Badfic Manor App, part 2
Sep. 1st, 2011 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crows_pet_foxStrengths:
• He’s good in a fight, rather obviously. He doesn’t have much in the way of direct powers himself – without his demons, he’s basically badass normal with the ability to do a few magically-augmented guard/block and strike tricks with the sword, but in tandem with one of his summons, he can be pretty dangerous.
• He’s bright and fairly clever. He does work in a detective agency, even if it’s more dealing with supernatural cases, weird shit and occult research and investigation than criminal cases; he’d be a bit lost on forensics and the mundane side beyond a fairly basic extent, but he’s good at the weird shit, and he’s both decent and very determined at problem-solving, as well as being fairly adaptable.
• It’s hard to actually rattle him by this point, and even if he is rattled/thrown off, he’s not likely to show it.
• No fear. He understands the value of a good tactical retreat, but given that he’s had threats from Shinado Abaddon and similarly ridiculous that he hasn’t flinched at? You’re not going to intimidate him. If you try too hard at it, you’re probably just going to piss him off and make him all the more determined to prove you wrong.
• The phrase “give up” is not in his vocabulary. He can get kicked DAMN hard and still pick up, dust off, and keep going; frustration’s more likely to manifest in grumpy “GDIT I WILL BEAT THIS” and internal “fucking locusts” than him getting discouraged.
• Self Control. It’s a rare accomplishment to get him to truly break his usual poker-face deadpan, and he’s got a pretty iron will that extends to a hold over his own actions/reactions.
• Nonjudgmental; one of his stronger allies is the head of a Yakuza group (albeit one that does show a sense of responsibility about their territory), -he negotiates and deals with demons and spirits of every stripe-, and unless you’re hurting others for the sake of trollololol, he’s likely to at least attempt to understand where you’re coming from, even if he doesn’t agree/is still standing in your way. (Even on the Law path in RKvKA Lucifer is a plot-important NPC he’ll have perfectly civil conversations with and not react with hostility when Lucifer is popping in meddling.)
• On that note, he can be very good at minor diplomatics, picking up on what people are after and where they’re upset/angry/things got out of control, and finding ways to address that if possible.
Weaknesses:
• Stubborn, and “give up” is not in his vocabulary. Frustrate him enough and you can push him into being a bit obsessive about overcoming the obstacle in question! He might walk away if there’s honestly nothing he can do, but the first opportunity he has to go back and correct that, he’ll take it. Tactical retreats will be at the last possible opening outside of ridiculous “okay seriously there’s not even a clue how to fight that”, and the top of his agenda will be “how do I beat that?”. He may get himself into trouble.
• No fear. He can be rational and all and recognize what would be a Bad Idea, but NOTHING is going to actually daunt him; if he ends up in a conflict that’s more than he can chew, he’ll just take it as a sign that he needs to find a way to fix that.
• There are very few ways to piss him off or get him to honestly dislike you. If you cross them, and continue on that course/don’t change? You will have a very quiet, calculating, vicious, and vindictive enemy that will hold the grudge until such time as you have some massive epiphany and Change Your Ways. If that doesn’t happen, or isn’t likely? YEAH ENJOY BEING THE TARGET OF A PISSY TRIPLE-SCORPIO.
• Raised by
• His “demons” are a bunch of assorted nuts and flakes, and if they get out of his sight, there’s no telling what will happen. (Actually there is, and it will be hilarity, chaos, and sweet, sweet havoc.) They’re perfectly loyal and obedient to his orders (to the extent they can understand) as long as he’s ACTUALLY THERE, if they wander off…
• He’s from the 30’s. He’ll have a learning curve with modern technology, and there’s a handful of things that were rare/absent from 1930’s Japan that will be unfamiliar.
• He Exists For His Duty. That above note about “If there isn’t something going on he usually goes on standby-mode waiting”? He will –NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HIMSELF- most of the time at the Manor, and he’s got a few too many technically healthy hang-ups to crack in a “nothing matters I’mma sulk” way or go reclusive.
History: His actual background pre-game timeline is basically left to a few inferences and short comments; he’s from a small village outside of the city that’s hidden up in the mountains, which serves as a “central base” of sorts for the four Kuzunoha summoner-lines that serve the Yatagarasu. The canon timeline is a little odd at some points; both games list the same year as the time they occur, but besides a date on the screen at one point, everything else in dialogue and interactions implies that there’s been some time passage – enough that a decent amount of people that haven’t paid as much attention to the one splash screen in RKvKA assume there’s at least several months if not a year or two. (The shift in behavior around Raidou also seems to imply a year or two; in RKvSA, there’s a lot of NPC reactions of “Aren’t you too young for this sort of thing?” and “just a kid”, in RKvKA, there’s actually a line from Gouto in the tutorial about “You’re reaching the age now where you’d probably prefer to have female demons, right? :D” and assorted other flirting/teasing/hitting on.) It doesn’t help the screwy awareness of time passage that there’s a half-joke NPC/demon in the series who breaks the fourth wall constantly that has a line about “Haven’t seen you for three years” that refers to the amount of time between the games’ release dates. (It’s at least not as bad as DCMK; it’s not hard to just interpretation fudge time between the two games.) Nothing is ever mentioned of anything like parents, and all that’s seen around his trials and interactions with the village and shrine spirits etc. is said spirits themselves, hence the inference/extrapolation that he was basically raised by the shrine spirits, and his parents are probably gone, and that too early for him to really remember them – and it IS canon-referenced that he’s grown up training as a summoner from an early age. *Headcanon - he has no living family unless Gouto counts. It’s also fairly safe to assume that one of his parents was the previous holder of the Raidou Kuzunoha title.
Also worth noting is that he does exist in an alternate history timeline – he’s from Taisho 20, and in reality the Taisho era only lasted 15 years, which means a decent extension on a period of time in Japan’s history that was more democratic and progressive that occurred in between the more chaotic Meiji era and the militaristic and imperialistic Showa era. In normal reality, the Taisho ended in 1926 and economic pressures undid many of the moves towards democracy; in Raidou’s universe, the period of relative prosperity has continued and the Diet is still a major power, although some of the military is certainly trying to push towards a more aggressive stance.
On passing trials put before him by the shrine spirits and being given the title of “Raidou Kuzunoha XIV”, he was assigned the Capital as his protectorate and territory. (Which does include what is now Tokyo, but thanks to the debates over what was defined as “THE CAPITAL”, it also includes basically an entire region and even that can be debated despite it having been the seat of the Imperial government and the Diet, but this is an app, not a history paper! :D ) As it’s a large, chaotic, and difficult to keep track of territory, the Yatagarasu contacted another agent of theirs, the ex-military-intelligence officer turned private detective Narumi. To the public, Raidou would work as Narumi’s assistant, while Narumi would work as a sort of senior-partner to Raidou with the Agency being a base of operations that wouldn’t draw too many questions. I am going to skip over the first case in the novella for now, for your sanity and mine and because I still need to actually read that one, and it’s not one of the major earthshattering ones.
This brings us to the events of the first game. Remember all my snarky remarks about SMT games of any sort and how sort-of insane they are? I now take no further responsibility for the WTFery that is about to make up this app. Oh, also, spoilers.
Like both of Raidou’s terrifyingly apocalyptic cases, this one started with a teenage girl contacting the agency with a request. In this case, it was a phone call begging Narumi to meet her at the bridge near the agency; when Raidou and Narumi went, the girl asked them to kill her, and then was promptly kidnapped by weird masked “people” in red uniforms that soundly trounced Raidou. The girl was Kaya Daidouji, only daughter of the Daidouji family, an old noble family that now made their living off a factory; investigation of the family revealed a legend that the girls of the family would be possessed by a demon on their sixteenth birthday, a practice that’d led to previous daughters being sacrificed. Moreover, this got more complicated, as during the investigation her uncle suddenly transformed into a partial-monster and fled. Attempting to chase down descriptions of a creature matching the uncle led to appearances in Ginza-cho, which turned out to not be the uncle but a similar creature that was a Rickshaw driver who was transforming and attacking cabs out of various bits of personal resentment; on defeating the monster and further investigation, the cabbie was freed of the curse, but there were signs of military involvement starting, nevermind another summoner who was far less principled meddling and threatening Raidou. Daidouji was tracked to his own factory, where the “dark summoner” appeared again with a trap; on taking apart that and catching up, the thing that had turned Daidouji into the monster reached its next stage of maturity, separating and fleeing – a Hiruko leech-spirit that amplified and fed on negative emotions. The Dark Summoner finally showed himself as Rasputin, and Daidouji was left half-dead and rescued by some of his workers; the Hiruko had been released across the Capital, and the military was feeding and collecting them for some unknown purpose, gathering them to a radio tower on a mountainside in the Capital. The matured Hiruko and the hosts they’d fed off were being used to create the red-uniformed “soldiers”, a sort of highly developed undead, but this was a by-product of a larger project, something a rogue general was working on under the cover of developing an unstoppable army for the military. The Navy was investigating and attempting to defuse this rogue project, acts which led to Raidou needing to rescue an undercover Navy agent and break a curse on the Admiral that had caught on that something was Very Much Not Right.
On making it into the radio tower finally, the dark/spirit-realm side of said tower was now basically a giant mass of semi-fused Hiruko; the tower was putting out a signal that helped amplify and speed the Hiruko’s development. At the top, the general in charge used it to resurrect a god of one of the older cultures of Japan, something that’d collapsed in Japan’s pre-history, leaving Raidou to fight that, along with some worrying comments about referencing humanity in third person – on defeating that, Rasputin entered and banished Raidou to basically a point far enough out in the spirit realms that trying to get back “home” got Raidou detoured to a parallel timeline. After some hijinx and confusing the Yatagarasu (“why are you here and not in your timeline-“) and his older alternate self, he managed to make it back to a deceptively quiet capital, an empty office, and Narumi having gone off alone to the General’s secret underground research facility to “finish this” in a fit of angst and Responsibility, believing Raidou dead.
Yep, the mundane normal ex-military-intelligence had a fit of “Oh god I let the kid go off alone and get killed”, left an “If you are alive and come back, just stay home and let me deal with this” note, and went to go pursue the summoners and old gods and all of it without the Summoner.
On catching up to a now fairly battered and bleeding Narumi, who made one last feeble attempt at “This isn’t the kind of thing kids should have to do! D: “, there was a confrontation with the general …
Who was possessed by another, very bitter goddess from the past history of the Japanese islands. Said Goddess was feeding some of the army’s more aggressive tendencies as a way to build an “unstoppable army” to wipe out modern Japan in bitterness, and was seemingly using Kaya and the entity that would possess her to do so; after killing the general and the goddess, Kaya was rescued, and EVERYTHING WAS SUNSHINE AND ROSES!
Actually the General had succeeded in launching a satellite with a bigger version of the sort of thing the radio tower was doing, and the plan to build the “Soulless Army” was still running on its own without him/her/it, which meant needing to find a way to combat that; also most of the Hiruko swarm was detached from the radio tower and fused with a battleship, turning it into an unstoppable giant monster powered by said satellite and the combined rage, hatred, and bitterness of the capital, lashing out blindly and destroying the city – the “Soulless God”. Kaya volunteered to work in the agency, and was very helpful, and helped find something that could be used to destroy the satellite from the ground!
And then promptly asked some very weird questions and disappeared with it after headpatting Raidou for helping him/her/it get their hands on the one thing that could be used to stop them.
Mmmmyep. Turns out the possession legend wasn’t a legend.
And all they had to go on now, was a folder of information their navy agent buddy had stolen, in Russian, with a bunch of equations for building and aiming a rocket.
This leads to the scene mentioned above with GLEEFULLY breaking a vodka bottle over Rasputin’s head and threatening to leave him as the guinea pig of a mad scientist if he didn’t help with the whole rocket project. Did I mention that this Rasputin was actually a sort of cyborg from an unknown far future? Don’t worry, that part will make some sort of SMT-special sense soon.
After some further hijinx, Gouto – who was the first Raidou Kuzunoha, had screwed up in some unspecified manner, and was now sentenced to spend the foreseeable, very long future as a soul shoved into a cat body watching over his descendants – and one of Raidou’s demons went up on a “suicide mission” to destroy the satellite and remove the power source that was being used to keep the “Soulless God” active; it blew up, removing Gouto from the plot until his body would be restored in the second game, there’s a rare moment of Raidou being slightly angst-ish and mourning since he wasn’t aware Gouto was basically not going to get off the hook that easily, the Soulless God collapsed seemingly “dead”, and EVERYTHING WAS SUNSHINE AND ROSES RIGHT? THIS TIME?
…That’s when the second Soulless God with the rest of the Hiruko and possessed-Kaya showed up.
See, if Raidou weren’t so stubborn, their world would’ve imploded a few times over.
Possessed-Kaya admitted defeat in that time and place, but took the second Soulless God, retreating out those nice funny corridors between timelines and space to recoup and plot a new plan; he/she/it blamed Raidou for some unspecified horrible future that would come, and vowed to destroy the current world in such a way that said future couldn’t happen.
DID I MENTION SHIN MEGA TEN VERSE PLOTS ARE KIND-OF INSANE?
On reporting this to the Yatagarasu, the conclusion from Narumi and Raidou was “we need to go rescue Kaya” and the Yatagarasu agreed with an also conclusion from Raidou and the Yatagarasu that whatever was possessing Kaya, letting it recover and move again would be a Very Bad Thing. This meant sending Raidou to go through the Akarana corridors, chasing it and the Soulless God down to wherever said possessing entity was from, and putting an end to things once and for all.
This begins the time space shenanigans! See, the entity possessing Kaya was from a future timeline that puts him somewhere after the original Shin Megami Tensei games – a timeline where in the 80’s, outside entities meddled n politics, causing a nuclear apocalypse and breaking reality so all the demons, angels, and old gods could move in to fight over taking over; at first things swung into complete anarchy, then the other way with the followers of YHVH and the angelics/order-faction taking over, turning things into a “LAW AND ORDER AND STRICT STATIC SOCIETY” hell that makes Equilibrium look like a 60’s rally. (BTW, “YHVH” in SMT is generally the Gnostic demi-urge sense, and KIND OF AN ASSHOLE.) Said entity was Raidou Kuzunoha XVL, who’d been a Templar for the Messianic Temples and doing damn well at it, but kinda realized what a Hellhole the world was, and was trying to prevent the entire timeline from happening.
By blowing up the past and starting a minor apocalypse a few decades early.
Oh, and Rasputin? Who had, since, blown off his duties and went “YEAH FUCK THIS I’M GONNA DRINK AND CHASE GIRLS AGAIN WOOHOO!”? Was a sort of black-ops agent of the temple sent back to meddle and try to ensure the timeline DID happen. Yes, he decided to blow it off and stay in the past. This also proves that RK the 40th was being played and used to try to ensure the timeline got pushed BACK to the normal SMT timeline, since it’s observed in the Akarana that in the normal SMT timeline Taisho era ended at 15!
(Fun fact: Raidou’s timeline where Taisho went to 20 and the weird thermonuclear war in the 80’s never happened? Is the timeline the Persona games take place in! The detective agency that helps out in several Persona games is the Kuzunoha detective agency, and follows from the other two Devil Summoner games which were never released in English; the guy running them is someone who is possessed by/working with the current Kyouji Kuzunoha, one of the other “Four Great Summoners/lines”, who got himself murdered but didn’t let that stop him.)
One battle royale and exorcism later, Raidou takes Kaya back to Taisho 20, and returns her to her family safely not-possessed, with Raidou Kuzunoha XVL destroyed.
Some time later, Gouto’s been restored to his body and returned to his post, and ANOTHER GIRL WALKS INTO THE OFFICE WITH A SIMPLE REQUEST AND NO REAL DESIRE TO EXPLAIN DETAILS.
That right there should be red flags by now, really.
So Raidou set out to find this “Dahn” person, who Akane wanted them to find and arrange a meeting. Aaand ends up running straight into problems with these funny golden locusts that’re appearing all over the city, and getting used by people – see, they feed on luck! Which means they’ll feed off one person’s luck, leaving that person doomed to misfortune and “ever get the feeling all various events are conspiring to enforce Murphy’s Law as a constant?” badly enough to lead to freak accidental deaths, Final Destination impressions, and some suicides, while a person who could catch one of the locusts could use that to be unnaturally lucky and have EVERYTHING GO THEIR WAY. “Get cornered by Raidou only to have him step on a freak banana peel and fall, giving an opening to escape” unnaturally lucky. And they’re swarming over the capital, being sold/released by said Dahn person; moreover, attempts at investigating get Raidou confronted by a couple of people in odd archaic uniforms with masks who use the locusts on him.
(There’s a reason “FUCKING LOCUSTS” is the shorthand for “this is what it’s like when Raidou gets extraordinarily frustrated”.)
For the next chapter and a half, Raidou is under the luck locust’s curse, and is basically stubborning his way through figuring out WHAT THE HELL SERIOUSLY while –everything goes wrong-. To make matters more fun, he starts getting dreams and randomly passing out with visions of some strange place with golden light and “welp that’s not normal reality” stamped all over it, where a strange figure that is mimicking him/people he knows with a strange mask prods at him to just abandon his title and give up seriously what the Hell, that calamity is inevitable and this is the way the world SHOULD go.
Oh, did I mention the funny blonde foreigner who shows up out of nowhere making funny cryptic remarks who knows way too damn much and just smugly popcorn.gif’s through while being occasionally helpful yet strangely unsettling, and has a habit of appearing and disappearing out of thin air? He’s kind of important.
A broken insect cage with a seal on it gives the investigation a lead – the crest belongs to the Tsukigata family, a clan of assassins that work with insects who’ve also quietly served the Yatagarasu for ages. They live in the tiny little quiet run-down Tsukigata village up in the mountains where the main source of income in the modern era is a hot-springs inn not many tourists come to, nobody wants to talk to anybody from outside the village, and the children sing a creepy song that apparently everyone there grows up knowing. Oh, and all the houses have masks hanging outside them of the “Guardian Deity Shinado”, a mask that matches the one worn by the figure in Raidou’s visions.
So basically, Raidou, Gouto, Tae, and Narumi walk into a horror movie trope.
Attempts at fishing for various information get stonewalled; among the few things they have is that Akane is the daughter of the Tsukigata lord, she’s engaged to “Lord Tento” who is connected to the Guardian Deity, and the village in general REALLY DOESN’T LIKE OUTSIDERS. The investigation manages to go downhill pretty steadily, to the point of threats being made on the lives of the investigation team, and Raidou’s little luck curse leading to the team getting trounced and cornered by a group of the assassins intent on finishing the job; they only manage to survive because of the intervention of Geirin Kuzunoha, one of Raidou’s colleagues, and his apprentice Nagi – and that only because Geirin is assigned the village as his territory, has been there forever, and is respected as an ally of the Tsukigata family. Geirin manages to arrange a meeting with Akijiro, the head of the Tsukigata family, which leads to … not too much more information – Dahn is Akane’s older brother, and Dahn is DEAD SET AGAINST the marriage to “Lord Tento” which Akane’s agreed to and is “important to the village’s future”, and there’s somethingsaidafewtimesthatgetsglossedoveraboutthemarriageritualandthewordsacrificebutnobodywantstotalkaboutthat. Oh, and Geirin assures Raidou he has things under control in Tsukigata village plz deal with the capital shoo shoo go home. The Yatagarasu’s herald breaks the luck-eating curse on Raidou, and they return to dealing with that mess.
Of course it’s not as simple as “shoo shoo go home”, and they end up continuing investigation in the village, trying to track down Dahn, who … intentionally gets Raidou and Nagi to follow him into the Sacred Sanctuary Where Outsiders Aren’t Even Allowed Near It to show them what’s really going on in the village. See, the supernatural insects the Tsukigata and their vassals work with? Are gifts from the Tento LordS, plural, a race of stunted, malformed semi-human creatures that were driven underground centuries ago; at some point in their history the Tento Lords stopped having natural-born women of their own … aaand made a bargain that they’d continue supporting and teaching the Tsukigata to use the insects that gave them their power, if the Tsukigata clan would give the Tento Lords their daughters. So basically he’s objecting to the marriage because future of the clan or no, it means his little sister going to some underground caves and being a breeder for a race of troglodytes. Somehow, Akane has reached a point of being Okay With This, is well aware of what the ceremony entails, and plans on going through with it, while Dahn has vowed to stop the ceremony and find a way to keep the Clan in power without them being under the thumb of the Tento Lords anymore. (And the part nobody knows until MUCH later in the plot is that he got these books from this funny blond foreigner who was highly respected by some of the fringe “Mushibito” – relatives of the Tento Lords who were more peaceable – and Dahn found mention of a King Abaddon who ruled over unstoppable locust-monsters, that the Mushibito worshiped as their eventual savior, and Dahn decided he was going to become King Abaddon. Yeah, Dahn’s kinda special, in a “You hit every branch on the stupid tree when you fell out of it, didn’t you?” way.)
While there was some discussion with both Nagi and Raidou kinda Not Entirely Cool with the status quo even if Akane WAS, the wedding ceremony was in three days, and Dahn was stubbornly intent on Stopping It in a way that would mean a lot of innocent people dying and the capital falling into ruins, which kinda made him the first priority and “Screwed up traditions” second. This led to Raidou and Geirin both being present at the wedding ceremony to deal with Dahn’s inevitable interference.
Dahn shows up, attempts the most PATHETIC attempts at threats and intimidation ever on Raidou, and gets his ass handed to him. It’s fairly safe to say, at this point, that while Dahn did not achieve “I GET TO HIT HIM? AND TERRORIZE HIM? GLEE AND HAPPY DAY, I AM A KID AT CHRISTMAS! :D” like Rasputin, he’s …kind of irritated Raidou. The Tsukigata clan imprisons Dahn, Akane goes to the Tento Lords, and everything’s just going to be cleanup, right? I mean, Dahn’s still strutting in the prison saying it’s too late and he’s going to be King Abaddon and SAVE HIS SISTER even if that means torching cities and all, but he’s behind bars, things are quiet, the rest is details, right?
HAHAHAHA WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED ABOUT THAT SUNSHINE AND ROSES THING.
Remember all those swarms of locusts that’re still wreaking havoc in the capital?
Sure they’re useful to people that catch them, enough that there’s an underground trade in them which is pissing off Satake by now. Oh, also, in the spirit worlds of the Capital, the White Rider has started galloping around trumpeting that soon it’ll be the end of the world. Yes, the White Rider as in “First Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. IT’S A WONDERFUL SIGN, REALLY.
The problem is that after a while, the people who keep them are starting to …mysteriously disappear or turn up dead, which has the police of the Capital out on the hunt for a “serial killer”, with the common factors being that the bodies are ripped to pieces and there’s broken insect cages by them. See, after the locusts eat their fill, they manage to escape (and other things are starting to creep out and attack the people with them), and the locusts go back to a central nest where they’re storing aaaalll of that good fortune in this big glowie positive-energy crystal thing!
Which is leaving a vacuum that suddenly gets filled by the negative-energy counterpart, as the capital clouds over ominously and there’s a BIG RED HOLE IN THE CLOUDS. Pursuing the “serial killer” leads to an encounter with a giant black locust-monster with a scorpion tail that pretty well flattens Raidou, leading to another vision with that creepy masked figure telling him to drop his title and fuck off already seriously THIS IS THE FATE OF THE CAPITAL AND THE WORLD AFTER IT. Oh, and all the misfortune caused by the little gold locusts has things turning worse in the capital, to the point that some areas are rioting and Satake’s having to practically pull martial law on his territory. By the time Raidou comes back with something that can HURT the funny black “Apollyon” locust monster?
There’s suddenly an ominous black sphere filling that red hole in the clouds, and Dahn has managed to escape – apparently Apollyon showed up at Tsukigata too – and there’s a big epic moment where Dahn is on the radio tower. (Yes, the same radio tower from the first game and the Hiruko, seriously, the place seems to EXIST to be a focal point for Badness, even if it IS also revealed to be a point on a setup that’s a big giant ward structure keeping some nasty things sealed; the stuff it seals isn’t as bad as the stuff that uses it, anyway.) Dahn has a nice maniacal moment, declares himself KING ABADDON, as a SWARM of the Apollyons spreads out over the capital wreaking havoc, then starts to circle the tower.
Aaand he whistles to call them under his control.
They sorta stare at him funny, and then a couple of them chew on the radio tower, but can’t QUITE get through the protections on it, so they look very disappointed that they can’t eat the funny stupid human, and hover dejectedly before swooping off to go back to eating people and causing chaos.
Yeah, he didn’t read the stuff the funny blonde foreigner gave him NEARLY well enough.
SPEAKING OF WHOM, while Dahn is having his “wait wait, this isn’t how it was supposed to go D:” breakdown with Raidou and Narumi looming behind him, the FUNNY BLONDE FOREIGNER appears out of nowhere with an expression suggesting popcorn.gif, and every time Dahn tries to insist that this isn’t what he meant to happen and didn’t know it’d blow up like this, calmly does the verbal equivalent of grabbing him by the hair and slamming his face in the fact that yes, he did know how much trouble it’d cause, yes, he did have every opportunity to realize what would happen, and yes, he decided to do so anyway, and this entire mess with people dying everywhere is HIS RESPONSIBILITY, leading to a nice BSOD and saving Raidou the attempt at beating Dahn until the stupid falls out.
Probably lucky for Dahn, since physically beating him until the stupid fell out would probably just leave a bloody smear on the floor, and as relatively well as Raidou takes all of this, you can’t tell me there wasn’t temptation considering how much destruction Dahn caused to his territory out of stupidity and Only Reading Half The Manual.
Oh, and from Dahn you can also get a NAME for the funny blonde foreigner who’s quietly picked up stalking Raidou on the side!
It’s Louis Cypher. :D (“Please allow me to introduce myself~ I’m a man of wealth and of taste~”) And yes, he continues the trend of being vaguely and cryptically helpful while still being skeevy and suspicious. Yeah, seems as entertaining as it all is, he’s not too keen on the world ending, either.
In the end, Dahn has a fit of Sudden Onset Maturity, offers to let Raidou hit him for being stupid, and instead gets Narumi being vaguely comforting and a nice scene that ends with him getting recruited to help Clean Up His Damn Mess Already. Narumi and Dahn go to gather the loose luck locusts, while Raidou takes Tae to go to Tsukigata Village and figure out wtf and how to get rid of the GAPING RED HOLE IN THE SKY. Partly because Tae noticed that the creepy-fucking-children’s-song which Raidou’s ended up memorizing has verses that mention the sky being pierced through and “Great Ma’s gonna cut you to shreds and you die” and things that seem a little too relevant.
Sadly Tsukigata’s swarming with Apollyon too, which means that there’s a chase to rescue the villagers and get them holed up in the inn, which for some reason is a vaguely safe structure; aaand apparently the Tento Lords have been coming out to greet the Apollyon and GIVE THEM BIG HUGS, by which we mean get eaten. Yeah, apparently the Mushibito recognize the Apollyon as their saviors from the despair of the world, by which we mean “WE GET TO DIE AND THE WORLD ENDS AND WE DON’T GET ABUSED ANYMORE YAY DEATH!”.
In other words, more of that fine print Dahn didn’t read when he was getting help from them to become their Prophesied Savior King Abaddon.
This is the kind of crap Raidou deals with for a living. Kinda amazing he hasn’t snapped yet, eh?
Oh and there’s a vague mention of a story about some Hero in the village’s past who stopped this from happening once before! :D :D :D And Nagi says something that Geirin might know something/it was a previous Geirin Kuzunoha!
Geirin is Very Unhappy with Raidou being informed of this, leading to a nice chase where a mildly frustrated Raidou is trying to find the information on what the hell Geirin Kuzunoha the Whatever did to close the hole while Geirin slams metaphorical doors in his face and tells him to drop it, even resorting to a duel over the information…and then Stalks Off to Do It Himself You Damn Whippersnappers Sit Outside. Nagi and Raidou, being mildly observant and noticing that Geirin’s been coughing a lot and leaning on things, don’t. See, Geirin kinda has TB, and is well aware that the one creature that can bring the BIG BLACK BALL OF DEATH where it can be dealt with is something sealed where he’s the only one that can open it, and doesn’t really want to go down as dying of TB, so he’s going to do a blaze of glory Heroic Sacrifice to unseal it without explaining this to the kids!
Which, he manages most of it, and then ends up falling just short of opening the seal.
Lucky for the world Raidou and Nagi had a mutual “…Dude you’re coughing up blood, like Hell, we’re following you.”, leading to Nagi taking over the Geirin Kuzunoha title to finish breaking the seal. Unfortunately, while the demon on the other side is vaguely amused and perfectly willing to help, Nagi’s in no way ready to work with it for this one – it needs to take a TON of energy from the summoner, and she’s still a nooblet.
Raidou’s part in bringing the Black Ball of Death where the nice positive-energy ball the Luck Locusts gathered can be used to attack it: Being noms for an ancient Demon of Gluttony so it can feed off him and use that energy to bring the Black Ball of Death to where the glowy ball of goodness is.
Three days later, when Raidou wakes up from this, the hole in the sky is gone and all, there’s just a few things that Tao Tie, said demon, and the assorted others are confused by; namely, the Black Ball of Death that was supposed to go away has instead fallen from the sky on Tsukigata manor, the Apollyon are disappearing, but the people who’ve been hit the worst by all that misfortune chaos are starting to act increasingly psycho.
In fact, the villagers have taken up the funny creepy masks and are acting INCREDIBLY psycho.
Horror-movie killing-anyone-they-can-blame psycho, and the capital’s breaking out in riots.
(Translation: The Apollyon are possessing people who’ve been falling into despair, amplifying and warping that.) By now all four of the Horsemen are out riding around just WAITING, and the funny masked figure kicks Raidou again in visions, declaring it time to “save” the world from its despair and calling “hope” a falsehood that leads people to seek continued suffering. Oh, and dear Louis appears to fill in some of this and explain how this works, and that by the way the funny masked figure? THAT’S “King Abaddon”, known to the villagers as Shinado.
Note that yes, Raidou is managing to mostly pull off …. Well, a slightly “ >___<” grumpy version of the determined stoic “GODDAMNIT I WILL NOT BE BUDGED I WILL WIN THIS BITCHES”. And has Tae and Nagi taking turns trying to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid and drive himself into the ground while recovering from being Tao Tie’s snack, at least before the villagers go psycho on everyone.
Oh, and they decided to sacrifice Akane by throwing her into the big black ball of doom as an offering to Lord Shinado, what with, you know, the “marriage to the Tento Lords’ kind of annulled by most of them being eaten by giant demon locusts.
Dahn is not happy with this, but at least he’s you know, calmed down, started listening to people, and is cooperating – to the point of helping catch the rest of the Luck Locusts to use them to force a way into the Black Ball of Doom, and this is enough for Raidou to be perfectly okay working with him. At least he’s fixing things.
Oh, and Louis keeps randomly showing up places he shouldn’t being weirdly helpful from this point on, if occasionally throwing in sticks jabbed at things and being a little bluntly honest.
Dahn snaps Akane out of a sort of Shinado-possession, and gets to help rescue the villagers from it, and they end up helping open the doors for Raidou to fight Abaddon, which ends up being another demonstration of the Triple Scorpio Never Say Fucking Die Duty Mode, since between him and Abaddon are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and a lot of attempted Hannibal Lectures about how all of this fighting to improve things is just causing more people to suffer and it’d be better for them all to just let it END. The response involves a lot of “…. -_______- *GLARE*” and ignoring said Hannibal Lectures.
Yes, this does mean that Raidou is coming ot the Manor just as things are being fixed from epic chaos and Abaddon the Infinite Abyss Gatekeeper of Hell and Herald of the End Times trying to answer the call of people’s despair to End Everything and mercy-kill the planet, and having to stomp Abaddon the Infinite Abyss until it conceded defeat and slunk off to admit that maybe it wasn’t time to kill the planet yet and maybe it should wait until later.
First Person Sample:
[The video feed is of somewhere out on the grounds; the person in it is serious and composed to a pretty severe level, although there’s just barely visible exasperation somewhere in that nice, composed, controlled expression.]
Has anyone seen a one-legged creature in soot-stained leather with a metal face-mask? It’s probably attempting to … build walls. Or take them down. I’m not sure which.
Also if anyone is suddenly finding their hallway or room walled off, I would like to apologize for his behavior, and I will see to it that the walls are taken down as soon as I’ve caught up to him to make sure there isn’t any more damage done.
Third Person Sample:
It’s a beautiful, lovely, bright day outside, and the Manor grounds are peaceful and serene, without a single worrisome thing in sight…
Except the giant spider.
The giant, bright yellow spider with a woman’s head attached, long stringy hair, that happens to be the size of a small truck.
Who seems to be stalking along behind a young man dressed entirely in black; whoever he is, he’s not paying any attention to the giant spider. His attention is more on the surroundings – patrolling and scouting out the grounds, something he’s been at all morning; he’s just wandering back in out of the woods, still quietly on edge. While the cape makes it impossible to tell where his hands are, the end of the sword-scabbard hanging from his belt IS visible, and it’s occasionally ticking and shifting as a giveaway that yes, he’s keeping a hand on the hilt, and taking in the Manor with a flat, slightly unhappy looking lineface.
He’s had quite a few attempts at trapping him in illusions, pocket realms, dream realms, and parts of the spirit worlds and Dark World, but this is managing to be a bit of a new one on him – nevermind the first time someone’s managed to separate him from Gouto, and a complete lack of any clues to what’s going on, so as calm as he’s being? He’s … a little bit on edge, and halfway waiting for something to come out and try to eat his head. It’s normally what happens when someone traps him in an illusory space; either they try to banish him so far that he can’t find his way back, or he gets shut in a small box with things that want to kill him. It’s gotten a bit past something to be really upset about, and into the kind of annoying routine that gets old after the third or fourth time but never goes away, like jammed printers in an office; worth keeping guard up, not worth investing a lot of emotion and energy in.
Links: A Let’s Play of the first game!
Fandom wiki page for him
Notes: I do kinda tend to read the family name and all as being a case of “yes, descended from Kuzunoha”, which isn’t that far-fetched considering the way SMT is with weirdness – Kuzunoha being a Fox in Japanese folklore. So, basically, somewhere way back in his family tree, there’s Kitsune. Worth noting that in the first game one of the “half-forgotten” gods actually references him as a “Fox”.
AND HERE WE GET INTO THE DEMONS HE’S BRINGING. I BET YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE DONE, EH?
NEKOMATA: the least combat-dangerous of them – she has a nasty set of claws on her and certainly knows how to use them, but no big spectacular blow things up powers. She DOES have the ability she can grant to Raidou, of transforming into someone else if they have a snatch of hair or a few drops of blood or something; while it does come with a little bit of body language/mannerisms, it’s not much, and it’s up to Raidouto mimic speech patterns/etc. – someone with supernatural senses or something who’s paying close attention can pick out that it’s not the person it appears to be. (At one point in game Raidou uses this to mimic Geirin to get past something only he could open, and Nagi recognizes him on carriage and aura.) Besides potential for havoc with manorites, he currently has a few transformations learned from home; he’s not likely to pull Geirin again out of respect for the dead, but the interesting ones he has that he’s likely to use include Shizu, a girl who now works in the red-light district, a Shiba-inu dog, and really, you can’t tell me he DOESN’T have shed cat hair from Gouto to turn into a black cat even though it doesn’t come up in game, seriously. On a similar note he could probably also turn into Tae (female reporter) or Narumi.
In personality, she’s … well, for one, mythologically Nekomata were normal cats that got past a certain age and gained power, and going by game personality, she’s basically a cat that’s grown up and gone a bit fluffy-airhead ohmaigawd teenage-college age girl. And a cat. She looks like a humanoid catgirl, calico, with a tail that forks out into two.
JOROUGUMO: this. By the way, she’s about the size of a small pickup truck. And yes, that mouth is full of fangs. Personality wise, she’s basically femme fatale, and no, don’t go in a room alone with her if Raidou’s not there; she’s not likely to be let out unsupervised much. She’s another of the ones that’s more physically dangerous than powers, what with webbing, lots of teeth, long sharp claws, and being fairly strong, but doesn’t have much in the way of flashy magic.
However, the shared-ability she has that she can grant to Raidou? Is mind-reading in snippets. It does have to be intentionally triggered, and only catches a minute or so of surface thoughts; basically, it’d be a case of “if it’s activated he can get what would be the bracket-text internal monologue from the last tag or two”.
IPPON-DATARA: WAAALLLLLllllSSSS!!!!!!111!!! This thing. It stands a little over six feet high, and is ... uh ... special. IT BuILdS WAAAAlllLLLssssSS!!1! THE BesT DAmN WAALLLLlllLLSSSssssSS!!!1!. Technically they're a degraded form of blacksmith spirit; its brain is basically a half-warmed-over slurry.
..As for abilities, it's decently strong, takes a beating relatively well, can bash things with a hammer, and builds things; it can also use some minor fire spells that manifest in a burst of flames in its immediate radius. Also it builds walls.
Personality wise ... its brain is a warmed over slurry. You CAN talk to it, but the conversation is liable to be fraught with nonsense and non-sequitors which it will act like should make PERFECT sense, its ability to follow trails of logic and understand complex concepts is a craps shoot, and its idea of a reasonable subject shift would have a human put in a rubber room with a niiice huggy jacket. About the one thing it really understands well is hitting things that are hitting it/its master and walls. Raidou found it building walls, recruited it because said walls were between him and The Thing Threatening The City, and it builds THE BEST DAMN WALLS. WALLS ARE ITS LIFE AND ITS PASSION. Oh, technically in canon “building walls” extends to being able to erect supernatural barriers that’d show up as a nice pretty air-shimmer and anyone trying to walk through the pretty colored barrier going thud, too.
TARRASQUE: Image here. Tarrasque is basically a drunken, crotchety grumpy old man. If he had a cane, he’d be banging it at the young’uns, and he’s perpetually cranky. He’s mostly more pleasant to Raidou because Raidou has repeatedly bribed him with alcohol, beaten him down when he decided Raidou might be a nice snack, and later on ended up rescuing him after his home/food source got abandoned and he was lost and starving. He can do an area-effect frost attack, give Raidou a fairly strong frost-enchantment on his sword, and is big enough to be good water transportation for Raidou and possibly two or three others.
Bonus: Among the things he’s summoned/interacted with canonly: Belphegor, as in the demon, is a sidequest target in the second game. Lucifer, obviously. Metatron is a possible endgame summon if you’re twinking out in the second game. There’s every indication that, as in any other SMT verse, “God” is still an asshole. And yes, most of the SMT games are a glorious clusterfuck of canon AU’s that –are- established to be able to interact with each other; there’s even an alternate version of SMT:Nocturne where Raidou’s wandered into one of the “WORLD ENDED, EVERYTHING’S FUCKED UP” timelines, presumably via, you know, still having the keys to go out theAkarana/Amala corridors occasionally, meaning that yes, he is entirely too used to space-time fuckery. I’m playing him as not being the Nocturne version, or at least, if he does wander that way, it hasn’t happened yet.
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Date: 2011-09-02 07:34 pm (UTC)Swapping the truck-sized spider with:
INUGAMI: This (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3288/2654603334_633e4218b9_o.jpg). Weak healing spell, decent set of teeth, yes the body's translucent; same mind-reading "catch things here and there" trick the Jorougumo has! Also a weak healing spell. Personality is ... uhm ...well, it's a dog. A slightly bitchy "I hate everyone" kind of dog, and yes, one of those things where he's ... probably the only person that could put a hand out to it without getting bitten. *If you look up some of the folklore on these it's not too surprising :| * Can talk, but much like with the Nekomata, the personality's about what you'd expect from talking to an abused dog given language use. (Because as much as I love the truck-sized spider, writing her for extended periods of time sorta hurt my head to think about.)
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Date: 2011-09-02 07:44 pm (UTC)BELIAL: This, and about 10-ish feet tall standing straight. (http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080617061802/megamitensei/images/thumb/e/e9/Belial.jpg/341px-Belial.jpg) Old, pointy, bit of an ego, prone to looking down on mortals, and yes, demon/fallen angel. Yes this is partly to fuck with the assorted SPN cast/related and people named after demons, plus in case of Raidou getting in HORRIBLY over his head and to help with that "no healers" problem. No, you probably wouldn't want to prod at him without Raidou around unless you were very cautious; on the other hand, he's more likely to grumpily curl up with a book in the library if left to his own devices and not bothered. Sort of the "Hm, need the big guns" summon - Big area-effect fire-spell, bit of a pure-energy-burst area-nuke with about a 30' radius, and actually CAN do a pretty potent "well, as long as you're still breathing they can do something about that" healing spell! Won't go picking fights, is pretty good about following Raidou's orders, but can be potentially hazardous to the disrespectful/annoying.