9th Day of Spring, 1306
Visiting Dignitaries
The week had gone by faster than anyone would have liked.
Miya had spent a day reading and memorizing the massive tome of cryptic gibberish that was the Book of Secrets, before Yuki took it to the Order of Arcanum for them to see and make a copy of.
Almost immediately, one of the Wu-Jen tried to make a Duplicate of the book, but the spell failed – indicating that a Magical Duplicate would never be possible. Fortunately, one of the Senior Scribes of the Order knew the Ink Flowing Transcription method and was able to transcribe the entire book of secrets at an alarmingly fast pace – finishing the four hundred page plus book in just under thirty minutes.
The replica was ink on paper, rather than the original’s embroidered threads on silk, but was in all other regards a perfect duplicate.
Thanking Yuki for her service to Sendai and the Order of Arcanum, they handed the original tome back to her for delivery to Yunikawa and took their copy into the depths of the Inner Sanctum to begin working on unlocking its secrets.
As Yuki left the Grand Hall of Wu-Jen, she realized that once again, they had given her nothing for the service she had just rendered (and wondered if they ever would).
Arriving home, Yuki turned the book over to Miya (who would take a crack at decrypting it) and then decided to just relax and spend time with her mother and little Kioko, as the poor little fox girl would be leaving them in such a short time.
In turn, little Kioko showed Yuki, Miya, and Yuki’s Mother something special the next day, taking them to the garden out behind the family home with a sweet rice cake.
Trotting ahead and out into the garden, Kioko placed the rice cake on the ground, bowed, and then ran back over to the others to hold Yuki and Miya’s hands.
“See? I told you!” Kioko said with a marked satisfaction, as she peered into the garden.
Then, in the garden, a large number of radish spirits suddenly manifested visibly around the rice cake and seemed to be talking amongst themselves excitedly – gesturing here and there with their tiny sprout-like arms.
After a moment, they came to some kind of agreement and picking up the rice cake, marched in a solemn parade around the garden, complete with a drummer and two gongs.
After crossing the garden back and forth three times, they vanished again, taking the rice cake with them back into the Spirit World.
“Well, I’ll be…” Yuki’s Mother marveled, “what a prestigious honor to actually see them with the naked eye!”
---
For Miya’s part, pouring obsessively over each and every page of the Book of Secrets with her Break the Code technique, she actually began to see a pattern slowly emerging – and after working on it for nearly six sleepless days and nights, suddenly found some meaning within the text.
At first it appeared over and over again, hidden in each page – a three character alphanumeric (number, number, letter). Then, taking the more than four hundred alphanumerics and looking at them collectively, Miya found that by applying certain logarithms, a coherent sentence structure began to unfold.
Using this new information, the pages of the Book of Secrets revealed a set of sixty Shinto prayers hidden within, fourteen of which were currently unknown. The prayers themselves however, including the unknown ones, were by no means extraordinary – It seemed a rather huge waste of effort to bother encoding such widely available information.
There had to be more – the Shinto prayers had to represent a false code, written into the book to mislead those who would try to decrypt it. It was absolutely maddening! And time had run out, as Yunikawa would be coming for the book on the morrow…
---
As this went on, Roka spent the week looking up old contacts, who all seemed overjoyed to find that he was still alive – especially those of the feminine persuasion. The one person he was unable to see in that time however was his old friend Yone, who as far as he could tell, was some sort of big shot in the underground circle now-a-days – maybe even Yakuza Boss of Sendai if all the rumors where true.
He did manage to find Yone’s brother, Toru Ishida, however – who promised to pass word to Yone that Roka wanted to catch up with her sometime.
Having re-established pretty much of all his old ties, Roka then found himself dwelling on his ill-fated desire to somehow establish himself over Lilitu the Succubus. With Jenna’s ability to control minds and his newly found talent for telling outrageously compelling lies, he figured that now was a good a time as any to give it a try.
It cost a hefty sum and a few underworld favors to find an evilly aligned priest willing to summon a demon and give control of it to someone else; but there Roka was, with Jenna the Vampire Samurai-ko, Yuma the Priest of Sorrows, and Lilitu the voluptuous sex demon of Roka’s erotic haunted dreams.
It promised to be one hell of a night, regardless – and it certainly was – until it all went horribly south, thanks to Jenna getting a little too aroused by the goings on and drinking Yuma the Priest of Sorrows dry in a vampiristic blood frenzy.
When all was said and done, Roka was quite lucky that Jenna didn’t turn on him too and was actually saved by Lilitu’s Mind Control – which she used to calm the vampire back down and then sent her off to dispose of the body.
The rest of the evening was then spent alone with Lilitu in the throes of unadulterated ecstasy – once again ruining any hopes of Roka enjoying normal sex ever again…
---
Udo meanwhile, spent the week on a trip to Mount Fuji in hopes of finding a dragon or some other magnificent creature there. As it turned out, he was actually the most unusual thing to be seen there – arriving by air in the form of a great Pterodactyl.
Alighting on the rim of the sleeping volcano, Udo looked down into the basin to find nothing out of the ordinary.
Then activating Spirit Sight, he managed to spot a small cairn of piled stones not too far from where he was. Heading over and checking it out, he realized that the cairn only existed in the Spirit World and that he could not interact with it from the Physical side.
There was however, a small silver placard on the cairn with a single ancient word written on it in Old Realm – ‘Desolikus’ – though it held no special meaning to Udo.
Searching around the rim of the volcano further, Udo discovered four more cairns of similar design – each in the Spirit World only, and set out evenly along the periphery of the volcanoe’s rim from each other.
Like the first, they each had a single Old Realm word inscribed on a silver placard. In total, the five cairns read: Desolikus; Infernumis; Abysmael; Umbrunus; and Lothorum.
Having found all that the top of Mount Fuji had to offer, Udo went down the mountain and discovered a small village where he could rest before having to make his flight back to Sendai. While there, her met and spoke with some of the monks that revered the sacred mountain and asked them about the words he had seen.
None of them could say what the words were, but reiterated over and over again that Mount Fuji was the realm of slumbering gods and that they should not be disturbed by mortals nosing around where they did not belong.
The next day, Udo left Mount Fuji and (in Pterodactyl form), flew back to Sendai – arriving the day before Yunikawa was set to arrive.
---
During this same time, Rai and Lee, spent the week talking about the past and current states of Nippon and making sure Lee knew the proper protocols in current society. For now, Lee really had nowhere else to turn, and having a ‘noble born’ as an ally was not a gift to turn down lightly.
He also learned a little about the Wu-Jen Yunikawa; and that if anyone had the power to return him to his own time, it would be Yunikawa.
For Rai’s part, he spent part of the week trying to re-connect with some of his old allies, with mixed success. It seemed that while they were aware of his return and glad for it immeasurably, they were also sad to report that the unification of Ninja Clans had stalled with his disappearance (almost nine years ago) and then fell apart almost completely after the death of the Nezumi Ninja Shaman Split-Tooth.
In fact, Ninja Master Kai Shugyo and Nezumi Ninja Master Thorn were currently adversarial towards each other and all the fighting over the years had torn down and burned many of the bridges that Split-Tooth had spent his life trying to establish.
There were some serious repairs that needed to be made to these ‘bridges’ if the Ninja would ever rise to the position necessary to restore Nippon to its people.
And it now looked like it was up to Rai to step up and try to make that happen himself (at least in the proper circles for now)…
---
‘Uncle’ Yunikawa meanwhile, had come back into Sendai late in the afternoon of the 2nd, as he had said he would. Traveling with his three beautiful Samurai-ko and a large chest carried on a litter, he had been seen entering the home of the Chief Magistrate.
Jenna meanwhile, explained to Roka that she had to go now, and went without any further words to the Chief Magistrate’s house to rejoin her old master inside.
As for the Samurai, they had all gathered nearby, expecting to be summoned into the meeting with Yunikawa and Chief Magistrate Saito, but that moment never came.
Perplexed, and a little worried about their future standing in Sendai, the Samurai were met a few hours later by a messenger of the Chief Magistrate, relaying that Master Kenjiro Yunikawa would be on his way to the home of Akiko Shirahata (Yuki’s Mother) shortly, and that the Samurai and Korean Lee should all meet him there for a late dinner. Further, upon conclusion of Yunikawa’s business with the Chief Magistrate, riders would be sent to Edo to consult with the Daimyo of the Samurai’s future in Sendai.
With daylight waning, the Samurai and Lee all headed out to the Zen Archery School together, to arrive at the home of Yuki’s mother Akiko Shirahata.
No sooner had they got there however, that it immediately became clear that something was amiss!
Yuki’s Mother and little Kioko were nowhere in sight and the lights of the house were completely dark. It would not at all be like Headmistress Akiko to forget such a momentous appointment and bring shame and dishonor upon herself and her family name in so doing.
Then, as everyone approached to see what was going on, the door to the estate suddenly creaked open and a bloody hand flopped out of the darkness!
This, and only a few minutes before Master Yunikawa would arrive…
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Topic: Mythic Nippon Adventure IV (Read 230965 times)