I was thinking more about telling the time by the sun and the moon.

Now the question that haunts my mind... does the fact that I appear to be the only one around who has an understanding of irony make me ordinary? Or extraordinary...

... Reimu is the guardian of an extraordinary place, but she probably wishes that she could be normal. Maribel and Renko are girls from an ordinary place, but wish to find the extraordinairy place. Bam! Beautiful, juicy irony. With a salty, lascivious scent like a well-seasoned steak.

I don't think she wishes she could be normal.

Yeah, Reimu's pretty cool with beating up youkai for a living.

I imagine she wishes the need to beat up youkai would happen less often though. It seriously cuts into her "sitting around, drinking tea" time.

Here's a question - what if the roles were reversed, and Reimu was the one dreaming of a world on the other side of the Border? Would she daydream about going off to a Japanese high school? Would the "mundanity" of Mary and Renko's space-aged world be as fantastical to Reimu as hers is to them? Or would she recoil at the thought of a world where nobody can fly and everyone's human and there's no monsters to beat up?

The former! *pumps fist*

Hm, since we already covered "crazy Alice, " I'll have to try a different angle.

I didn't try to make this one a narrative (or so longwinded), it just came out that way. I did try to use overblown adjectives, though - I love overblown adjectives.

---

Alice - Ruin

Alice's world ended when the invaders confronted her mother. She watched from a distant hilltop as the benevolent goddess Shinki razed the spires of Makai with spears of fire and volleys of bullets. The Mother of Makai was unused to being defied; her power was enough to crush these interlopers many times over, but she was wild and clumsy in wielding it. Alice knew that this same power would be used to revive her fellow Makajin and restore the city to its former glory, but standing in the red glare as demonic wings of light filled the sky and devastation fell in thundering waves, it was distant comfort.

(The experience would have a similar effect on Reimu, leading her to create the spellcard system; Gensokyo wouldn't be so easy to rebuild, after all.)

As Shinki's favored daughter, Alice bore a grimore that would grant her a measure of the goddess's amazing power. Eager for revenge and blaming them for what had happened, she challenged one of the invaders to a duel... and fell. Not only did relying on raw power cause random destruction, but it would fail you when you needed it the most! She sat and pondered her loss as a new Makai City rose from the scorched grit and her old friends returned to life.

Alice couldn't continue as she was. This new Makai was exactly the same as the one Shinki had pulverized, but it didn't feel like home anymore. With mother's blessing, she set out to find herself, eventually settling in Gensokyo after some multiversal adventures. She had grown in her walk between worlds, becoming not only a woman but a youkai as well. Even her closest friends have only heard cryptic hints of the things she did and saw in that strange year.

One thing that Alice has learned about herself is that she's not a destroyer. If she must fight (and she must, Gensokyo being what it is), she will fight with skill, cunning and precision. A battle that forces her to resort to brute force is a battle she doesn't deserve to win. Makai's sky on that awful night is always fresh in her memory, full of eldritch flame and shrieking power. She will never bring such ruin down on anyone. She thinks herself a coward for fearing her own power, but it takes another kind of courage to submit to beatings from youkai she could brush away in an instant.

So it is that her grimore, full of terrible secrets and godly might, remains locked and hidden at her side. It has not been opened since her fateful duel, and won't be for a very long time. She can't deny it forever, though; as the daughter of a Goddess, Alice has a birthright to fulfill. The dolls, her children, are not just weapons, tools or expressions of her new philosophy.

They're practice.

edited 25th Sep '11 2:50:31 AM by Durazno

I like your write-up. Its neat.

I concur.

I've always liked the notion that Alice's dollmaking is a way for her to emulate her mommy figure, but this is the first time I've seen it suggested that she was being groomed as a successor. Muy interesante.

Though I do have to wonder where the gunpowder fits in. Did Shinki experiment with explosive Makaijin in her youth?

I have to imagine that a world where nobody can fly and everyone's human and there's no monsters to beat up would be her vision of Hell.

edited 31st May '11 11:50:18 PM by SuperDimensionman

Hum, I didn't consider the gunpowder.

Maybe making all of her minions explosive is a way to keep herself sharp? Can danmaku set off gunpowder?

Where does she get her gunpowder, anyway? I can't imagine that's the kind of thing that's easy to get ahold of in Gensokyo.

She makes it herself? She buys if from the kappa? Take your pick. I know that the Chinese discovered gunpowder in the ninth century, so it fits in the mostly medieval setting.

Inaba of the WAHH states that most magicians dabble in alchemy. I would think she makes her own.

Sulfer is a fairly abundant natural resource. Plus, Gensokyo has hot springs. Those are vaguely related to sulfur probably.
Gensokyo has bamboo forests and a spare Mokou so it has charcoal.
The third gunpowder ingredient is saltpeter which can be made out of pee*

^{Also straw and wood ash.}

. True story.

Put it all together and you've got gunpowder.

Gensokyo isn't medieval; it's Meiji-era, nominally. There's no reason there couldn't be honest-to-goodness firearms around, though I can't imagine that they're still in working order after 125-odd years. (Unless the kappa or the humans have a gunsmith to make new ones.)

I can buy that. It's not nearly as much of a stretch as a lot of world-building that people have come up with in response to unanswered questions.

edited 1st Jun '11 1:19:19 AM by SuperDimensionman

Oh, alchemy, of course...Patchouli even has a Philosopher's Stone.

though hers is not the one we'd expect, instead being a set of 5 stones that fire bullets.

Patches' Philosopher's Stone seems to be more of a set of the condensed essences of the elements of Tuesday-Saturday. Powerful, but probably just a cool name for a spell card than immortality, which wouldn't be useful to most of Gensoukyo anyway.

edited 1st Jun '11 8:55:13 AM by Pulse

Exactly, not the one we'd expect from the name.

I would expect the one that turns base metals into gold and silver.

And guess what Patchouli's isn't.

A vampire? A mind flayer? A black hole? A chair?

No no, I got this. She's not a box of chocolates.

...You can drop the sarcasm at any time