Touhou 13.9999999: Phantasmagoria of Electric Boogaloo

It was a grey day, the sun was not shining... and Gensokyo was starting to buzz with activity. Why? Well, no other reason than all the strange accoutrements that various youkai and normal humans had been finding by their bedsides. Phones, televisions, handheld gaming systems (undoubtedly the best thing to receive... whilst it worked), fancy clocks—anything and everything.

This was certainly something that bore investigating.

Marisa was not the most punctual person. She had spent the previous night doing quite a lot of work, and the morning, well... she was still asleep. Her bed was quite a mess, really. Her pyjamas, obtained from Kourindou, were black, and covered in a star print. They were one size too big for her and quite a mess themselves, exposing the snoozing witch's stomach and sliding down one shoulder. Really, this was a messy morning.

Something on Marisa's bedside table rang. The witch flailed in her bed, surprised, and sat up, rubbing her eyes.

"Muh...?"

Blearily, she reached to her bedside... and grabbed some strange, small, plastic object. It said it was on alarm mode.

Marisa stared.

Only a few moments later, after a hasty shower and equally hasty dressing, Marisa was in the air, clutching the phone.

This was definitely an incident.

Tewi Inaba didn't really have a dedicated room more than she had her own favorite roomy tree branch on a specific tree hidden in the depths of the Forest of the Lost. What was a room to a girl like her anyways? She woke up and either wandered off to Eientei to harass the bunnies there or wandered around the forest to harass the bunnies there and help out wanderers when she found them. More than once she had been offered space in Eirin's mansion, and she actually did keep a bare bones room there, but it didn't really appeal to her. She was just used, over centuries and centuries, to sleeping out in the open. And sleeping in her waking clothes too. Not like she really had space for a closet anyways. When you were as old as Inaba you let go of some of the more superficial things like a prim and proper appearance.

So Tewi woke up as she always did, stretched out as she always did, gave her clothes a cursory dusting and smoothing out as she always did. She was about to jump down to the forest floor and take off to do whatever, but it occurred to her that something was different. Her ears were registering a change in the ambient noise of the forest, possibly a traveler in the nearby copses, or some insect youkai dueling in the distance, or...

Or a metal thing sitting neatly on the branch perpendicular to her sleeping branch. It was so well placed that Tewi had the sneaking suspicion that someone had put it there. Was it a trap? Some kind of prank? Tewi didn't really have any enemies more than she had a bunch of people who found her annoying, and this whatever it was looked way too complicated to be a simple joke. It was emitting some kind of static noise, and it had an antenna like an insect youkai's only made of metal. It was a box, with two circles of metal mesh, which is where Tewi's sensitive ears picked up the noise as being sourced from. She quickly ran over her options. Bring it to Eirin? Ask the rabbits? Go out of the Forest and ask around?

Well her first option would clearly be making the thing stop being so noisy. She jumped over, and carefully fiddled around with the knobs the device presented to her, still unsure about how safe the device was for her health. She pushed the antenna up and down and around, nothing happened. She turned a dial around back and forth, nothing happened. She turned a different dial. To her annoyance it made the thing even more loud. She turned it the other direction and the thing got quieter, until it was completely silent. Score one for logical interfaces!

Pure and Honest Aya Shameimaru

The slowly rising sun occasionally poked out from the dreary grey clouds that covered the heavens today, and from atop Youkai Mountain you could see the beautiful effect of sun rays streaming across the forest of magic, like bright streamers on a green fuzzy piece of fabric. From a quaint, little house hidden among the already hidden village of the Tengu, Aya Shameimaru watched the morning light show from her windows with split attention, distracted by something equally impressive.

For weeks the traditional reporter has noticed the upward trend of items appearing from the outside world through the barrier, hearing stories people finding them almost everywhere. And today something finally appeared in Aya's own house. She was no stranger to technology, owning a collection of machine for her newspaper and her camera never out of arm's reach, but this was simply beyond anything she's ever seen. A cylindrical metal body a little bigger than her head with black plastic trim, a removable transparent pot with a handle on the side that fit in the bottom of the machine, and a lid on top that hid a funnel inside it, alongside the usual assortment of buttons and nobs. A coffee maker to an outsider, but unknown to the tengu.

Aya began to smile the more and more questions began to from in her head. This was most certainly a story worthy of the Bunbunmaru. Taking the machine under her arm, she left her home and spread her wings, taking flight with a mighty flap of. With super speed she flew towards the Hakurei Shrine, where she would get a few answers (and say hi to her favorite shrine maiden).

edited 12th May '13 5:29:29 PM by Luke_Prowler

Ruler of Pandæmonium, Creator of Demons, Mistress of Magic, Currently Lost Mother
Shinki was frustrated. Getting to Gensokyo had been child's play—but finding her way around? Now, that was the hard part. She had arrived hoping to look for Alice, to see how she was doing... and was now surrounded by bamboo. In every direction. Even flying up out of it hadn't helped with deciding which way to go, and flattening everything for several miles in one direction to carve a clear path wouldn't be a good way to start her journey.

And now, sat in front of her, there was a digital camera. Now, what could this be doing here? Gensokyo was supposed to be cut off from the outside world... and shiny new toys like this shouldn't be fully charged when left in the middle of a forest.

Perfect and Elegant Maid
Another random item. Sakuya was starting to get concerned; it was like someone was targeting the mistress. What if one of these were to be a trap? Fortunately, she had managed to remove them all from Lady Scarlet's chambers before they had been seen. This one, however, was in her room.

Worrying.

She would have to ask the shopkeeper about this.

In a single smooth motion Tewi bounded down from her place of rest into the thick of the forest proper. She figured the best course of action was to wander around until something made itself clear as to what was responsible for the device she was now hugging to her chest. That was how she handled most problems anyways, and only rarely did that result in getting beaten up as a bystander to some irrelevantly Gensokyo-shattering problem. Most of the time the root of the issue could easily be found. Gensokyo, at the end of the day, was a small world, and there were only so many places an anonymous person could be.

"Hey, you're that girl from Makai aren't you?" Tewi pretty quickly ran across Shinki in her wanderings, and in her usual manner she decided to be friendly until other options were made necessary. She figured it was worth a shot to ask about the thing in her arms. "Do you know what this is, per chance?" Tewi indicated the radio.

Reimu — In the magical land of slumber

"Zzzzzz." the lazy miko slept the night away unaware of the situation at hand. Strange things appeared while she was entirely unaware of it. It didn't matter because she was sleeping soundly. Dreams of far off lands where she had a mundane job, in a mundane community— wait, why was she dreaming about that? She lived in Gensokyo.

RING RING RING RING'

"WHAT!?" Reimu sat up, smashed her head on a... is that a tray of some kind? Where did that come from? "Ahhhh!" she rubbed her head with an open palm. What was that noise? What was EVEN GOING ON? "Gghhhh." she grit her teeth, slid herself out from under the strange table and looked at what was on top. It was a ringing clock. "Can you stop? she asked it politely. "I'm trying to SLEEP."