went wide. My lack of sleep and confusion over this turn of events had all but nullified my reaction time.

As another surge of pain went by when I tried to grab the Yukkuri, I realized within a second full of abject dread that the branch had gone straight through my Achilles’ tendon. Unable to even flex it, my leg was now essentially useless. Fumbling to get a grip of the Marisa, the manjuu jumped to the left instead, pivoting the spear-branch in my wound so hard it broke in half. I went down face first, my will to move deafened by the roar of pain running through half my body. I rolled on the ground and dropped my healthy foot on the Marisa, pressing hard and twisting my heel to kill it for good.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I pulled the remaining piece of branch off my foot. My heart sank even further as I saw the injury: Gracefully dodging the malleoli, the spear went straight to the tendon connecting my calf muscles to my foot and avoided any vital nerves and blood vessels. This was either great luck or a very calculated wound. I didn’t want to know which one was it.

Until I looked at the tip. Then I knew.

Of course it had pierced my foot – the branch had been artificially sharpened to a fine point, a literal branch. A Yukkuri would take hours if not days of continuous, conscious effort to sharpen it. I felt like throwing up all over, trembling with cold and fear. The Patchouli was no coincidence. The thing I slipped on, obviously a Ko-Marisa, wasn’t there by coincidence either. If they had time to sharpen a spear, then they had time to place a Ko-Marisa up there for me to step on!

They had planned this! They had planned all of this, goddammit!

A hideous mixture of whispers and rustling reached my ears. I got up the best I could and limped my way towards the edge of the clearing away.

Out from behind a tree, a round shadow jumped out and tackled my abdomen. The basketball-sized Alice bounced hard and caused me to stagger.

By the time the second one hit my back and threw me to the ground, I managed to see that they were everywhere around me.

I could feel, through the vibrations of the ground, how the Yukkuris were bouncing up and down to move and surround me. I rolled around to see dozens, hundreds, of the critters approaching me, carefully but without ever stopping. I punted with my healthy leg any of the critters that came close, but even with that it was impossible to shake so many off. I slowly got up again, denying the situation in my mind and only thinking I had to escape. This time about half a dozen Yukkuris tackled me from the back and threw me down back again.

I didn’t have it in me to fight against at least a hundred of them, so I allowed them to crawl on top of me.

They probably thought they would be able to suffocate me, but other than being a persistent bother they were still too light and small to knock the air out of me by sitting on my back. Various ‘yu’s of confusion could be heard as the minutes went by and I was still breathing.

“MOVE AWAY!” I heard from afar. The Yukkuris stopped talking and moving, and jumped out and away from me. They were all staring at the opposite edge of the clearing, where a massive shadow moved between the trees. It got bigger and bigger, until it reached the clearing itself.

Moonlight made the skin of the titanic, living manjuu shine.

“IKU-SAMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” the Yukkuris cried out in unison. I don’t know if the entirety of the clan was there or not, but the screams left me momentarily deaf.

The giant Yukkuri approached slowly. It had light purple hair and a short, rounded hat as accessory, decorated with a red ribbon looped around with a bow. Its brown eyes glistened against the moon.

It moved carefully, somewhat clumsily even, never once looking away from me. As it got closer, I managed to get a better look at its size – definitely several times larger than a normal Yukkuri, but much stouter than the rest, an abnormal shape that I’ve never seen before – horizontally oblong, but doing its best in keeping its shape as spherical as possible. Definitely not a Dosu-type, as those are even taller than me, and vertically elongated; this Iku-sama probably could only reach me up to my abdomen or chest at most. I’d go as far as to call it obese – but those Yukkuri have a definite, well-documented gourd shape.

Finally, it wobbled its way to me and stood in front, looking down at me with a grimace of disdain.

I got up for a third time, trying my best not to look pained in front of the giant Yukkuri. I couldn’t let it show any sign of weakness.

‘Iku-sama’ stood a bit taller, reaching almost up to my ribs.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” I said, unable to shake off my usual condescending tone I reserved for Yukkuris.

“Yuyu, Iku-sama was also wondering when Mister Human was going to show his ugly face!” it replied.

Silence again, broken only by my faint panting. My ankle was still hurting and, even though no artery was compromised, still oozing blood. A faint, pulsating pain in my hand grimly reminded me of the bite wound.

“Mister Human here,” I finally said, pointing at myself, “will now go back so we can all take it easy. What do you think… Iku-sama?” I almost spat the words out. Calling it by its dumb moniker was nothing but give it agency. Lower myself to its ridiculous standards. But I was, undeniably and thoroughly, afraid. I couldn’t allow my fear to blossom and be seen in my actions, or else I’d lose the edge in this diplomatic exchange.

“We can’t take it easy, Mister Human. Iku-sama can’t take it easy!” It yelled, referring again to itself.

At the words ‘Iku-sama’, a Marisa screamed and lunged at me again.

The giant Yukkuri shook once, shimmered, and from produced a blue-white electric arc connecting its body with the Yukkurisa’s.

“SILENCE!!!”

Momentum was the only thing that kept it going, lightly hitting and bouncing off of me. The lump of charcoal that was the Marisa hit the ground, smoking.

Silence, plus a very uneasy burning smell, wafted through the clearing once again.

“We can’t take it easy, Mister Human,” it repeated.

“…”

“We can’t take it easy… while Mister Human still lives!”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Diplomacy’s off the table. It’s all over.

It was now or never. In a quick, practiced motion, I pulled my multi-tool knife from my belt and jumped with my healthy leg at the towering Yukkuri, bringing the blade downward—

What I vaguely thought to be white noise blocked my senses, and only a second later I recognized it as pure pain. My back arched as my muscles stopped responding to me, millions of volts coursing through my body.

I don’t know how long it lasted, but next thing I knew my forehead slammed against the cold grass, gasping for air. The knife was no longer in my hand.

The massive Yukkuri laughed. It was an unbearable shrill that was painful to even listen to. The other Yukkuris soon followed, adding to the cacophony.

The towering Yukkuri Iku waddled closer.

Okay, so it didn’t kill me. It’s either not powerful enough to kill a human, confirming my previous theory…

Or it wasn’t using its full strength. I raised my head and looked beyond the titan.

Even with my vision blurred, I could vaguely see the outlines of the tree stump.

It could be trying to just keep me alive for long enough.

The giant Iku laughed. It knew I knew.

I had fallen face down with my arms bent, and my undamaged hand felt something cold in my belt holster. Relief washed over me.

The walkie-talkie.

I took it out of the holster, doing my best not to move too much.

Not that I had a lot of resources for running away with a crippled leg anyways. My only hope relied on my lifeline to the old fart. I turned the device on, yanked the earphones from it and pressed the talk button with my thumb the best I could.

Subtlety was over. Still face down, I brought the walkie-talkie to my face.

“SOS! SOS! Fukuicchi, tell me you’re there, I need help as soon as possible!”

The frenzied critters stopped moving, probably wondering who I was talking to.

The reply came after seconds of eternity, in which I thought the device had died with the shock.

“Is that you? What’s wrong? Respond! Resp-“

“IIIIYYYAAAAA!!!” I looked up, and the towering Iku screamed and shook violently in place. What came after was something I could barely register again as intolerable pain – two bolts of sharp white-blue lightning shot out of the Yukkuri’s ribbon and struck me, causing all my muscles to tense and twitch again. In a lapse of cognition, I realized I was still clutching the walkie talkie, button still pressed due to my paralyzed fingers.

“Extraction! Extraction, now!”  I groaned through the electric shock, using by instinct an old codeword from the Factory goons, as I felt the walkie talkie fizzle and die in my hand – it was only then that the current stopped flowing. Numb all over except for my still-burning foot and hand, I couldn’t help but still twitch well after Iku-sama had stopped electrocuting me.

Laughing again. Laughing and cheering. And, occasionally, chanting. I cursed my luck. I didn’t know my message got there in time, if it got there at all. Best case scenario, the old man heard only static and that should have hopefully been enough.

“Perhaps shitty old geezer will now learn that going against the will of Iku-sama will be its final mistake!!”

“Fuck you.” I bent my arms and pulled, attempting to get up or at least looking like I still had some dignity left.

“HA!” Another shock, this time nearly instantaneous. My limbs kept flailing about even after the current stopped. It was merely for show, just to prove to me and its subjects how easy it was to keep me down. This petty rancor, this childish display of power… even if much smarter than your average Yukkuri, the little fucker was still a Yukkuri.

And yet here I was, overpowered…!

I felt pressure in my sides and legs. I didn’t understand what was happening until my head lifted by itself a few centimeters of the ground. With the great effort it took my brain to remember it still had a body from the neck down, I found myself levitating off the ground.

No, not levitating. I looked to my sides. The Yukkuris were, massively, trying to get under my body and limbs and lift me up. My weight was unbearable for a single Yukkuri, but for dozens of them it was distributed well enough to hold me, slowly.

Iku-sama didn’t need to say a word. The Yukkuris rotated me until the tree stump altar was directly in front of me.

My body barely responded. All it would’ve taken for me to break free was to roll over and out of this pathetically hilarious Yukkuri crowdsurfing, but I didn’t have the strength in me anymore. I did manage to splat a critter or two by pressing as hard as I could possibly manage with the tip of my shoe, but another one soon took its place. Whenever one got too close to my hand, I dug my fingers into it; eventually they figured it out and just took the opportunity to bite my hand whenever they could – I could see blood pouring out of my fingers, but I couldn’t feel any pain coming from them.

The giant Iku screamed. The Yukkuris screamed back, deafening me.

And they began moving forward, carrying me over them.

Towards the stump.

At the moment, I was too busy gasping for air to see what was going on around me as I was being carried. My heart was beating irregularly and I could feel it palpitate in my chest – the shocks had fucked my cardiac conduction system into an arrhythmia. I steeled my anxiety as much as I could; if the shocks didn’t kill me then my own fear would be stopping my heart soon enough.

The movement had ceased, and the Yukkuris got out from under me. Some of them, mainly the ones holding my center of mass, took too long to leave and their bodies gave in against my weight. My back felt wet all over as my shirt soaked in the bean paste of the crushed yukkuris.

Iku closed in. I was comically oversized for the altar-stump; only part of my trunk was being held by it and the rest of my body spilled out from it.

“MISTER HUMAN!!!” Iku-sama cried out. “WE WILL NOW PASS JUDGEMENT UPON YOUR ACTIONS! WHAT DO YOU SAY?”

“Well,” I whispered, “Mister human wants an easy mister chair.”

“FEEEEEE-“ the electric Yukkuri tazed me again. A metallic taste flooded my mouth – I had bitten the tip of my tongue as my jaw tensed, and had begun to bleed.  My thoughts became hazy again. I couldn’t believe it! In this sorry position by a gang of Yukkuris…?

No, I thought to myself. These weren’t Yukkuris. At least they’re not the ones I know.

Iku-sama yelled something. Its followers rearranged themselves in such a way that all I could see now were manjuus, manjuus all over. A faint tingling feeling over my skin and pressure on my chest told me that the bigger ones were climbing over me.

The moon was hidden behind the trees. Above me a starry sky looked back at me, impassively.

My mind, unable to muster the strength necessary to take note of my pained body, focused in my surroundings instead. I wondered briefly why the altar sounded so hollow when my hands slammed against it by action of a particularly bloated Alice. Using a few fingers as best as I could for touch and a roll of the eyes for sight, I reached a conclusion that should’ve arrived to me much sooner: the altar steps were not made of stone as I originally thought from afar, but from bone. The rounded shape of what I first considered rocks yielded another conclusion: it was made out of skulls. Whether they were human or animal skulls, I couldn’t find the strength to care anymore.

Blonde hair swept past my sight. The Alices. Three large Alices (Were they the same ones from before? Did it matter?) sat on my chest and attempted to do the same thing they did with the KoyukkuReimu. Nothing happened, of course – they weren’t nearly heavy enough for me and their penipeni were not nearly strong enough to pierce my clothes, let alone my chest. One of the Alices humped me so hard it broke its penipeni in half and withdrew silently from the fight, defeated. The remaining two drenched my chest in sugarwater, or condensed milk, with a disgusting scream of “REFRESHEDDDD!!!”

“Soooo~? Is shitty old geezer refreshed too~?” Said a voice. Probably Iku’s.

“Seriously, is this the best you’ve got?” I replied. Or at least, I tried to do so. What came instead was something like “Srrsbbbrrgmmmghghh.” Blood and saliva dribbled down my mouth and onto my chin and neck.

Laughter. More weight on me. A voice went on and on, but I kept tuning in and out of it. Briefly, vaguely, I realized I was passing out, coming to my senses only to lose consciousness again momentarily. Time became hazy. The stars focused in and out of my vision. 

I lifted my head as hard as I could, causing the obese Reimu that was lying on my forehead wobble, and saw the crowd of Yukkuris surrounding the altar as one – a shaking, screaming ring of pastry. In response to my insolence by moving, the bloated Yukkuri opted to shit on me. I bit off a section of it and the shithead began to twitch and seize, jumping off my face and giving me a breath of fresh air again. Not once did I hear it screaming in pain – I had most likely just caused it to go haywire from losing so much bean paste at once.

Everything smelled so sickly sweet. Is this what the victims of Mesoamerican empires felt like, laying atop a stone pyramid while the smell of burning flesh wafted into their noses, gaze affixed upon the stars right before some freak donning a stone mask slashed open their neck and guts? The parallelism was just too funny in my mind. The absurdity of this whole situation was too funny, too unbelievable. I smiled, against myself. My lips cracked and began to bleed.

“Mister Human, who has spied on our easy place and planned against us!”

“Fuck… you. I didn’t even want to--”. Or rather, “fffggrrghvvgfffg…”    

“Mister Human, who has sent one of its evil Remilias to eat us!”

“Oh, come on…”

“Mister Human, who has sent an innocent Yukkuri here to die!”

“You killed it, not me…”

“Mister Human, who has killed Patchouli and other members of our easy clan just now!”

“You-You sent them to die…”

“Mister Human, who gracelessly stomp-stomped on one of our precious little Marisas!”

“You… You put it there, you cunning little f-“

“SILENCE! FEEEEVERRRR!!!”

Another flash, another surge of pure pain. I couldn’t even open my mouth now. I was too weakened. I felt like slipping in and out of consciousness constantly; every time I blinked it seemed like I entered a deep, week-long sleep.

And yet, when I looked up once again, I saw the distorted, enraged face of my colossal captor.

“The verdict against this shitty old geezer who can’t take it easy is… Death!!!!! Shitty old geezer must die!”

The ensuing cacophony sounded like a war cry of high-pitched legionnaires.

“Shitty Mister Human must die!!!!!!!” They all screamed. “Shitty Mister must dieeeeeeeee!!!!!!!”

They wanted to see my blood, guts and life spilled all over their precious altar. I wondered, in a haze, if they had enough strength in their jaws to eat my body once they killed me. “What a shame,” I thought, vaguely and nonchalantly, “if they’re able to eat me. It would’ve been nice to at least have something left to bury…”

I passed out again. Or did I? The stars looked a little different somehow. Or did they…?

“Any last words, shitty Mister Human?” The words came clearly, this time.

“You…”

“Hnnnnn?”

Stall. I had to stall. I didn’t remember what for, but I had to stall.

“You’re…” I spat out more blood. I hoped it was coming out of my mouth. My heart felt like it was beating whenever the hell it wanted to.

“Yeeees~?”

“You’re the ugliest shithead manjuu I’ve ever seeEEAEARARAGHAGHGHGHHNNNNGG”

Another shock. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it was much much longer than the previous times – but also weaker. Before losing myself in pure pain again, I thought that now it was just doing it to see me suffer.

 “And now, our clan will be a safe haven once more after holy justice is served by my hand!” Iku-sama continued. The only thing I could think at that point was if I was hallucinating its words or not – how the hell did a Yukkuri manage to say things like that? My train of thought was cut short by a violent burst of electricity, which lasted a few seconds too long and left my limbs twitching uncontrollably. The crowd cheered in response to my cries of help, which only came out as incomprehensible grunting through half-gritted teeth.

“Your punishment will bring peace to our clan! Your death will bring peace to our little ones!” Iku went on, shocking me some more at the end of each sentence. At that point, I was foaming out of my mouth and unable to emit a single sound out of it. My body has probably stopped responding at that point, but I couldn’t bother with trying to move it. Slowly, I was accepting my fate. Iku-sama began to shake so fiercely the altar began to vibrate. A loud hum came from the frenzied Yukkuri, and I only registered it came from the ribbons when an arc of white-hot electricity shot out between them.

That was it, then. I wasn’t going to survive another hit, especially not one as intense as to electrify the air surrounding the ribbons. It was going in for the kill.

“Now, Mister Human, DIE EASY! FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVEEEEEEEEE— Huh?“

Huh?

The humming and vibrating stopped as the entire altar became illuminated from above. Unable to turn my head up and see what was going on, I rolled my eyes as hard as possible, only to get a glimpse of a strong light source overhead. Did I pass out again, and the moon had moved all the way to the top of the sky? No… it was too strong to be moonlight.  Once the roaring of the Yukkuris died off, my eardrums shook with a noise unmistakable in its origin. With increased mental effort, I managed to figure out what exactly was the thing above me.

A helicopter.

They arrived. I didn’t remember who were supposed to come, but they did. The realization made me relax to the point of near-unconsciousness once again. This, combined with my essentially-paralyzed body, made details even hazier to remember. Hasty footsteps.  A whooshing sound I eventually associated with my memories of the archetypal Factory flamethrowers. Screams of Yukkuris being burned, crushed and mauled by the “uneasy Mister Humans”.  Far, far away, I heard something that sounded like “There! There he is!”. More voices, but not the high-pitched yelps I’ve been hearing so far. Human ones.

Iku-sama, who was previously looking with sheer horror at what undoubtedly was a massacre happening behind my back, fixed its deformed gaze straight back at me. Still safe from the line of attack, it approached me with incredible speed – its face showed a grimace of pure rage I haven’t seen even in a human being. It yelled at me again, this time an incoherent scream. Arcs of electricity shot out of its ribbons and body again. I could barely register what was going on, other than its face filling my entire field of vision, burning into my retinae.

“YOU!!! YOU CALLED THEM!!! YOU BROUGHT THEM HERE!!!!! YOU WANT TO DESTROY IKU’S PRECIOUS EASY REIGN!!!!! SHITTY OLD GEEZER WHO BROUGHT SHITTY FRIENDS MUST DIE EASY! MUST DIE EASY! MUST D--“

A screech, a loud bang, and something like glass breaking.

The massive yukkuri got cut short again, this time by something I remember vividly: its face contorted from anger to surprise and then to nothing at all, as a small hole formed between its eyes, which went from looking at something behind me to diverging from each other, right eye pointing up and outwards and left eye looking in and down. Iku-sama twitched once, twice and stopped moving, rolling onto a side. A fine mist of sticky, abrasive paste sprayed from the hole towards my face.

More crying from the little ones. Death throes from those lucky enough to have a quick death by stomping. Death throes from those unlucky enough to die by one of the many killing techniques us humans have taken so much pride in refining. Blurs of white hazmat suits and orange-tinged gloves appeared in my peripheral vision. Very near me, wood and grass fizzled and crackled. Fire.

The screams behind me were dying off now, and so was my awareness of what was going on around me. The last thing I remember from that night was how a few pairs of hands grabbed me from the altar and lifted me out.

The sickly sweet smell became even stronger, with an unmistakable tinge of something burning, and it surrounded me, and for a moment I became the charred Remilia that flew where it shouldn’t.

The words they said to me, things like “Hold on, buddy, you’re gonna make it” came to me muffled, and for a moment I became the Ko-Reimu squashed and raped to death by its own compatriots.

Then their words to each other, things like “We’re moving, let’s get out of here!” sounded like they came from underwater, and for a moment I became the Ko-Marisa gurgling in the stream.

I let my head drop, only to lose myself once again into the starry night and towards a final submersion into unconsciousness.

[a.nobod...@gmail.com]

Hmm... I don't know on you guys' end, but I keep seeing the posts out of order depending on when I opened them. Just in case, before you read on and spoil yourself...

"The office of my former supervisor..." is part 1.
"The second day started even more..." is part 2.
"My mind was someplace else..." is part 3
"My little vantage point was surrounded by...", part 4
"'Hey, You!'" is part 5
And the italicized "Hey buddy" is part 6.

[The Didact]

I saw the part you mentioned was delayed show up after all other chapters were posted. It confused me until I looked through the thread and got the whole picture. Strange.

[Hitosura]

Yeah, I picked that up.  Oddly enough, I thought part 6 was part 5... like, an aftermath letter, before the scene moves to the aftermath.

Still, interesting.  An Iku with a disproportionately large core that was able to live with very little paste surrounding it.  Founds her own cult of hive-minded yukkuri that became so attached to her, they were unable to survive outside of the conclave.  Shame it had to end with them all dying, rather than just quarantine off the zone and let them just live.  Normally, large clans of 100+ tend to have adverse effects on the environment around them (since they tend to just keep eating everything), but this clan actually achieved an equilibrium (or you accidentally overlooked that :x).

On Friday, August 5, 2016 at 12:05:54 AM UTC-4, a.nobod...@gmail.com wrote:

[saline]

I loved this!